The one thing the US doesn't understand about drone warfare is that: * Here soon when large nations fight it might be drone vs drone and long term stalemate might ensue if both have large amounts of resources, that until a supply chain is broken on one of the two sides.
Wasn't that the WW-I / WW-II scenario (except we were throwing farmboys at each other instead of drones)?
* Dirt poor nations will resort to asymmetric warfare, terrorism will grow as a result.
Interesting, this guys seems pretty extreme but I'm of the opinion that if technology is starting to play such major roles in almost all sports why shouldn't cyborgs be allowed to compete in track and field?
Spring-foot prosthetics are a clear unfair advantage in long distance running, they need their own league to compete in, otherwise truly competitive athletes would have to cut their feet off to have a chance of winning.
I agree there is certain bio-research that should be done, not only in the Challenger Deep, but also across the floor of the Gulf of Mexico and any number of other under-explored areas.
More useful than space? Dunno, I like my satellite communication, GPS and weather imagery, and the military loves their ICBMs. An awful lot of deep sea exploration is supported by space based tech today.
We're still mucking about in near-Earth orbit about 99% of the time (because that's where the immediately useful stuff is, for the most part) - deeper space is limited to pure science/exploration missions at the moment, I'd like to see some more serious engine development that can support a manned mission to Mars, not so much for the manned mission itself, but for other applications like asteroid mining / redirection, for starters.
I personally think that deep trenches are at least as interesting as outer space.
Interesting, certainly, inspiring? No. The possibilities of space are (cough) endless. Once you get to the bottom of the trench, you're pretty much done. Can't live there, nothing of immediate value there, much harder to sustain a colony there than outer space.
Not saying we shouldn't visit the trenches too, just that I don't think it warrants as much attention or investment as outer space.
sci fi world with at least some effort at plausibility. (not all of it, but some details were there, for instance Jake suffering muscle weakness after prolonged time in the tank)
'Cause a culture capable of interstellar travel couldn't eliminate muscle weakness or fix nerve damage.
I've had minor nerve damage twice, no, we can't fix it, and we're not likely to figure out how anytime soon. All this brain-machine-interface crap is just that, literally two-bit crap - when compared to actual nerves containing hundreds of thousands of fibers.
If you want to kvetch about the tech in the movie, go after the Avatar link - as if lag, even light-speed lag, and other factors wouldn't make that wholly unworkable... I was also a little disappointed that they could make this magical link, and yet be unable to run a simple tracer to find Jake when he got lost in the jungle... but, those are both "suspension of disbelief" points central to the storyline.
He created a sci fi world with at least some effort at plausibility.
Oh, c'mon! Where the frig in the Periodic Table does one find "Unobtanium"? Seriously? I heard that, and gave up on the flick from that point on.
Unobtainium: well, why not call it Carbon, formed in large quantities into some kind of useful room-temperature superconductor (or other highly valuable commodity) by processes unique to the formation of Pandora. Sure you could synthesize it, but it's cheaper to go dig it up. The miracle of Unobtainum was irrelevant to the plot beyond the fact it was valuable and they had to take down HomeTree to get it. Any time wasted explaining what Unobtainium was good for is just pandering to a very small percentage of the audience, a small percentage with relatively little influence over ticket buyers, apparently.
The reason the "indians" won was because the entire planet was a biological entity that could defend itself, by mobilizing all resources against the human invaders
Entity, meet biological warfare (easily possible, given the ease with which the DNA was replicated) and a gaggle of large asteroids being flung at the surface just for good measure (also possible, given the massive energy require to go FTL (or was it near-light?) speeds in the first place). There's at least half a dozen ways, given that story's tech, in which to destroy the inhabitants without harming the material, endangering a single human being, and basically turning the place into an airless rock that can be strip-mined.
Seriously... good visual effects (easily give it that), but the story had more holes in it than a sieve.
Yeah, and the U.S. could have nuked Afghanistan and Iraq into oblivion, as well as any upstarts like Iran or North Korea who would have chirped about it. Maybe, just maybe, there were political implications back home that prevented waging all-out war on obviously sentient beings that are absolutely no threat to us, and whose only crime is sitting on something valuable.
There is certain "herd logic" on/. that makes no sense to me, "Avatar Sucks!!!" being one.
It was over-hyped, and maybe too expensive to make, but I don't really care about that - I ignore the hype and if Hollywood wants to risk that kind of money, that's their business.
Looking at the end product of Avatar, its story, scientific accuracy and entertainment value were no worse than any number of "good" science fiction movies, it was a little too heavy on the Vietnam parallels for me, but what the hell, it's his story, let him tell it.
Tell you what, if Avatar Sucks, tell me why AND name 3 movies that both did it (your point) better, and were better movies overall.
$60K - $10K for standard IRAs = $50K - $10K for taxes (guesstimated) = $40K - $12K for stated savings = $28K - $12K for mortgage (guesstimated) = $16K / 52weeks = $300 / week to live on. Piece of cake, my mom and I each lived on $100/week while I was in Grad school, cars paid off, Ramen noodles for dinner, and that leaves you $5K/year "mad money" to take a vacation or two, replace the transmission that just fell out of your car, or whatever...
On the other hand, I know families living on $200K/year+ who are saving less money than you - they are the heat in the consumer driven economic engine, people like me and you are the sand in the gearbox.
In the same way that a Laptop is a stripped down computer for mobility and should not be priced at the $3000 or so that a full desktop gaming rig costs.
Now that depends... I won a $3500 credit toward purchase of a laptop in a contest once (yes, had to spend it all on one single laptop, no buying 7 netbooks or accessory monitors or anything like that.) The $3K+ laptop market is an interesting place, a lot like a Ferrari dealership - they are all overpriced bad compromises that excel in certain things. I ended up with a 13" ultra-light speed demon - it's shockingly light and I can play StarCraft II on it at reasonably high settings (1600x900 res) - until the fans clog up with dust, that is - and even before then you can roast a small chicken in about 45 minutes using the exhaust vent air, just make sure to rotate it regularly or it will scorch to a crisp.
Will I replace this (typing on it now) super-lappie with anything remotely similar when it dies? No... in-fact, I bought a nice cool running $600 12" Acer to use while the speed demon was off to the factory for warranty repairs...
3. 116F isn't scorching, but it's a move in the wrong direction
4. it is, after all, just a tablet and not an actual computer replacement
Otherwise, I find it pretty sweet - still not enough for me to consider trading in our iPad-1 for (I really like that the iPad-1 doesn't get hot) but, hey, if the price doesn't bother you and you won't be putting it in the hands of kids/people who might kill it (yes, for an even HIGHER price, you can get 2x accidental damage coverage with AppleCare)... it's a fun little device, nothing I'll be throwing out my laptop computers over, but cool nonetheless.
Back in the day, putting software on disks, boxing it up and distributing it was a large part of the cost of development. Now, with the Internet, distributing software is basically free.
Way back in the day, I wrote code for single configuration computer systems (8 bit Apple/Atari/Commodore), and when I had it working, I copied it onto a disk and shipped it. There were some optional fancy loader schemes, but basically, no headaches at all.
Now, get out NSIS or whatever to make an installer, test it on 3 or 4 of the OSs it's supposed to run on, put in the "live patching via web" module, test that... you could invest a couple of hundred man hours in distributing "Hello World" to a typical spread of target systems. If your target audience size is in the millions, it's clearly worth the effort, but down in the less than 100 customers range, software is much harder to distribute now than it was when you FedEx-ed a floppy, and if you pay your developers anything, no cheaper.
The number I've heard kicked around forever is an "average" lifespan of 30 years in primitive society... some live to 100, but most do not.
We've got a lot of interesting diseases to work on curing today, things that simply would have made us dead in the past, now we hang around and suffer long enough for the medical community to classify our conditions and try to do something about them - they even succeed occasionally.
Most of my anecdotal observations in life tend tend to agree: life in a bubble isn't good for you, even if you never leave it.
Ah, but the big questions remains unanswered: Does the basement count? Do Dorito bits count as dirt? Are keyboards a good source of antigens for the early immune system?
Better than nothing, I suspect, but there's a bit too much homo (self-sameness) in that form of homeopathy to help you if you ever leave the basement.
Finding this hard to swallow personally. I was born with pneumonia and had chronic infections early in life. In my 20s I am still plagued by allergies, asthma and generally poor health despite generally good habits as far as diet, exercise, and hygiene. I cringe when I think about what kind of state I'd be in if I didn't.
The theory goes that it's too late for sloppy hygiene to help you much, now, but if you ate more dirt as a kid, you'd be healthier.
Most of my anecdotal observations in life tend tend to agree: life in a bubble isn't good for you, even if you never leave it.
Humanity (or human like creatures) survived for several hundred thousand years without modern medicine. If the body was not capable of developing defenses to disease we wouldn't still be here.
Main difference in modern life is that most of us live long enough to see our grand-children and usually our great-grand children - human like creatures 10,000+ years ago probably didn't.
It's a new thing to do, and we've been getting much better at it in the last 100 years. Dental hygiene seems to be a good thing overall. Not drinking toilet water, while mostly good, also seems to have some bad aspects like Polio (and, yes, we've found another way around _that_ one, but there are others...)
I sincerely hope that the study of pro-biotics starts yielding more useable knowledge soon, making your own kefir seems like a hit and miss affair right now.
The way we're paving the world, if they don't get acclimated to humans, they're going to become extinct. I'd much rather see them have their own space (see my sig-blog), but until that happens, species like the Florida panther are going to have to figure out how to co-exist, or perish.
In my engineering jobs, sex roles have always been... ahem, traditional - this is at about 8 different jobs in two Southern US states over the last 25 years. Same applied to the grocery store I worked in.
The "women bosses" I have had the most experience with are elementary school principals... they have run the gamut from insecure totalitarian witches to the ineffective ostrich to genuine warm caring professionals who do the right thing - not much different from the men I have had as bosses.
Slashdot Mirror
So, let's start complaining about this after unemployment is below 2%.
The one thing the US doesn't understand about drone warfare is that:
* Here soon when large nations fight it might be drone vs drone and long term stalemate might ensue if both have large amounts of resources, that until a supply chain is broken on one of the two sides.
Wasn't that the WW-I / WW-II scenario (except we were throwing farmboys at each other instead of drones)?
* Dirt poor nations will resort to asymmetric warfare, terrorism will grow as a result.
Feels like we've been there since, oh, Korea?
Interesting, this guys seems pretty extreme but I'm of the opinion that if technology is starting to play such major roles in almost all sports why shouldn't cyborgs be allowed to compete in track and field?
Spring-foot prosthetics are a clear unfair advantage in long distance running, they need their own league to compete in, otherwise truly competitive athletes would have to cut their feet off to have a chance of winning.
Once this breakthrough is perfected, the quality of life for humanity will go up immensely.
FTFY, the best prosthetic of any kind today still sucks horribly compared to actual, grown along with your brain, body parts.
I have always been able to hear frequencies that 99% of my same-aged peers cannot... does that make them all disabled (partially deaf)?
My color perception is somewhat less sensitive than my wife's, does that make me disabled (partially color blind)?
My grandmother's short term memory is operating at about 10% of its former capacity, is she disabled?
I injured my ACL in high-school and never had it repaired, I can't play basketball at a competitive level, am I disabled?
In bicycling, I can out hill-climb 90% of my same aged peers, does that make them disabled?
Get over the labels and the idea that everybody is the same, we're not.
I agree there is certain bio-research that should be done, not only in the Challenger Deep, but also across the floor of the Gulf of Mexico and any number of other under-explored areas.
More useful than space? Dunno, I like my satellite communication, GPS and weather imagery, and the military loves their ICBMs. An awful lot of deep sea exploration is supported by space based tech today.
We're still mucking about in near-Earth orbit about 99% of the time (because that's where the immediately useful stuff is, for the most part) - deeper space is limited to pure science/exploration missions at the moment, I'd like to see some more serious engine development that can support a manned mission to Mars, not so much for the manned mission itself, but for other applications like asteroid mining / redirection, for starters.
In the old days, the government didn't have the resources, or the vision, to fund most valuable research.
I'm not sure the trench counts as valuable science, science certainly, but more valuable as PR.
I personally think that deep trenches are at least as interesting as outer space.
Interesting, certainly, inspiring? No. The possibilities of space are (cough) endless. Once you get to the bottom of the trench, you're pretty much done. Can't live there, nothing of immediate value there, much harder to sustain a colony there than outer space.
Not saying we shouldn't visit the trenches too, just that I don't think it warrants as much attention or investment as outer space.
sci fi world with at least some effort at plausibility. (not all of it, but some details were there, for instance Jake suffering muscle weakness after prolonged time in the tank)
'Cause a culture capable of interstellar travel couldn't eliminate muscle weakness or fix nerve damage.
I've had minor nerve damage twice, no, we can't fix it, and we're not likely to figure out how anytime soon. All this brain-machine-interface crap is just that, literally two-bit crap - when compared to actual nerves containing hundreds of thousands of fibers.
If you want to kvetch about the tech in the movie, go after the Avatar link - as if lag, even light-speed lag, and other factors wouldn't make that wholly unworkable... I was also a little disappointed that they could make this magical link, and yet be unable to run a simple tracer to find Jake when he got lost in the jungle... but, those are both "suspension of disbelief" points central to the storyline.
If you want realism, watch a PBS documentary.
He created a sci fi world with at least some effort at plausibility.
Oh, c'mon! Where the frig in the Periodic Table does one find "Unobtanium"? Seriously? I heard that, and gave up on the flick from that point on.
Unobtainium: well, why not call it Carbon, formed in large quantities into some kind of useful room-temperature superconductor (or other highly valuable commodity) by processes unique to the formation of Pandora. Sure you could synthesize it, but it's cheaper to go dig it up. The miracle of Unobtainum was irrelevant to the plot beyond the fact it was valuable and they had to take down HomeTree to get it. Any time wasted explaining what Unobtainium was good for is just pandering to a very small percentage of the audience, a small percentage with relatively little influence over ticket buyers, apparently.
The reason the "indians" won was because the entire planet was a biological entity that could defend itself, by mobilizing all resources against the human invaders
Entity, meet biological warfare (easily possible, given the ease with which the DNA was replicated) and a gaggle of large asteroids being flung at the surface just for good measure (also possible, given the massive energy require to go FTL (or was it near-light?) speeds in the first place). There's at least half a dozen ways, given that story's tech, in which to destroy the inhabitants without harming the material, endangering a single human being, and basically turning the place into an airless rock that can be strip-mined.
Seriously... good visual effects (easily give it that), but the story had more holes in it than a sieve.
Yeah, and the U.S. could have nuked Afghanistan and Iraq into oblivion, as well as any upstarts like Iran or North Korea who would have chirped about it. Maybe, just maybe, there were political implications back home that prevented waging all-out war on obviously sentient beings that are absolutely no threat to us, and whose only crime is sitting on something valuable.
+1 - Sensible.
There is certain "herd logic" on /. that makes no sense to me, "Avatar Sucks!!!" being one.
It was over-hyped, and maybe too expensive to make, but I don't really care about that - I ignore the hype and if Hollywood wants to risk that kind of money, that's their business.
Looking at the end product of Avatar, its story, scientific accuracy and entertainment value were no worse than any number of "good" science fiction movies, it was a little too heavy on the Vietnam parallels for me, but what the hell, it's his story, let him tell it.
Tell you what, if Avatar Sucks, tell me why AND name 3 movies that both did it (your point) better, and were better movies overall.
There is something to be said for not being transfixed by an electronic gizmo.
Freedom: the ability to choose and execute your choice without restraint.
So, FAA makes you not-free to use your gadget, but arguably is helping you make the occasional choice to put it down.
I knew several physicians who refused to ever carry a cellphone as late as 1999... why? Freedom.
Ah, but not full, dead-on prior art. Apple patented the base concept in 1992.
Now you're doing lawyer work (researching prior art)... I think the patent office has been intentionally feeding the lawyers since the early 1990s.
$60K - $10K for standard IRAs =
$50K - $10K for taxes (guesstimated) =
$40K - $12K for stated savings =
$28K - $12K for mortgage (guesstimated) =
$16K / 52weeks =
$300 / week to live on. Piece of cake, my mom and I each lived on $100/week while I was in Grad school, cars paid off, Ramen noodles for dinner, and that leaves you $5K/year "mad money" to take a vacation or two, replace the transmission that just fell out of your car, or whatever...
On the other hand, I know families living on $200K/year+ who are saving less money than you - they are the heat in the consumer driven economic engine, people like me and you are the sand in the gearbox.
In the same way that a Laptop is a stripped down computer for mobility and should not be
priced at the $3000 or so that a full desktop gaming rig costs.
Now that depends... I won a $3500 credit toward purchase of a laptop in a contest once (yes, had to spend it all on one single laptop, no buying 7 netbooks or accessory monitors or anything like that.) The $3K+ laptop market is an interesting place, a lot like a Ferrari dealership - they are all overpriced bad compromises that excel in certain things. I ended up with a 13" ultra-light speed demon - it's shockingly light and I can play StarCraft II on it at reasonably high settings (1600x900 res) - until the fans clog up with dust, that is - and even before then you can roast a small chicken in about 45 minutes using the exhaust vent air, just make sure to rotate it regularly or it will scorch to a crisp.
Will I replace this (typing on it now) super-lappie with anything remotely similar when it dies? No... in-fact, I bought a nice cool running $600 12" Acer to use while the speed demon was off to the factory for warranty repairs...
What's not to like about the new iPad:
1. its price
2. its vulnerability to water/drop damage
3. 116F isn't scorching, but it's a move in the wrong direction
4. it is, after all, just a tablet and not an actual computer replacement
Otherwise, I find it pretty sweet - still not enough for me to consider trading in our iPad-1 for (I really like that the iPad-1 doesn't get hot) but, hey, if the price doesn't bother you and you won't be putting it in the hands of kids/people who might kill it (yes, for an even HIGHER price, you can get 2x accidental damage coverage with AppleCare)... it's a fun little device, nothing I'll be throwing out my laptop computers over, but cool nonetheless.
The dead obvious clause "readily apparent to one skilled in the art" or somesuch, has been ignored for about 20 years now...
Back in the day, putting software on disks, boxing it up and distributing it was a large part of the cost of development. Now, with the Internet, distributing software is basically free.
Way back in the day, I wrote code for single configuration computer systems (8 bit Apple/Atari/Commodore), and when I had it working, I copied it onto a disk and shipped it. There were some optional fancy loader schemes, but basically, no headaches at all.
Now, get out NSIS or whatever to make an installer, test it on 3 or 4 of the OSs it's supposed to run on, put in the "live patching via web" module, test that... you could invest a couple of hundred man hours in distributing "Hello World" to a typical spread of target systems. If your target audience size is in the millions, it's clearly worth the effort, but down in the less than 100 customers range, software is much harder to distribute now than it was when you FedEx-ed a floppy, and if you pay your developers anything, no cheaper.
http://setilive.org/ focuses on Kepler planets, and it's much more interactive than the old SETI@home
The number I've heard kicked around forever is an "average" lifespan of 30 years in primitive society... some live to 100, but most do not.
We've got a lot of interesting diseases to work on curing today, things that simply would have made us dead in the past, now we hang around and suffer long enough for the medical community to classify our conditions and try to do something about them - they even succeed occasionally.
Most of my anecdotal observations in life tend tend to agree: life in a bubble isn't good for you, even if you never leave it.
Ah, but the big questions remains unanswered: Does the basement count? Do Dorito bits count as dirt? Are keyboards a good source of antigens for the early immune system?
Better than nothing, I suspect, but there's a bit too much homo (self-sameness) in that form of homeopathy to help you if you ever leave the basement.
Finding this hard to swallow personally. I was born with pneumonia and had chronic infections early in life. In my 20s I am still plagued by allergies, asthma and generally poor health despite generally good habits as far as diet, exercise, and hygiene. I cringe when I think about what kind of state I'd be in if I didn't.
The theory goes that it's too late for sloppy hygiene to help you much, now, but if you ate more dirt as a kid, you'd be healthier.
Most of my anecdotal observations in life tend tend to agree: life in a bubble isn't good for you, even if you never leave it.
Humanity (or human like creatures) survived for several hundred thousand years without modern medicine. If the body was not capable of developing defenses to disease we wouldn't still be here.
Main difference in modern life is that most of us live long enough to see our grand-children and usually our great-grand children - human like creatures 10,000+ years ago probably didn't.
It's a new thing to do, and we've been getting much better at it in the last 100 years. Dental hygiene seems to be a good thing overall. Not drinking toilet water, while mostly good, also seems to have some bad aspects like Polio (and, yes, we've found another way around _that_ one, but there are others...)
I sincerely hope that the study of pro-biotics starts yielding more useable knowledge soon, making your own kefir seems like a hit and miss affair right now.
The way we're paving the world, if they don't get acclimated to humans, they're going to become extinct. I'd much rather see them have their own space (see my sig-blog), but until that happens, species like the Florida panther are going to have to figure out how to co-exist, or perish.
In my engineering jobs, sex roles have always been... ahem, traditional - this is at about 8 different jobs in two Southern US states over the last 25 years. Same applied to the grocery store I worked in.
The "women bosses" I have had the most experience with are elementary school principals... they have run the gamut from insecure totalitarian witches to the ineffective ostrich to genuine warm caring professionals who do the right thing - not much different from the men I have had as bosses.