without using java which is all but a dead language (that happens to run on the majority of cell phones sold today
Not relevant. None of the Java phone apps in existence will ever be able to work on the iPhone. Why? Because they're all designed with the assumption that the phone has a 4 way D-pad and a left and a right button. The iPhone has none of those things. So, those applications already need to be re-written if they're going to work on the iPhone.
Calling an asynchronous or subdivided chip "150GHz" is deeply misleading, since in a normal chip, the amount of work done in one cycle is proportionate to the number of gates it can potentially go through, which will naturally be smaller if one uses a subdivided chip. On the other hand, if you look at the Core 2 Duo, even though it only clocks at twice the GHz of a P3, it actually does much more work per cycle, since it has more transistors packed into a smaller space -- which is why Intel is deliberately underclocking the chips, in order to keep them from melting.
At any rate, I think we can both agree that there's a ways to go before we "run out of room at the bottom," but my suggestion is that the bottom may be closer than we think, perhaps even in the ballpark of just 100x current speeds (=speed doubling every 1.5 months for the next decade).
In 1903, man flew in a heavier than air craft for the first time. In 1969, man landed on the moon. Therefore, in 2001, man will have moon bases and be able to send a manned mission to Jupiter.
Sorry, it didn't work out like that.
Why not?
Because we haven't invented any new rocket fuels since the 60s, and conventional rocket fuels suck. All that Jetsons/Star Trek stuff was based on the theory that we would keep ramping up the curve at the same speed, but in reality, we hit a plateau and leveled off.
The same thing is already starting to happen to computers. Notice how the GHz race has slowed to a trickle? In 2000, Intel broke the GHz barrier with the Pentium III. Today, eight years later, I use a 2.1 GHz Core 2 Duo processor. Why is my chip "only" doing twice as many GHz? Because there's a brick wall and Intel is running up against it. The faster you go, the exponentially more heat you generate. Worse than that, no matter what cooling system you use, the fact is that 299,792,458 m/s / 1 cm = 29.9792458 GHz. That is, you can never get a signal from one side of a.5cm chip and back faster than 30 GHz without breaking the speed of light. So, it's not physically possible that for me to ever get a 30GHz Core 10 Quadro. It ain't gonna happen. Meanwhile quantum computers, while nice for some problems, do not offer generic speed ups for all problems. Quantum computers only aid in some, well-defined problems like factoring numbers. Not all algorithms benefit from the quantum effect. The number you suggested for quantum computers is basically from out of your ass. I think that if we are lucky, we'll see another 100x speed up of computers before we hit the plateau, but eventually they will plateau. I have no doubt of that.
Meanwhile, has science really been moving faster since the internet? QCD was invented before the internet. DNA was discovered and used for making insulin etc. before the internet. Dark matter was on the edge of the internet's coming into being, but dark matter is kind of just a mathematical kludge anyway. "Hey, our math doesn't work. So there must be more stuff here slowing things down (dark matter) and more energy there speeding things up (dark energy)." Our knowledge of dark matter and energy is very crude, almost like the view of the atom in Marie Curie's day.
In any event, the whole "singularity" movement strikes me as being the same eschatological nonsense that human beings have always believed. "OMG, a comet and an earthquake: it's the end of the world!!" No, it's not. For you personally, the end of the world will come in about 120 years max. (Aubrey de Grey is full of crap.) For the rest of the world, there's time enough for things to keep working themselves out. The Earth will keep orbiting the sun. Life will go on. AI researchers will continue to try to make a robot that can run around as well as a four year old. This too shall pass.
I've been thinking about this issue, and my current thought is that, yes, everyone has bias. Everyone is prejudiced in some way. No one can see the world from viewpoint other than their own. However, it is also true that some people have a commitment to find out the truth (where truth = the sympathetic merger of all possible perspectives and biases into a truly universal, impersonal account of the situation with no detail omitted) and some people don't. So, while no one person can find the truth, since the truth is, by the definition I'm using, a synthesis of an infinite amount of data, which no one can have access to all of, nevertheless, the voices of those who have a commitment to striving towards the truth is to be esteemed more highly than the voices of those who consider their own biases to the only standard for making judgments. In other words, we must have a commitment to finding the external truth, even while recognizing that we can only strive for it using our internal measurements.
Dude, HandBrake is free. Using a DVD drive wastes battery life. A lot of people rip their DVD collections just for that reason alone. Plus, again, kids like to accidentally ruin discs. Even if you use a PC, HandBrake is a good idea.
Has built-in DVD possibility. Winner: Lenovo X300.
YOU say "Whooptee doo." Big plus for me... my laptop MUST have a built in DVD drive as I use it as an entertainment station for the kids while we're away, and having a separate drive hanging off on a usb cable is a big NO NO. You also contradict yourself with for the Lenovo "You get to lug a DVD player", and yet for the Apple you say "you can bring along a USB powered DVD". Which is better, one that's in built, out of the way, doesn't need the external casing, or one hidden away in the body of the machine... if you NEED or WANT a DVD player (which a LOT of us still do), then it's a major failing to not have one in the unit. Yes, I can see certain people who'll have little need for one, but don't off handly say it's not a good thing.
I don't you really need the DVD drive with you when you're on the road. Just use Handbrake or some other software to rip the DVD to your HD, then you don't have to worry about your kids getting peanut butter on the disc. Or you can get an iPod or other portable video player so you don't have to worry about wasting your battery on movies.
Has WiMax connectivity. Winner: Lenovo X300.
I like how you ignore this, which considering that the Apple lacks drives and needs to share others, would seem to be something it could do with, data transfer wise.
WiMax isn't meant for local networking. It is to Wifi as cellular phone is to portable phone. The MacBook already has 802.11n, which is decently fast. That said, yes, having it would be better than not.
Has USB Wireless. Winner: Lenovo X300.
While this isn't widespread yet, how cool to not have to plug in new devices? Very nice.
It's called Bluetooth. I haven't plugged a mouse into my PowerBook for the last four years. Similarly, most printers can be either plugged into the network directly or plugged into the USB port on an Apple Wifi router (I don't know if other companies make routers that do this yet). So, the device that will take advantage of Wireless USB are going to have to be things that need a lot of bandwidth, but don't use Wifi. That rules out hard drives, since there are tons of wireless NASes on the market. So, basically it just leaves iPods/other media players and digital cameras, but already some of those use Wifi. So, while WUSB is a good idea, and I wish it luck, it's not such a big deal. It's just a minor evolution of existing standards.
Doesn't use Mac OS X Leopard. Winner: MacBook Air.
This SO doesn't apply to most people... SOME want OSX, OTHERS want Vista/XP, you can't put this as a carte blanch statement.
The MacBook is more versatile. If you want to run XP/Vista, you just need to install it. With a PC laptop, you can only run OS X illegally, which is sure to be buggy and lead to headaches.
One more point for people on both sides:
I've heard a lot of complaining about the tiny size of the MBA's hard drive. And while that's true, what people are ignoring is the fact that we now have wireless NASes. So, just put a terabyte in your living room, store your media library on that, access it wirelessly from your laptop, and when you go on the road, just sync it to a portable media player first and keep your serious computing separate from your entertainment.
Actually, as another poster points out, the problem is much worse for materialists than for those who believe in souls. If you have a soul, it can just wander on over to your new body after the teleportation is through. If you're just "stuff," it would be like making an exact replica of the Mississippi River on Mars. Sure, it looks the Mississippi River did at the time the copy was created, but it's not really the "same" river, is it? The Mississippi River isn't a collection of particular atoms, or even a location of moving water, it's an on-going, self-perpetuating process. Teleporting the Mississippi would destroy it, since it would destroy the historicity of the river. The same thing applies to the human body. It's not a thing or a collection of atoms or a particular shape, it's a continual process.
Wait a few years, and we'll be looking back at the games we play now and think "Geez, those things suck!"
Will we? Because with the high end catalogs of the NES/SNES, we look back and say, "Y'know, that was pretty good!" Look at how Nintendo is selling millions of games with its "Virtual Console" service. Games like Mario 3 or Street Fighter 2 are basically eternal. You can upgrade the graphics, sure, but the core gameplay was good enough to stand the test of time. So, it's not inevitable that we look back on current gen games as sucking... Then again, we might. I think the PS/N64 era didn't hold up as well as it might have, since those titles were often trying to "show off" their graphics, and now it looks silly. Then again, people still love games like Ocarina of Time or FF7, even though the graphics no longer impress anyone.
No offense, but you're full of shit. The vast majority of games from before the NES don't just suck -- they're effectively unplayable. Seriously, go into your closet and dust off the Atari 2600. I did a couple years ago. I wanted to play some "retro" games from my childhood, but I ended up shocked. The games on it suck. They just plain suck. Sure, there are couple good games, like Adventure or Pitfall, but these are the exception, not the rule. For the NES on the other hand, even the crappiest platformers are still playable. You might get bored and fail to beat it, but at least you can tolerate the first couple levels. With the Atari, all you have are some ugly blobs floating around and absolutely nothing to hold your interest in the game now that the novelty factor is long dead. It's really sad. I wanted to like the Atari again, but in a post-NES world, videogames are held to a much higher standard -- one that only the best of the Atari games can come close to holding a candle to and that the majority of games don't even give you a hint of.
Mind you, the arcade games of the late 70s/early 80s were probably much better than the Atari. But you also have to remember that most kids weren't made of quarters and could only go to the arcade for special events like birthday parties a couple times a year. Sure, some kids spent their whole pre-adolescence in an arcade, but, again, those are the exception, not the rule. The fact is, it's much better to be a young gamer today when the dross of yesteryear has been rightly forgotten and the gems have been polished and collected into retro compilations for modern systems. Today's gamers can play a wider variety of games than the arcade rat of the 80s could even dream of.
It's a shame you weren't modded up. Does it make any sense at all to suppose the RIAA would go after random people in fraudulent lawsuits? That would be such a dumb idea it's hard to really contemplate it seriously. You can't milk an individual for more money than they have, so the most you can get out of a lawsuit of an individual is around $100k or so paid out over a long period of time. On the other hand, getting caught doing a fraudulent lawsuit would risk multiple millions of dollars in a counter-suit. It doesn't make any financial sense.
All things being equal, is the world better with machine guns?
Now, on the one hand, you might argue, if you're going to have a war anyway, then you may as well use a tool that lets you meet your objective without risking your own troops, reducing the total lives lost in the encounter. So, in that case, there are the same number of dead enemies and fewer dead people on our side.
The trouble is, our enemies now have machine guns too. And since they have machine guns, the lives lost by us are now equal again. And worse, crazy people can get machine guns and use them to shoot up schools or whatever and kill more people than they would be able to using a normal gun or a knife.
Building a robot tank only makes sense if you believe that the US will always be the global super-cop capable of going into all other nations without the fear that some other nation's troops will come into it. Having a robot tank encourages us to invade other places, since, hey, it's not like many Americans are going to die. The trouble is, the more wars we fight without being killed, the more the other side thinks, "We need to find an asymmetric way to get inside of the US and do similar damage to them." They could, for example, hack one of the tanks remotely. Or, more simply, have a mole in the US military and instruct that mole to turn our weapons against us. Or they could do the usual kinds of terrorism such as car bombs or snipers.
The point is, even if having a new weapon may in some cases be a good thing for us, in the long run, we're better off finding a way of maintaining peace that doesn't rely on our being able to kill everyone else, since they will someday gain a similar capability.
There's a real difference between direct and indirect contribution to the problem. I've got work at something or I'll starve. I could emigrate (and in fact, I did live outside the US for two years), but that's not a very practical solution to the problem of excessive militarism. What makes more sense is for me to stay in the country and vote for people who have reasonable foreign policy goals. There's nothing about just having a job that necessarily implies killing someone else. On the hand, when you design a robot tank, the goal of that action is, "If everything works out, there will be a better way to kill people remotely." Killing is the goal, not something that might happen inadvertently anyway. That's not a good goal to have!
Now look, I don't condemn all things military. My brother and brother-in-law are both officers in the military. I can respect people who want to defend their country. But I don't see the need to create a whole new class of killing machines.
Does it concern you at all that you're helping create a machine which is being funded expressly in the hopes that it will be good at killing people at a later date?
Exactly. Competing with online gaming news is stupid, because even a magazine with an incredibly short publishing cycle is always going to be a couple weeks behind the curve. On top of that, they can't include video previews of upcoming games. The way for magazines to compete is to go smarter. Write long, thoughtful articles about Game And Society, Games And Childhood Nostalgia, Games and The Meaning of Life, &c. People are interested in those, and they can't necessarily be found just anywhere online, and since they don't rely on up-to-the-minute news or videos, they aren't liable to being scooped out of existence.
Sheez, hasn't this been going on for a while? When I was teaching in Japan almost two years ago, one of the other teachers in my district said he was having the students write up their towns in Wikipedia for a group project. You can still see some of their edits if you go to Oyabe, Toyama and other pages. This isn't really news.
Faster clock speeds also mean that signals travel a shorter distance per clock cycle, which if your chip stays the same size starts to become more of an issue when wire delays become the dominant factor over switching delay. 5GHz would give a distance of just over an inch or so for your signal per cycle.
Bingo. People can say, "Parallelization suxx0rz!" all they want, but the fact of the matter is that 299,792,458 m/s / 1 cm = 29.9792458 gigahertz. (Thanks Google calculator.) That's the absolute ceiling: the speed of light divided by chip size. People can deride multi-core all they want, but they'll never get Intel to put resources into creating a 40GHz chip for you, since, you know, it can't actually be created without FTL processors.
Graphics: 3/10. There are some pictures and graphics on the side, but for the most part it's just text one a screen. I could forgive it not being 3D, but they're not even using sprites! The in-game ads are also kind of lame, considering how little effort they put into the graphics.
Sound: 1/10. No sound to speak of, just the hum of my computer's fan, which is kind of annoying.
Gameplay: 5/10. There's not a lot to the gameplay. Basically, you submit messages in the box, and if they're good other people write stuff back to you. On the one hand, this could be a really good idea, since the other messages are sent by other players, but in practice it doesn't work, because they don't show your stats, so it's not even clear if you're winning or losing.
Overall: 4/10. I like the idea, and I'd be interested in seeing a sequel (or maybe some additional downloadable content), but with the way it's implemented now I cannot recommend this game.
The beginning of TP is a bit slow, to be sure, but after you become a wolf, it's pretty awesome. I remember the pre-wolf parts being like, "We waited so long for this?" but post-wolf was really epic and impressive.
Of course, I'm sure that some Mac fan is going to point out how this is another Apple innovation.
Sure, Artie MacStrawman will, but the sophisticated fanboy will make two points:
1) Sometimes Microsoft actually gets stuff right before Apple. For example, until 10.4, OS X only had UNIX-style permissions, which are inferior to NTFS-style permissions. But,
2) How things are put into practice matters, too. Microsoft has had a good permissions system in place since, what was it, NT 4.0? However, it wasn't until Vista that Microsoft actually started, you know, using them on consumer systems to separate users as has been done in Unix forever.
So yes, sometimes MS is ahead of the curve, like with this applications signing thing, but the question is how are these things put to use? Has MS used application signing to prevent security problems? Pre-Vista, the answer was no. I don't know enough about Vista to say if they're being put to good use now.
Slashdot Mirror
Not relevant. None of the Java phone apps in existence will ever be able to work on the iPhone. Why? Because they're all designed with the assumption that the phone has a 4 way D-pad and a left and a right button. The iPhone has none of those things. So, those applications already need to be re-written if they're going to work on the iPhone.
Calling an asynchronous or subdivided chip "150GHz" is deeply misleading, since in a normal chip, the amount of work done in one cycle is proportionate to the number of gates it can potentially go through, which will naturally be smaller if one uses a subdivided chip. On the other hand, if you look at the Core 2 Duo, even though it only clocks at twice the GHz of a P3, it actually does much more work per cycle, since it has more transistors packed into a smaller space -- which is why Intel is deliberately underclocking the chips, in order to keep them from melting.
At any rate, I think we can both agree that there's a ways to go before we "run out of room at the bottom," but my suggestion is that the bottom may be closer than we think, perhaps even in the ballpark of just 100x current speeds (=speed doubling every 1.5 months for the next decade).
Pie in the sky.
.5cm chip and back faster than 30 GHz without breaking the speed of light. So, it's not physically possible that for me to ever get a 30GHz Core 10 Quadro. It ain't gonna happen. Meanwhile quantum computers, while nice for some problems, do not offer generic speed ups for all problems. Quantum computers only aid in some, well-defined problems like factoring numbers. Not all algorithms benefit from the quantum effect. The number you suggested for quantum computers is basically from out of your ass. I think that if we are lucky, we'll see another 100x speed up of computers before we hit the plateau, but eventually they will plateau. I have no doubt of that.
In 1903, man flew in a heavier than air craft for the first time. In 1969, man landed on the moon. Therefore, in 2001, man will have moon bases and be able to send a manned mission to Jupiter.
Sorry, it didn't work out like that.
Why not?
Because we haven't invented any new rocket fuels since the 60s, and conventional rocket fuels suck. All that Jetsons/Star Trek stuff was based on the theory that we would keep ramping up the curve at the same speed, but in reality, we hit a plateau and leveled off.
The same thing is already starting to happen to computers. Notice how the GHz race has slowed to a trickle? In 2000, Intel broke the GHz barrier with the Pentium III. Today, eight years later, I use a 2.1 GHz Core 2 Duo processor. Why is my chip "only" doing twice as many GHz? Because there's a brick wall and Intel is running up against it. The faster you go, the exponentially more heat you generate. Worse than that, no matter what cooling system you use, the fact is that 299,792,458 m/s / 1 cm = 29.9792458 GHz. That is, you can never get a signal from one side of a
Meanwhile, has science really been moving faster since the internet? QCD was invented before the internet. DNA was discovered and used for making insulin etc. before the internet. Dark matter was on the edge of the internet's coming into being, but dark matter is kind of just a mathematical kludge anyway. "Hey, our math doesn't work. So there must be more stuff here slowing things down (dark matter) and more energy there speeding things up (dark energy)." Our knowledge of dark matter and energy is very crude, almost like the view of the atom in Marie Curie's day.
In any event, the whole "singularity" movement strikes me as being the same eschatological nonsense that human beings have always believed. "OMG, a comet and an earthquake: it's the end of the world!!" No, it's not. For you personally, the end of the world will come in about 120 years max. (Aubrey de Grey is full of crap.) For the rest of the world, there's time enough for things to keep working themselves out. The Earth will keep orbiting the sun. Life will go on. AI researchers will continue to try to make a robot that can run around as well as a four year old. This too shall pass.
I've been thinking about this issue, and my current thought is that, yes, everyone has bias. Everyone is prejudiced in some way. No one can see the world from viewpoint other than their own. However, it is also true that some people have a commitment to find out the truth (where truth = the sympathetic merger of all possible perspectives and biases into a truly universal, impersonal account of the situation with no detail omitted) and some people don't. So, while no one person can find the truth, since the truth is, by the definition I'm using, a synthesis of an infinite amount of data, which no one can have access to all of, nevertheless, the voices of those who have a commitment to striving towards the truth is to be esteemed more highly than the voices of those who consider their own biases to the only standard for making judgments. In other words, we must have a commitment to finding the external truth, even while recognizing that we can only strive for it using our internal measurements.
Dude, HandBrake is free. Using a DVD drive wastes battery life. A lot of people rip their DVD collections just for that reason alone. Plus, again, kids like to accidentally ruin discs. Even if you use a PC, HandBrake is a good idea.
I don't you really need the DVD drive with you when you're on the road. Just use Handbrake or some other software to rip the DVD to your HD, then you don't have to worry about your kids getting peanut butter on the disc. Or you can get an iPod or other portable video player so you don't have to worry about wasting your battery on movies.
WiMax isn't meant for local networking. It is to Wifi as cellular phone is to portable phone. The MacBook already has 802.11n, which is decently fast. That said, yes, having it would be better than not.
It's called Bluetooth. I haven't plugged a mouse into my PowerBook for the last four years. Similarly, most printers can be either plugged into the network directly or plugged into the USB port on an Apple Wifi router (I don't know if other companies make routers that do this yet). So, the device that will take advantage of Wireless USB are going to have to be things that need a lot of bandwidth, but don't use Wifi. That rules out hard drives, since there are tons of wireless NASes on the market. So, basically it just leaves iPods/other media players and digital cameras, but already some of those use Wifi. So, while WUSB is a good idea, and I wish it luck, it's not such a big deal. It's just a minor evolution of existing standards.
The MacBook is more versatile. If you want to run XP/Vista, you just need to install it. With a PC laptop, you can only run OS X illegally, which is sure to be buggy and lead to headaches.
One more point for people on both sides:
I've heard a lot of complaining about the tiny size of the MBA's hard drive. And while that's true, what people are ignoring is the fact that we now have wireless NASes. So, just put a terabyte in your living room, store your media library on that, access it wirelessly from your laptop, and when you go on the road, just sync it to a portable media player first and keep your serious computing separate from your entertainment.
Don't blame me, I voted for Cowboy Neil.
Actually, as another poster points out, the problem is much worse for materialists than for those who believe in souls. If you have a soul, it can just wander on over to your new body after the teleportation is through. If you're just "stuff," it would be like making an exact replica of the Mississippi River on Mars. Sure, it looks the Mississippi River did at the time the copy was created, but it's not really the "same" river, is it? The Mississippi River isn't a collection of particular atoms, or even a location of moving water, it's an on-going, self-perpetuating process. Teleporting the Mississippi would destroy it, since it would destroy the historicity of the river. The same thing applies to the human body. It's not a thing or a collection of atoms or a particular shape, it's a continual process.
See my essay at http://deadhobosociety.com/index.php/HelloWorldProject/ENTRY34 for a longer discussion of the same general subject.
Wait a few years, and we'll be looking back at the games we play now and think "Geez, those things suck!"
Will we? Because with the high end catalogs of the NES/SNES, we look back and say, "Y'know, that was pretty good!" Look at how Nintendo is selling millions of games with its "Virtual Console" service. Games like Mario 3 or Street Fighter 2 are basically eternal. You can upgrade the graphics, sure, but the core gameplay was good enough to stand the test of time. So, it's not inevitable that we look back on current gen games as sucking... Then again, we might. I think the PS/N64 era didn't hold up as well as it might have, since those titles were often trying to "show off" their graphics, and now it looks silly. Then again, people still love games like Ocarina of Time or FF7, even though the graphics no longer impress anyone.
No offense, but you're full of shit. The vast majority of games from before the NES don't just suck -- they're effectively unplayable. Seriously, go into your closet and dust off the Atari 2600. I did a couple years ago. I wanted to play some "retro" games from my childhood, but I ended up shocked. The games on it suck. They just plain suck. Sure, there are couple good games, like Adventure or Pitfall, but these are the exception, not the rule. For the NES on the other hand, even the crappiest platformers are still playable. You might get bored and fail to beat it, but at least you can tolerate the first couple levels. With the Atari, all you have are some ugly blobs floating around and absolutely nothing to hold your interest in the game now that the novelty factor is long dead. It's really sad. I wanted to like the Atari again, but in a post-NES world, videogames are held to a much higher standard -- one that only the best of the Atari games can come close to holding a candle to and that the majority of games don't even give you a hint of.
Mind you, the arcade games of the late 70s/early 80s were probably much better than the Atari. But you also have to remember that most kids weren't made of quarters and could only go to the arcade for special events like birthday parties a couple times a year. Sure, some kids spent their whole pre-adolescence in an arcade, but, again, those are the exception, not the rule. The fact is, it's much better to be a young gamer today when the dross of yesteryear has been rightly forgotten and the gems have been polished and collected into retro compilations for modern systems. Today's gamers can play a wider variety of games than the arcade rat of the 80s could even dream of.
It's a shame you weren't modded up. Does it make any sense at all to suppose the RIAA would go after random people in fraudulent lawsuits? That would be such a dumb idea it's hard to really contemplate it seriously. You can't milk an individual for more money than they have, so the most you can get out of a lawsuit of an individual is around $100k or so paid out over a long period of time. On the other hand, getting caught doing a fraudulent lawsuit would risk multiple millions of dollars in a counter-suit. It doesn't make any financial sense.
All things being equal, is the world better with machine guns?
Now, on the one hand, you might argue, if you're going to have a war anyway, then you may as well use a tool that lets you meet your objective without risking your own troops, reducing the total lives lost in the encounter. So, in that case, there are the same number of dead enemies and fewer dead people on our side.
The trouble is, our enemies now have machine guns too. And since they have machine guns, the lives lost by us are now equal again. And worse, crazy people can get machine guns and use them to shoot up schools or whatever and kill more people than they would be able to using a normal gun or a knife.
Building a robot tank only makes sense if you believe that the US will always be the global super-cop capable of going into all other nations without the fear that some other nation's troops will come into it. Having a robot tank encourages us to invade other places, since, hey, it's not like many Americans are going to die. The trouble is, the more wars we fight without being killed, the more the other side thinks, "We need to find an asymmetric way to get inside of the US and do similar damage to them." They could, for example, hack one of the tanks remotely. Or, more simply, have a mole in the US military and instruct that mole to turn our weapons against us. Or they could do the usual kinds of terrorism such as car bombs or snipers.
The point is, even if having a new weapon may in some cases be a good thing for us, in the long run, we're better off finding a way of maintaining peace that doesn't rely on our being able to kill everyone else, since they will someday gain a similar capability.
There's a real difference between direct and indirect contribution to the problem. I've got work at something or I'll starve. I could emigrate (and in fact, I did live outside the US for two years), but that's not a very practical solution to the problem of excessive militarism. What makes more sense is for me to stay in the country and vote for people who have reasonable foreign policy goals. There's nothing about just having a job that necessarily implies killing someone else. On the hand, when you design a robot tank, the goal of that action is, "If everything works out, there will be a better way to kill people remotely." Killing is the goal, not something that might happen inadvertently anyway. That's not a good goal to have!
Now look, I don't condemn all things military. My brother and brother-in-law are both officers in the military. I can respect people who want to defend their country. But I don't see the need to create a whole new class of killing machines.
Is there a mod +1: Sad But True?
Does it concern you at all that you're helping create a machine which is being funded expressly in the hopes that it will be good at killing people at a later date?
Exactly. Competing with online gaming news is stupid, because even a magazine with an incredibly short publishing cycle is always going to be a couple weeks behind the curve. On top of that, they can't include video previews of upcoming games. The way for magazines to compete is to go smarter. Write long, thoughtful articles about Game And Society, Games And Childhood Nostalgia, Games and The Meaning of Life, &c. People are interested in those, and they can't necessarily be found just anywhere online, and since they don't rely on up-to-the-minute news or videos, they aren't liable to being scooped out of existence.
Simple solution: Change the dialog that pops up and says, "[Cancel] [Replace]" to one that says"[Cancel] [Replace] [Merge]". Done.
Sheez, hasn't this been going on for a while? When I was teaching in Japan almost two years ago, one of the other teachers in my district said he was having the students write up their towns in Wikipedia for a group project. You can still see some of their edits if you go to Oyabe, Toyama and other pages. This isn't really news.
Bingo. People can say, "Parallelization suxx0rz!" all they want, but the fact of the matter is that 299,792,458 m/s / 1 cm = 29.9792458 gigahertz. (Thanks Google calculator.) That's the absolute ceiling: the speed of light divided by chip size. People can deride multi-core all they want, but they'll never get Intel to put resources into creating a 40GHz chip for you, since, you know, it can't actually be created without FTL processors.
An exercise for those who believe more Hz is still the future:
Open Google.com
Type "299792458 m/s / 1cm"
You'll get "29.9792458 gigahertz"
That's the fastest light can get from one side of a half centimeter chip to another and back. Think about what that means.
"Video Game Reviews Are Broken, Please Fix"
published by Kotaku
Graphics: 3/10. There are some pictures and graphics on the side, but for the most part it's just text one a screen. I could forgive it not being 3D, but they're not even using sprites! The in-game ads are also kind of lame, considering how little effort they put into the graphics.
Sound: 1/10. No sound to speak of, just the hum of my computer's fan, which is kind of annoying.
Gameplay: 5/10. There's not a lot to the gameplay. Basically, you submit messages in the box, and if they're good other people write stuff back to you. On the one hand, this could be a really good idea, since the other messages are sent by other players, but in practice it doesn't work, because they don't show your stats, so it's not even clear if you're winning or losing.
Overall: 4/10. I like the idea, and I'd be interested in seeing a sequel (or maybe some additional downloadable content), but with the way it's implemented now I cannot recommend this game.
Buy/Rent/Skip? Skip.
The beginning of TP is a bit slow, to be sure, but after you become a wolf, it's pretty awesome. I remember the pre-wolf parts being like, "We waited so long for this?" but post-wolf was really epic and impressive.
Sure, Artie MacStrawman will, but the sophisticated fanboy will make two points:
1) Sometimes Microsoft actually gets stuff right before Apple. For example, until 10.4, OS X only had UNIX-style permissions, which are inferior to NTFS-style permissions. But,
2) How things are put into practice matters, too. Microsoft has had a good permissions system in place since, what was it, NT 4.0? However, it wasn't until Vista that Microsoft actually started, you know, using them on consumer systems to separate users as has been done in Unix forever.
So yes, sometimes MS is ahead of the curve, like with this applications signing thing, but the question is how are these things put to use? Has MS used application signing to prevent security problems? Pre-Vista, the answer was no. I don't know enough about Vista to say if they're being put to good use now.
Most Wii developers don't even know that it supports progressive scan and widescreen!
Perhaps. Then again, apparently Apple back-ported Leopard's ImageKit API to 10.4 just for iWorks. So, that might effect PDF creation.