He is definitely right about Segway. Segway was a brilliant invention (it still is a brilliant invention) killed by Kamen's paranoid mania for secrecy. Codename Ginger is a very entertaining and interesting book retelling the story of Segway's conception, invention, development and the business that was (mostly wasn't) clumsily built on top of it. If Dean Kamen wasn't constantly worried about Honda stealing his ideas and (in violation of or designing around around his patents) building a 100$ knock-offs, he might have allowed his marketing people to do user testing or something. It turns out that he didn't. Another blow to Segway was the hype, which too resulted from secrecy. When rumours about the product started circulating, Kamen did the worst possible thing - he didn't tell anyone anything. During the year that followed speculation ran rampant and when time came for Segway to be released, anything short of a teleportation device or a time machine was simply not enough.
Had Kamen not be as paranoid, we might have been all segwaying around already.
Please, don't let your political preferences (libertarianism) influence your perception of reality so much. State socialism, while not perfect, is infinitely better than corporation-dominated capitalism. Not to mention that the USSR was not a threat to the American political and economic system.
If you yahoo for it, the first result is a streaming version of the video. Apparently, it is also available from a ton of different places as well. And it's really funny, thanks for the pointer, Sycraft-fu.
You have a very limited perception of art. Why do people accept still life and landscape images, but not stories about technology? You are simply brainwashed to think that "only people matter", while it is obviously (to a rational person) not true. There is architecture, there is abstract art, there is music, all of it is NOT about people, but a lot of it is still considered good art. But stories about technology are taboo.
I think the simple explanation is that those who appose hard sci-fi are simply luddites at heart. They don't enjoy knowledge, don't appreciate progress and are overall very dull traditionalistic individuals that I would find extremely boring to have around.
Lucas saw it. He saw clips from Star Wars IV converted to 3D and was happy about the results. I think you are overly sceptical. If people can make stereo 3D from NO footage (just do a CGI scene), certainly doing 3D based on the existing live video should be possible.
The noose may tighten, but the bird is already out of the cage. P2P can't be defeated by DRM. There already are efficient mechanisms to get almost any content for free in a non-restrictive format. There is ed2k, there is BitTorrent, there are KaZaA, SoulSeek and many others. Recent history shows that it's impossible to kill P2P, because it adapts. It's like with viruses - you can kill a particular one, but you can't kill all of them.
There is also Freenet, which is already surprisingly usable and it is rather safe. Freenet already uses some form of "forward correction", which, I think, is like par on steroids, like in the recent Avalanche proposal, so reliability is not a big problem.
You only need to make one copy and it can be released safely and distributed very fast. DRM or no DRM, the people have already won.
Commercialisation inevitably leads to dumbing down the content. It's most easily seen here in Russia, where we lost good Soviet TV (which had science, art, great movies and intelligent entertainment) and had it replaced with crap so horrid and fetid that TV employees (whom I should not call journalists) knowingly target their programs at the uneducated illiterate and superstitous mass public and where Moscow parliament had to start an enquiry regarding the latest and most popular reality show and why it is so stupid and offensive.
It should be obvious by now that only public TV can work. All countries should switch to the Soviet model aka the BBC model, where the public pays a fixed amount of money (directly or indirectly) and TV organisations are tasked with making great programming without worrying about ratings.
Resolution is certainly important, but to me the difference between a 2CD DivX and an IMAX Experience (tm) is really not that significant. I am talking about The Matrix sequels. I certainly enjoyed the ultra-high resolution on the ultra-large screen, but a quality 2CD DVD-Rip is not that bad either.
Actually right now I am trying the new big^H^H^H small thing that is watching movies on a PDA. The pirates around here sell a neat compilation of 21 best films of 2004 on a single DVD, encoded in 320xsomething for watching on a Palm or PocketPC. I am surely missing something, but overall this is a satisfactory experience (and I can watch the movie on a subway, or in a beautiful park, or on the river shore).
The last time I was in IMAX, there was a brief (felt like 10-15 minutes) light show explaining how cool the IMAX technology is. Then there were some ads (a long one for Nescafe, since they are a kind of sponsor or something), then zillions of trailers. And only then we were allowed to watch the movie.
I don't know, really... According to map24, there seems to be a "colony" (Novo-Pargolovskaja Kolonija - prison?) almost right under my window. There is an unfinished shopping mall there, but I don't see a prison.:)
I didn't. As a matter of fact, I am anti-tattoo and anti-piercing. I think that it's stupid and pointless and I find that most people who are into it are silly, foolish and empty-minded.
But 1) I don't see what tattoos have with doing the job well. It is perfectly possible for a silly person with a tattoo to perform his business functions very well. And 2) I don't see how one complaint proves that all customers are scared of tattoos and the company needs to prohibit them. People can get offended by anything. You can't completely eliminate the possibility that at some point some customer will dislike some particular thing about your company and it's silly to try. It's even sillier to be reactive and do things like prohibiting tattoos AFTER someone complained, because the odds are next time the next grumpy customer will want to complain about something completely different.
You are not a troll, you are simply a confused person, who thinks that "powers that be" are interested in improving the education. Well, they are, but their ideas of improvement are very different from your own ones.
There is a vast amount of information on all aspects of problem with the education system available, but here are some quick links.
Read up on Educational Quality Assessment test, on two-corridor educational system, on the emergence of standardized testing, on the origins of the American public school system. It isn't that there is a conspiracy to enslave and dumb down the kids, it's that the main participants who shaped the education system are not interested in having a well-educated populace and that shows.
BTW, contrast it with the Soviet Union and other socialist/communist countries where education was perceived as a goal in itself (In 1970s an international survey on automation showed that among factory workers about twice as many had completed secondary education in the USSR as in the US. At the same time it was perceived in the Soviet Union that the workers had not enough educaiton, while in the USA it was perceived that the workers had too much education).
Schools mindlessly spending on tech is a symptom, not a problem.
Teaching is a skill. Education is a technological process. Most people still don't get it. There is no reason why an average teacher should be expected to just take the modern equipment and instantly integrate it into his teaching process.
But let me assure you that once you realise it and train the teacher to use the equipment in his teaching (which involves more than being able to turn it on and off), the quality of teaching will go up.
And if you want to talk about great lectureres using chalkboards very effectively, it is also important to realise that there are much more teachers who teach badly using chalkboards. All things equal, skilled use of modern technology is a plus in education (though it rarely happens).
But why should the complaint lead to anything? So what if that old bitch didn't like a tattoo? Just ask (not banish) the guy to wear long sleaves when he talks with her. Why suddenly enforce a changed dress code for the whole company? Is that single comment really indicative of the demands of ALL clients? And would failure to comform with them lead to loss of sales?
I think this is precisely the situation where a proper response to the complaint would be to say "Yes, miss, we will do as you demand" and do nothing.
Yes, there are risks, but the question is why should we (the general public) care about nanotech (and GM food, of course) so much. Why isn't it enough to spend, say, 50 million government dollars on a "Program for Research of Health Risks of Nanotechnology" and then use the information found to make decisions? There are much worse things happening in the world and in the American society in particular. The corrupted political process, the powerful capitalist corporations, the intentionally crippled educational system, the dumbed down media. It's not like people live in some sort of utopia and nanotech is their only possible problem.
Why should ordinary citizens be concerned about the hypothetically possible risks of nanotech, when I am sure most of them don't even know what an atom is? Life is risky, everything we do is risky (and some of it outright harmful) and the society has already developed systematic ways to cope with the danger. Let the system work, don't short-circuit it by irrational protesting.
The recent progress in brain scanning and neurophysiology suggests to some extent that both types of irrationality are may be caused by similar types of brain damage (or organic differences). People who oppose nanotech on such a flimsy basis and in such a way are most likely seriously mentally ill. I am not saying that they should necessarily be locked up in a mental ward, but their opinions should definitely be ignored. They are just nuts and I mean it literally.
If at the end of life, you look back and have no regrets, then you have lived well.
I.e. if you look back at the 100 women and children that you killed and mutilated, the 10 police officers you killed, the 50 million dollars worth of property you destroyed and you whole Hannibal Lecter-cross-Jack the Ripper-like life and have no regrets then you have lived well?
I don't think so. While in a sense every program is as valid as any other, I tend to beleive that there are some objective criteria that we can use. It is possible to say that some person's life was worthless and pointless compared to someone else. It is possible to distinguish between worthwhile and worthless things to do. "Whatever makes you feel good" is not a valid criteria.
I do realise that it's generally impossible to persuade most people that this is true, but I believe that it's a correct worldview. Because of this I consider social relationships (for their own sake) less important than actually doing useful and interesting stuff and learning stuff. I can only pity those of my friends who spend most of their time and efforts on getting girls or buying a better car.
I am glad for you, but ultimately this is the future that we as a society will have to face soon. People will become shut-ins, as tele-work and part-time work become more feasible. In 2010-2015 full-immersion virtual reality will make its first inroads and the "problem" will be exasperated.
Yes, shut-ins usually aren't normal, but that won't make their choice less valid. Yes, they may have poor social skills, but so what?
I am not a shut-in. I am good looking, can be very open and sociable, girls like me, my self-esteem goes through the roof, but I'd rather "sit at home and play computer games" if I could. Yes, there are more interesting things for now, but psychologically it's much more comfortable to live in the virtual digital world. Already. It's a given that people will make this choice and let's learn to recognize it as just another lifestyle.
I recall from a Discovery (?) documentary called "Snowball Earth" that it isn't actually dark at all under about 10 meters of ice (if we are lucky and the ice is clear and transparent). Life can thrive there. It's entirely possible that there are large frozen oceans on Hoth and there is a lot of photosynthesis going on there. For all we know, there can be giant frozen lakes with a lot of underwater life. This means that birds and land animals can exist too, although without a compelling reason to stay above the surface, they would be forced to move underwater by natural selection.
Also, when they talk about Coruscant being "in the heart of the galaxy" they ignore the obvious possibility that everyone is speaking figuratively. If it is generally in the centre and if it's that important, then it is in the heart almost by definition, just like we can say that Rome is in the heart of Italy or Paris is in the heart of France.
Mind your language. It's very counterproductive to say that [much of the] brain is still a black box [effectively]. People pick this up and turn a blind eye towards the progress that was made in recent decade(s).
It's much better to say that much of the brain is still understood poorly. Or that at the expected rate of development it will take at least 25 years to fully understand how the brain works. This way people have a better view on reality than when they are told "brain is still a mystery".
BTW, according to NISTEP's latest report, "Elucidation of brain mechanisms for logical reasoning" will happen by 2028.
Slashdot Mirror
The point of Mark's blog post is that a stealth startup is a NET loss. I.e. that the expected value of deciding to go stealth is negative.
He is definitely right about Segway. Segway was a brilliant invention (it still is a brilliant invention) killed by Kamen's paranoid mania for secrecy. Codename Ginger is a very entertaining and interesting book retelling the story of Segway's conception, invention, development and the business that was (mostly wasn't) clumsily built on top of it. If Dean Kamen wasn't constantly worried about Honda stealing his ideas and (in violation of or designing around around his patents) building a 100$ knock-offs, he might have allowed his marketing people to do user testing or something. It turns out that he didn't. Another blow to Segway was the hype, which too resulted from secrecy. When rumours about the product started circulating, Kamen did the worst possible thing - he didn't tell anyone anything. During the year that followed speculation ran rampant and when time came for Segway to be released, anything short of a teleportation device or a time machine was simply not enough.
Had Kamen not be as paranoid, we might have been all segwaying around already.
Please, don't let your political preferences (libertarianism) influence your perception of reality so much. State socialism, while not perfect, is infinitely better than corporation-dominated capitalism. Not to mention that the USSR was not a threat to the American political and economic system.
Watch "Orwell Rolls in His Grave" (available from the P2P network of your choice). Media in the USA is not interested in this kind of stories.
Double Trust is a much better implementation, but as another poster said, there is a plenty of metasearch engines out there.
If you yahoo for it, the first result is a streaming version of the video. Apparently, it is also available from a ton of different places as well. And it's really funny, thanks for the pointer, Sycraft-fu.
You have a very limited perception of art. Why do people accept still life and landscape images, but not stories about technology? You are simply brainwashed to think that "only people matter", while it is obviously (to a rational person) not true. There is architecture, there is abstract art, there is music, all of it is NOT about people, but a lot of it is still considered good art. But stories about technology are taboo.
I think the simple explanation is that those who appose hard sci-fi are simply luddites at heart. They don't enjoy knowledge, don't appreciate progress and are overall very dull traditionalistic individuals that I would find extremely boring to have around.
Lucas saw it. He saw clips from Star Wars IV converted to 3D and was happy about the results. I think you are overly sceptical. If people can make stereo 3D from NO footage (just do a CGI scene), certainly doing 3D based on the existing live video should be possible.
The noose may tighten, but the bird is already out of the cage. P2P can't be defeated by DRM. There already are efficient mechanisms to get almost any content for free in a non-restrictive format. There is ed2k, there is BitTorrent, there are KaZaA, SoulSeek and many others. Recent history shows that it's impossible to kill P2P, because it adapts. It's like with viruses - you can kill a particular one, but you can't kill all of them.
There is also Freenet, which is already surprisingly usable and it is rather safe. Freenet already uses some form of "forward correction", which, I think, is like par on steroids, like in the recent Avalanche proposal, so reliability is not a big problem.
You only need to make one copy and it can be released safely and distributed very fast. DRM or no DRM, the people have already won.
Commercialisation inevitably leads to dumbing down the content. It's most easily seen here in Russia, where we lost good Soviet TV (which had science, art, great movies and intelligent entertainment) and had it replaced with crap so horrid and fetid that TV employees (whom I should not call journalists) knowingly target their programs at the uneducated illiterate and superstitous mass public and where Moscow parliament had to start an enquiry regarding the latest and most popular reality show and why it is so stupid and offensive.
It should be obvious by now that only public TV can work. All countries should switch to the Soviet model aka the BBC model, where the public pays a fixed amount of money (directly or indirectly) and TV organisations are tasked with making great programming without worrying about ratings.
Resolution is certainly important, but to me the difference between a 2CD DivX and an IMAX Experience (tm) is really not that significant. I am talking about The Matrix sequels. I certainly enjoyed the ultra-high resolution on the ultra-large screen, but a quality 2CD DVD-Rip is not that bad either.
Actually right now I am trying the new big^H^H^H small thing that is watching movies on a PDA. The pirates around here sell a neat compilation of 21 best films of 2004 on a single DVD, encoded in 320xsomething for watching on a Palm or PocketPC. I am surely missing something, but overall this is a satisfactory experience (and I can watch the movie on a subway, or in a beautiful park, or on the river shore).
The last time I was in IMAX, there was a brief (felt like 10-15 minutes) light show explaining how cool the IMAX technology is. Then there were some ads (a long one for Nescafe, since they are a kind of sponsor or something), then zillions of trailers. And only then we were allowed to watch the movie.
I don't know, really... According to map24, there seems to be a "colony" (Novo-Pargolovskaja Kolonija - prison?) almost right under my window. There is an unfinished shopping mall there, but I don't see a prison. :)
I didn't. As a matter of fact, I am anti-tattoo and anti-piercing. I think that it's stupid and pointless and I find that most people who are into it are silly, foolish and empty-minded.
But 1) I don't see what tattoos have with doing the job well. It is perfectly possible for a silly person with a tattoo to perform his business functions very well. And 2) I don't see how one complaint proves that all customers are scared of tattoos and the company needs to prohibit them. People can get offended by anything. You can't completely eliminate the possibility that at some point some customer will dislike some particular thing about your company and it's silly to try. It's even sillier to be reactive and do things like prohibiting tattoos AFTER someone complained, because the odds are next time the next grumpy customer will want to complain about something completely different.
You are not a troll, you are simply a confused person, who thinks that "powers that be" are interested in improving the education. Well, they are, but their ideas of improvement are very different from your own ones.
c lassics.html
There is a vast amount of information on all aspects of problem with the education system available, but here are some quick links.
http://www.spinninglobe.net/againstschool.htm
http://www.beverlye.com/article1.html
http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_4_urbanities-
Read up on Educational Quality Assessment test, on two-corridor educational system, on the emergence of standardized testing, on the origins of the American public school system. It isn't that there is a conspiracy to enslave and dumb down the kids, it's that the main participants who shaped the education system are not interested in having a well-educated populace and that shows.
BTW, contrast it with the Soviet Union and other socialist/communist countries where education was perceived as a goal in itself (In 1970s an international survey on automation showed that among factory workers about twice as many had completed secondary education in the USSR as in the US. At the same time it was perceived in the Soviet Union that the workers had not enough educaiton, while in the USA it was perceived that the workers had too much education).
Schools mindlessly spending on tech is a symptom, not a problem.
Teaching is a skill. Education is a technological process. Most people still don't get it. There is no reason why an average teacher should be expected to just take the modern equipment and instantly integrate it into his teaching process.
But let me assure you that once you realise it and train the teacher to use the equipment in his teaching (which involves more than being able to turn it on and off), the quality of teaching will go up.
And if you want to talk about great lectureres using chalkboards very effectively, it is also important to realise that there are much more teachers who teach badly using chalkboards. All things equal, skilled use of modern technology is a plus in education (though it rarely happens).
But why should the complaint lead to anything? So what if that old bitch didn't like a tattoo? Just ask (not banish) the guy to wear long sleaves when he talks with her. Why suddenly enforce a changed dress code for the whole company? Is that single comment really indicative of the demands of ALL clients? And would failure to comform with them lead to loss of sales?
I think this is precisely the situation where a proper response to the complaint would be to say "Yes, miss, we will do as you demand" and do nothing.
Yes, there are risks, but the question is why should we (the general public) care about nanotech (and GM food, of course) so much. Why isn't it enough to spend, say, 50 million government dollars on a "Program for Research of Health Risks of Nanotechnology" and then use the information found to make decisions? There are much worse things happening in the world and in the American society in particular. The corrupted political process, the powerful capitalist corporations, the intentionally crippled educational system, the dumbed down media. It's not like people live in some sort of utopia and nanotech is their only possible problem.
Why should ordinary citizens be concerned about the hypothetically possible risks of nanotech, when I am sure most of them don't even know what an atom is? Life is risky, everything we do is risky (and some of it outright harmful) and the society has already developed systematic ways to cope with the danger. Let the system work, don't short-circuit it by irrational protesting.
The recent progress in brain scanning and neurophysiology suggests to some extent that both types of irrationality are may be caused by similar types of brain damage (or organic differences). People who oppose nanotech on such a flimsy basis and in such a way are most likely seriously mentally ill. I am not saying that they should necessarily be locked up in a mental ward, but their opinions should definitely be ignored. They are just nuts and I mean it literally.
If at the end of life, you look back and have no regrets, then you have lived well.
I.e. if you look back at the 100 women and children that you killed and mutilated, the 10 police officers you killed, the 50 million dollars worth of property you destroyed and you whole Hannibal Lecter-cross-Jack the Ripper-like life and have no regrets then you have lived well?
I don't think so. While in a sense every program is as valid as any other, I tend to beleive that there are some objective criteria that we can use. It is possible to say that some person's life was worthless and pointless compared to someone else. It is possible to distinguish between worthwhile and worthless things to do. "Whatever makes you feel good" is not a valid criteria.
I do realise that it's generally impossible to persuade most people that this is true, but I believe that it's a correct worldview. Because of this I consider social relationships (for their own sake) less important than actually doing useful and interesting stuff and learning stuff. I can only pity those of my friends who spend most of their time and efforts on getting girls or buying a better car.
I am glad for you, but ultimately this is the future that we as a society will have to face soon. People will become shut-ins, as tele-work and part-time work become more feasible. In 2010-2015 full-immersion virtual reality will make its first inroads and the "problem" will be exasperated.
Yes, shut-ins usually aren't normal, but that won't make their choice less valid. Yes, they may have poor social skills, but so what?
I am not a shut-in. I am good looking, can be very open and sociable, girls like me, my self-esteem goes through the roof, but I'd rather "sit at home and play computer games" if I could. Yes, there are more interesting things for now, but psychologically it's much more comfortable to live in the virtual digital world. Already. It's a given that people will make this choice and let's learn to recognize it as just another lifestyle.
I recall from a Discovery (?) documentary called "Snowball Earth" that it isn't actually dark at all under about 10 meters of ice (if we are lucky and the ice is clear and transparent). Life can thrive there. It's entirely possible that there are large frozen oceans on Hoth and there is a lot of photosynthesis going on there. For all we know, there can be giant frozen lakes with a lot of underwater life. This means that birds and land animals can exist too, although without a compelling reason to stay above the surface, they would be forced to move underwater by natural selection.
Also, when they talk about Coruscant being "in the heart of the galaxy" they ignore the obvious possibility that everyone is speaking figuratively. If it is generally in the centre and if it's that important, then it is in the heart almost by definition, just like we can say that Rome is in the heart of Italy or Paris is in the heart of France.
Except that some people will again be pissed off asking "Why can't I buy a Powerbook without Mac OS? Stop the bundling!"
Mind your language. It's very counterproductive to say that [much of the] brain is still a black box [effectively]. People pick this up and turn a blind eye towards the progress that was made in recent decade(s).
It's much better to say that much of the brain is still understood poorly. Or that at the expected rate of development it will take at least 25 years to fully understand how the brain works. This way people have a better view on reality than when they are told "brain is still a mystery".
BTW, according to NISTEP's latest report, "Elucidation of brain mechanisms for logical reasoning" will happen by 2028.