Re:Some day humanity will manage things a better
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The Real Job Threat
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Actually dilithium wasn't fuel, it was an engine component. It was the thing that allowed them to produce a controlled matter-antimatter reaction. Under normal circumstances you didn't need to replace it, though if they did something nuts like sling shot back to the 80's they had problems (but they repaired the dilithium even then). The gist seemed to be that dilithium was a substance that was rare, useful, but there was way more around then needed for just practical purposes, and everyone wanted to stockpile it... similar to gold today.
I half agree with what you're saying about DS9, BTW. The first half of the series was pretty bleak (quality wise). There are quite a few gems in the later seasons, but I never made it that far though when the show was on the air. I only discovered them on Netflix. There's also a whole lot of Ronald Moore's hand in DS9, and he wanted DS9 to be like his BSG remake: not exactly true to Star Trek. In a way it's too bad he didn't get VOY instead of Brannon Braga. Braga could have probably done a lot more with the space station, and Ronald Moore seems pretty good at "ship alone in uncharted space" hence BSG.
Re:Some day humanity will manage things a better
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The Real Job Threat
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Sorry, I should have cited that in my previous post.
You are kind of right in the sense that Gene Roddenberry didn't want there to be money, but I guess the writers felt otherwise. Note the blurb at the bottom quoting Ronald Moore.
Re:Some day humanity will manage things a better
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The Real Job Threat
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· Score: 1
Actually all Star Trek series have money in them, not just TNG and DS9. The Federation uses "credits", beginning with TOS and continuing through VOY. They never explicitly say what credits are backed by (and I doubt anyone ever really thought about it), but the name suggests that credits are backed by some centralized cache of rare (dilithium for instance) Federation resource or pool of resources. In TOS it could have been anything because they didn't have replicators yet (just food slots, which weren't full replicators). Dilithium was also traded to other races in a few TOS episodes. They treated it as a form of currency. They also used coins (credits?) in Trouble with Tribbles to buy drinks. It wan't until TNG that they start claiming to have near infinite resources, equally shared (and that stops by Season 3).
In ST4 Kirk says: "They're still using money, I guess we better find some." ST4 was a comedy, and that was probably just meant as a one-liner, but it's the main source for the notion that they don't use money in the ST's future (that and some stuff Picard says in 1st season TNG). Kirk might have meant two things besides "in the future there is no economy". First he might have meant that they didn't bother with actual cash and coins. Like going to a restaurant and finding out when the bill comes that they won't take your debit card. Second he might have meant the bus itself. Public transportation might be completely public (like schools currently are) by his time. It's kind of surprising that San Francisco doesn't have that already, given the culture.
Wow, you mean you can't change the voice? You've been able to switch it on Apple Talk since almost its inception. Siri seems to use the "Viki" Apple Talk voice. I assumed that it was just a default setting. "Viki" is a logical default as it's a more advanced version of the old "Victoria", and arguably the most natural sounding Apple Talk voice. It's ridiculous if they don't let you change it, even if it's a memory issue you could still switch the voice when you sync the phone.
But then, it is Apple "Selling You What You Could Buy Yesterday, Tomorrow!": 'Customizable' voices will probably be an iPhone 5 selling point.
Me too, I meant to defend ST. Some people on Slashdot want to hold everything up to "hard" SciFi which I think is missing the point. Space Operas are fun too, and while Star Trek plays it fast and loose with the science, there's plenty of great stuff in there.
When I wrote that quip about the transporters I was thinking about an interview Ronald Moore did discussing why he kept everything so low tech in his Battlestar Galactica remake. Basically he felt that it was nearly impossible to write interesting drama on Star Trek because all the technology was too powerful. For instance, why ever have a character die if you can just reanimate them with the transporter. Likewise, a hand phaser is powerful enough to level a city. So eventually the writers just started treating the transporter like a doorstep and a phaser like a regular gun (with a few exceptions of course).
I think you're being a little hard on Star Trek. It was written by a steam of different authors, and later by committee, not Roddenberry. One of the big problems for writing for TV and film is you have to make a lot of sacrifices when it comes to internal consistency vs plot.
That said, Star Trek did at least make an attempt to echo "scientific ideas". Things like warp drive evolved over time. In the original series, the guiding principal of warp drive was "the ship goes really, really fast", but they did pepper in quite a few bits of theory that were interesting at the time. Antimatter as a power source, for one. The idea that if you go too fast you go back in time (similar to the notion that if something exceeds the speed of light would be traveling backwards in time). And the need for a deflector shield, space is not empty.
By mid-run TNG (well after the crazy in the TNG Tech manual), they added in a little more. Warp drive was able to handwave relativity because the ship wasn't actually moving, it was just altering the geometry of the space around it. It's a nod to dark energy, which is currently believed by some to cause galaxies to move away from each other at a rate greater then the speed of light. They also capped warp-speed to warp 10, which became infinite speed. Exceeding warp 10 meant you were arriving at your destination before you left, similar to light speed causality paradoxes (a refinement of simply going too fast in TOS). If you look at the velocity charts governing TNG warp speed, they look remarkably like the relativistic time dilation charts. The subjective effects are the same too. Were it possible to travel at light speed, for that traveler time outside would seem to move infinitely fast, allowing them (from their perspective) to occupy all points in space at once. Warp 10 is the same, except they actually are moving infinitely fast.
Transporters are another story though. They only exist to save cash on special effects. The writers almost completely gave up on thinking about them by the 4th season of TNG.
Well, the Wheel of Time by definition will never be finished. There is no beginning or ending to the turning of the Wheel of Time. The Wheel turns and turns, and the Wheel weaves a new book every two years.
It looks like I may be wrong about the black hole thing. I think I confused inertial mass with mass, or something like that. It seems to be a common misconception, Googling the topic returns a huge amount of black holes.
Not to reply to my own post, but now that I think about it, a bank of railguns that hurl things into space would be a great use for solar or wind power. Since the railguns can be positioned anywhere, the problem of transmitting electricity is taken out of the equation. It would be an extremely cheap solution.
Most of the weight is in the pusher plate if I'm not mistaken. The best way to assemble it would probably be to launch the ship's other components conventionally. The plate material can be rail-gunned into LEO and everything assembled there. We'd probably want to push it out of the magnetosphere conventionally too. Then we can nuke with impunity.
While it might be possible to launch Orion from the surface, it would be one hell of an engineering problem. Remember, nukes in a vacuum are very different then nukes in an atmosphere. A nuke in space is a gamma ray flashbulb. It's a relatively gentle push. On Earth the atmosphere converts a lot of those high frequency EM bands into heat, which excites the air, creates areas of overpressure, and then you have a shockwave. Pollution aside, you run the risk of breaking your ship. Sure it can be engineered around, but it probably would be easier and cheaper to build a ship that's only designed for use in a vacuum.
Assuming you have a drive capable of continuous acceleration, gravity is a lot less of an issue then you might think. All you need to do is keep you rate of acceleration at 9.8m/s^2 and you essentially have artificial gravity. Not only that, but within a year you'll be pretty close to the speed of light (a whole other can of worms). I might be mistaken, but drives theoretically capable of 9.8m/s^2 have already been invented. A way to power them has not.
It seems to me, that even if we figured out how to get a fusion ramjet working there are a lot of issues simply with the nature of going fast that would prevent near light speed travel. The first is that while a ramjet will protect you from particles, it won't from light. At speeds high enough for a ramjet to function, the light reaching you would be so far blue-shifted that it would be like sitting in a gamma-ray furnace.
Obviously you want to travels as close to the speed of light as possible, so that time dilation can extend your life long enough to get anywhere interesting. But what relativity gives in time, it takes back in mass.
The second problem is a ship going that fast will accrue mass as it gains speed. Even if we handwave away the issue of powering it, you still get to the point where you're flying a black hole. As you make your way through the cosmos you'll be causing all sorts of mayhem in the solar systems you pass.
Finally, even handwaving away the mass issue entirely, a ship traveling that fast (or even a lot slower) would automatically become pretty much the most devastating weapon of mass destruction we can realistically imagine. It would be nearly invisible and carry enough kinetic energy to destroy pretty much anything, just be running into it. So if you're cruising for hot green alien babes, you can't expect them to be to happy to meet you when you hop out of your armageddon machine.
Actual AI in the sense that on some level it can learn and adapt. AI isn't my field, but my understanding is that that trait is what seperates an AI from a chatterbox. I'm not talking about anything fancy like being self aware or anything.
Too bad if it's just a chatterbox, a distributed AI with access to all that smart phone data would be pretty exciting (or terrifying, whichever).
That's a pretty cool idea (the networking part, not the Terminators).
First off, is Siri is an actual AI? Does it learn or is it just a chatterbox?
If so, the fact that Siri will be installed on millions of phones incredible. One of the biggest limitations for any intelligence (artificial or not) is input. Even a mediocre AI becomes a lot more convincing on the Turing test with Google's help. Each Siri will have access to GPS data, user search patterns, their email, texts, and potentially even their photo's (with facial recognition data) and physical activity (via the accelerometer).
Now imagine if those millions of Siri were networked, operating as one large hive mind. Imagine the massive amount of data about the minutia of being human we would be feeding into that enormous AI. It's a huge opportunity to advance the field. It's also a little scary. Personally, if Apple was to allow a voluntary, opt-in program that would allow my Siri to network with other opt-in Siri's, I'd probably take it. But I'm not the paranoid type.
Do you remember the USS Reliant from Star Trek 2? It was unusual for it's time because the engines were on the bottom. They weren't supposed to be. The original design had everything the other way around, but when the model makers got the sketches "up" was mis-labled. They built the ship upside-down and the director decided to just go with it.
I'm guessing too, but wouldn't acceleration due to centrifugal force decrease as the universe expands over time? Similar to an ice skater that holds out her arms to slow a spin. My understanding is that the expansion of the universe is accelerating over time.
Also, if the universe is spinning, wouldn't it collapse into a disk?
How does UK law deal with companies like whitepages.com or mylife.com? Are they considered search engines or data repositories, or does the law not make a distinction?
What exactly is the second layer? I'm curious, and I don't want to infer anything you don't mean to say. What exactly do you find so ridiculous?
It's strange that so many people that use this site can understand the intricacies of a programming language but can't sound-out a misspelled word. I appreciate proper spelling and grammar, but is it really worth derailing a thread just to mock someone's mistake?
Miatas really are a pretty good deal, happiness/money wise. I'm on my second one. So far the only things that have needed to be replaced on the second one (2002) are tires, brakes, and oil.
I might be dead wrong, I'm just going on what I've been told by people more knowledgable then myself. My understanding is that for stainless steel to be immune to oxidation, it must have the iron atoms removed from its surface. It's usually dipped in sulfuric acid, which leaves behind only nickel (on the surface). With something as thin as sheet metal, most of what you have left is nickel.
I may be wrong though, I have no experience, I'm just parroting what I've heard said by friends that work on expensive cars and planes. Obviously the thickness of the sheet is an important variable too.
Well, at least no one saw that one coming. No one could ever have predicted that a government mandate issued to private company would wind up being sourced to the cheapest possible labor.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually dilithium wasn't fuel, it was an engine component. It was the thing that allowed them to produce a controlled matter-antimatter reaction. Under normal circumstances you didn't need to replace it, though if they did something nuts like sling shot back to the 80's they had problems (but they repaired the dilithium even then). The gist seemed to be that dilithium was a substance that was rare, useful, but there was way more around then needed for just practical purposes, and everyone wanted to stockpile it... similar to gold today.
I half agree with what you're saying about DS9, BTW. The first half of the series was pretty bleak (quality wise). There are quite a few gems in the later seasons, but I never made it that far though when the show was on the air. I only discovered them on Netflix. There's also a whole lot of Ronald Moore's hand in DS9, and he wanted DS9 to be like his BSG remake: not exactly true to Star Trek. In a way it's too bad he didn't get VOY instead of Brannon Braga. Braga could have probably done a lot more with the space station, and Ronald Moore seems pretty good at "ship alone in uncharted space" hence BSG.
Oh here we go: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Federation_credit
Sorry, I should have cited that in my previous post.
You are kind of right in the sense that Gene Roddenberry didn't want there to be money, but I guess the writers felt otherwise. Note the blurb at the bottom quoting Ronald Moore.
Actually all Star Trek series have money in them, not just TNG and DS9. The Federation uses "credits", beginning with TOS and continuing through VOY. They never explicitly say what credits are backed by (and I doubt anyone ever really thought about it), but the name suggests that credits are backed by some centralized cache of rare (dilithium for instance) Federation resource or pool of resources. In TOS it could have been anything because they didn't have replicators yet (just food slots, which weren't full replicators). Dilithium was also traded to other races in a few TOS episodes. They treated it as a form of currency. They also used coins (credits?) in Trouble with Tribbles to buy drinks. It wan't until TNG that they start claiming to have near infinite resources, equally shared (and that stops by Season 3).
In ST4 Kirk says: "They're still using money, I guess we better find some." ST4 was a comedy, and that was probably just meant as a one-liner, but it's the main source for the notion that they don't use money in the ST's future (that and some stuff Picard says in 1st season TNG). Kirk might have meant two things besides "in the future there is no economy". First he might have meant that they didn't bother with actual cash and coins. Like going to a restaurant and finding out when the bill comes that they won't take your debit card. Second he might have meant the bus itself. Public transportation might be completely public (like schools currently are) by his time. It's kind of surprising that San Francisco doesn't have that already, given the culture.
Wow, you mean you can't change the voice? You've been able to switch it on Apple Talk since almost its inception. Siri seems to use the "Viki" Apple Talk voice. I assumed that it was just a default setting. "Viki" is a logical default as it's a more advanced version of the old "Victoria", and arguably the most natural sounding Apple Talk voice. It's ridiculous if they don't let you change it, even if it's a memory issue you could still switch the voice when you sync the phone.
But then, it is Apple "Selling You What You Could Buy Yesterday, Tomorrow!": 'Customizable' voices will probably be an iPhone 5 selling point.
Me too, I meant to defend ST. Some people on Slashdot want to hold everything up to "hard" SciFi which I think is missing the point. Space Operas are fun too, and while Star Trek plays it fast and loose with the science, there's plenty of great stuff in there.
When I wrote that quip about the transporters I was thinking about an interview Ronald Moore did discussing why he kept everything so low tech in his Battlestar Galactica remake. Basically he felt that it was nearly impossible to write interesting drama on Star Trek because all the technology was too powerful. For instance, why ever have a character die if you can just reanimate them with the transporter. Likewise, a hand phaser is powerful enough to level a city. So eventually the writers just started treating the transporter like a doorstep and a phaser like a regular gun (with a few exceptions of course).
I think you're being a little hard on Star Trek. It was written by a steam of different authors, and later by committee, not Roddenberry. One of the big problems for writing for TV and film is you have to make a lot of sacrifices when it comes to internal consistency vs plot.
That said, Star Trek did at least make an attempt to echo "scientific ideas". Things like warp drive evolved over time. In the original series, the guiding principal of warp drive was "the ship goes really, really fast", but they did pepper in quite a few bits of theory that were interesting at the time. Antimatter as a power source, for one. The idea that if you go too fast you go back in time (similar to the notion that if something exceeds the speed of light would be traveling backwards in time). And the need for a deflector shield, space is not empty.
By mid-run TNG (well after the crazy in the TNG Tech manual), they added in a little more. Warp drive was able to handwave relativity because the ship wasn't actually moving, it was just altering the geometry of the space around it. It's a nod to dark energy, which is currently believed by some to cause galaxies to move away from each other at a rate greater then the speed of light. They also capped warp-speed to warp 10, which became infinite speed. Exceeding warp 10 meant you were arriving at your destination before you left, similar to light speed causality paradoxes (a refinement of simply going too fast in TOS). If you look at the velocity charts governing TNG warp speed, they look remarkably like the relativistic time dilation charts. The subjective effects are the same too. Were it possible to travel at light speed, for that traveler time outside would seem to move infinitely fast, allowing them (from their perspective) to occupy all points in space at once. Warp 10 is the same, except they actually are moving infinitely fast.
Transporters are another story though. They only exist to save cash on special effects. The writers almost completely gave up on thinking about them by the 4th season of TNG.
Well, the Wheel of Time by definition will never be finished. There is no beginning or ending to the turning of the Wheel of Time. The Wheel turns and turns, and the Wheel weaves a new book every two years.
I don't know, I thought "Spin" was pretty good. I didn't like "Axis" and "Vortex" though.
It looks like I may be wrong about the black hole thing. I think I confused inertial mass with mass, or something like that. It seems to be a common misconception, Googling the topic returns a huge amount of black holes.
Not to reply to my own post, but now that I think about it, a bank of railguns that hurl things into space would be a great use for solar or wind power. Since the railguns can be positioned anywhere, the problem of transmitting electricity is taken out of the equation. It would be an extremely cheap solution.
Most of the weight is in the pusher plate if I'm not mistaken. The best way to assemble it would probably be to launch the ship's other components conventionally. The plate material can be rail-gunned into LEO and everything assembled there. We'd probably want to push it out of the magnetosphere conventionally too. Then we can nuke with impunity.
While it might be possible to launch Orion from the surface, it would be one hell of an engineering problem. Remember, nukes in a vacuum are very different then nukes in an atmosphere. A nuke in space is a gamma ray flashbulb. It's a relatively gentle push. On Earth the atmosphere converts a lot of those high frequency EM bands into heat, which excites the air, creates areas of overpressure, and then you have a shockwave. Pollution aside, you run the risk of breaking your ship. Sure it can be engineered around, but it probably would be easier and cheaper to build a ship that's only designed for use in a vacuum.
Assuming you have a drive capable of continuous acceleration, gravity is a lot less of an issue then you might think. All you need to do is keep you rate of acceleration at 9.8m/s^2 and you essentially have artificial gravity. Not only that, but within a year you'll be pretty close to the speed of light (a whole other can of worms). I might be mistaken, but drives theoretically capable of 9.8m/s^2 have already been invented. A way to power them has not.
It seems to me, that even if we figured out how to get a fusion ramjet working there are a lot of issues simply with the nature of going fast that would prevent near light speed travel. The first is that while a ramjet will protect you from particles, it won't from light. At speeds high enough for a ramjet to function, the light reaching you would be so far blue-shifted that it would be like sitting in a gamma-ray furnace.
Obviously you want to travels as close to the speed of light as possible, so that time dilation can extend your life long enough to get anywhere interesting. But what relativity gives in time, it takes back in mass.
The second problem is a ship going that fast will accrue mass as it gains speed. Even if we handwave away the issue of powering it, you still get to the point where you're flying a black hole. As you make your way through the cosmos you'll be causing all sorts of mayhem in the solar systems you pass.
Finally, even handwaving away the mass issue entirely, a ship traveling that fast (or even a lot slower) would automatically become pretty much the most devastating weapon of mass destruction we can realistically imagine. It would be nearly invisible and carry enough kinetic energy to destroy pretty much anything, just be running into it. So if you're cruising for hot green alien babes, you can't expect them to be to happy to meet you when you hop out of your armageddon machine.
Actual AI in the sense that on some level it can learn and adapt. AI isn't my field, but my understanding is that that trait is what seperates an AI from a chatterbox. I'm not talking about anything fancy like being self aware or anything.
Too bad if it's just a chatterbox, a distributed AI with access to all that smart phone data would be pretty exciting (or terrifying, whichever).
That's a pretty cool idea (the networking part, not the Terminators).
First off, is Siri is an actual AI? Does it learn or is it just a chatterbox?
If so, the fact that Siri will be installed on millions of phones incredible. One of the biggest limitations for any intelligence (artificial or not) is input. Even a mediocre AI becomes a lot more convincing on the Turing test with Google's help. Each Siri will have access to GPS data, user search patterns, their email, texts, and potentially even their photo's (with facial recognition data) and physical activity (via the accelerometer).
Now imagine if those millions of Siri were networked, operating as one large hive mind. Imagine the massive amount of data about the minutia of being human we would be feeding into that enormous AI. It's a huge opportunity to advance the field. It's also a little scary. Personally, if Apple was to allow a voluntary, opt-in program that would allow my Siri to network with other opt-in Siri's, I'd probably take it. But I'm not the paranoid type.
Funny story:
Do you remember the USS Reliant from Star Trek 2? It was unusual for it's time because the engines were on the bottom. They weren't supposed to be. The original design had everything the other way around, but when the model makers got the sketches "up" was mis-labled. They built the ship upside-down and the director decided to just go with it.
I'm guessing too, but wouldn't acceleration due to centrifugal force decrease as the universe expands over time? Similar to an ice skater that holds out her arms to slow a spin. My understanding is that the expansion of the universe is accelerating over time.
Also, if the universe is spinning, wouldn't it collapse into a disk?
How does UK law deal with companies like whitepages.com or mylife.com? Are they considered search engines or data repositories, or does the law not make a distinction?
What exactly is the second layer? I'm curious, and I don't want to infer anything you don't mean to say. What exactly do you find so ridiculous?
It's strange that so many people that use this site can understand the intricacies of a programming language but can't sound-out a misspelled word. I appreciate proper spelling and grammar, but is it really worth derailing a thread just to mock someone's mistake?
Miatas really are a pretty good deal, happiness/money wise. I'm on my second one. So far the only things that have needed to be replaced on the second one (2002) are tires, brakes, and oil.
Crap, you're totally right. It's chromium not nickel. I got my metals mixed up, and didn't bother to double check wiki.
I'm positive on the stainless steel part, even wikipedia backs me up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeLorean_DMC-12
Aluminum might be cool, but I have a feeling its tendency to warp under stress limits it's use automobile wise.
I might be dead wrong, I'm just going on what I've been told by people more knowledgable then myself. My understanding is that for stainless steel to be immune to oxidation, it must have the iron atoms removed from its surface. It's usually dipped in sulfuric acid, which leaves behind only nickel (on the surface). With something as thin as sheet metal, most of what you have left is nickel.
I may be wrong though, I have no experience, I'm just parroting what I've heard said by friends that work on expensive cars and planes. Obviously the thickness of the sheet is an important variable too.
Well, at least no one saw that one coming. No one could ever have predicted that a government mandate issued to private company would wind up being sourced to the cheapest possible labor.