It's not really a problem, don't worry about Moldavian mafiosis. In Russia (I guess it's similar in Moldova) This kind of information (not financial info, since the most companies don't trust the government enough to share payroll details with it) - birthdays, phonenumbers (fixed and cell), addresses, car registration info, etc., can be routinely bought from pirates. It usually is a bit more expensive (say, 10$ as opposed to 2$ for a MS Office CD) and technically illegal, but it's still very easy to buy. However, this hasn't led to anything bad. Criminals always had access to this kind of data through corrupt police officers and their own channels, but now honest law-abiding ordinary citizens can get it too. A businessman can quickly find some details about an acquiantance. A guy can find a phone number of a girl he met. Somone can find contact details of their lost friend or relative, etc. Seriously, I've never heard about this kind of information being used to harm anyone (there probably are some isolated cases, but they are likely insignificant).
If you allow me to continue the natural selection analogy, "correct" is anything that makes a user more likely to continue using the browser and make others use it.
People will not necessarily understand that broken HTML is not HTML. Microsoft, the most powerful player on the browser market, is not interested in people learning it and the very existence of IE prevents it. And when you say better, you must use the game theory and aks "better for whom?".
Of course, what I just wrote only really applies in a heterogenous environment
Wrong. This only applies in a homogenous environment where you can force everyone to write good HTML and force every application to ignore bad HTML. In the real world every developer and web-developer makes his choice. And it just so happens (by virtue of natural selection) that for browser-developers it makes most sense to write code that understands bad HTML. This way their product works better, users are happier and their browser enjoys the 90% market share. Microsoft is not evil (in this regard), they are just being rational.
You don't need to be paranoid. Even if there was no evil plan, rendering broken HTML correctly is a trait that benefits the survival of the browser. Just as rendering standard code is a beneficial trait for HTML-authoring tool.
Mozilla, Opera, Safari and the rest are simply less suited in this respect. They can argue as much as they want about their adherence to standards, but in the end they must learn to display malformed HTML/CSS/JS correctly or fail miserably (because some pages will only work in IE).
There is a third option. Build your own PC, but spend 1500$ on it. Then you would have a decent case, top-of-the-line video and audio cards, decent 5.1 or 7.1 speakers, enough HDD space to store 0.1 LOC, DVD-burner, a decent monitor and all peripherals you can think of (wireless keyboard/mouse/headset). You don't need to pay Dell for a decent PC setup, you can easily build it yourself. You can use the same parts (that were tested by Dell for compatibility/quality), but the end result will still be much cheaper.
Absolutely. I think Ray understands it just as well, but choses not to concentrate on these issues because it's not where he is most competent. There are some areas where progress was stopped by social, cultural or political issues, but they are relatively few compared with those were progress reigned supreme. So any particular prediction coming out of Ray's mouth contains an implied disclaimer "Except in forse majeur situations".
There is always this uncertainty about the future, but we still have reasons to be optimistic. Consider how the recent controversies of implantable chips, stem cells and therapeutic cloning were resolved. Chips got the FDA approval in the US, they found limited use in South America. Japanese kids are already marked with RFID tags for monitoring (albeit not implantable ones). Stem cell therapy becomes less and less controversial as more and more evidence is uncovered of its eficacy. Finally, therapeutic cloning seems to be growing in popularity.
I admit that as progress continues the opposition to technological and scientific development intensifies. Ignoramuses don't like change and try to mark each development as evil, but they can't have more than very limited success. This is partly a matter of personal optimism, but I think setbacks such as "unpopularity" of GM food are only temporary. As technology improves, it will trump the fear.
Google will not make these pieces of software, it will simply buy the companies (like Picasa) that make it and then bury them for indefinite period of time without updates (like Picasa). And then it will be all downhill, as it will repeat Microsoft's track record in killing innovative ideas... Or may be not.
I agree that this is a rather clumsy attempt, but it's better than nothing (and there are so few attempts that most teenagers have to get a boring beige Winbox). Among the features that I noticed are better integration with a phone/mp3 player, a decent attempt at style, a wall-mounted LCD to take care of lack of desk space, a desktop environment that sounds nice from the description.
I disagree with you that they are paying extra for parts. They use the same parts and volume discounts on computer hardware are almost non-existant (a few percents at most). It doesn't matter much whether you are buying a thousand 3D cards or a million of them. There are already hundreds of small companies building custom computers and they don't seem to have this problem of expensive parts. So hip-e is not paying anything extra for the parts and the profit will be quite decent if they can sell these machines at all. Yes,they are definitely overpriced, but a) they may lower the prices in the future b) some people might still be interested in the product.
Regarding the pills, I already wrote that he likely takes about 10 pills daily with 250 different vitamins/minerals inside them. Which is nothing to worry about.
As for difficulty of predicting the future, it varies. Some things, like visual designs of 2030 are extremely hard to do. But other things are easy. If you understood what steam engines are good for in 1670, you were a hundred years agead of the applications, but there was nothing to prevent you from explaining how the steam engine might be used in 1770 and how it would revolutionise everything by 1870. Today it's even easier, because the timeframe is much shorter and because our capability for imagining the possibilities is so much greater.
It is already obvious what will be possible with nanotech, genetics and AI. We can see if not the limits, but things so far from today that they seem like magic. The only thing that remains is to follow the speed of progress and construct a simple timeline that is consistent with reality.
Today's predictions are not based on leaps of faith (like robotics, AI and fusion 50 years ago). They are based on the fact that we know the gist of the future already and on convergence between different fields (making progress faster and so paradoxically easier to predict). A lot of things are happing at the same time and they all help each other.
I think the main objection people have to Ray's predictions (I call them "Ray's", but obviously he is just one of the large group of people with similar ideas) is that that don't like the things that he predicts, not just the timeframe. If someone is not comfortable with an artificial retina in his eye, he won't discuss the year when it might come true, he'll just say it's a silly prediction outright.
For more serious examples of current future predictions, check out this page.:)
First, I just want to point out that Intel's announcement is even less relevant than you admit. It's a PR blunder on their part to let people think that silicon is dead. In truth, Intel will just accelerate their work on more complex processors running at the same frequency. Multi-core processors and then truly parallel processors. Yes, this is difficult, but so was upping the frequency. There is no reason to believe that Intel Pentium 6000 will not be released in early 2005. Yes, it will run at 3GHz, but it will be twice as fast as a Pentium IV 3GHz, because it will do much more per cycle.
Second, I want to note that to criticise Ray for timeframes one needs to have the same or better understanding of current progress, which I seriously doubt you do. He spends most of the time keeping track of what is being done and what is being planned. He knows much better when we can expect new advances and he knows much better how will they play together to create synergetic technologies like medical nanobots.
No, it's just that some people (including Ray) see things. They see obvious patterns that are somehow escaping your attention. When Ray reads today's news, he reads about Mitsubishi planning a 400$ wearable display in early 2005. He reads about DOE planning a 1Kpixel artificial retina by 2007. He thinks about things he already knew, remembers what was done during the last two decades, connects the dots and realises that in 2014 we might very well have artificial vision widespread among healthy people. This isn't magic, it's just having very wide interests (what he mentions in this interview) and being at least moderately intelligent to add 2 plus 2.
It is well-known (I read research dating to 1970s-1980s) that people who are narrow specialists can generally foresee about 7 years of progress in their fields. People who are not specialists in a certain field can do only a few years estimates. Most people are blind - they read the same news, see the same technologies being turned into products, but they can't see the obvious future trends. Some people, like Kurzweil (and many others) can.
A French woman named Jeanne Calment lived to the ripe old age of 122. Her secret to longevity - statistics, probability theory, being lucky, not dying by the age of 120, blind chance, etc. Basically, living boring ordinary life and hoping that through random chance she will be the outlier. Unlike this anal-retentive pill-pushing twat that actually does something to live longer. What good is living forever when you're an intelligent superhuman when you could have been an average retarded grandma that died at 70 (remember, only 1 out of 100 million retarded grandmas has to live until 120)?
Those 94 that don't die, that is. According to Kurzweil vision (which I generally share), by 2030 medical nanorobots will be able to fix and fine-tune every aspect of human organism. So if you are alive by 2030, it will be possible to make you as healthy as you want. This will apply to people of all ages and everyone will change his biological age to the preferred one (which might not be the same for all people, but at least everyone will be free to chose it).
I suggest those who don't understand this simple fact check out the bottle for any food supplement. There are usually 20-50 components in each pill. This means that Kurzweil is likely taking no more than 10 pills daily, which translates into about 2-3 per meal. Which isn't really that big of a deal.
They don't realize the fact that the reason why many people buy iPods, even if they cost more, is that they are much easier to install and use than their products.
No, the reason why many people buy iPods is the same reason why people buy Windows - the brand. People know that iPods are cool, so they buy them (assuming that most players actually are similar in price and performance).
Their advantage is that they are building this using Windows (they don't need to invest in their own OS) and off-the-shelf parts (they don't need to invest in hardware R&D). Basically the only things they make are a cool case (costs little to design and can be produced for peanuts in China) and a distribution of some useful applications (still, they don't need to write as much as Apple does). Thus they have very little investment to recuperate and can pocket most of the (very thick) margin. They are a niche player and may possibly be better than Apple in this niche.
The premium that would be paid by customers is somewhat warranted (for some) because hip-e appears to be better suited for teenagers than the iMac. iMac is great and good value for its price, but it's not really targeted towards teenagers. There are some unique features that only hip-e offers and they might have some success because of this. Apple has strong position in the educational market (computers for students), but they don't offer anything specifically for the teenage audience.
Re:This news is a week to late!
on
Hip-e All-In-One PC
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Blah-blah-blah, you just hate anything innovative and don't RTFA. First, this computer has preinstalled application to protect from viruses and spyware. Second, this is not a DIY computer - all drivers are already in place and everything is compatible. There are advantages to using Macs, but it doesn't mean every other product is crap. You know, there might be a reason Macs have 2% market share...
Re:these are the folks who created the iOpener
on
Hip-e All-In-One PC
·
· Score: 1
So basically you are saying that there is no room for companies other than Apple in the computers for teenagers market? I don't think so. This may be not as good as an iMac, but at least it's a PC designed for teens and branded for teens. I don't have many teenage American kids among my friends, but I would dare guess that they might actually enjoy having a hip-e in their living room more than another beige box.
The Russian team on IMOs usually consists mostly of people from a St. Petersburg math school (239). From personal experience there I can say that most of the kids who are good (as in exceptional) in math can be good in programming, but not everyone likes it. Those who have computers early, who are introduced to programming and who don't have other time consuming hobbies will easily become top performers in both programming and math.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not really a problem, don't worry about Moldavian mafiosis. In Russia (I guess it's similar in Moldova) This kind of information (not financial info, since the most companies don't trust the government enough to share payroll details with it) - birthdays, phonenumbers (fixed and cell), addresses, car registration info, etc., can be routinely bought from pirates. It usually is a bit more expensive (say, 10$ as opposed to 2$ for a MS Office CD) and technically illegal, but it's still very easy to buy. However, this hasn't led to anything bad. Criminals always had access to this kind of data through corrupt police officers and their own channels, but now honest law-abiding ordinary citizens can get it too. A businessman can quickly find some details about an acquiantance. A guy can find a phone number of a girl he met. Somone can find contact details of their lost friend or relative, etc. Seriously, I've never heard about this kind of information being used to harm anyone (there probably are some isolated cases, but they are likely insignificant).
What the hell is "correct?" How do you decide?
If you allow me to continue the natural selection analogy, "correct" is anything that makes a user more likely to continue using the browser and make others use it.
People will not necessarily understand that broken HTML is not HTML. Microsoft, the most powerful player on the browser market, is not interested in people learning it and the very existence of IE prevents it. And when you say better, you must use the game theory and aks "better for whom?".
Of course, what I just wrote only really applies in a heterogenous environment
Wrong. This only applies in a homogenous environment where you can force everyone to write good HTML and force every application to ignore bad HTML. In the real world every developer and web-developer makes his choice. And it just so happens (by virtue of natural selection) that for browser-developers it makes most sense to write code that understands bad HTML. This way their product works better, users are happier and their browser enjoys the 90% market share. Microsoft is not evil (in this regard), they are just being rational.
You don't need to be paranoid. Even if there was no evil plan, rendering broken HTML correctly is a trait that benefits the survival of the browser. Just as rendering standard code is a beneficial trait for HTML-authoring tool.
Mozilla, Opera, Safari and the rest are simply less suited in this respect. They can argue as much as they want about their adherence to standards, but in the end they must learn to display malformed HTML/CSS/JS correctly or fail miserably (because some pages will only work in IE).
There is a third option. Build your own PC, but spend 1500$ on it. Then you would have a decent case, top-of-the-line video and audio cards, decent 5.1 or 7.1 speakers, enough HDD space to store 0.1 LOC, DVD-burner, a decent monitor and all peripherals you can think of (wireless keyboard/mouse/headset). You don't need to pay Dell for a decent PC setup, you can easily build it yourself. You can use the same parts (that were tested by Dell for compatibility/quality), but the end result will still be much cheaper.
Absolutely. I think Ray understands it just as well, but choses not to concentrate on these issues because it's not where he is most competent. There are some areas where progress was stopped by social, cultural or political issues, but they are relatively few compared with those were progress reigned supreme. So any particular prediction coming out of Ray's mouth contains an implied disclaimer "Except in forse majeur situations".
There is always this uncertainty about the future, but we still have reasons to be optimistic. Consider how the recent controversies of implantable chips, stem cells and therapeutic cloning were resolved. Chips got the FDA approval in the US, they found limited use in South America. Japanese kids are already marked with RFID tags for monitoring (albeit not implantable ones). Stem cell therapy becomes less and less controversial as more and more evidence is uncovered of its eficacy. Finally, therapeutic cloning seems to be growing in popularity.
I admit that as progress continues the opposition to technological and scientific development intensifies. Ignoramuses don't like change and try to mark each development as evil, but they can't have more than very limited success. This is partly a matter of personal optimism, but I think setbacks such as "unpopularity" of GM food are only temporary. As technology improves, it will trump the fear.
Too bad that you post this AC, or I would have added another friend.
Google will not make these pieces of software, it will simply buy the companies (like Picasa) that make it and then bury them for indefinite period of time without updates (like Picasa). And then it will be all downhill, as it will repeat Microsoft's track record in killing innovative ideas... Or may be not.
I have a hard time imagining the next generation for IM clients myself. Any ideas? :-/
Sure. For example, David Brin is working on Holocene Chat right now.
Email is for email. Anyone know any good librarian pr0n sites?
:) Alternatively, search for "librarian" on any porn search engines.
As a matter of fact, I do.
I agree that this is a rather clumsy attempt, but it's better than nothing (and there are so few attempts that most teenagers have to get a boring beige Winbox). Among the features that I noticed are better integration with a phone/mp3 player, a decent attempt at style, a wall-mounted LCD to take care of lack of desk space, a desktop environment that sounds nice from the description.
I disagree with you that they are paying extra for parts. They use the same parts and volume discounts on computer hardware are almost non-existant (a few percents at most). It doesn't matter much whether you are buying a thousand 3D cards or a million of them. There are already hundreds of small companies building custom computers and they don't seem to have this problem of expensive parts. So hip-e is not paying anything extra for the parts and the profit will be quite decent if they can sell these machines at all. Yes,they are definitely overpriced, but a) they may lower the prices in the future b) some people might still be interested in the product.
Regarding the pills, I already wrote that he likely takes about 10 pills daily with 250 different vitamins/minerals inside them. Which is nothing to worry about.
:)
As for difficulty of predicting the future, it varies. Some things, like visual designs of 2030 are extremely hard to do. But other things are easy. If you understood what steam engines are good for in 1670, you were a hundred years agead of the applications, but there was nothing to prevent you from explaining how the steam engine might be used in 1770 and how it would revolutionise everything by 1870. Today it's even easier, because the timeframe is much shorter and because our capability for imagining the possibilities is so much greater.
It is already obvious what will be possible with nanotech, genetics and AI. We can see if not the limits, but things so far from today that they seem like magic. The only thing that remains is to follow the speed of progress and construct a simple timeline that is consistent with reality.
Today's predictions are not based on leaps of faith (like robotics, AI and fusion 50 years ago). They are based on the fact that we know the gist of the future already and on convergence between different fields (making progress faster and so paradoxically easier to predict). A lot of things are happing at the same time and they all help each other.
I think the main objection people have to Ray's predictions (I call them "Ray's", but obviously he is just one of the large group of people with similar ideas) is that that don't like the things that he predicts, not just the timeframe. If someone is not comfortable with an artificial retina in his eye, he won't discuss the year when it might come true, he'll just say it's a silly prediction outright.
For more serious examples of current future predictions, check out this page.
Another reason is that bonus materials are different. There are materials on the theatrical DVDs that are not included with the extended editions.
I'd have cut the Aragorn nearly drowning scenes
Check out the Purist Edit. They (and other useless scenes) are cut there.
First, I just want to point out that Intel's announcement is even less relevant than you admit. It's a PR blunder on their part to let people think that silicon is dead. In truth, Intel will just accelerate their work on more complex processors running at the same frequency. Multi-core processors and then truly parallel processors. Yes, this is difficult, but so was upping the frequency. There is no reason to believe that Intel Pentium 6000 will not be released in early 2005. Yes, it will run at 3GHz, but it will be twice as fast as a Pentium IV 3GHz, because it will do much more per cycle.
Second, I want to note that to criticise Ray for timeframes one needs to have the same or better understanding of current progress, which I seriously doubt you do. He spends most of the time keeping track of what is being done and what is being planned. He knows much better when we can expect new advances and he knows much better how will they play together to create synergetic technologies like medical nanobots.
No, it's just that some people (including Ray) see things. They see obvious patterns that are somehow escaping your attention. When Ray reads today's news, he reads about Mitsubishi planning a 400$ wearable display in early 2005. He reads about DOE planning a 1Kpixel artificial retina by 2007. He thinks about things he already knew, remembers what was done during the last two decades, connects the dots and realises that in 2014 we might very well have artificial vision widespread among healthy people. This isn't magic, it's just having very wide interests (what he mentions in this interview) and being at least moderately intelligent to add 2 plus 2.
It is well-known (I read research dating to 1970s-1980s) that people who are narrow specialists can generally foresee about 7 years of progress in their fields. People who are not specialists in a certain field can do only a few years estimates. Most people are blind - they read the same news, see the same technologies being turned into products, but they can't see the obvious future trends. Some people, like Kurzweil (and many others) can.
A French woman named Jeanne Calment lived to the ripe old age of 122. Her secret to longevity - statistics, probability theory, being lucky, not dying by the age of 120, blind chance, etc. Basically, living boring ordinary life and hoping that through random chance she will be the outlier. Unlike this anal-retentive pill-pushing twat that actually does something to live longer. What good is living forever when you're an intelligent superhuman when you could have been an average retarded grandma that died at 70 (remember, only 1 out of 100 million retarded grandmas has to live until 120)?
Those 94 that don't die, that is. According to Kurzweil vision (which I generally share), by 2030 medical nanorobots will be able to fix and fine-tune every aspect of human organism. So if you are alive by 2030, it will be possible to make you as healthy as you want. This will apply to people of all ages and everyone will change his biological age to the preferred one (which might not be the same for all people, but at least everyone will be free to chose it).
I suggest those who don't understand this simple fact check out the bottle for any food supplement. There are usually 20-50 components in each pill. This means that Kurzweil is likely taking no more than 10 pills daily, which translates into about 2-3 per meal. Which isn't really that big of a deal.
They don't realize the fact that the reason why many people buy iPods, even if they cost more, is that they are much easier to install and use than their products.
No, the reason why many people buy iPods is the same reason why people buy Windows - the brand. People know that iPods are cool, so they buy them (assuming that most players actually are similar in price and performance).
Their advantage is that they are building this using Windows (they don't need to invest in their own OS) and off-the-shelf parts (they don't need to invest in hardware R&D). Basically the only things they make are a cool case (costs little to design and can be produced for peanuts in China) and a distribution of some useful applications (still, they don't need to write as much as Apple does). Thus they have very little investment to recuperate and can pocket most of the (very thick) margin. They are a niche player and may possibly be better than Apple in this niche.
The premium that would be paid by customers is somewhat warranted (for some) because hip-e appears to be better suited for teenagers than the iMac. iMac is great and good value for its price, but it's not really targeted towards teenagers. There are some unique features that only hip-e offers and they might have some success because of this. Apple has strong position in the educational market (computers for students), but they don't offer anything specifically for the teenage audience.
Blah-blah-blah, you just hate anything innovative and don't RTFA. First, this computer has preinstalled application to protect from viruses and spyware. Second, this is not a DIY computer - all drivers are already in place and everything is compatible. There are advantages to using Macs, but it doesn't mean every other product is crap. You know, there might be a reason Macs have 2% market share...
So basically you are saying that there is no room for companies other than Apple in the computers for teenagers market? I don't think so. This may be not as good as an iMac, but at least it's a PC designed for teens and branded for teens. I don't have many teenage American kids among my friends, but I would dare guess that they might actually enjoy having a hip-e in their living room more than another beige box.
Finland isn't. But Iceland (and possibly Greenland, though they are a protectorate of Denmark anyway) is.
The Russian team on IMOs usually consists mostly of people from a St. Petersburg math school (239). From personal experience there I can say that most of the kids who are good (as in exceptional) in math can be good in programming, but not everyone likes it. Those who have computers early, who are introduced to programming and who don't have other time consuming hobbies will easily become top performers in both programming and math.