Voila, you aren't tethered to your phone, and won't even know if it rings.
Amazing things, these phones. They let you get calls when you want and completely ignore 'em when you don't, while still allowing you to have them in a pinch.
Exactly - Apple builds generally solid kit, so they can command a premium price for (usually) lesser specs which lets them make sure the quality control is (mostly) there because they have a lot more room in the margins.
That said, I do think that some of the HTC stuff I've played with is pretty solid. I love my Evo now that I got a higher capacity battery - it's a pretty decent machine and has essentially replaced my netbook.
You can buy tickets in bulk and then return the ones you don't use - most stores will take them back. They do this because often employers will buy bunches to give as gifts to employees and then return them.
If I remember right, they even mention this in the Wired article.
I bought a first generation MacBook when they made the switch to Intel. A little over a year and a half ago it just completely died. I brought it in, they said the mainboard was fried, and said it would cost me $500 to fix it because it was out of warranty and not under Apple Care.
Three days later I go in to pick up my machine and they didn't just fix it - they gave me an entirely new machine. Better processor, more ram, bigger hard drive and better video. So, for $500 I got an entirely new machine.
Six months after that I got a check in the mail from Apple for $500. The thing that had caused my MacBook to die (after a few years of use) was some kind of manufacturing defect, so they covered the repair cost and a little extra. I also was given Apple Care on the now repaired machine.
So, on a machine that was years old and died, I got free repairs/upgrade to a brand new machine and free AppleCare.
The other bit of service I had with them was when my iPhone screen cracked. They replaced it for free (even though it was a year old), waiving the $250 replacement fee.
If Apple keeps that kind of service, I'll keep buying their kit when it meets my needs and price point.
Unless the trips to the moon are strictly one way, there's still a chance of bio-weapons coming back with people & equipment from the moon & getting loose on Earth. Really, the moon wouldn't be much different than our current best biohazard workspaces other than being farther away - I think vacuum and hard radiation are used as ways to cut off secure facilities and try to sterilize anything coming out of them, but maybe I'm wrong.
The big advantage of doing it there would be security theater - "Yes, we do these things, but we do them on the moon so it's perfectly safe because, you know... Moon."
Which is not to say there wouldn't be a ton of stuff that you couldn't do that would be much easier if you "owned" space & the moon as a base of operations for that ownership.
Though, to be honest, I'd much rather have LEO to GEO and beyond than the moon or, really, any other planet in the solar system. With artificial structures in space you can get any level of effective gravity you want, from free-fall to multiple g regions (want super strong soldiers? Have them spend long periods of time in a structure that slowly amps up from 1 to 3 g via spin - if they don't have massive cardiac problems that seems like it would be a full-body workout), you don't have a gravity well to deal with when leaving those structures (because you launch along the central axis) you don't have any weird planetary shit to deal with like quakes or dust or whatever, and from a military standpoint that kind of absolute control over an important facility is probably a pretty big deal.
No tea for me, just coffee, but I'm totally in wacky idea mode myself.
Except it's cheaper and possibly even better in the long run for their reputation to do things the quick and easy way and then fix their mistakes.
Fire out the C&D letters without spending time & money to investigate - cheap. If one of the C&Ds generates a bit of bad PR, THEN quickly move to respond, showing that you listen, can admit mistakes, and fix 'em. Look at this thread - everyone's pointing out that it was probably the legal department that screwed up and giving kudos to Blizzard's dev team for making things good. Overall that's a huge net win for the entire organization: the lawyers look bad (who cares?) while the people who make the content look great.
Vitally relevant to that particular field, the study of game history and game development. I don't think anyone - except perhaps you - was under the impression that the author was actually suggesting MUDS are vitally relevant in a universal sense.
When it comes to current game design, actually, MUDS *are* quite relevant. There were a LOT of MUDS out there, and they were generally very easy to modify by anyone with a very slight amount of technical skill and interest in game design and development. As a result, you wound up with an amazing amount of variety in game mechanics and attempts at implementing some ideas that were way way way ahead of their time. Of course there was a lot of crap, too, but that's no different than any other field.
Even better, MUDS were *cheap* to make and modify - so you had people who might have the interest and ability working on them but didn't need a ton of funding, so you had lots of creative and interesting ideas. Unfortunately, the recent shift to emphasizing production values over gameplay has really made it difficult for people to both create new and interesting ideas using the (relatively decent) open source MMO project software out there and to attract fans.
I dare say that of any MMO out there now, or that will come out in the next 10 years, for any feature that they care to claim is new or groundbreaking, I could find a MUD that had something similar 10-20 years ago.
That kind of influence on an industry this size is pretty much the definition of "vitally relevant."
Six day per week mail service is not essential for 99% of people, I'll wager. If one routinely receives things that are so time sensitive that they can't wait for a weekly mail drop, then they can rent a PO box and get daily delivery. Delivery to government facilities on a daily basis makes sense because it's the government eating their own dogfood, as it were, and also because having regular access to mail for serving military personnel is a nice way to boost morale.
When discussing (as this thread was) the idea of finding ways to make postal service more efficient without gutting it completely, one big thing would be to reduce OVER service where possible. We are, currently, largely overserved by 6-day-per-week post.
Which is not to say I'm not loony. I certainly could be.
As opposed to every other company in the history of the universe who was releasing something that was highly anticipated. Why, I remember when Apple was launching the iPhone, Jobs came out on stage was like, "Uh, well, it's OK I guess, if you care about phones or something, but, you know, its no big deal or anything." Ditto for Microsoft launching pretty much anything - I know I was feeling kind of bad for them when they had their "I'm a PC, and I think my mom doesn't really love me" marketing campaign around the launch of Windows 7.
Remember back in the day, when Blizzard was properly humble? Hell, I still remember the marketing materials that came out for Diablo II, which were basically a suicide note from the development team in which they talked about their various failings in life.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to a late lunch at Subway, who has as their motto "Probably better than eating from a garbage bin."
If the USPS could be severed from congress without the requirement that they service any address in the US or they could have competitors but those competitors be required to service any address in the US, then your options could work.
Personally, I think mail delivery should be limited to 1 day per week to any non-PO box or any non-government facility address.
Therein lay the rub - I want someone who has experience but who hasn't ossified. I want a doctor who has done open heart surgery thousands of times so that he or she would be aware of all kinds of issues that could crop up and would be able to deal with them with competence. I also want that doctor to use the best and most advanced techniques they possibly can.
I'm a huge fan of trial periods with new jobs - ESPECIALLY with people who have extensive claimed experience - because it lets you see whether or not they're capable of bringing that experience to bear on new problems as well as learning new tools.
A younger coder or someone with less experience may be more willing to use new tools and techniques, but they're also usually going to have a much, much, MUCH smaller skillset and less experience with different environments.
You're trivializing what the cartels have done to those countries and the people who live within them by comparing Microsoft's relatively benign practices to the murders, rapes, enslavement and atrocities committed by the cartels.
Yes, Microsoft lead by Gates (and he was not the ONLY player there) has done some bad stuff. So had Oracle, so has Apple, so has *insert name of ANY corporation* - it's part of the whole corporate concept. Corporations are, by design, essentially sociopathic entities bent on profit at all costs.
But the fact of the matter is, there are lots of extremely wealthy people out there - people who, in many cases have made their fortunes in FAR more "evil" fashions than Gates, who have been responsible for killing hundreds or thousands of people and poisoned huge swaths of the Earth - who do exactly fuckall for anyone but themselves.
Looking at the ENTIRETY of Gates' career and comparing it to most other people - yes, Gates has done some rather admirable things and a few things that, since you decided to start comparing him and his organization to other groups - barely even rate on the scale of evil that corporations perpetrate every single day.
The problem there is that quail eggs are external to the mother and thus can get moved into whatever orientation. Egg layers must have evolved along lines that make egg orientation relatively irrelevant to embryonic development. Human beings are generally upright except for periods of sleep, when still not upside down - so gravity may play some role. However, within amniotic fluid, the effects of weight are presumably greatly reduced, and also babies do develop in a number of orientations themselves (breech vs. regular birth) so maybe not. Then again, there are some rather serious changes that happen to the body in zero and low g - so maybe the body would say "Hey, I'm under stress here, maybe getting pregnant isn't a good idea" and have a miscarriage. Or maybe stress on the body has been a constant thing during human development and evolution, so the "stress" of zero or low gee won't matter.
In any case, it would be a very, very good idea to figure these things out before attempting full-on colonization. Wouldn't it be a hoot if breeding couples needed to live in a 1g centrifuge during pregnancy?
Anyway, I'd be more worried about the danger of having quail breed on a spacecraft - how do you prevent our former Vice President from shooting the astronauts in the face when quail are present?
3-5 years sounds about right. It'll give the market time to mature, a bigger market will lead to more "obvious" features being implemented and improved a bit, and it will be exactly the kind of device I'm looking for a media consumption/casual use device to be since hopefully the major issues will be ironed out.
For some things I'm definitely an early adopter - but for this, it would just be a little bit convenient rather than anything really new, so I'm content to wait.
I don't think most people upgrade with *every* rev - most people probably would upgrade every three years or so, MAYBE every other year in a rapidly changing marketplace (smartphones, for example). And it isn't that the products are being EOLd for purely marketing reasons (though some are) it's more like the space just changes that fast as new players enter and start challenging each other to innovate.
The point of frequent product refreshes is to get the people who say "I won't get that until it has x, y and z." For example with the iPad, I won't get a tablet like that until it has front and back cameras and the equivalent of the "retina" display resolution.
Granted, there are some people who will continually upgrade, but I think they're in the minority and so you wind up with people staggering revs.
This application is nothing terribly exciting, but the idea of being able to take a picture on a cheap mobile device, that device being able to analyze the picture for content, decide it's a certain kind of thing, and then attempt to analyze and solve that kind of problem is pretty neat.
I could see applications of this that would examine, say, a pile of items and an empty space and then suggest an ideal packing strategy to fit them all most efficiently. Or, as someone who does a lot of "some assembly required" type projects, I could see IKEA wanting to use something like this where people could buy a thing, lay out the parts, take a picture of that part layout with their phone, and get video instructions showing them how to put it all together, in sequence, along with common mistakes. (Can you guess that I've broken or otherwise fucked up a number of IKEA assemblies?)
Lots of potential for ubiquitous real-time assessment and analysis of visual data, but yes, sudoku isn't terribly exciting.
For screening, I really can't think of anything - like, even elite unit training seems kind of unsatisfactory to the task because *generally* people going into it have some conception of what they're going to be doing. I've watched a documentary or two about the physical training they do, and while I obviously couldn't imagine actually DOING that stuff, it seems like there isn't really much that is a surprise, but rather people are just pushed beyond what any reasonable human being thinks of as their limits.
I would say, though, that there seem to have been very few instances of astronauts completely losing their shit in orbit, and so if I had to pick screening measures, I'd include a lot of the ones they use to screen astronauts as a starting point and go from there. Probably measures of adaptability as well, resilience as well, and that'd be an OK start.
Whatever kind of people you sent, the first wave should, ideally, be filled with survivors (not triple PhD's, but people with very practical and generalized survival skillsets) who are completely expendable and who are OK with that idea. I don't know if there's any way to really test for that.
I have over 100,000 ebooks and I've paid for exactly 5 of them. Maybe 10,000 of those books are in the public domain and the remainder I grabbed in a few mega torrents since hey, they were available. I set up some scripts to have MobiPocket convert them all to a format my Kindle can handle, and they all fit onto the memory card my (original) Kindle can read.
The whole process of getting those 90,000 books and converting them so I could read them was easier and took less time than it took me to deal with Amazon customer support when, erroneously, the 5th and final book I paid for from their site, disappeared from my device when I was in the middle of reading it. It turns out it was just a software error, but it made me decide that as much as I like the device, I will absolutely *not* let Amazon have anything to do with what I put on it.
I am not the kind of person one would normally think becomes a pirate, but in the last few years, the behavior of those who hold copyrights abusing the system to ensure that their copyrights NEVER expire coupled with DRM that punishes ONLY legitimate customers and not pirates have made me basically decide, fuck it - I'm just not going to worry about paying for things like this.
Mind you, I am also the kind of person who paid on the high end for the Humble Bundle (and didn't play any of the games) and who bought a few "name your own price" tracks and albums just to support those models, bought songs on iTunes when they dropped the DRM to show support for that, and I also tend to send a few bucks to various OS projects when I find their stuff useful or neat. But I'm done paying unless I feel like it, and I can't even bring myself to feel guilty about it as I would have just 5 years ago.
I've got a lot of disposable income (more now, thanks to piracy), and I just choose not to bother spending it on people that treat me preemptively like I'm shit.
Yeah - like I said in my OP, I think it's going to be really freaking hard to figure out who to send. My follow-up about hundreds of people being sent would be one way to kind of address the problem of this being something completely novel in human experience and hard to figure out who would make it.
As the person that response was in reply to said, we can't even reliably pick people to serve on a submarine, among hundreds of other people, for relatively short durations - picking 6 people for a Mars trip when we don't even know what the criteria should be... Yeah, this isn't something easy, I think we can all agree.
Oh, for sure - anyone going on the AT expecting to find isolation is going to be (probably) sorely disappointed. I was thinking more along the lines of "relative isolation" (compared to living in a city with high population density) and "relative lack of creature comforts" and "relative lack of choice in other people there" etc. In my case, for my hike, I'm actually looking to start a little bit early (I enjoy cold-weather hiking) like the end of February rather than end of March as many do but yeah, I'd still not be alone just because you have section hikers who start at various points etc. And I'll likely have friends joining me at various parts for stretches. I guess my point with the AT stuff is that even though it's more privation and isolation than most westerners experience in this day and age, it's still nothing remotely like what Mars might be like.
Maybe the closest on Earth to this would be Antarctica - though from what I understand, even down there it's pretty crowded and bustling these days compared to anything a likely first effort at colonization would have. Still wouldn't have the whole "never going home again" thing, but we can't have everything.
There's a pretty vast difference between having a non-real-time, non-physical-space and thus very limited interaction with someone and being in their physical space. Maybe I'm weird, but I've found that when my only interactions with friends and family were via electronic communications (and I didn't even have a signal lag to contend with) it just wasn't as satisfying, and in some ways was actually worse than no contact at all because the poor quality of just an email or just a voice or just an image just highlighted what was missing.
And, as far as a one-way colonist goes, I can't see "wanting to live forever in history" as being a good trait, actually. If you go for the glory of having your name in print, what are you going to do a year or two down the road when everyone on Earth has pretty much stopped paying attention to you and it's just day-to-day work? I mean, I don't disagree that people would know the names of a few of the first (but probably nobody but space nuts would know the second or third waves - hell, most people would struggle to name the second person on the moon, let alone the poor guy who had to stay behind in the command module). People wanting glory would seem to be the wrong sort to send on a one-way trip. You want people who want to settle in for the long haul, and who won't give a damn if people remember their name or not.
With regards to having a "few" people around you not being isolation - that depends on who those people are. While I'm sure that there would be strong bonds formed amongst any colonization team, there is a huge difference between being on Earth where you can always see new faces & meet new people and being in a situation where you run an extremely likely chance of *NEVER* being in the physical presence of a new human being again. Even in ye olden days, people who never left their home counties would have the occasional caravan or traveler, and the option (sometimes) of being nomadic.
My point here is that this would be fundamentally unlike *anything* humans have done, ever, and from the examples given, it seems like the people who wrote in to volunteer may not be thinking it through.
Now, thinking about it some more, I would probably volunteer and go from there, knowing I could always back out.
I was thinking about just that thing after I hit submit... I think, with this kind of thing, the way to do it would be the same way previous waves of colonists in any new land did it: send reasonably "fit" and reasonably "stable" pre-existing social groups who have a good mix of skills to apply and where the overall strength of that social unit is able to compensate for (relative) weaknesses.
With SEAL teams, it seems like they'd be trying to recruit individuals who are capable of elite physical and psychological performance under *extreme* stresses and that would also do well in teams with other elite individuals - there really isn't any room for someone to be, say, 90% (that relative weakness I mentioned above) and not adversely affect team cohesion, morale and functioning. With a family group, responding to relative weakness seems to often have a beneficial effect on cohesion and seems to often lead to a more stable unit through shared adversity.
Basically, if this thing were to become viable, plan on waves of several hundred families (however defined) being sent up. With enough people it should be possible to end up with a pretty stable bunch that is self moderating and fault tolerant in a way that elite military teams can't be due to the requirements for members.
So maybe that father of three wasn't being romantic or naive, and should bring the fam along too.
But even my longest (currently) planned trip (a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail) still has me going into town for resupply every week at most and of course ends with me safe back home. On shorter trips I've spent a longer time away from people and civilization (60 days in the woods, but I had made several trips ahead of time to lay in supplies so I didn't need to go anywhere) and it was lonely - but again, in the end I knew I was coming back to the things I felt were "home." Despite going on those kinds of trips (which I venture to say most westerners never even come close to doing), I really can't even begin to imagine what it would be like to make such a trip and *know* that I was never, ever coming back and I would almost certainly never, EVER see any of the people and places I love, and never have the luxury of easy survival that we have here on Earth, even in some of the worst places on the planet, ever again.
I know there are many people who would volunteer for such a trip - I certainly think it would be pessimistic to think that we couldn't find several thousand people who are qualified and capable of making the trip. Heck, maybe I'd even be one of them, but based on my experience simply removing myself from human company for 2 months, probably not. In any case, people like that "father of three" volunteering just come off as romantic and not particularly thoughtful.
We don't have anything comparable to abandoning *for sure* everything you know and settling somewhere new in our race's living memory. We have a handful of people alive who were born in the very late 1890's - when crossing from Europe to the Americas was not unreasonable to contemplate doing twice, or being able to send for one's family, or otherwise not cut oneself off from everything you knew. Even Columbus made it here and back - there really would be nothing comparable in even the most charitable definition of modern times.
Maybe I'm being overly dramatic, but I do wonder what people who could do this one-way-for-sure trip and survive would be like. I have lived without the streets of my city underfoot and the ceilings of my home overhead, but I can't imagine what it would do to me to have alien soil under alien skies and know I'd never set foot on Earth again.
Real life isn't like a 4x strategy game where you can only focus on one possible advance at a time. Some people are thinking about sustainable foods, some about ways to stop pollution, some about more efficient ways to use other resources. There are even subgroups of each of those, looking at different ways to accomplish each of these things.
Your (not at all charming) naivete about who eats bugs and who doesn't aside, the fact that it squicks you out is pretty much irrelevant. Lots of foods that are seen as luxury items were originally considered food suitable only for the poor (because they looked hideous - I'm thinking of lobsters), and many foods we see as staples are actually quite disgusting if you spend even a fraction of a second thinking about where they come from.
As to the urine thing - what do you think you're drinking every time you have water? Recycled pee. What do you think you're breathing in every time you inhale? Particles of poop, and other things. Maybe if you educated yourself (or quit lying to yourself about just how gross the environment you live in is) you'd be less squeamish about eating bugs and able to appreciate things you haven't been conditioned to appreciate your whole life.
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Volume->mute.
Voila, you aren't tethered to your phone, and won't even know if it rings.
Amazing things, these phones. They let you get calls when you want and completely ignore 'em when you don't, while still allowing you to have them in a pinch.
Exactly - Apple builds generally solid kit, so they can command a premium price for (usually) lesser specs which lets them make sure the quality control is (mostly) there because they have a lot more room in the margins.
That said, I do think that some of the HTC stuff I've played with is pretty solid. I love my Evo now that I got a higher capacity battery - it's a pretty decent machine and has essentially replaced my netbook.
You can buy tickets in bulk and then return the ones you don't use - most stores will take them back. They do this because often employers will buy bunches to give as gifts to employees and then return them.
If I remember right, they even mention this in the Wired article.
What you said!
I bought a first generation MacBook when they made the switch to Intel. A little over a year and a half ago it just completely died. I brought it in, they said the mainboard was fried, and said it would cost me $500 to fix it because it was out of warranty and not under Apple Care.
Three days later I go in to pick up my machine and they didn't just fix it - they gave me an entirely new machine. Better processor, more ram, bigger hard drive and better video. So, for $500 I got an entirely new machine.
Six months after that I got a check in the mail from Apple for $500. The thing that had caused my MacBook to die (after a few years of use) was some kind of manufacturing defect, so they covered the repair cost and a little extra. I also was given Apple Care on the now repaired machine.
So, on a machine that was years old and died, I got free repairs/upgrade to a brand new machine and free AppleCare.
The other bit of service I had with them was when my iPhone screen cracked. They replaced it for free (even though it was a year old), waiving the $250 replacement fee.
If Apple keeps that kind of service, I'll keep buying their kit when it meets my needs and price point.
Unless the trips to the moon are strictly one way, there's still a chance of bio-weapons coming back with people & equipment from the moon & getting loose on Earth. Really, the moon wouldn't be much different than our current best biohazard workspaces other than being farther away - I think vacuum and hard radiation are used as ways to cut off secure facilities and try to sterilize anything coming out of them, but maybe I'm wrong.
The big advantage of doing it there would be security theater - "Yes, we do these things, but we do them on the moon so it's perfectly safe because, you know... Moon."
Which is not to say there wouldn't be a ton of stuff that you couldn't do that would be much easier if you "owned" space & the moon as a base of operations for that ownership.
Though, to be honest, I'd much rather have LEO to GEO and beyond than the moon or, really, any other planet in the solar system. With artificial structures in space you can get any level of effective gravity you want, from free-fall to multiple g regions (want super strong soldiers? Have them spend long periods of time in a structure that slowly amps up from 1 to 3 g via spin - if they don't have massive cardiac problems that seems like it would be a full-body workout), you don't have a gravity well to deal with when leaving those structures (because you launch along the central axis) you don't have any weird planetary shit to deal with like quakes or dust or whatever, and from a military standpoint that kind of absolute control over an important facility is probably a pretty big deal.
No tea for me, just coffee, but I'm totally in wacky idea mode myself.
Except it's cheaper and possibly even better in the long run for their reputation to do things the quick and easy way and then fix their mistakes.
Fire out the C&D letters without spending time & money to investigate - cheap. If one of the C&Ds generates a bit of bad PR, THEN quickly move to respond, showing that you listen, can admit mistakes, and fix 'em. Look at this thread - everyone's pointing out that it was probably the legal department that screwed up and giving kudos to Blizzard's dev team for making things good. Overall that's a huge net win for the entire organization: the lawyers look bad (who cares?) while the people who make the content look great.
Vitally relevant to that particular field, the study of game history and game development. I don't think anyone - except perhaps you - was under the impression that the author was actually suggesting MUDS are vitally relevant in a universal sense.
When it comes to current game design, actually, MUDS *are* quite relevant. There were a LOT of MUDS out there, and they were generally very easy to modify by anyone with a very slight amount of technical skill and interest in game design and development. As a result, you wound up with an amazing amount of variety in game mechanics and attempts at implementing some ideas that were way way way ahead of their time. Of course there was a lot of crap, too, but that's no different than any other field.
Even better, MUDS were *cheap* to make and modify - so you had people who might have the interest and ability working on them but didn't need a ton of funding, so you had lots of creative and interesting ideas. Unfortunately, the recent shift to emphasizing production values over gameplay has really made it difficult for people to both create new and interesting ideas using the (relatively decent) open source MMO project software out there and to attract fans.
I dare say that of any MMO out there now, or that will come out in the next 10 years, for any feature that they care to claim is new or groundbreaking, I could find a MUD that had something similar 10-20 years ago.
That kind of influence on an industry this size is pretty much the definition of "vitally relevant."
Six day per week mail service is not essential for 99% of people, I'll wager. If one routinely receives things that are so time sensitive that they can't wait for a weekly mail drop, then they can rent a PO box and get daily delivery. Delivery to government facilities on a daily basis makes sense because it's the government eating their own dogfood, as it were, and also because having regular access to mail for serving military personnel is a nice way to boost morale.
When discussing (as this thread was) the idea of finding ways to make postal service more efficient without gutting it completely, one big thing would be to reduce OVER service where possible. We are, currently, largely overserved by 6-day-per-week post.
Which is not to say I'm not loony. I certainly could be.
As opposed to every other company in the history of the universe who was releasing something that was highly anticipated. Why, I remember when Apple was launching the iPhone, Jobs came out on stage was like, "Uh, well, it's OK I guess, if you care about phones or something, but, you know, its no big deal or anything." Ditto for Microsoft launching pretty much anything - I know I was feeling kind of bad for them when they had their "I'm a PC, and I think my mom doesn't really love me" marketing campaign around the launch of Windows 7.
Remember back in the day, when Blizzard was properly humble? Hell, I still remember the marketing materials that came out for Diablo II, which were basically a suicide note from the development team in which they talked about their various failings in life.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to a late lunch at Subway, who has as their motto "Probably better than eating from a garbage bin."
If the USPS could be severed from congress without the requirement that they service any address in the US or they could have competitors but those competitors be required to service any address in the US, then your options could work.
Personally, I think mail delivery should be limited to 1 day per week to any non-PO box or any non-government facility address.
Therein lay the rub - I want someone who has experience but who hasn't ossified. I want a doctor who has done open heart surgery thousands of times so that he or she would be aware of all kinds of issues that could crop up and would be able to deal with them with competence. I also want that doctor to use the best and most advanced techniques they possibly can.
I'm a huge fan of trial periods with new jobs - ESPECIALLY with people who have extensive claimed experience - because it lets you see whether or not they're capable of bringing that experience to bear on new problems as well as learning new tools.
A younger coder or someone with less experience may be more willing to use new tools and techniques, but they're also usually going to have a much, much, MUCH smaller skillset and less experience with different environments.
You're trivializing what the cartels have done to those countries and the people who live within them by comparing Microsoft's relatively benign practices to the murders, rapes, enslavement and atrocities committed by the cartels.
Yes, Microsoft lead by Gates (and he was not the ONLY player there) has done some bad stuff. So had Oracle, so has Apple, so has *insert name of ANY corporation* - it's part of the whole corporate concept. Corporations are, by design, essentially sociopathic entities bent on profit at all costs.
But the fact of the matter is, there are lots of extremely wealthy people out there - people who, in many cases have made their fortunes in FAR more "evil" fashions than Gates, who have been responsible for killing hundreds or thousands of people and poisoned huge swaths of the Earth - who do exactly fuckall for anyone but themselves.
Looking at the ENTIRETY of Gates' career and comparing it to most other people - yes, Gates has done some rather admirable things and a few things that, since you decided to start comparing him and his organization to other groups - barely even rate on the scale of evil that corporations perpetrate every single day.
The problem there is that quail eggs are external to the mother and thus can get moved into whatever orientation. Egg layers must have evolved along lines that make egg orientation relatively irrelevant to embryonic development. Human beings are generally upright except for periods of sleep, when still not upside down - so gravity may play some role. However, within amniotic fluid, the effects of weight are presumably greatly reduced, and also babies do develop in a number of orientations themselves (breech vs. regular birth) so maybe not. Then again, there are some rather serious changes that happen to the body in zero and low g - so maybe the body would say "Hey, I'm under stress here, maybe getting pregnant isn't a good idea" and have a miscarriage. Or maybe stress on the body has been a constant thing during human development and evolution, so the "stress" of zero or low gee won't matter.
In any case, it would be a very, very good idea to figure these things out before attempting full-on colonization. Wouldn't it be a hoot if breeding couples needed to live in a 1g centrifuge during pregnancy?
Anyway, I'd be more worried about the danger of having quail breed on a spacecraft - how do you prevent our former Vice President from shooting the astronauts in the face when quail are present?
3-5 years sounds about right. It'll give the market time to mature, a bigger market will lead to more "obvious" features being implemented and improved a bit, and it will be exactly the kind of device I'm looking for a media consumption/casual use device to be since hopefully the major issues will be ironed out.
For some things I'm definitely an early adopter - but for this, it would just be a little bit convenient rather than anything really new, so I'm content to wait.
I don't think most people upgrade with *every* rev - most people probably would upgrade every three years or so, MAYBE every other year in a rapidly changing marketplace (smartphones, for example). And it isn't that the products are being EOLd for purely marketing reasons (though some are) it's more like the space just changes that fast as new players enter and start challenging each other to innovate.
The point of frequent product refreshes is to get the people who say "I won't get that until it has x, y and z." For example with the iPad, I won't get a tablet like that until it has front and back cameras and the equivalent of the "retina" display resolution.
Granted, there are some people who will continually upgrade, but I think they're in the minority and so you wind up with people staggering revs.
This application is nothing terribly exciting, but the idea of being able to take a picture on a cheap mobile device, that device being able to analyze the picture for content, decide it's a certain kind of thing, and then attempt to analyze and solve that kind of problem is pretty neat.
I could see applications of this that would examine, say, a pile of items and an empty space and then suggest an ideal packing strategy to fit them all most efficiently. Or, as someone who does a lot of "some assembly required" type projects, I could see IKEA wanting to use something like this where people could buy a thing, lay out the parts, take a picture of that part layout with their phone, and get video instructions showing them how to put it all together, in sequence, along with common mistakes. (Can you guess that I've broken or otherwise fucked up a number of IKEA assemblies?)
Lots of potential for ubiquitous real-time assessment and analysis of visual data, but yes, sudoku isn't terribly exciting.
For screening, I really can't think of anything - like, even elite unit training seems kind of unsatisfactory to the task because *generally* people going into it have some conception of what they're going to be doing. I've watched a documentary or two about the physical training they do, and while I obviously couldn't imagine actually DOING that stuff, it seems like there isn't really much that is a surprise, but rather people are just pushed beyond what any reasonable human being thinks of as their limits.
I would say, though, that there seem to have been very few instances of astronauts completely losing their shit in orbit, and so if I had to pick screening measures, I'd include a lot of the ones they use to screen astronauts as a starting point and go from there. Probably measures of adaptability as well, resilience as well, and that'd be an OK start.
Whatever kind of people you sent, the first wave should, ideally, be filled with survivors (not triple PhD's, but people with very practical and generalized survival skillsets) who are completely expendable and who are OK with that idea. I don't know if there's any way to really test for that.
I have over 100,000 ebooks and I've paid for exactly 5 of them. Maybe 10,000 of those books are in the public domain and the remainder I grabbed in a few mega torrents since hey, they were available. I set up some scripts to have MobiPocket convert them all to a format my Kindle can handle, and they all fit onto the memory card my (original) Kindle can read.
The whole process of getting those 90,000 books and converting them so I could read them was easier and took less time than it took me to deal with Amazon customer support when, erroneously, the 5th and final book I paid for from their site, disappeared from my device when I was in the middle of reading it. It turns out it was just a software error, but it made me decide that as much as I like the device, I will absolutely *not* let Amazon have anything to do with what I put on it.
I am not the kind of person one would normally think becomes a pirate, but in the last few years, the behavior of those who hold copyrights abusing the system to ensure that their copyrights NEVER expire coupled with DRM that punishes ONLY legitimate customers and not pirates have made me basically decide, fuck it - I'm just not going to worry about paying for things like this.
Mind you, I am also the kind of person who paid on the high end for the Humble Bundle (and didn't play any of the games) and who bought a few "name your own price" tracks and albums just to support those models, bought songs on iTunes when they dropped the DRM to show support for that, and I also tend to send a few bucks to various OS projects when I find their stuff useful or neat. But I'm done paying unless I feel like it, and I can't even bring myself to feel guilty about it as I would have just 5 years ago.
I've got a lot of disposable income (more now, thanks to piracy), and I just choose not to bother spending it on people that treat me preemptively like I'm shit.
Of course not - proponents of that and igneous fluid couldn't get a fire started.
Yeah - like I said in my OP, I think it's going to be really freaking hard to figure out who to send. My follow-up about hundreds of people being sent would be one way to kind of address the problem of this being something completely novel in human experience and hard to figure out who would make it.
As the person that response was in reply to said, we can't even reliably pick people to serve on a submarine, among hundreds of other people, for relatively short durations - picking 6 people for a Mars trip when we don't even know what the criteria should be... Yeah, this isn't something easy, I think we can all agree.
Oh, for sure - anyone going on the AT expecting to find isolation is going to be (probably) sorely disappointed. I was thinking more along the lines of "relative isolation" (compared to living in a city with high population density) and "relative lack of creature comforts" and "relative lack of choice in other people there" etc. In my case, for my hike, I'm actually looking to start a little bit early (I enjoy cold-weather hiking) like the end of February rather than end of March as many do but yeah, I'd still not be alone just because you have section hikers who start at various points etc. And I'll likely have friends joining me at various parts for stretches. I guess my point with the AT stuff is that even though it's more privation and isolation than most westerners experience in this day and age, it's still nothing remotely like what Mars might be like.
Maybe the closest on Earth to this would be Antarctica - though from what I understand, even down there it's pretty crowded and bustling these days compared to anything a likely first effort at colonization would have. Still wouldn't have the whole "never going home again" thing, but we can't have everything.
There's a pretty vast difference between having a non-real-time, non-physical-space and thus very limited interaction with someone and being in their physical space. Maybe I'm weird, but I've found that when my only interactions with friends and family were via electronic communications (and I didn't even have a signal lag to contend with) it just wasn't as satisfying, and in some ways was actually worse than no contact at all because the poor quality of just an email or just a voice or just an image just highlighted what was missing.
And, as far as a one-way colonist goes, I can't see "wanting to live forever in history" as being a good trait, actually. If you go for the glory of having your name in print, what are you going to do a year or two down the road when everyone on Earth has pretty much stopped paying attention to you and it's just day-to-day work? I mean, I don't disagree that people would know the names of a few of the first (but probably nobody but space nuts would know the second or third waves - hell, most people would struggle to name the second person on the moon, let alone the poor guy who had to stay behind in the command module). People wanting glory would seem to be the wrong sort to send on a one-way trip. You want people who want to settle in for the long haul, and who won't give a damn if people remember their name or not.
With regards to having a "few" people around you not being isolation - that depends on who those people are. While I'm sure that there would be strong bonds formed amongst any colonization team, there is a huge difference between being on Earth where you can always see new faces & meet new people and being in a situation where you run an extremely likely chance of *NEVER* being in the physical presence of a new human being again. Even in ye olden days, people who never left their home counties would have the occasional caravan or traveler, and the option (sometimes) of being nomadic.
My point here is that this would be fundamentally unlike *anything* humans have done, ever, and from the examples given, it seems like the people who wrote in to volunteer may not be thinking it through.
Now, thinking about it some more, I would probably volunteer and go from there, knowing I could always back out.
I was thinking about just that thing after I hit submit... I think, with this kind of thing, the way to do it would be the same way previous waves of colonists in any new land did it: send reasonably "fit" and reasonably "stable" pre-existing social groups who have a good mix of skills to apply and where the overall strength of that social unit is able to compensate for (relative) weaknesses.
With SEAL teams, it seems like they'd be trying to recruit individuals who are capable of elite physical and psychological performance under *extreme* stresses and that would also do well in teams with other elite individuals - there really isn't any room for someone to be, say, 90% (that relative weakness I mentioned above) and not adversely affect team cohesion, morale and functioning. With a family group, responding to relative weakness seems to often have a beneficial effect on cohesion and seems to often lead to a more stable unit through shared adversity.
Basically, if this thing were to become viable, plan on waves of several hundred families (however defined) being sent up. With enough people it should be possible to end up with a pretty stable bunch that is self moderating and fault tolerant in a way that elite military teams can't be due to the requirements for members.
So maybe that father of three wasn't being romantic or naive, and should bring the fam along too.
But even my longest (currently) planned trip (a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail) still has me going into town for resupply every week at most and of course ends with me safe back home. On shorter trips I've spent a longer time away from people and civilization (60 days in the woods, but I had made several trips ahead of time to lay in supplies so I didn't need to go anywhere) and it was lonely - but again, in the end I knew I was coming back to the things I felt were "home." Despite going on those kinds of trips (which I venture to say most westerners never even come close to doing), I really can't even begin to imagine what it would be like to make such a trip and *know* that I was never, ever coming back and I would almost certainly never, EVER see any of the people and places I love, and never have the luxury of easy survival that we have here on Earth, even in some of the worst places on the planet, ever again.
I know there are many people who would volunteer for such a trip - I certainly think it would be pessimistic to think that we couldn't find several thousand people who are qualified and capable of making the trip. Heck, maybe I'd even be one of them, but based on my experience simply removing myself from human company for 2 months, probably not. In any case, people like that "father of three" volunteering just come off as romantic and not particularly thoughtful.
We don't have anything comparable to abandoning *for sure* everything you know and settling somewhere new in our race's living memory. We have a handful of people alive who were born in the very late 1890's - when crossing from Europe to the Americas was not unreasonable to contemplate doing twice, or being able to send for one's family, or otherwise not cut oneself off from everything you knew. Even Columbus made it here and back - there really would be nothing comparable in even the most charitable definition of modern times.
Maybe I'm being overly dramatic, but I do wonder what people who could do this one-way-for-sure trip and survive would be like. I have lived without the streets of my city underfoot and the ceilings of my home overhead, but I can't imagine what it would do to me to have alien soil under alien skies and know I'd never set foot on Earth again.
Real life isn't like a 4x strategy game where you can only focus on one possible advance at a time. Some people are thinking about sustainable foods, some about ways to stop pollution, some about more efficient ways to use other resources. There are even subgroups of each of those, looking at different ways to accomplish each of these things.
Your (not at all charming) naivete about who eats bugs and who doesn't aside, the fact that it squicks you out is pretty much irrelevant. Lots of foods that are seen as luxury items were originally considered food suitable only for the poor (because they looked hideous - I'm thinking of lobsters), and many foods we see as staples are actually quite disgusting if you spend even a fraction of a second thinking about where they come from.
As to the urine thing - what do you think you're drinking every time you have water? Recycled pee. What do you think you're breathing in every time you inhale? Particles of poop, and other things. Maybe if you educated yourself (or quit lying to yourself about just how gross the environment you live in is) you'd be less squeamish about eating bugs and able to appreciate things you haven't been conditioned to appreciate your whole life.