One of the biggest differences between charitable use of cpu cycles and other forms of charity is that at present time charitable cpu cycles are not tax-deductible. Which is a shame, because if they were tax-deductible we'd see a lot more computing power devoted to whatever distributed project you could name...and no, I have no idea how one would implement such a system... Still, a large corporation that otherwise left its myriad desktops alone all night could thereby stand to benefit as much as the recipients of project data.
You're right--ID is necessary to fully participate but it isn't truly mandatory. I think part of the problem with a national ID card is that it would somehow be a mandatory step forward--one *would* be expected to have one's papers at the ready at the checkout line, so to speak.
I think the similar such a tool you're referring to (re "Southpark") is called "Maya" and it has a very steep learning curve indeed...I'd call it more of a cliff than a curve. (Well worth the climb, tho.) And Blender's interface is indeed similar. For simple 2D animation, ToonBoom Express might be one way to go. Neither of these programs is anywhere near as free as Blender of course...
If each carbon "y" is less than neuron-sized/
then is each branching neuron capable of being carbonized?/
And if virtual e-e.coli are not-yet-there/
Is a y-carbon e-neuron less-so or Moore?
I always thought lightsabres were just li'l fusion power plants with the business end being the (shaped) magnetic field leaking a little of the old plasma out somehow. I guess that would make the things slightly radioactive...
If only the French had attempted this and half-succeeded...If only there were a decent "A man a plan a canal: Panama" type palindrome that applied to space elevatores. A man, a plan, a tube: ebutyesrejwen!"? OK, I had to work hard to get a reference to Millville in...
I met a fella at a party in England once in the seventies. We peed in a field and argued over whether "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Milky Way" was a better title. He thought not... Said I was a telepathic bastard in fact, but that's water out back of the comet now. Point: All I want is a PDA with all the video and movies and radio cross-ref'd with the Texts, with the words "Don't Panic" on its cover. Counterpoint: After all this time, is that too much to ask of Western Civilization? Tesserapoint: Or, at least, of an anonymous yet literate electronics factory in Taiwan?
Actually, what about that? I mean, remaking, say, numbers four five and six? 1977 (& 1980 and 198x) was a loooong time ago, and Johnny Depp wasn't in the original. Two major flaws. No, five. No, three. No... wait... uh
Technically, Cohen seems to be doing splineoscoping rather than rotoscoping, by mapping out splines from the video and somehow fleshing them out. Cool. And personally I thought "Waking Life" appeared to be mostly Studio Artist video...
I would like to know more specifics about this "ideology of adventure." What's it called? Adventurism? Is it a cult? Can I join? Do we get to go on scary picnics and wear matching blousons? I think that part of the problem is that "space" is considered so different and filled with strange beasts and hostile airs that people naturally consider it an impassible wasteland. Sort of like the Atlantic before Henry the Navigator, or South China Sea after the Treasure Fleet bureaucrats. To this day, I understand that if you dump someone into the north Atlantic without protection or likewise toss them out an airlock in low Earth orbit, the effect on their lifespan is about the same...
The SE is possible now. Possible as in, throw enough time and brains and money and blood at it and it becomes doable then done. Another good major project of construction example is the Panama Canal, which the French deemed a wash (there were too many skeeters) before the US took over the ruins and finished it. The elevator has potential to be a Panama Canal for the 21st century, (they're even saying they'd build it in roughly the same neighborhood). Nice prestige project for US, or somebody...
Spare computer cycle-tax credits, clearing house
on
Photon Soup Update
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· Score: 1
It would be useful if the IRS were to offer some kind of tax write-off for use of one's spare computing cycles. I formerly worked in an office where all the desks had networked computers that did...nothing... (except suck down sleep-cycle juice) for twelve to eighteen hours a day, if not 24 hours a day on weekends. Presuming a workaholic who leaves the keyboard alone for eight hours every night (to run to the pharmacy to refill that Provigil prescription?) and crashes on weekends, that's, uh, urm, 88 hours of downtime. Not counting lunch, bathroom breaks, naps, nooners, etc... I kind of wonder what could be accomplished with all this spare (corporate) computing power. It would be thriftful, although perhaps Orwellian on an individual basis, if one could register a CPU with a central gov't agency which could a.) disburse the unused cycles to scientific and commercial endeavors, then b.) give back a modest tax credit. You know--SETI@irs.gov... Is this a truly horrible idea: allowing the Feds (could also be done on a state level--hint, hint, California) unfettered access to your computer? Can't they already get unfettered access if they are all desirous and (legally speaking) puppy-eyed? Having said that I'm therefore pleased that the best-know distributed computing program is out of Berkeley...
I agree with Dun Malg. Besides, the idea of creating a "link" between the US and Russia would be kind of cool, diplomatically speaking, besides being a great engineering achievement. Right up there with the space elevator. To say nothing of the potential for road trips. You're sitting in your apartment in Oklahoma City. Suddenly you get an idea: Quick road trip to Capetown, South Africa. A few days, weeks, and/or months later, there you are, maybe. Would an actual bridge be cheaper?
You're right; it's more or less a go-see-what's-out-there kind of thing. And most space technology is very specific to the problems of wandering around in space, manned or unmanned. Skimming through the NYROB article that started this string of comments I got the impression that the author was mostly impatient with the cost of the technology involved, and the public expense thereby incurred. We all have our issues. I still don't understand dairy subsidies, for example. Likewise any argument of the type I classify "let's not go there, we're all very comfy right here in the nice warm cave" tends to make me uncomfortable. It's not cheap to fly around up there. It was probably never cheap to do exploring: Imperial China was never a global seafaring world power because in China the Imperial bureaucrats cancelled a very elaborate government program of sea exploration. The treasure junks became an incidental casualty of infighting in the Forbidden City, and, come to think of it, exploration of the world beyond China by sea was severely regulated, essentially outlawed. A few years later, along comes King Henry and his little fleet. If there'd been more red tape hurled in the Chinese cancellation process, the Portuguese might've run into the Chinese fleet off the coast of South Africa. Now, imagine a world where the Chinese invented Tang and velcro in the fifteenth century and ask yourself... No, wait, that's another post...er...Yeah, well, who cares what that dope Weinberg thinks? I guess my point is that both paradigm-cracking exploration and trying to smother it in favor of the reasonable expectation of stability at home are natural human impulses. Leading to different cultural characteristics. I don't consider sending robots exploration. Call me old-fashioned. There's a post elsewhere today about the inadequacy of American engineering schools, regarding outsourcing of jobs requiring math and engineering skills for computer science. Maybe what we should do is spend a great deal of money on the space program so that teachers in these fields will earn more money and students in these fields will, you know, have something cool to do. Aerospace in the US is a wildly cyclical business, and right now Boeing is taking a beating in the civilian market from the EUAirbus company. So maybe this is merely another symptom of that educational, economic failing. BTW, NASA is thinking of outsourcing the replacement for the Shuttle to the Russians...
Hopefully not. I was particularly uplifted by elements of his State of the Union address in 2003. He does need help on either his follow-through or, at least, publicizing his follow-through.
Re:maybe we shouldn't be going to Mars
on
The Wrong Stuff
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· Score: 1
Or vice-versa. Think of it, ladies and gentlemens: tiny Martian bacteria in their microscopic metallic war-tripods stalking over the British landscape, crushing everything in their path...wait, no, you're right. That's why they sterilize everything on a space probe before and during the flight. And you do have an excellent point, in a way: Once human lands on Mars, well, you can kiss goodbye the thought of not infesting the Martian biosphere with Earthness. One furtive pee and it is all over.
Answer: Every cent is spent on Earth, and a sizable percentage would likely be spent at US universities. I suspect it's a matter of national technical priorities, in a weird way. The current top aerospace engineers are (mostly) aging and retired veterans of the brief US push into space in the nineteen-sixties. I think the general idea of the Bush plan is to provide a place for American aerospace engineers to, you know, actually get paid once in a while for what they decided to educate themselves to do. The excellent merits of visiting or colonizing Mars aside, the primary effect of the plan would probably be to either prevent the further decay of the US spacefaring knowledge base...or maybe accelerate it in some weird way involving the Dept. of Boeing-Lockheed and the peculiar dynamics of our military-industrial complex. Somebody else might know more about that. It costs a lot because inventing completely new stuff for a compltely new environment sometimes costs ya. (At least, it used to--lots of the tech to do the job is already studied to death at this point.) And you could no doubt easily spend a trillion dollars, or ten trillion, building permanent "colonies" on the Moon and Mars--but you could do it on a smaller budget as well. So I don't understand why an estimate of $500 billion for that seems particularly unrealistic or out of line. Sure, a one-shot visit has been priced at a twentieth of that... But a trillion-dollar price presumably includes establishing two new versions of the US, (well, OK, maybe half a new version of Hilo and half a new version of Arizona), on other planets. For that, it's pretty cheap.
I wonder whether anyone has modded a a cellphone with voice-recognition into a 1967-style ST communicator. Seems to me that it would be easy to do, especially the part where you flop open the mesh cover to the tune of that neat cicada sound...
IANARS as well, and I too would like to see swoopy fifties-style spaceships zoom off to orbit as RH&G intended. But if they work, it isn't the accidental release of nuclear stuff that worries me--it is the deliberate release,which sounds much more likely. Also, the actual fuel materials likely to be used are...kind of bad news. http://www.scescape.net/~woods/elements/polonium.h tml#abundance Polonium for example, is dandy powersource stuff (see another story on slashdot about weapons powered by Polonium), as long as you keep it away from yer precious bodily tissues... I suspect a space elevator will be the work of one person with a lot of money, rather than a government. And that person would have to want a whole lot more money. So the economics might not be there for a sane investor. Never stopped anybody before, of course. If the expenditure isn't too great, India, on the other hand, might have both a site available {:-) wonder where?} and a national motive to swing for the fences...
Time Warner's current slogan is, in part, "the place to be"
and with roughly 1,188,000 cable boxes in NYC, it certainly is (for them, anyway)...The city, sans interlopers and faux cable boxes must be a gold mine for them. When you call their customer service they also have a prerecorded announcer inform you that they're committed to being the best cable service. If they're a monopoly, however, (and for all practical purposes they are, in many neighborhoods) how can they be the best? Or the worst? Or anything but the medium?
There isn't much talk here of using tablet pcs as if they were inexpensive Cintiqs with hard drives... Which to me seems their real beauty. They are relatively CHEAP lcd drawing tablets, and the most attractive ones come with fold-out keyboards and harddrives, to boot. The real problem seems to me to be that manufacturers are indeed addressing the wrong market: To run a graphics-oriented OS, they are building an anemic graphics-processing computer. Without fail, as pointed out above, if you want to run, say, Photoshop on a laptop, there are much more powerful choices available. No one is making the tablet PC equivalent of the new Voodoo or Alienware laptop with a replaceable mobile graphics card, super fast processor, huge drawing screen. And that makes no sense. I mean, if you want to draw on the damn thing, why can't you buy a tablet that will run at a modern speed, i.e. the cutting-edge that some competitive graphics markets (like game level design) demand. This is why I think Apple may be off-base about Tablet PCs being a market to avoid: Yeah, the only people who would want a Tabletbook are, you know, that vast minority of long-haired artist types who like to use Macs for graphic applications like drawing and stuff, or notating music,or DVJing... I guess since most Macs go to the accounting crowd, this is a very small market indeed. I think what may have happened is that an attempt was made to introduce the machines broadly, rather than to the niche market of people who use electronic drawing tablets as part of their daily commercial repertoire in the first place. And maybe they did this because those people all use Macs. On the other hand, maybe the introduction of a killer PC-only ap like Adobe Atmosphere could change this equation for tablets.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the biggest differences between charitable use of cpu cycles and other forms of charity is that at present time charitable cpu cycles are not tax-deductible. Which is a shame, because if they were tax-deductible we'd see a lot more computing power devoted to whatever distributed project you could name...and no, I have no idea how one would implement such a system... Still, a large corporation that otherwise left its myriad desktops alone all night could thereby stand to benefit as much as the recipients of project data.
You're right--ID is necessary to fully participate but it isn't truly mandatory. I think part of the problem with a national ID card is that it would somehow be a mandatory step forward--one *would* be expected to have one's papers at the ready at the checkout line, so to speak.
I think the similar such a tool you're referring to (re "Southpark") is called "Maya" and it has a very steep learning curve indeed...I'd call it more of a cliff than a curve. (Well worth the climb, tho.) And Blender's interface is indeed similar. For simple 2D animation, ToonBoom Express might be one way to go. Neither of these programs is anywhere near as free as Blender of course...
I tried this over the summer. It are yum. It are also powerful stuff.
If each carbon "y" is less than neuron-sized/ then is each branching neuron capable of being carbonized?/ And if virtual e-e.coli are not-yet-there/ Is a y-carbon e-neuron less-so or Moore?
I always thought lightsabres were just li'l fusion power plants with the business end being the (shaped) magnetic field leaking a little of the old plasma out somehow. I guess that would make the things slightly radioactive...
If only the French had attempted this and half-succeeded...If only there were a decent "A man a plan a canal: Panama" type palindrome that applied to space elevatores. A man, a plan, a tube: ebutyesrejwen!"? OK, I had to work hard to get a reference to Millville in...
I met a fella at a party in England once in the seventies. We peed in a field and argued over whether "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Milky Way" was a better title. He thought not... Said I was a telepathic bastard in fact, but that's water out back of the comet now. Point: All I want is a PDA with all the video and movies and radio cross-ref'd with the Texts, with the words "Don't Panic" on its cover. Counterpoint: After all this time, is that too much to ask of Western Civilization? Tesserapoint: Or, at least, of an anonymous yet literate electronics factory in Taiwan?
Actually, what about that? I mean, remaking, say, numbers four five and six? 1977 (& 1980 and 198x) was a loooong time ago, and Johnny Depp wasn't in the original. Two major flaws. No, five. No, three. No... wait... uh
Technically, Cohen seems to be doing splineoscoping rather than rotoscoping, by mapping out splines from the video and somehow fleshing them out. Cool. And personally I thought "Waking Life" appeared to be mostly Studio Artist video...
I would like to know more specifics about this "ideology of adventure." What's it called? Adventurism? Is it a cult? Can I join? Do we get to go on scary picnics and wear matching blousons? I think that part of the problem is that "space" is considered so different and filled with strange beasts and hostile airs that people naturally consider it an impassible wasteland. Sort of like the Atlantic before Henry the Navigator, or South China Sea after the Treasure Fleet bureaucrats. To this day, I understand that if you dump someone into the north Atlantic without protection or likewise toss them out an airlock in low Earth orbit, the effect on their lifespan is about the same...
Could one also lase sunlight, beam same down to earth, then channel the beam into a ground-based launch system?
The SE is possible now. Possible as in, throw enough time and brains and money and blood at it and it becomes doable then done. Another good major project of construction example is the Panama Canal, which the French deemed a wash (there were too many skeeters) before the US took over the ruins and finished it. The elevator has potential to be a Panama Canal for the 21st century, (they're even saying they'd build it in roughly the same neighborhood). Nice prestige project for US, or somebody...
It would be useful if the IRS were to offer some kind of tax write-off for use of one's spare computing cycles. I formerly worked in an office where all the desks had networked computers that did...nothing... (except suck down sleep-cycle juice) for twelve to eighteen hours a day, if not 24 hours a day on weekends. Presuming a workaholic who leaves the keyboard alone for eight hours every night (to run to the pharmacy to refill that Provigil prescription?) and crashes on weekends, that's, uh, urm, 88 hours of downtime. Not counting lunch, bathroom breaks, naps, nooners, etc... I kind of wonder what could be accomplished with all this spare (corporate) computing power. It would be thriftful, although perhaps Orwellian on an individual basis, if one could register a CPU with a central gov't agency which could a.) disburse the unused cycles to scientific and commercial endeavors, then b.) give back a modest tax credit. You know--SETI@irs.gov... Is this a truly horrible idea: allowing the Feds (could also be done on a state level--hint, hint, California) unfettered access to your computer? Can't they already get unfettered access if they are all desirous and (legally speaking) puppy-eyed? Having said that I'm therefore pleased that the best-know distributed computing program is out of Berkeley...
I agree with Dun Malg. Besides, the idea of creating a "link" between the US and Russia would be kind of cool, diplomatically speaking, besides being a great engineering achievement. Right up there with the space elevator. To say nothing of the potential for road trips. You're sitting in your apartment in Oklahoma City. Suddenly you get an idea: Quick road trip to Capetown, South Africa. A few days, weeks, and/or months later, there you are, maybe. Would an actual bridge be cheaper?
You're right; it's more or less a go-see-what's-out-there kind of thing. And most space technology is very specific to the problems of wandering around in space, manned or unmanned. Skimming through the NYROB article that started this string of comments I got the impression that the author was mostly impatient with the cost of the technology involved, and the public expense thereby incurred. We all have our issues. I still don't understand dairy subsidies, for example. Likewise any argument of the type I classify "let's not go there, we're all very comfy right here in the nice warm cave" tends to make me uncomfortable. It's not cheap to fly around up there. It was probably never cheap to do exploring: Imperial China was never a global seafaring world power because in China the Imperial bureaucrats cancelled a very elaborate government program of sea exploration. The treasure junks became an incidental casualty of infighting in the Forbidden City, and, come to think of it, exploration of the world beyond China by sea was severely regulated, essentially outlawed. A few years later, along comes King Henry and his little fleet. If there'd been more red tape hurled in the Chinese cancellation process, the Portuguese might've run into the Chinese fleet off the coast of South Africa. Now, imagine a world where the Chinese invented Tang and velcro in the fifteenth century and ask yourself... No, wait, that's another post...er...Yeah, well, who cares what that dope Weinberg thinks? I guess my point is that both paradigm-cracking exploration and trying to smother it in favor of the reasonable expectation of stability at home are natural human impulses. Leading to different cultural characteristics. I don't consider sending robots exploration. Call me old-fashioned. There's a post elsewhere today about the inadequacy of American engineering schools, regarding outsourcing of jobs requiring math and engineering skills for computer science. Maybe what we should do is spend a great deal of money on the space program so that teachers in these fields will earn more money and students in these fields will, you know, have something cool to do. Aerospace in the US is a wildly cyclical business, and right now Boeing is taking a beating in the civilian market from the EUAirbus company. So maybe this is merely another symptom of that educational, economic failing. BTW, NASA is thinking of outsourcing the replacement for the Shuttle to the Russians...
Hopefully not. I was particularly uplifted by elements of his State of the Union address in 2003. He does need help on either his follow-through or, at least, publicizing his follow-through.
Or vice-versa. Think of it, ladies and gentlemens: tiny Martian bacteria in their microscopic metallic war-tripods stalking over the British landscape, crushing everything in their path...wait, no, you're right. That's why they sterilize everything on a space probe before and during the flight. And you do have an excellent point, in a way: Once human lands on Mars, well, you can kiss goodbye the thought of not infesting the Martian biosphere with Earthness. One furtive pee and it is all over.
Yes, and after we eat the giant squid lets start on the smaller bite-sized whales and anything else still alive down there.
Answer: Every cent is spent on Earth, and a sizable percentage would likely be spent at US universities. I suspect it's a matter of national technical priorities, in a weird way. The current top aerospace engineers are (mostly) aging and retired veterans of the brief US push into space in the nineteen-sixties. I think the general idea of the Bush plan is to provide a place for American aerospace engineers to, you know, actually get paid once in a while for what they decided to educate themselves to do. The excellent merits of visiting or colonizing Mars aside, the primary effect of the plan would probably be to either prevent the further decay of the US spacefaring knowledge base...or maybe accelerate it in some weird way involving the Dept. of Boeing-Lockheed and the peculiar dynamics of our military-industrial complex. Somebody else might know more about that. It costs a lot because inventing completely new stuff for a compltely new environment sometimes costs ya. (At least, it used to--lots of the tech to do the job is already studied to death at this point.) And you could no doubt easily spend a trillion dollars, or ten trillion, building permanent "colonies" on the Moon and Mars--but you could do it on a smaller budget as well. So I don't understand why an estimate of $500 billion for that seems particularly unrealistic or out of line. Sure, a one-shot visit has been priced at a twentieth of that... But a trillion-dollar price presumably includes establishing two new versions of the US, (well, OK, maybe half a new version of Hilo and half a new version of Arizona), on other planets. For that, it's pretty cheap.
I wonder whether anyone has modded a a cellphone with voice-recognition into a 1967-style ST communicator. Seems to me that it would be easy to do, especially the part where you flop open the mesh cover to the tune of that neat cicada sound...
IANARS as well, and I too would like to see swoopy fifties-style spaceships zoom off to orbit as RH&G intended. But if they work, it isn't the accidental release of nuclear stuff that worries me--it is the deliberate release,which sounds much more likely. Also, the actual fuel materials likely to be used are...kind of bad news. http://www.scescape.net/~woods/elements/polonium.h tml#abundance
Polonium for example, is dandy powersource stuff (see another story on slashdot about weapons powered by Polonium), as long as you keep it away from yer precious bodily tissues... I suspect a space elevator will be the work of one person with a lot of money, rather than a government. And that person would have to want a whole lot more money. So the economics might not be there for a sane investor. Never stopped anybody before, of course. If the expenditure isn't too great, India, on the other hand, might have both a site available {:-) wonder where?} and a national motive to swing for the fences...
Actually, the McLuhan is the message...
and with roughly 1,188,000 cable boxes in NYC, it certainly is (for them, anyway)...The city, sans interlopers and faux cable boxes must be a gold mine for them. When you call their customer service they also have a prerecorded announcer inform you that they're committed to being the best cable service. If they're a monopoly, however, (and for all practical purposes they are, in many neighborhoods) how can they be the best? Or the worst? Or anything but the medium?
There isn't much talk here of using tablet pcs as if they were inexpensive Cintiqs with hard drives... Which to me seems their real beauty. They are relatively CHEAP lcd drawing tablets, and the most attractive ones come with fold-out keyboards and harddrives, to boot. The real problem seems to me to be that manufacturers are indeed addressing the wrong market: To run a graphics-oriented OS, they are building an anemic graphics-processing computer. Without fail, as pointed out above, if you want to run, say, Photoshop on a laptop, there are much more powerful choices available. No one is making the tablet PC equivalent of the new Voodoo or Alienware laptop with a replaceable mobile graphics card, super fast processor, huge drawing screen. And that makes no sense. I mean, if you want to draw on the damn thing, why can't you buy a tablet that will run at a modern speed, i.e. the cutting-edge that some competitive graphics markets (like game level design) demand. This is why I think Apple may be off-base about Tablet PCs being a market to avoid: Yeah, the only people who would want a Tabletbook are, you know, that vast minority of long-haired artist types who like to use Macs for graphic applications like drawing and stuff, or notating music,or DVJing... I guess since most Macs go to the accounting crowd, this is a very small market indeed. I think what may have happened is that an attempt was made to introduce the machines broadly, rather than to the niche market of people who use electronic drawing tablets as part of their daily commercial repertoire in the first place. And maybe they did this because those people all use Macs. On the other hand, maybe the introduction of a killer PC-only ap like Adobe Atmosphere could change this equation for tablets.