For sure. The thing that set ST apart from the rest of the sci-fi of that ilk, is that in addition to the triumph of technology that these series showcased, ST was much more prevalent in showing the triumph of philosophy. A lot of sci-fi characters seem like immature idiots in a world of technological fancy. Most notable in ST to me is not the tech, but the characters. Uhura's line about her generation no longer fearing words being one of the notable ones, Picards timely episode about security vs. liberty, and i'm sure there are countless others that escape me right now.
It is hard to imagine that in a world that has conquered nearly all of the worlds' problems with technological solutions, people would still be acting like children.
I consider not having the latest games on my powerbook throughout college part of the reason why i graduated. If you are in the library and have to choose between playing the latest game or starting to work on your compilers project, you will be thankful that you removed the first option. Not to mention if you have a mac, your unix classes won't require you to work at a mainframe terminal, you have your own unix box with you at all times.
Most newer technologies featured on/. always seems unlikely and full of holes, but this one seems a lot more solid.
I think its partially because it isn't among the usual triumvurate of slashdot stories regarding technology; power generation, revolutionary computer tech, and bio/nano tech. If this site was more slanted to automotive news, we would have heard about this story sometime last year, the details would be spotty, and the evidence would be missing. Slashdot will usually report auto news if it involves some part of the triumvurate (nano-tech coating, hybrid cars, electric cars, etc).
Not that i'm bashing automotive news, i'm just offering an explanation.
I wouldn't care if it took 100K miles to regain my investment.
This is a website for geeks. I personally would rather drive at 40mpg and pay 3000 to the engineers and company that designed a hybrid engine than drive at 35mpg and pay 1000 to the billionaire aristocrat oil tycoons.
Ok, so lets turn this into a viable scenario. Company A spends 5 million on its IT staff in a typical business year. Management guru Q comes up with an inspired idea: "Why don't we pay the poor unfortunate souls in country M to do our work for 1 million dollars a year!" Proposal is enacted, and the managment rejoices.
Suddenly Company A has 4 million dollars to play with. They decide to invest in brilliant idea Y which coincidentally requires 4 million dollars in funds to come to fruition. The company prospers and new jobs are created. That 4 million dollars doesn't just dissolve, and if it is not being invested in the company, it goes somewhere.
Even if brilliant idea Y doesn't exist, the stockholders get a hefty amount of dividends and that money also goes "somewhere". The local restuarants have a banner year, the service industry has an influx of funds, or the sons and daughters go to a private school instead of a public one. The money may be dispersed, the work may be different, but it doesn't dissapear.
The only people that need to worry are those that are completely incapable of adapting. While I do feel sorry for you, i can't say i regret this post-modern intellectual darwinism, it encourages creativity. If you are still bitter about your job being outsourced, don't worry, someone bright will have another idea, and you can hitch your wagon onto that train too.
I guess my argument would be that i think i shouldn't have to pay for music. I think the ideal would be realized if the artists distributed their music for free, and made their money off of performances. I would compare this to the art world. I can go to google and search for any work of visual art and find an image. Yet there is no uproar from the fine art world. If i want a more immersive experience, i go to the museum.
I understand your point, but i would have to disagree. Partially.
I am a java coder. I consider C/C++ a knowledge based coding language. If you take your time to learn all the tricks of the trade in C, you will probably be a better coder than I am. Java isn't as tricky of a language, most everything you need is in the javadocs.
I can gaurantee you that the C++ master would write cleaner code than the casual java coder, and probably even better than the java master, the difference being the java coder doesn't have to know every nook and cranny of the coding language to write a good program. I would never presume to call the C++ programmer more intelligent than the java programmer, merely more knowledgable and likely more passionate.
I personally don't use java with the desire to become a java guru or a programming master, i just want to write software that works, and i don't want to spend a great deal of time doing it. I don't program for the joy of programming, i program for the joy of solving a problem. The amazing thing about java is that it gives the ability to write software to just about anyone. Yes there are B coders in java, but many of them are A engineers who see coding as a means to an end, not the end itself. Whether they can write good software or not is a function of their intelligence, in my opinion, not of their language choice.
In reality, resources aren't cheap and in infinite supply, they are expensive to find and process, and due to being finite they invariably get more expensive as time goes on.
Not yet. Keep being a good little engineer and maybe someday we'll get there.
Meanwhile, the dream of fusion power is just that: a dream.
So too were many of the technologies that we use today.
As long as it takes energy and resources to produce the things we need, like food to start off with, then no one can "share it with many people at no cost", no matter how many robots we have.
Until food production and energy production is automated.
All i can say is technology makes the impossible possible. I'm not an engineer for the money or the pride, I'm an engineer because i believe that science and technology is the biggest driving force we have to change the world for the better.
The answer is actually quite a bit simpler than all of this. You can't force people to be nice or to share, I for one do not like to be forced to do anything. But I have found that for the greater part of people that i meet, most would like to help eachother out, as long as they don't have to sacrifice anything (or sacrifice very little) to help.
If I wrote a little piece of software for organizing my MP3s, i could share it with many people at no cost to myself. From this notion, the idea of open source seems to be the key. People write for respect in the community, open source idealism, or just contribute code that would go to waste on a shelf anyway. The cost of distribution is negligible, thus there is no personal sacrifice. Expand open-source idealism to things like Wikipedia et al and you can visualize where this is going
My answer to the idea of an economic equality, is technology. If there was no monetary incentive (i.e. getting paid) to being a dishwasher or a toilet cleaner, would you do these jobs? Probably not. Who would? A machine. Any job simple enough to model in software is probably too boring for a human mind to do voluntarily. The work needs to be done, but I'd much rather design a machine to do it. If all the boring jobs are done by machines, i think you'll find it easier to achieve this kind of star-trek utopia you describe.
Both camps (Japan and France) have offered to take up half the costs to build in their locale. Answer is obvious. Take the original planned investment, and give half to each camp, and build 2. We'd probably learn alot more from having them both, and we could explore different options in the building process. And we could finally get to work and start seeing news on slashdot about the progess instead of the squabbling
I would be all for low processing power machines, if my code didn't take so damn long to compile. If i have to wait for 10 seconds on my 2.4ghz, i'd hate to see compile times of 20 mins on an old beater...
If i left all my material goods to my kids, they would not need to squirm and fight to get them. People that grew up having a lot of money usually aren't as worried about money, its something they just have. I would want my kids to not have to work a job they hate just so they can put food on the table, I would want the food to be on the table so they can work a job they love.
Indefinately extending human lifespan isn't a death sentence for the human race.
For one reason, advanced civilizations have decreasing population growth, and with no need to make kids to carry on a name, may have no population growth.
For another reason, and a more blanket application of logic...Life is a fight for survival. We in the western world just have an indirect fight for survival so we can't really appreciate it. If there are more people and more demand for resources, there are two ways the problem is solved, by creating more resources, or by decreasing the amount of people. If Person A has to fight for survival and is starving to death, and Person B has a piece of bread, A will try to take B's bread by any means necessary. If there is a fight to the death over the piece of bread, one person will die, the other will survive. Hence, a population decrease...
They claim to have an 85% process efficiency (numbers used for the general public, who is comfortable with numbers under 100%) which translates into about 567% energy efficiency. In other words, if you can imagine you have a 100 BTU worth handful of turkey guys, For every 100 BTU's in the guts put in, 15 BTU's are required to sustain the process, and 85 units are generated in excess in the form of oil.
The difference being that the lone ranger virus writer can hide pretty easily, but put a company with a highly visible public face, and its easy to point a finger or mount an opposition. You can't easily fight something you can't see.
All i would need to be distracted enough while excercising so that i could tolerate it, is a touch screen computer on a treadmill. Reading my e-mail can easily take up 30 minutes of my day, and a simple touch screen interface would be all i would need to interact fully with the system. I could then reply to the messages after finishing my jog, and have gotten some good physical activity out of the deal. Read email, browse the web, play some solitaire, there a number of low input demand activities that take up my day that a touch screen would be perfect for.
I am going to have to go ahead and disagree with you there. If you surround a kid (like the one described) with intellectual equals only, he will certainly be happier talking about math/computers/science/etc. but will likely find themselves to be crippled later in life. Dealing with those of less intelligence is a very useful skill, and it requires interaction. Do you think your boss and coworkers will be appreciative of the inner workings of the laws of thermodynamics? Learning to connect to people on a broad range of topics from the mundane to the highly technical is the best way to remove all roadblocks in your personal and professional development.
Not all intellectuals care about math and science, and I think with an open mind you will realize there are people smarter than you that don't know the first thing about differential equations or sophisticated schematics. Some of the most brilliant people I know are social phenoms and can analyze people and society faster than I can analyze code.
Slashdot Mirror
For sure. The thing that set ST apart from the rest of the sci-fi of that ilk, is that in addition to the triumph of technology that these series showcased, ST was much more prevalent in showing the triumph of philosophy. A lot of sci-fi characters seem like immature idiots in a world of technological fancy. Most notable in ST to me is not the tech, but the characters. Uhura's line about her generation no longer fearing words being one of the notable ones, Picards timely episode about security vs. liberty, and i'm sure there are countless others that escape me right now.
It is hard to imagine that in a world that has conquered nearly all of the worlds' problems with technological solutions, people would still be acting like children.
mod this up please
I consider not having the latest games on my powerbook throughout college part of the reason why i graduated. If you are in the library and have to choose between playing the latest game or starting to work on your compilers project, you will be thankful that you removed the first option. Not to mention if you have a mac, your unix classes won't require you to work at a mainframe terminal, you have your own unix box with you at all times.
Not that i'm bashing automotive news, i'm just offering an explanation.
I wouldn't care if it took 100K miles to regain my investment.
This is a website for geeks. I personally would rather drive at 40mpg and pay 3000 to the engineers and company that designed a hybrid engine than drive at 35mpg and pay 1000 to the billionaire aristocrat oil tycoons.
Wouldn't you?
Ok, so lets turn this into a viable scenario. Company A spends 5 million on its IT staff in a typical business year. Management guru Q comes up with an inspired idea: "Why don't we pay the poor unfortunate souls in country M to do our work for 1 million dollars a year!" Proposal is enacted, and the managment rejoices.
Suddenly Company A has 4 million dollars to play with. They decide to invest in brilliant idea Y which coincidentally requires 4 million dollars in funds to come to fruition. The company prospers and new jobs are created. That 4 million dollars doesn't just dissolve, and if it is not being invested in the company, it goes somewhere.
Even if brilliant idea Y doesn't exist, the stockholders get a hefty amount of dividends and that money also goes "somewhere". The local restuarants have a banner year, the service industry has an influx of funds, or the sons and daughters go to a private school instead of a public one. The money may be dispersed, the work may be different, but it doesn't dissapear.
The only people that need to worry are those that are completely incapable of adapting. While I do feel sorry for you, i can't say i regret this post-modern intellectual darwinism, it encourages creativity. If you are still bitter about your job being outsourced, don't worry, someone bright will have another idea, and you can hitch your wagon onto that train too.
I guess my argument would be that i think i shouldn't have to pay for music. I think the ideal would be realized if the artists distributed their music for free, and made their money off of performances. I would compare this to the art world. I can go to google and search for any work of visual art and find an image. Yet there is no uproar from the fine art world. If i want a more immersive experience, i go to the museum.
I understand your point, but i would have to disagree. Partially.
I am a java coder. I consider C/C++ a knowledge based coding language. If you take your time to learn all the tricks of the trade in C, you will probably be a better coder than I am. Java isn't as tricky of a language, most everything you need is in the javadocs.
I can gaurantee you that the C++ master would write cleaner code than the casual java coder, and probably even better than the java master, the difference being the java coder doesn't have to know every nook and cranny of the coding language to write a good program. I would never presume to call the C++ programmer more intelligent than the java programmer, merely more knowledgable and likely more passionate.
I personally don't use java with the desire to become a java guru or a programming master, i just want to write software that works, and i don't want to spend a great deal of time doing it. I don't program for the joy of programming, i program for the joy of solving a problem. The amazing thing about java is that it gives the ability to write software to just about anyone. Yes there are B coders in java, but many of them are A engineers who see coding as a means to an end, not the end itself. Whether they can write good software or not is a function of their intelligence, in my opinion, not of their language choice.
All i can say is technology makes the impossible possible. I'm not an engineer for the money or the pride, I'm an engineer because i believe that science and technology is the biggest driving force we have to change the world for the better.
The answer is actually quite a bit simpler than all of this. You can't force people to be nice or to share, I for one do not like to be forced to do anything. But I have found that for the greater part of people that i meet, most would like to help eachother out, as long as they don't have to sacrifice anything (or sacrifice very little) to help.
If I wrote a little piece of software for organizing my MP3s, i could share it with many people at no cost to myself. From this notion, the idea of open source seems to be the key. People write for respect in the community, open source idealism, or just contribute code that would go to waste on a shelf anyway. The cost of distribution is negligible, thus there is no personal sacrifice. Expand open-source idealism to things like Wikipedia et al and you can visualize where this is going
My answer to the idea of an economic equality, is technology. If there was no monetary incentive (i.e. getting paid) to being a dishwasher or a toilet cleaner, would you do these jobs? Probably not. Who would? A machine. Any job simple enough to model in software is probably too boring for a human mind to do voluntarily. The work needs to be done, but I'd much rather design a machine to do it. If all the boring jobs are done by machines, i think you'll find it easier to achieve this kind of star-trek utopia you describe.
Both camps (Japan and France) have offered to take up half the costs to build in their locale. Answer is obvious. Take the original planned investment, and give half to each camp, and build 2. We'd probably learn alot more from having them both, and we could explore different options in the building process. And we could finally get to work and start seeing news on slashdot about the progess instead of the squabbling
I would be all for low processing power machines, if my code didn't take so damn long to compile. If i have to wait for 10 seconds on my 2.4ghz, i'd hate to see compile times of 20 mins on an old beater...
If i left all my material goods to my kids, they would not need to squirm and fight to get them. People that grew up having a lot of money usually aren't as worried about money, its something they just have. I would want my kids to not have to work a job they hate just so they can put food on the table, I would want the food to be on the table so they can work a job they love.
Indefinately extending human lifespan isn't a death sentence for the human race.
For one reason, advanced civilizations have decreasing population growth, and with no need to make kids to carry on a name, may have no population growth.
For another reason, and a more blanket application of logic...Life is a fight for survival. We in the western world just have an indirect fight for survival so we can't really appreciate it. If there are more people and more demand for resources, there are two ways the problem is solved, by creating more resources, or by decreasing the amount of people. If Person A has to fight for survival and is starving to death, and Person B has a piece of bread, A will try to take B's bread by any means necessary. If there is a fight to the death over the piece of bread, one person will die, the other will survive. Hence, a population decrease...
Escalades are also, *one model*
They claim to have an 85% process efficiency (numbers used for the general public, who is comfortable with numbers under 100%) which translates into about 567% energy efficiency. In other words, if you can imagine you have a 100 BTU worth handful of turkey guys, For every 100 BTU's in the guts put in, 15 BTU's are required to sustain the process, and 85 units are generated in excess in the form of oil.
The difference being that the lone ranger virus writer can hide pretty easily, but put a company with a highly visible public face, and its easy to point a finger or mount an opposition. You can't easily fight something you can't see.
All i would need to be distracted enough while excercising so that i could tolerate it, is a touch screen computer on a treadmill. Reading my e-mail can easily take up 30 minutes of my day, and a simple touch screen interface would be all i would need to interact fully with the system. I could then reply to the messages after finishing my jog, and have gotten some good physical activity out of the deal. Read email, browse the web, play some solitaire, there a number of low input demand activities that take up my day that a touch screen would be perfect for.
I am going to have to go ahead and disagree with you there. If you surround a kid (like the one described) with intellectual equals only, he will certainly be happier talking about math/computers/science/etc. but will likely find themselves to be crippled later in life. Dealing with those of less intelligence is a very useful skill, and it requires interaction. Do you think your boss and coworkers will be appreciative of the inner workings of the laws of thermodynamics? Learning to connect to people on a broad range of topics from the mundane to the highly technical is the best way to remove all roadblocks in your personal and professional development.
;)
Not all intellectuals care about math and science, and I think with an open mind you will realize there are people smarter than you that don't know the first thing about differential equations or sophisticated schematics. Some of the most brilliant people I know are social phenoms and can analyze people and society faster than I can analyze code.
Maybe I'm just a poor coder
So I can realize my childhood dream?