...that even among other such politicians, Hillary is one of the most blatant, shameless populists ever to have walked the Earth. Her perspectives, her very mind itself in its' entirety is completely for sale, for the purpose of gaining votes.
On the one hand, I think what you are saying is she has no opinion of your own, but on the other hand what I'm hearing when you say this is: "She will support the opinion that the majority want," which is the point of a representational government.
I'd say if she were serving the wants of the people, that's significantly better than many, many politicians that server the wants of themselves. It's a strange idea, I know, but you do want your policymakers to listen to the will of the people and support it, and you'd like them to do that even when it is at odds with their own personal belief, if a sufficient majority of the nation wishes a particular change.
I guess what you see is a bad thing, is actually a good thing in my book. Do you want your leader's vote to be for sale to the most powerful lobby, or would you rather it be for sale to the public opinion of the majority? The question isn't whether her opinion can be swayed. The question is who can do it. The point of her stance on Iraq is she and every other member of congress was LIED TO, and made their decisions based on LIES. People actually criticize our policy makers when they do an about face after realizing they were lied to. That's pretty sad.
This does a credible job of summarizing how I feel about M$ and their products. TV is awful (haven't watched it for more than a few minutes in 15 years). I am sometimes the unfortunate victim of housemates and whatnot and I can say that TV is the most irritating experience ever once you become accustomed to receiving information that you asked for only when you ask for it (search/video rental/library/bookstore). Cell phones are like this, too. "Would you like to connect to Media.NET and spend lots of money on ringtones? No? How about desktop images? No? Ok, but how about--how about you give me a way to change the main menu to exclude anything but call related features that I have already paid for, you bastards?"
And so on. It's really nothing more than commercialism interfering with content. You want to watch something, so people use that as leverage to try and force you to listen to their sales pitch. The reason that it works is they can slip in under most peoples' tolerance level which is set by how badly they need a mindnumbing experience (e.g. "Oh, GOD. I'll listen to this stupid commercial because I'm tired and I don't want to go to the video store or read a book and fine the commercial will end in 60 seconds and by the next one I will have simmered down and be willing to tolerate it again in exchange for my mindnumbing.")
I'm not sure how any advertiser can be a good person, since they realize they are deliberately finding the maximum level of push that the average person can sustain before they become annoyed enough to shut out the marketing mechanism completely. (In other words, TV has evolved to provide the maximal amount of "tell you what to do, what you need, and how to spend your money" possible without losing the majority of the audience. That's not a pleasant thought. But back to M$, that's the same thing they do. Lace the maximum amount of "buy our $hit into each product" that you will tolerate. "Oh, wouldn't you like to use this integration feature with our other product?" "Wouldn't you like to do this which requires only just a tiny bit more money for a Professional upgrade, and so on." It's all crap.
Doesn't this seem a little stupid? It's like a terrorist's shopping list. Grab Google and zoom around the map. Mark blurred areas on map. Bomb area. Presto!
You can't dictacte that people not sell their services. It's too generic. You have to specifically have a law that prohibits an exchange of money for a particular server: hence the legal issues surrounding prostitution. There has to be a specific statute which says, "You are not allowed to receive money for using your time in this way." EBay cannot dictate that. EBay can however, choose whoever the want to exclude from their site. So, if the issue is, who can EBay shut out of their service: anyone. But if the issue is, can they dictate what you sell to others when it doesn't involve their service, the answer is no. You need state or federal legislation for that.
If selling virtual items becomes a big enough market, EBay will just be shooting themselves in the foot and their tune will change. Bank on it.
The relocation manager tells me that whenever there is conflict between their relocation policy and the offer, their internal relocation policy supersedes.
Whenever some HR monkey conflicts with the stability of my financial life (home), my desire to tell said monkey's company to piss off supersedes my previous acceptance of their offer.
Don't put up with that crap. When you get that vascillating prick on the phone and he spews superseding reprioritization of denatured pre-hire compensation, you can say, "Well, that is very interesting to know. Will you please communicate to the hiring manager that I can no longer accept the position because you, Mr. HR Monkey, saw fit to breach good faith and contradict the offer that the manager made and reduced the relocation package that I was relying upon in making the decision to sell my home and relocate to your state? Yes, please do go ahead and explain that to him. I'll let him know to expect your call. Good day."
Those are good reasons why we will continue to be a bunch of fatties as a nation. There is strong economic pressure to keep things as they are with regard to our use of motor vehicles. I have no doubt that the oil and automotive companies would proclaim the imminent Apocalypse if it appeared that 20% of the driving population would switch away from motor vehicles within the decade. Land use is another aspect of this. Effective community design requires access to a sizeable quantity of land, but we have individual ownership and particularly in the more populated regions this is where a large portion of peoples' wealth is found. So, asking them to sacrifice their plot of land near the city to build a community that emphasizes closeness and access to local services is going to hit them where they hurt and they will fight unless they see what is in it for them and it is worth it.
I think the issue runs pretty deep. I don't think we have a sustainable lifestyle, but because people are very resistant to change (people love the freedom of cars and the power of land ownership and will fight tooth and nail for both), I think things will have change and when it does the change will be sharp and beyond most peoples' control.
This is obviously because in a city there are many things to do and in suburbia there are many television shows to watch. Here's another one: if you live in a city, many things are a short walk away (that's the whole point), whereas in suburbia, you're hopping in the car and sitting on your ass for the duration of almost any trip, and your sitting on your couch otherwise.
It's not rocket science: "Oh, God. We think there is a real pattern here. When people live within walking distance of interesting places and activities, they walk more, burn more calories, and are slimmer on average." Do I get a PhD now for not being an idiot?
Reinforcement isn't needed if the building material is strong enough that the second floor is its own support. As in, the floor is one bigass joist.
No building should ever be watertight. That's an unmitigated disaster in all cases because we bring moisture into our homes through the plumping and our bodies (respiration) and general airflow. If you make a building really watertight you have tons of water problems related to mold and bacteria. What they appear to mean is that you can pour the structure of the building without any seams, which does go a long way toward watertight, but then you have all the structure drawbacks of doing so unless the material is sufficiently flexible to accomodate temperature expansion and stresses that come from seismic activity and settling which happens to the land that many, many houses are built upon. Here they mean that the roof is built exactly like a floor as one continuous object from base to roof.
Most of the devices that I have looked at for this build the form and fill it. One material is used that is highly viscous and is layered into the shape of the form and then a flowing material (cement) is poured into the form. You can do this all in one go provided the materials set quickly enough and particularly the outer boundaries harden with enough strength to hold shape while the inner and outer materials bond. Another way to approach it is to think of brick laying. The materials themselves have all the fill and form that you need, provided the mortar dries fast enough and with sufficient strength to support the layers building up above it.
What I've noticed is that the insecure people with limited skills like to feel superior. The really competent people aren't concerned with feeling superior because they are busy doing important work and trying to become better at what the do (because they know that there is no limit to getting better at what you do). Feeling superior is a dead end because it's like saying, "I've arrived." And then what more is there to do? Hence, my claim. People that claim superiority are anything but that because they limit themselves.
I'm good at what I do after 8 years in IT, and I know that. But I'm not arrogant about it. There are people that have deeper knowledge and broader experience. Still I know that I am skilled, often more skilled than people I work with, but I also know that there is much to learn. One of the people that helps me learn those new things is the customer. I've never seen any really skilled developer in IT ragging on the customer--ever. The really good people see very clearly and never lose sight of the fact that the customer drives the product and when the customer does not understand what your product is doing, that's work that you, the developer has to do.
In other words, the people feeling all superior and insulting the customer are actually saying, "I don't know what the customer wants or how to give it to them," each time they are condescending or insulting. I'd like to reiterate though, that I've worked at 6 companies in the past 8 years and never had the misfortune to work with people like that, so I'm not so sure how common the attitude in the article really is. On the other hand, when I interview, I weed out any company where I talk to a developer and I get the "holier than thou and holier than thy neighbor too" response.
And for sure, you're right. IT does not have a monopoly on this. People are the same in every industry. A couple weeks ago I overheard a bunch of Fred Meyer employees ranting about the stupidity of their customers. Blaming other people is always a way of excusing personal responsibility for the happiness or lack there of in your own life. Always.
As a person being interview, I'd usually rather just hear "not interested". Half the times I have interviewed in the past, I talk to people and they clearly prioritize things that I think are just ridiculous. Like going for a Senior position interview with 8 years of experience and they spend the entire set of interviews on those little clever solutions to theoretical problems that you cover in college. Things that you never ever have to use in practical development, and things that are so much less important than design skills, people skills, and self discipline and focus under job pressures (deadlines, crazy bosses, crazy coworkers, etc.).
Usually when I interview with a company like that, I'd much rather they just say thanks for coming in and good luck with your job search. I find more often than not, that the time when they should be providing feedback most is when they never do: during the interview. But usually, instead of helping you identify what shade of glasses they are looking at the world through, they play cagey and noncomittal. Not like I have a lot of angst or anything,:-) but I remember this interview where the guy asks me how I would solve a difficult scalability issue, so I mention that your data structure needs to be such that you can rapidly access data distributed across different media, and he totally misses the subtlety that I am talking about and becomes very condescending and explains the simpler first step which leads to what I was talking about.
The later feedback from that fellow was that my technical skills were not up to snuff. So by this I am saying, its not always the case that the guy or girl at the whiteboard is dumb as a post. Sometimes as an interviewer we drop the ball in our assessment and assumption, and so it can often be a smarter thing to just thank the person and move on without feedback. On the other hand, if the person asks, "Did you feel my technical skills in Java were lacking?" then you could "Yes/No" the question, provided you are good at ending a conversation right there. If they try to rev up to the "But, but, but..." conversation, you're mature enough and experienced enough to nip that one in the bud right? "You asked me for my feedback and I have given it: EJB and Struts are highly desirable skills; we seek strong proficiency in both areas. If you strengthen your knowledge in those areas, it will certainly pay off for you in the future. We'll keep your resume on file."
I think if someone has to ask other people, "Should I provide interview feedback?" then they shouldn't. If you were ready to do that well, you'd know when and when not to. What to say and what not to.
This is one of those rare situations where the general stupidity of human beings is reassuring.
Paraphrasing the End of the Article
on
UFOs In the News
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· Score: 1
When the cloud cover is low (1900ft) like that, airport lights frequently punch holes in the cloud cover.
*chuckle* The "expert" at the end explains it away as low clouds and airport lights. The key points here are that it was directly above an airport. The military does not typically operate in civilian air space, but most especially, they do not fly fancy doo-dads anywhere near civilian airports. The risk of something catastrophic is enormous and the article also indicates that radar sweeps were clear at that location. The other key points are that this object was observed: 1) stationary, 2) unlit, and 3) moving completely vertically and punching a physical hole in the cloud cover.
Whatever it was, it is very unlikely that it was man-made. It could have been an electrostatic phenomenon that consolidated the low hanging clouds into a dense oblate spheroid and then funneled it straight up through the clouds. The circularity of the region is consistent with rotation and the upward movement with funneling. Not all tornados touch down on the ground for instance. Anyway, there are plausible scientific explanations.
Robots have always mattered. It's just that for a long time, no one cared that they did. In the near future, many of us will be replaced by robots, and then we'll care very much about robots, since we'll mostly be robots. We've always been quite excellent at caring about ourselves, after all.
The economic implications of robots are enormous. Historically, the higher the efficiency of a worker at producing the necessities of life, the greater the disparity between the wealthy and the poor (the guy that owns the huge grain thresher compared to the guy that employed 30 people to do that job in the past). Robots will provide nearly infinite cost efficiency. Consider the man that owns a robot that can create clothing. For a nominal cost (maintenance and some electricity), the robot produces marketable goods at 0 labor cost to the owner. This should drastically reduce the cost of goods in many markets, but then the incentive for human beings to work changes radically. Either costs for necessity items will be kept artificially high, thus making the owners of the robots incredibly wealthy (virtually free labor to produce valuable goods), or all items that can be manufactured by robot labor will be free. You would think we would all be liberated at that point. No need to work. Just do something creative and enjoy it. But I think it is likely that huge segments of our population would descend into a destructive spiral of hedonism, or apathy, or violence. This would be most severe of the advent of robot labor occured in a single human generation, and that is extremely likely when considering the pace of advancement in the area. If you think about the implications of free labor, it means that property is king. Transforming the materials into goods becomes extremely cheap, so owning the land with the raw materials is everything. In the past, the need for laborers to transform it helped distribute wealth, but without it, I suspect massive concentration of wealth and power into a small elite of property owners.
I'd love it if we were all freed to pursue artistic, scientific, and atheletic endeavors, and many would. But even now, where goods are still expensive enough that most work a good portion of each week, there are many, many unhappy people. Perhaps it is not as gloomy as I think. But I feel very certain that there will be tremendous social upheaval when robots reach a point that they can handle the majority of manual labor tasks (and computers are coming along nicely on the higher order analytic tasks as well). And people with wealth just tend to seize every opportunity to protect and increase that wealth...not a positive scenario.
I am skeptical that 2007 is the year, but I am certain that this change will occur and when it does it will likely occur in less than a decade, and that will create challenges...big challenges.
These many answers are good, but I think we should all be wary of the Spanish Inquisition. No one ever expects them, possibly due to their many elements of surprise...let's see, there was uhm...
Not very practical from a materials perspective, but some efficiency gain might be possible if the underside of the driving surface was insulated and heat was piped through that layer to the cooler earth below it. Again, not very practical from a material costs perspective (probably), but TD might not entirely kill the idea.
On the other hand, if you can make the driving surface out of thin film voltaics or have a transparent driving surface with a voltaic layer below it, you wouldn't have much of that heating because the solar cells would convert the radiant energy to electricity directly.
The number one reason that this idea is not practical is that the oil companies would go apeshit and lobby it into the ground like the EV1 in Cali. Wee! I think most of these innovations are currently limited by politics rather than the scientific feasibility. I mean, suppose you did fab these voltaic/battery roads and had cars drawing power from them. Well, that's an economic "No, no" since the extremely powerful petroleum companies would take a big hit on revenue and the government hates it when that happens to big business. We can't suddenly have cars running around on renewable energy that is free after the build costs. No gas stations, huge loss of maintenance revenue for automotive companies because eletric engines have far fewer parts and far lower maintenance costs (no gas processing components at all--exhaust, combustion engine, filters, etc.). Even if I had the brains to explicitly spell out a cost-effective and totally viable method of making this idea work, it would die horribly before becoming a reality. Sure the gas/automotive companies could consolidate and decide to go into the business of building this new solution, but that's effort. And big, powerful, very wealthy, companies are done with their "effort" stage unless they are forced into it by legislation or some factor that it even bigger than they are.
Would be neat if we could put something like this in roads. Vroom! There's already a lot of power near roads. Electric cars that charge as you drive. Refueling is automatic; cars check in at a pay station once a month for a meter read.
I have this hope that people will unanimously tell M$ to stick Vista. I can already do the things that I want to do with a computer; it is basically an appliance for me now. The only reason I have upgraded in the past is forced obsolesence (M$ refuses to maintain a version beyond a point), and this is why people hate their monopoly. Everyone knows they have been forced to pay huge costs just because M$ can pop out a new OS version and say, "No more support for the last one," whether you like it or not.
As a user of applications, there's no reason why any of the applications that I use could not run beautifully and likely faster and leaner on older generations of Windows. In fact, if they M$ had simply focused on updating core systems (interfacing with new graphics hardware is a good example) things would be good. I had to migrate to a new OS several times just because of DirectX compatibility. "We just couldn't make DirectX 9 work on WinXX! Bullshit. Fix your architecture to anticipate changes. Highly payed software architects can do that. I do that. Why can't you?"
And of course, instead of focusing on continuing to polish and upgrade the OS in a simple fashion, M$ takes the approach of complete overhaul every time, lately in the interest of security. Well, news flash for the company that can afford to pay security "experts" hundreds of thousands a year: a really bad way to secure something is to completely rewrite it again and again. If you cannot make progressive refinements to a system, it has extremely poor design and you need to bite the bullet, own up to that, and fix that.
Just look at evolution. It is an interative approach with progressive refinements that are responses to the environment (e.g. the human body's response to pathogens from generation to generation). There is a very good reason for this approach in nature. The notion of generating radically different (i.e. screw inheritance and your body gets a random set of DNA) genetic sequences from generation to generation would be genocide. It's STUPID on a universal scale.
But that is M$ and Windows for you. Oh, yes. We'll come to terms with it because the OS is still largely monopolized. Yes there is light at the end of that tunnel thanks to Linux and MacOS reaching a greater consumer base, but the fact is that M$ approach to OS development is an evolutionary screw up which must eventually give way to a saner approach. The only reason it exists is because of what can be seen as an extinction or genesis event where it was the only show in town (PC). It was there initially in the absence of competition, but the "proprietary" approach will collapse under the weight of its own inability to adapt and interoperate. It's like a town that only permits marriage within the town. Eventually, you end up with fatal problems because the genetic sequences are adapting slower than pathogens and environmental factors that have no problems whatsoever with moving all over the place and sharing information.
See M$? You and proprietary software are retarded. I just proved it by reduction to evolution. Take your new OS and shove it.
I'm also very confused by this, because according to my reading, it is actually older than the Earth itself. I can only suspect fowl play, and with 10,000 football fields worth, there's a lot to go around.
There. My informativity quotient has exceeded our noble blogger. And for a more entertaining notion: I wonder if someone could get charged for criminal acts against humanity if they ran around Greenland with space heaters and tried to claim some cheap real estate before the boom?
People are already jockeying for position on Antarctica and the soon to be available northern shipping routes. Don't just be a victim of global warming. Be a profitable victim!
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say if she were serving the wants of the people, that's significantly better than many, many politicians that server the wants of themselves. It's a strange idea, I know, but you do want your policymakers to listen to the will of the people and support it, and you'd like them to do that even when it is at odds with their own personal belief, if a sufficient majority of the nation wishes a particular change.
I guess what you see is a bad thing, is actually a good thing in my book. Do you want your leader's vote to be for sale to the most powerful lobby, or would you rather it be for sale to the public opinion of the majority? The question isn't whether her opinion can be swayed. The question is who can do it. The point of her stance on Iraq is she and every other member of congress was LIED TO, and made their decisions based on LIES. People actually criticize our policy makers when they do an about face after realizing they were lied to. That's pretty sad.
And so on. It's really nothing more than commercialism interfering with content. You want to watch something, so people use that as leverage to try and force you to listen to their sales pitch. The reason that it works is they can slip in under most peoples' tolerance level which is set by how badly they need a mindnumbing experience (e.g. "Oh, GOD. I'll listen to this stupid commercial because I'm tired and I don't want to go to the video store or read a book and fine the commercial will end in 60 seconds and by the next one I will have simmered down and be willing to tolerate it again in exchange for my mindnumbing.")
I'm not sure how any advertiser can be a good person, since they realize they are deliberately finding the maximum level of push that the average person can sustain before they become annoyed enough to shut out the marketing mechanism completely. (In other words, TV has evolved to provide the maximal amount of "tell you what to do, what you need, and how to spend your money" possible without losing the majority of the audience. That's not a pleasant thought. But back to M$, that's the same thing they do. Lace the maximum amount of "buy our $hit into each product" that you will tolerate. "Oh, wouldn't you like to use this integration feature with our other product?" "Wouldn't you like to do this which requires only just a tiny bit more money for a Professional upgrade, and so on." It's all crap.
Doesn't this seem a little stupid? It's like a terrorist's shopping list. Grab Google and zoom around the map. Mark blurred areas on map. Bomb area. Presto!
If selling virtual items becomes a big enough market, EBay will just be shooting themselves in the foot and their tune will change. Bank on it.
Chocolate Chip Meth Cookies
Don't put up with that crap. When you get that vascillating prick on the phone and he spews superseding reprioritization of denatured pre-hire compensation, you can say, "Well, that is very interesting to know. Will you please communicate to the hiring manager that I can no longer accept the position because you, Mr. HR Monkey, saw fit to breach good faith and contradict the offer that the manager made and reduced the relocation package that I was relying upon in making the decision to sell my home and relocate to your state? Yes, please do go ahead and explain that to him. I'll let him know to expect your call. Good day."
Then you hang up, and shit gets fixed.
I think the issue runs pretty deep. I don't think we have a sustainable lifestyle, but because people are very resistant to change (people love the freedom of cars and the power of land ownership and will fight tooth and nail for both), I think things will have change and when it does the change will be sharp and beyond most peoples' control.
Ouch.
It's not rocket science: "Oh, God. We think there is a real pattern here. When people live within walking distance of interesting places and activities, they walk more, burn more calories, and are slimmer on average." Do I get a PhD now for not being an idiot?
Reinforcement isn't needed if the building material is strong enough that the second floor is its own support. As in, the floor is one bigass joist.
No building should ever be watertight. That's an unmitigated disaster in all cases because we bring moisture into our homes through the plumping and our bodies (respiration) and general airflow. If you make a building really watertight you have tons of water problems related to mold and bacteria. What they appear to mean is that you can pour the structure of the building without any seams, which does go a long way toward watertight, but then you have all the structure drawbacks of doing so unless the material is sufficiently flexible to accomodate temperature expansion and stresses that come from seismic activity and settling which happens to the land that many, many houses are built upon. Here they mean that the roof is built exactly like a floor as one continuous object from base to roof.
Most of the devices that I have looked at for this build the form and fill it. One material is used that is highly viscous and is layered into the shape of the form and then a flowing material (cement) is poured into the form. You can do this all in one go provided the materials set quickly enough and particularly the outer boundaries harden with enough strength to hold shape while the inner and outer materials bond. Another way to approach it is to think of brick laying. The materials themselves have all the fill and form that you need, provided the mortar dries fast enough and with sufficient strength to support the layers building up above it.
I'm good at what I do after 8 years in IT, and I know that. But I'm not arrogant about it. There are people that have deeper knowledge and broader experience. Still I know that I am skilled, often more skilled than people I work with, but I also know that there is much to learn. One of the people that helps me learn those new things is the customer. I've never seen any really skilled developer in IT ragging on the customer--ever. The really good people see very clearly and never lose sight of the fact that the customer drives the product and when the customer does not understand what your product is doing, that's work that you, the developer has to do.
In other words, the people feeling all superior and insulting the customer are actually saying, "I don't know what the customer wants or how to give it to them," each time they are condescending or insulting. I'd like to reiterate though, that I've worked at 6 companies in the past 8 years and never had the misfortune to work with people like that, so I'm not so sure how common the attitude in the article really is. On the other hand, when I interview, I weed out any company where I talk to a developer and I get the "holier than thou and holier than thy neighbor too" response.
And for sure, you're right. IT does not have a monopoly on this. People are the same in every industry. A couple weeks ago I overheard a bunch of Fred Meyer employees ranting about the stupidity of their customers. Blaming other people is always a way of excusing personal responsibility for the happiness or lack there of in your own life. Always.
Multiply the US by 2.54.
Usually when I interview with a company like that, I'd much rather they just say thanks for coming in and good luck with your job search. I find more often than not, that the time when they should be providing feedback most is when they never do: during the interview. But usually, instead of helping you identify what shade of glasses they are looking at the world through, they play cagey and noncomittal. Not like I have a lot of angst or anything, :-) but I remember this interview where the guy asks me how I would solve a difficult scalability issue, so I mention that your data structure needs to be such that you can rapidly access data distributed across different media, and he totally misses the subtlety that I am talking about and becomes very condescending and explains the simpler first step which leads to what I was talking about.
The later feedback from that fellow was that my technical skills were not up to snuff. So by this I am saying, its not always the case that the guy or girl at the whiteboard is dumb as a post. Sometimes as an interviewer we drop the ball in our assessment and assumption, and so it can often be a smarter thing to just thank the person and move on without feedback. On the other hand, if the person asks, "Did you feel my technical skills in Java were lacking?" then you could "Yes/No" the question, provided you are good at ending a conversation right there. If they try to rev up to the "But, but, but..." conversation, you're mature enough and experienced enough to nip that one in the bud right? "You asked me for my feedback and I have given it: EJB and Struts are highly desirable skills; we seek strong proficiency in both areas. If you strengthen your knowledge in those areas, it will certainly pay off for you in the future. We'll keep your resume on file."
I think if someone has to ask other people, "Should I provide interview feedback?" then they shouldn't. If you were ready to do that well, you'd know when and when not to. What to say and what not to.
I strongly recommend that you use the Sun as your primary piece of equipment.
This is one of those rare situations where the general stupidity of human beings is reassuring.
Whatever it was, it is very unlikely that it was man-made. It could have been an electrostatic phenomenon that consolidated the low hanging clouds into a dense oblate spheroid and then funneled it straight up through the clouds. The circularity of the region is consistent with rotation and the upward movement with funneling. Not all tornados touch down on the ground for instance. Anyway, there are plausible scientific explanations.
Could be martians, too.
The economic implications of robots are enormous. Historically, the higher the efficiency of a worker at producing the necessities of life, the greater the disparity between the wealthy and the poor (the guy that owns the huge grain thresher compared to the guy that employed 30 people to do that job in the past). Robots will provide nearly infinite cost efficiency. Consider the man that owns a robot that can create clothing. For a nominal cost (maintenance and some electricity), the robot produces marketable goods at 0 labor cost to the owner. This should drastically reduce the cost of goods in many markets, but then the incentive for human beings to work changes radically. Either costs for necessity items will be kept artificially high, thus making the owners of the robots incredibly wealthy (virtually free labor to produce valuable goods), or all items that can be manufactured by robot labor will be free. You would think we would all be liberated at that point. No need to work. Just do something creative and enjoy it. But I think it is likely that huge segments of our population would descend into a destructive spiral of hedonism, or apathy, or violence. This would be most severe of the advent of robot labor occured in a single human generation, and that is extremely likely when considering the pace of advancement in the area. If you think about the implications of free labor, it means that property is king. Transforming the materials into goods becomes extremely cheap, so owning the land with the raw materials is everything. In the past, the need for laborers to transform it helped distribute wealth, but without it, I suspect massive concentration of wealth and power into a small elite of property owners.
I'd love it if we were all freed to pursue artistic, scientific, and atheletic endeavors, and many would. But even now, where goods are still expensive enough that most work a good portion of each week, there are many, many unhappy people. Perhaps it is not as gloomy as I think. But I feel very certain that there will be tremendous social upheaval when robots reach a point that they can handle the majority of manual labor tasks (and computers are coming along nicely on the higher order analytic tasks as well). And people with wealth just tend to seize every opportunity to protect and increase that wealth...not a positive scenario.
I am skeptical that 2007 is the year, but I am certain that this change will occur and when it does it will likely occur in less than a decade, and that will create challenges...big challenges.
These many answers are good, but I think we should all be wary of the Spanish Inquisition. No one ever expects them, possibly due to their many elements of surprise...let's see, there was uhm...
On the other hand, if you can make the driving surface out of thin film voltaics or have a transparent driving surface with a voltaic layer below it, you wouldn't have much of that heating because the solar cells would convert the radiant energy to electricity directly.
The number one reason that this idea is not practical is that the oil companies would go apeshit and lobby it into the ground like the EV1 in Cali. Wee! I think most of these innovations are currently limited by politics rather than the scientific feasibility. I mean, suppose you did fab these voltaic/battery roads and had cars drawing power from them. Well, that's an economic "No, no" since the extremely powerful petroleum companies would take a big hit on revenue and the government hates it when that happens to big business. We can't suddenly have cars running around on renewable energy that is free after the build costs. No gas stations, huge loss of maintenance revenue for automotive companies because eletric engines have far fewer parts and far lower maintenance costs (no gas processing components at all--exhaust, combustion engine, filters, etc.). Even if I had the brains to explicitly spell out a cost-effective and totally viable method of making this idea work, it would die horribly before becoming a reality. Sure the gas/automotive companies could consolidate and decide to go into the business of building this new solution, but that's effort. And big, powerful, very wealthy, companies are done with their "effort" stage unless they are forced into it by legislation or some factor that it even bigger than they are.
Would be neat if we could put something like this in roads. Vroom! There's already a lot of power near roads. Electric cars that charge as you drive. Refueling is automatic; cars check in at a pay station once a month for a meter read.
As a user of applications, there's no reason why any of the applications that I use could not run beautifully and likely faster and leaner on older generations of Windows. In fact, if they M$ had simply focused on updating core systems (interfacing with new graphics hardware is a good example) things would be good. I had to migrate to a new OS several times just because of DirectX compatibility. "We just couldn't make DirectX 9 work on WinXX! Bullshit. Fix your architecture to anticipate changes. Highly payed software architects can do that. I do that. Why can't you?"
And of course, instead of focusing on continuing to polish and upgrade the OS in a simple fashion, M$ takes the approach of complete overhaul every time, lately in the interest of security. Well, news flash for the company that can afford to pay security "experts" hundreds of thousands a year: a really bad way to secure something is to completely rewrite it again and again. If you cannot make progressive refinements to a system, it has extremely poor design and you need to bite the bullet, own up to that, and fix that.
Just look at evolution. It is an interative approach with progressive refinements that are responses to the environment (e.g. the human body's response to pathogens from generation to generation). There is a very good reason for this approach in nature. The notion of generating radically different (i.e. screw inheritance and your body gets a random set of DNA) genetic sequences from generation to generation would be genocide. It's STUPID on a universal scale.
But that is M$ and Windows for you. Oh, yes. We'll come to terms with it because the OS is still largely monopolized. Yes there is light at the end of that tunnel thanks to Linux and MacOS reaching a greater consumer base, but the fact is that M$ approach to OS development is an evolutionary screw up which must eventually give way to a saner approach. The only reason it exists is because of what can be seen as an extinction or genesis event where it was the only show in town (PC). It was there initially in the absence of competition, but the "proprietary" approach will collapse under the weight of its own inability to adapt and interoperate. It's like a town that only permits marriage within the town. Eventually, you end up with fatal problems because the genetic sequences are adapting slower than pathogens and environmental factors that have no problems whatsoever with moving all over the place and sharing information.
See M$? You and proprietary software are retarded. I just proved it by reduction to evolution. Take your new OS and shove it.
I'm also very confused by this, because according to my reading, it is actually older than the Earth itself. I can only suspect fowl play, and with 10,000 football fields worth, there's a lot to go around.
There. My informativity quotient has exceeded our noble blogger. And for a more entertaining notion: I wonder if someone could get charged for criminal acts against humanity if they ran around Greenland with space heaters and tried to claim some cheap real estate before the boom?
People are already jockeying for position on Antarctica and the soon to be available northern shipping routes. Don't just be a victim of global warming. Be a profitable victim!
No wonder Uncle Sam periodically screws up ballot calculations: so people will just go home. Disaffected majorities are your plaything.