No. A perfect poll is not needed. The editors decide which options go in regardless of any "vote" so no significant percent of the population even needs the ability to "vote." I suspect the editors will just browse at +4 or +5 and pick the best visible options - like a slashdot interview. The moderation is just to bury the dross.
There is an established mechanism for voting, and it'll be used for the "final" vote - but the primary process needn't be and won't be democratic. At best it'll be a sort of approximate consensus.
Go ahead and consider a hardback novel. Now open the thing up so you can see two pages. Get the idea? Letter sized isn't over-big at all... and also allows viewing documents intended for printing and static web pages instead of just plain text.
As for color... I can't imagine it takes significantly more power to change a screen from reflecting all light to reflecting only one wavelength then to go from reflecting all light to reflecting none. Especially if you manage to do the thing with sub-pixels or whatever.
Right, that works. As long as you punish people who use a taser when a bullet wouldn't be merited the same as if they had shot the bullet. Which so far nobody is doing.
I would *certainly* rather be handcuffed and pushed outside rather then risk death by taser for spending too long on my question at a political speech.
Anyway, the GP was trying to say that if a device can cause death is irrelevant to if it is torture... so yes, if you use a bullet and gun to try to inflict pain, it can be torture. For example, kneecapping.
Deism was popular for a long time... but with advances in knowledge there's no reason why there needs to be a god to start it all - for three reasons. The first is that self-organizing behavior shows complex-seeming things arise without a "plan" or "guide" from simple rules. Second, and probably more important to your particular vision of deism is occam's razor - why do you *need* to create a being just for this? Finally and most importantly, you only raise the question of where your deist god came from. What created the god that created the universe, and why couldn't it just create the universe itself?
It doesn't mean the chance of creating such particles, it means the chance of them being dangerous. For example, a microscopic black hole is all but certain to do one of two things: evaporate in microseconds due to hawking radiation, or consume the earth. It should be noted that if the second is the case, this will take a few hundred billion years, at which point the sun will have already done the job. For the others, the outcomes are similar. All our models indicate that strangelets should be unstable... though in this case if they were stable the fear would be real. Still, either they are stable or they aren't - odds insanely for "not stable." You don't have to reroll stable/not for each one, in which case the risk would go up depending on how long the system ran.
I'm not really familiar with the dangers of a magnetic monopole, but I'd assume the risks were about the same.
Basically, black holes and strangelets are incredibly dangerous. BUT unless we're completely wrong about them, there is a 0% chance of them being around long enough to do any harm. There is a very tiny but non-zero chance we're completely wrong about them.
That question is meaningless. A singularity is a single point of exactly 0 radius. As another poster pointed out, the real question is the size of the event horizon caused by the singularity. And in the case of the type of microscopic black hole the LHC might produce, this size is so small that even if hawking radiation isn't real (if it is real the thing will evaporate in microseconds) it probably won't encounter a single proton before our sun goes nova.
Because you need a monopoly to get looked at for monopolistic practices? Only place they're even close is with the iPod, and while it's the favorite by far the rest of MP3 Players together make up enough of the market to make it not a monopoly. And they don't do anything anti-competitive with the iPod anyway - it plays standard files, and the interface with it is known so no lock-in.
You can't do that *yet* but I doubt if it'll be terribly long before you can. A touchscreen and a good program will let you take all the notes you want... an e-paper screen will let you read off a screen more comfortably and make it light enough and low power enough that you could hold it above your head to read if you liked.
Honestly there's no inherent value to printed paper... for now it's better then a computer screen for reading books, but it's only going to improve from here. I could see a really good e-book reader, good enough to fully replace books, by 2019... but I doubt enough of them cheap enough to replace books, though perhaps enough that printing will slow significantly.
Spirit and Opportunity have done fairly well on solar power... so I'd say it's improving in at least reliability - kinda important when you're days from a repair-man and need constant power for life support. Nuclear requires perpetual fuel shipments from earth, unless we can figure out fusion or we find lots of easily mined uranium on the moon. Solar might need to be replaced, but less often then nuclear fuel and the replacements could be made on the moon from the regolith eventually if I recall the composition accurately (mostly oxygen, iron, and silicon).
Re:Err.. Why do we need H20 for fuel again when,
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New Radar Maps of Moon
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There was nothing to do on the moon for the past 30 years. But we're running into the limits of earth-based telescopes, and of course there's the possibility of fusion any time now... Both those are things that weren't true in the 70's.
Also, at least as importantly, there are now other people who want to go there again and might be able to. When we stopped going to the moon, russia couldn't afford it any more and they were being torn apart anyway. Now china, india, russia, japan, and more might want to go to the moon... and might be able to before long... so we have to as well. Otherwise they good the good locations if we ever *do* need to go back. It's also being given as a stepping stone to mars. That might not be a great reason, but enough people think it is a good reason that it will be one of the reasons we finally go to the moon if we do go any time soon.
"all security does is build a wall. someone can always climb over it, somehow. the question for you is merely do you want a white picket fence? or do you want a 10 foot chain link fence with barbed wire on top?
locks on doors merely keep honest people honest. anyone determined to break into your house will find a way
don't invest your energy in a failed concept: i can have absolute security. you can't, it's always an arms race, forever"
A lock on your door will only keep honest people honest. But a full security system that calls the police will start to scare off casual thieves. Armed guards on patrol and putting what you want to protect in a safe will stop all but the most dedicated of thieves. Two walls, the first a 10-foot-tall concrete wall and the second a twenty foot tall solid stone wall topped with razer wire, with a hundred-yard-wide fire-filled pit between them filled with fire-proof crocodiles and periodic auto-lazer-turrets complemented by constant watch from overlapping guard towers who can call on several helicopters and a battalion of tanks all ten miles from your house will stop anything short of an invading army.
And some data might be worth that. For a computer, full-disk encryption and a measure to melt the entire computer if anyone tampers with the case might reduce the chance of even a dedicated hacker getting your data before destroying it all but zero. And spending a few hundred dollars a year to protect information worth millions doesn't seem out of line. Sure, it isn't perfect security, but if it reduces the chance of compromising data when a laptop is stolen from 100% to 1%... well that might be worth an annual fee for your place in the arms race.
Yes. Optimally using light to go between earth and moon satellites it would be about 2 seconds. In reality it will vary significantly with the orbit of the moon, and of course nothing is optimal.
It travels at "c" in a vacuum. Through various materials it travels slower. That's why lenses work - light travels slower in glass then in air. There are several ways to slow light down, but no way to speed it up to above "c."
I'm confused. Why exactly would you want to send someone to Europa or Titan? There's nothing there at all that needs a human to see it... and NASA still has plenty of budget left over to send rovers with lots of camera to both. No reason why you can't move the human space program to mars and push the robotic portion further into the solar system, to places we haven't ruled out for life, yet.
Mars (and to a lesser extent the moon) however, do hold the long-term promise of harboring self-sustained *human* life. While it would be an Epic project the likes of which has never been done, with complications we can't even realize yet... it would be relatively easy to terraform mars as compared to a rock further from the sun. Send everything to mars on a long route with solar sails and then use them to build huge mirrors to lengthen the days and increase heat. Start processing the regolith and non-water ice to make an atmosphere, and then start air-braking ice comets in the thickening atmosphere to add heat, hydrogen, oxygen, and water. Introduce some of the antarctic and bio-engineered bacteria.
It might take enormous effort for centuries and it'll certainly take a decade of research into closed biological systems to figure out how to build a biosphere from the ground up, but there's a *reason* to send man to mars. Europa, though? It's an ice ball. About all it has going for it is liquid water and possibly a heated core. It'll be very interesting if we find life there, but the surface is soaked in radiation and too far from the sun to be interesting as a habitat, and if we're going to live underground there's no reason to prefer it over any other large rock.
With a thick atmosphere and a surplus of mirrors we might eventually make one of Saturn's moons habitable, but the lower solar flux just makes it a less desirable position that would require more work then mars. Smaller surface, too.
Flying Car - Actually I do want this, assuming it's like Fifth Element...and I get to choose who gets one.
-It isn't like fifth element and you don't get to choose who gets one.
Cheap Nuclear Power- Nuclear power is cheap. 2 cents a kilowatt to produce.
-Point? It is cheap and it could be a lot cheaper. And we don't have enough uranium to last us into 2100 if we drop oil now... unless we pull it from seawater.
Strong AI - Uh, no. I don't want something that can have a bad hair day calculating the national debt.
-Too bad. We're nowhere *near* real strong AI. But you could probably get something close enough that most people couldn't tell right now if you *really* wanted to (and you could pay a team of programmers for several years) and if you limited it's realm.
No more oil - going to need a replacement for plastics then, won't we?
-We use plastic for *everything.* There is no replacement. We could, however, probably mange to synthesize it directly from biomatter if we tried *really* hard.
Non-lethal weapons for cops - there is no weapon that can incapacitate without risk of killing a person, and cops just *do* use non-lethal weapons in situations where lethal force isn't justified. Current lethal weapons work fine in situations where lethal force *would* be required, but using *any* non-lethal alternative to a lethal weapon that really could replace the lethal one in a situation where lethal force is required puts lives at risk unnecessarily. The problem isn't that stun guns and rubber bullets and so on aren't effective or are too effective, it's that they are misused.
Energy-beam weapons - You can't dodge a laser, but you can build a mirror. If you manage to reflect my relativistic tungsten slug complete with guidance system without moving several planets or a few days of lagtime you *deserve* to not get blown to smithereens. There are downsides to every weapon, but energy weapons as a rule are incredibly inefficient as far as energy to damage goes. Maybe they have a place, but if so it's in places where the difference between light speed and relativistic matter - in space over distances of a light-second or more. We're not there yet, and in the atmosphere the disadvantages of energy weapons increase and the benefits decrease.
Yea yea yea, I was just going for the "sharks+lasers" thing. A laser would actually be a kinda stupid weapon and a shark would be a stupid shape. The point is that it *would* be freaking awesome even without the shark and lazer.
While I admit this would be very hard, and if you built it chemically it would indeed be the greatest such achievement in chemistry... well, recall how long we've actually known what chemistry really *is.* We do the greatest chemical thing we've ever done every single year. And besides, you can simplify things at first. Mark the problem area and you limit what it has to recognize. Get the computing done in a convenient mainframe and transmit input and instructions wirelessly. I think we're almost as close to this as to really curing cancer and the common cold, though it none of those really fit in "sci-fi tech we could have right now (for a price)." We could do a human controlled robotic camera with a weapon, though. It'd be expensive, the batteries might only last an hour, but we could do it.
Flying Car - you don't actually want this, you want quick easy transportation.
Cheap Nuclear power - Well, if someone finds a scalable way to retrieve uranium from sea water or harvest He-3 from the moon (and a way to use it) we're good.
Video chat - it's already cheap. Buy a webcam, find someone else with one, and pay your internet bills. What you want is for more people to buy webcams. And for your phone to be connected to your computer.
Space travel for the masses - first you need a space destination for the masses. If you build it, they will come. But not for a while, and not until you have a destination. 20-50 years if people want it.
Cure for cancer - see cure for common cold.
Cure for common cold - Why bother with *just* the cold? Why not think big - mechanical immune replacement. Just build a tiny robot with a white list of what not to kill. Shape it like some really successful predator that's been around for a hundred million years. Strap a lazer to it. Then socialize medicine, because there's no money in a magical cure-all.
Strong AI - Ten years. Well, not really. But something that passes a turning test, even if it's just simulating intelligence. Give it a few hundred terabytes or so of choices and pattern matching combined with AI a bit better then what we have now.
Voice commanded appliances - Well, it might give you something not entirely unlike tea every time... but just connect all electronics in your house to your computer. Set it up like a mainframe and clients. Does your video-chat thing too.
No more oil - see nuclear power.
3D UI - not helpful. You get full voice input and some AI to make things easier by guessing what you're doing unless you ask for a command line... but 3D UI really doesn't help. Do you need to square your desktop? Does a browser with depth help? Are you going to wear polarized glasses so a screen can *be* 3D?
Cybernetic Implants - Yea, sure. But not soon. You don't get to see one, unless they fix that death thing before... well before you die.
Energy-beam weapons - NO. Seriously, not helpful. Kinetic energy is really more useful... I don't see any advantage to lazers and the like over just pushing things really fast.... lazers are faster but you can course adjust real "objects." And pack them with explosives.
Easy-to-maintain PC's - Define "maintain." Ah fine, why not. Get redundant hard drives and processors, make full RAM+ROM backups and get a *serious* "undo" button. Shouldn't be that hard. Then rewrite your OS from the ground up so you can't screw it up. I'm talking make it so that you could click a button to fix anything wrong, because there's a list of every option and what value it has. Verify all relevant options are correct, and then fix anything that differs from the "standard" install.
Keyless cars - Already have them. Fingerprint and so on.
Non-lethal weapons for cops - they have those. They don't really help. What you need is more training and accountability.
Tires that don't blow out or go flat overnight - Full rubber tires or auto-resealing tires. You can already get the kind that you can drive to a mechanic after what would have been a blowout... they have some kind of goo that driving fast plasters to the walls and is thick enough that it keeps air in but thin enough that it closes over holes. Solid rubber tires also exist for government officials... don't know if they're street legal, though.
Reliable Car Batteries - you follow recommendations on lifetime and get a car that turns the lights off 10 minutes after you take the keys out and modern batteries are as reliable as they get. Unless you get solar panels to charge them or something, but honestly if a battery goes dead these days it's probably your fault... and it's getting harder to make such mistake
As with all technology its use more then the technology itself will be good or bad. I can see it being useful as an auxiliary input method. This combined with speech recognition ought to be better then speech recognition alone, and of course it allows soundless input in a situation where sound isn't possible or is undesirable - though I'd imagine just lip reading would be somewhat less accurate then current speech recognition.
On the other hand, it could also be used as a tool for additional unnecessary surveillance.
Add to that... I know how to read lips from across the room. I can also hear just fine - it's a skill I started learning when talking to lots of deaf people (who could talk, but badly - and mostly by simulating lip movements) and deliberately honed later. I also know a couple words of sign language and if I cared to I could learn more. If need be I could fake being deaf (with the aid of earplugs if I felt the need I could even *be* deaf). A deaf person can't learn to hear or simulate being able to hear for a day. (well, some deafness can be fixed, but then you're not deaf anymore).
Erm, back on topic. In a "who hears best" competition some guy who can just turn up the volume on his hearing aid is obviously disqualified. This is no different. The Olympic games are to establish the best baseline humans at specific tasks. Artificial enhancement is forbidden. This includes drugs. It also includes replacing your leg with something engineered to allow a higher top speed and require less energy. Yes, even if you didn't choose to take it off. There are handicapped Olympics that I'm sure would allow artificial limbs, and there may eventually be "enhanced" Olympics (though I imagine they'd start with a much smaller audience and possibly not even international recognition). But if I replace my leg with a prosthetic that includes rocket engines, I can't expect to be allowed to compete against baseline humans. That'd just be silly.
Do exactly what you'd do if he asked without serial numbers. Which may be say "it's illegal for you to force me to tell" or to tell the truth, or to lie (use someone else's number, or say you lost your stub).
We aren't getting 50 "X won primary" stories. We're getting one for the early races, probably one for super tuesday, and maybe one when it's all over. The point is that Slashdot requires a story for discussion on a topic to take place (without everyone getting down-modded, leaving the people who actually contribute (people who care about their +karma score) mostly out of the conversation). Everyone here wants to talk about the primaries (500+ comments) so a story had to be posted. Why NH in particular? Probably the most recent election by the time our editors got around to posting one. They aren't exactly known for their... promptness, or we'd probably have had one for Iowa instead.
While I certainly agree that racism is nowhere near as bad as it used to be, and that in the NE it wasn't really *that* bad anyway, and likely had very little effect on the vote (certainly not 2%, not in New Hampshire)... you do have to admit that at least *some* votes are probably influenced by racism and sexism. In a very close race (and Obama/Hilary are pretty close so far, this early) it could be the deciding factor.
I believe the point is that gambling is legal in the US. But the US went and decided that the perfectly legal (in their countries, and if they were in the US and not online) gambling institutions on offshore islands were illegal.
This is more like saying "smoking X is alright in the US. smoking X is alright in the Netherlands. Smoking X you bought online from the netherlands is illegal."
So what, they're going to hold your computer hostage or arrest you because you have a 1GB truecrypt file on your computer? No they freaking aren't, not if you aren't already accused of a specific crime. America is getting bad, but it isn't *that* bad yet. "He/it looks suspicious" is not probable cause.
I personally have such a file on my computer and there is nothing illegal on it. I certainly encourage other people to do the same, so that encryption is *not* even the slightest proof you're hiding something.
How exactly does this blur the boundaries of life? I could see some people questioning if a virus was really alive, but adding more things like viruses wouldn't *further* blur the line, and anything as complex as bacteria would be life regardless of if they were natural or not.
I suppose if you let religion define "life" for you this might cause trouble, but definitions shouldn't be the job of religion.
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No. A perfect poll is not needed. The editors decide which options go in regardless of any "vote" so no significant percent of the population even needs the ability to "vote." I suspect the editors will just browse at +4 or +5 and pick the best visible options - like a slashdot interview. The moderation is just to bury the dross.
There is an established mechanism for voting, and it'll be used for the "final" vote - but the primary process needn't be and won't be democratic. At best it'll be a sort of approximate consensus.
Go ahead and consider a hardback novel. Now open the thing up so you can see two pages. Get the idea? Letter sized isn't over-big at all... and also allows viewing documents intended for printing and static web pages instead of just plain text.
As for color... I can't imagine it takes significantly more power to change a screen from reflecting all light to reflecting only one wavelength then to go from reflecting all light to reflecting none. Especially if you manage to do the thing with sub-pixels or whatever.
Right, that works. As long as you punish people who use a taser when a bullet wouldn't be merited the same as if they had shot the bullet. Which so far nobody is doing.
I would *certainly* rather be handcuffed and pushed outside rather then risk death by taser for spending too long on my question at a political speech.
Anyway, the GP was trying to say that if a device can cause death is irrelevant to if it is torture... so yes, if you use a bullet and gun to try to inflict pain, it can be torture. For example, kneecapping.
Deism was popular for a long time... but with advances in knowledge there's no reason why there needs to be a god to start it all - for three reasons. The first is that self-organizing behavior shows complex-seeming things arise without a "plan" or "guide" from simple rules. Second, and probably more important to your particular vision of deism is occam's razor - why do you *need* to create a being just for this? Finally and most importantly, you only raise the question of where your deist god came from. What created the god that created the universe, and why couldn't it just create the universe itself?
It doesn't mean the chance of creating such particles, it means the chance of them being dangerous. For example, a microscopic black hole is all but certain to do one of two things: evaporate in microseconds due to hawking radiation, or consume the earth. It should be noted that if the second is the case, this will take a few hundred billion years, at which point the sun will have already done the job. For the others, the outcomes are similar. All our models indicate that strangelets should be unstable... though in this case if they were stable the fear would be real. Still, either they are stable or they aren't - odds insanely for "not stable." You don't have to reroll stable/not for each one, in which case the risk would go up depending on how long the system ran.
I'm not really familiar with the dangers of a magnetic monopole, but I'd assume the risks were about the same.
Basically, black holes and strangelets are incredibly dangerous. BUT unless we're completely wrong about them, there is a 0% chance of them being around long enough to do any harm. There is a very tiny but non-zero chance we're completely wrong about them.
That question is meaningless. A singularity is a single point of exactly 0 radius. As another poster pointed out, the real question is the size of the event horizon caused by the singularity. And in the case of the type of microscopic black hole the LHC might produce, this size is so small that even if hawking radiation isn't real (if it is real the thing will evaporate in microseconds) it probably won't encounter a single proton before our sun goes nova.
Because you need a monopoly to get looked at for monopolistic practices? Only place they're even close is with the iPod, and while it's the favorite by far the rest of MP3 Players together make up enough of the market to make it not a monopoly. And they don't do anything anti-competitive with the iPod anyway - it plays standard files, and the interface with it is known so no lock-in.
You can't do that *yet* but I doubt if it'll be terribly long before you can. A touchscreen and a good program will let you take all the notes you want... an e-paper screen will let you read off a screen more comfortably and make it light enough and low power enough that you could hold it above your head to read if you liked.
Honestly there's no inherent value to printed paper... for now it's better then a computer screen for reading books, but it's only going to improve from here. I could see a really good e-book reader, good enough to fully replace books, by 2019... but I doubt enough of them cheap enough to replace books, though perhaps enough that printing will slow significantly.
Spirit and Opportunity have done fairly well on solar power... so I'd say it's improving in at least reliability - kinda important when you're days from a repair-man and need constant power for life support. Nuclear requires perpetual fuel shipments from earth, unless we can figure out fusion or we find lots of easily mined uranium on the moon. Solar might need to be replaced, but less often then nuclear fuel and the replacements could be made on the moon from the regolith eventually if I recall the composition accurately (mostly oxygen, iron, and silicon).
There was nothing to do on the moon for the past 30 years. But we're running into the limits of earth-based telescopes, and of course there's the possibility of fusion any time now... Both those are things that weren't true in the 70's.
Also, at least as importantly, there are now other people who want to go there again and might be able to. When we stopped going to the moon, russia couldn't afford it any more and they were being torn apart anyway. Now china, india, russia, japan, and more might want to go to the moon... and might be able to before long... so we have to as well. Otherwise they good the good locations if we ever *do* need to go back. It's also being given as a stepping stone to mars. That might not be a great reason, but enough people think it is a good reason that it will be one of the reasons we finally go to the moon if we do go any time soon.
"all security does is build a wall. someone can always climb over it, somehow. the question for you is merely do you want a white picket fence? or do you want a 10 foot chain link fence with barbed wire on top?
locks on doors merely keep honest people honest. anyone determined to break into your house will find a way
don't invest your energy in a failed concept: i can have absolute security. you can't, it's always an arms race, forever"
A lock on your door will only keep honest people honest. But a full security system that calls the police will start to scare off casual thieves. Armed guards on patrol and putting what you want to protect in a safe will stop all but the most dedicated of thieves. Two walls, the first a 10-foot-tall concrete wall and the second a twenty foot tall solid stone wall topped with razer wire, with a hundred-yard-wide fire-filled pit between them filled with fire-proof crocodiles and periodic auto-lazer-turrets complemented by constant watch from overlapping guard towers who can call on several helicopters and a battalion of tanks all ten miles from your house will stop anything short of an invading army.
And some data might be worth that. For a computer, full-disk encryption and a measure to melt the entire computer if anyone tampers with the case might reduce the chance of even a dedicated hacker getting your data before destroying it all but zero. And spending a few hundred dollars a year to protect information worth millions doesn't seem out of line. Sure, it isn't perfect security, but if it reduces the chance of compromising data when a laptop is stolen from 100% to 1%... well that might be worth an annual fee for your place in the arms race.
Yes. Optimally using light to go between earth and moon satellites it would be about 2 seconds. In reality it will vary significantly with the orbit of the moon, and of course nothing is optimal.
It travels at "c" in a vacuum. Through various materials it travels slower. That's why lenses work - light travels slower in glass then in air. There are several ways to slow light down, but no way to speed it up to above "c."
I'm confused. Why exactly would you want to send someone to Europa or Titan? There's nothing there at all that needs a human to see it... and NASA still has plenty of budget left over to send rovers with lots of camera to both. No reason why you can't move the human space program to mars and push the robotic portion further into the solar system, to places we haven't ruled out for life, yet.
Mars (and to a lesser extent the moon) however, do hold the long-term promise of harboring self-sustained *human* life. While it would be an Epic project the likes of which has never been done, with complications we can't even realize yet... it would be relatively easy to terraform mars as compared to a rock further from the sun. Send everything to mars on a long route with solar sails and then use them to build huge mirrors to lengthen the days and increase heat. Start processing the regolith and non-water ice to make an atmosphere, and then start air-braking ice comets in the thickening atmosphere to add heat, hydrogen, oxygen, and water. Introduce some of the antarctic and bio-engineered bacteria.
It might take enormous effort for centuries and it'll certainly take a decade of research into closed biological systems to figure out how to build a biosphere from the ground up, but there's a *reason* to send man to mars. Europa, though? It's an ice ball. About all it has going for it is liquid water and possibly a heated core. It'll be very interesting if we find life there, but the surface is soaked in radiation and too far from the sun to be interesting as a habitat, and if we're going to live underground there's no reason to prefer it over any other large rock.
With a thick atmosphere and a surplus of mirrors we might eventually make one of Saturn's moons habitable, but the lower solar flux just makes it a less desirable position that would require more work then mars. Smaller surface, too.
Flying Car - Actually I do want this, assuming it's like Fifth Element...and I get to choose who gets one.
-It isn't like fifth element and you don't get to choose who gets one.
Cheap Nuclear Power- Nuclear power is cheap. 2 cents a kilowatt to produce.
-Point? It is cheap and it could be a lot cheaper. And we don't have enough uranium to last us into 2100 if we drop oil now... unless we pull it from seawater.
Strong AI - Uh, no. I don't want something that can have a bad hair day calculating the national debt.
-Too bad. We're nowhere *near* real strong AI. But you could probably get something close enough that most people couldn't tell right now if you *really* wanted to (and you could pay a team of programmers for several years) and if you limited it's realm.
No more oil - going to need a replacement for plastics then, won't we?
-We use plastic for *everything.* There is no replacement. We could, however, probably mange to synthesize it directly from biomatter if we tried *really* hard.
Non-lethal weapons for cops - there is no weapon that can incapacitate without risk of killing a person, and cops just *do* use non-lethal weapons in situations where lethal force isn't justified. Current lethal weapons work fine in situations where lethal force *would* be required, but using *any* non-lethal alternative to a lethal weapon that really could replace the lethal one in a situation where lethal force is required puts lives at risk unnecessarily. The problem isn't that stun guns and rubber bullets and so on aren't effective or are too effective, it's that they are misused.
Energy-beam weapons - You can't dodge a laser, but you can build a mirror. If you manage to reflect my relativistic tungsten slug complete with guidance system without moving several planets or a few days of lagtime you *deserve* to not get blown to smithereens. There are downsides to every weapon, but energy weapons as a rule are incredibly inefficient as far as energy to damage goes. Maybe they have a place, but if so it's in places where the difference between light speed and relativistic matter - in space over distances of a light-second or more. We're not there yet, and in the atmosphere the disadvantages of energy weapons increase and the benefits decrease.
Yea yea yea, I was just going for the "sharks+lasers" thing. A laser would actually be a kinda stupid weapon and a shark would be a stupid shape. The point is that it *would* be freaking awesome even without the shark and lazer.
While I admit this would be very hard, and if you built it chemically it would indeed be the greatest such achievement in chemistry... well, recall how long we've actually known what chemistry really *is.* We do the greatest chemical thing we've ever done every single year. And besides, you can simplify things at first. Mark the problem area and you limit what it has to recognize. Get the computing done in a convenient mainframe and transmit input and instructions wirelessly. I think we're almost as close to this as to really curing cancer and the common cold, though it none of those really fit in "sci-fi tech we could have right now (for a price)." We could do a human controlled robotic camera with a weapon, though. It'd be expensive, the batteries might only last an hour, but we could do it.
Flying Car - you don't actually want this, you want quick easy transportation.
Cheap Nuclear power - Well, if someone finds a scalable way to retrieve uranium from sea water or harvest He-3 from the moon (and a way to use it) we're good.
Video chat - it's already cheap. Buy a webcam, find someone else with one, and pay your internet bills. What you want is for more people to buy webcams. And for your phone to be connected to your computer.
Space travel for the masses - first you need a space destination for the masses. If you build it, they will come. But not for a while, and not until you have a destination. 20-50 years if people want it.
Cure for cancer - see cure for common cold.
Cure for common cold - Why bother with *just* the cold? Why not think big - mechanical immune replacement. Just build a tiny robot with a white list of what not to kill. Shape it like some really successful predator that's been around for a hundred million years. Strap a lazer to it. Then socialize medicine, because there's no money in a magical cure-all.
Strong AI - Ten years. Well, not really. But something that passes a turning test, even if it's just simulating intelligence. Give it a few hundred terabytes or so of choices and pattern matching combined with AI a bit better then what we have now.
Voice commanded appliances - Well, it might give you something not entirely unlike tea every time... but just connect all electronics in your house to your computer. Set it up like a mainframe and clients. Does your video-chat thing too.
No more oil - see nuclear power.
3D UI - not helpful. You get full voice input and some AI to make things easier by guessing what you're doing unless you ask for a command line... but 3D UI really doesn't help. Do you need to square your desktop? Does a browser with depth help? Are you going to wear polarized glasses so a screen can *be* 3D?
Cybernetic Implants - Yea, sure. But not soon. You don't get to see one, unless they fix that death thing before... well before you die.
Energy-beam weapons - NO. Seriously, not helpful. Kinetic energy is really more useful... I don't see any advantage to lazers and the like over just pushing things really fast.... lazers are faster but you can course adjust real "objects." And pack them with explosives.
Easy-to-maintain PC's - Define "maintain." Ah fine, why not. Get redundant hard drives and processors, make full RAM+ROM backups and get a *serious* "undo" button. Shouldn't be that hard. Then rewrite your OS from the ground up so you can't screw it up. I'm talking make it so that you could click a button to fix anything wrong, because there's a list of every option and what value it has. Verify all relevant options are correct, and then fix anything that differs from the "standard" install.
Keyless cars - Already have them. Fingerprint and so on.
Non-lethal weapons for cops - they have those. They don't really help. What you need is more training and accountability.
Tires that don't blow out or go flat overnight - Full rubber tires or auto-resealing tires. You can already get the kind that you can drive to a mechanic after what would have been a blowout... they have some kind of goo that driving fast plasters to the walls and is thick enough that it keeps air in but thin enough that it closes over holes. Solid rubber tires also exist for government officials... don't know if they're street legal, though.
Reliable Car Batteries - you follow recommendations on lifetime and get a car that turns the lights off 10 minutes after you take the keys out and modern batteries are as reliable as they get. Unless you get solar panels to charge them or something, but honestly if a battery goes dead these days it's probably your fault... and it's getting harder to make such mistake
As with all technology its use more then the technology itself will be good or bad. I can see it being useful as an auxiliary input method. This combined with speech recognition ought to be better then speech recognition alone, and of course it allows soundless input in a situation where sound isn't possible or is undesirable - though I'd imagine just lip reading would be somewhat less accurate then current speech recognition.
On the other hand, it could also be used as a tool for additional unnecessary surveillance.
Add to that... I know how to read lips from across the room. I can also hear just fine - it's a skill I started learning when talking to lots of deaf people (who could talk, but badly - and mostly by simulating lip movements) and deliberately honed later. I also know a couple words of sign language and if I cared to I could learn more. If need be I could fake being deaf (with the aid of earplugs if I felt the need I could even *be* deaf). A deaf person can't learn to hear or simulate being able to hear for a day. (well, some deafness can be fixed, but then you're not deaf anymore).
Erm, back on topic. In a "who hears best" competition some guy who can just turn up the volume on his hearing aid is obviously disqualified. This is no different. The Olympic games are to establish the best baseline humans at specific tasks. Artificial enhancement is forbidden. This includes drugs. It also includes replacing your leg with something engineered to allow a higher top speed and require less energy. Yes, even if you didn't choose to take it off. There are handicapped Olympics that I'm sure would allow artificial limbs, and there may eventually be "enhanced" Olympics (though I imagine they'd start with a much smaller audience and possibly not even international recognition). But if I replace my leg with a prosthetic that includes rocket engines, I can't expect to be allowed to compete against baseline humans. That'd just be silly.
Do exactly what you'd do if he asked without serial numbers. Which may be say "it's illegal for you to force me to tell" or to tell the truth, or to lie (use someone else's number, or say you lost your stub).
We aren't getting 50 "X won primary" stories. We're getting one for the early races, probably one for super tuesday, and maybe one when it's all over. The point is that Slashdot requires a story for discussion on a topic to take place (without everyone getting down-modded, leaving the people who actually contribute (people who care about their +karma score) mostly out of the conversation). Everyone here wants to talk about the primaries (500+ comments) so a story had to be posted. Why NH in particular? Probably the most recent election by the time our editors got around to posting one. They aren't exactly known for their... promptness, or we'd probably have had one for Iowa instead.
While I certainly agree that racism is nowhere near as bad as it used to be, and that in the NE it wasn't really *that* bad anyway, and likely had very little effect on the vote (certainly not 2%, not in New Hampshire)... you do have to admit that at least *some* votes are probably influenced by racism and sexism. In a very close race (and Obama/Hilary are pretty close so far, this early) it could be the deciding factor.
I believe the point is that gambling is legal in the US. But the US went and decided that the perfectly legal (in their countries, and if they were in the US and not online) gambling institutions on offshore islands were illegal.
This is more like saying "smoking X is alright in the US. smoking X is alright in the Netherlands. Smoking X you bought online from the netherlands is illegal."
So what, they're going to hold your computer hostage or arrest you because you have a 1GB truecrypt file on your computer? No they freaking aren't, not if you aren't already accused of a specific crime. America is getting bad, but it isn't *that* bad yet. "He/it looks suspicious" is not probable cause.
I personally have such a file on my computer and there is nothing illegal on it. I certainly encourage other people to do the same, so that encryption is *not* even the slightest proof you're hiding something.
How exactly does this blur the boundaries of life? I could see some people questioning if a virus was really alive, but adding more things like viruses wouldn't *further* blur the line, and anything as complex as bacteria would be life regardless of if they were natural or not.
I suppose if you let religion define "life" for you this might cause trouble, but definitions shouldn't be the job of religion.