The forces of coercion and aristocratic statism cannot be allowed to prevail. The world they would create would crush the soul of humanity and bring progress to a grinding stop.
Throwing sand in the gears of this predictive machine means getting weird people.
Date your livestock, but only if you live in an apartment. Borrow a friend's supermarket membership card to do your shopping. Use your own card to make suspiciously large purchases of anchovies, motor oil, bird seed and tampons. Stick macaroni in your cap and do not call it a pipe. Go to church dressed in a furry costume and stuff the donation plate with bizarre foreign currency.
Of course, if enough people did this, people in terrorist sleeper cells would stand right out, since they'd be trying really hard to be normal and square.
In Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker (1937, ISBN 0819566934), a far-future multi-galactic civilization is in a fix. They've embarked on a project to create a mass-mind incorporating all sapient being, past* and present, in order to have the wisdom or knowledge or processing power to unveil the mysteries of the universe and learn the nature of the entity behind the creation of the universe.
Eventually their aeon-spanning telepathic sweeps detect the slow thoughts of primordial sapient dust clouds. With their help they find out that the Star Maker is running through an exhaustive series of universe simulations, tinkering with the parameters until it comes out just right. (Well, actually, in the novel they're described as increasingly sophisticated works of art.)
Screenwriter and comic John Rogers wrote a great polemic called "I Miss Republicans," ruing the disappearance of practical, technocratic Republicans in favor of the screwball ideologues:
No, seriously. Remember Republicans? Sober men in suits, pipes, who'd nod thoughtfully over their latest tract on market-driven fiscal conservatism while grinding out the numbers on rocket science. Remember those serious-looking 1950's-1960's science guys in the movies -- Republican to a one.
They were the grown-ups. They were the realists. Sure they were a bummer, maaaaan, but on the way to La Revolution you need somebody to remember where you parked the car. I was never one (nor a Democrat, really, more an agnostic libertarian big on the social contract, but we don't have a party...), but I genuinely liked them.
How did they become the party of fairy dust and make believe? How did they become the anti-science guys? The anti-fact guys? The anti-logic guys?
Sorry, folks, this isn't "business as usual" or "a pendulum swing" we don't have to worry about because it will swing back. It's the Wedge Strategy. It's Lysenkoism. It's the Ministry of Truth. It's 24 year old college drop-outs micromanaging NASA scientists' press activity.
Millions and millions of little processors hooked up by a ad hoc wireless network . . . I figure we have nine months until it gains consciousness and starts organizing legions of Third World kids.
I recently finished listening to a lecture series on the history of ancient Egypt. Fascinating stuff. As I recall, Queen Hatshepsut was kind of erased from history by a later pharaoh. Lady leaders just didn't fit in with the Way Things Were Supposed to Be.
Lots of ancient Egyptians had bad teeth. Flour tended to have lots of sand in it thanks to the grinding process, and chewing wore away tooth enamel very efficiently.
It's a very, very large gamma ray laser, created by a very patient race with an enemy living in a globular cluster whose orbit around the galaxy will take it into the path of the polar emission stream.
The other pole's stream will be redirected with a vibrating unobtanium mirror and used to paint advertising slogans in a gas cloud on the edge of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.
I can just picture insurance companies champing at the bit to work market tests into their eligibility rules and rate structure, and employers trying to find ways to discriminate on the basis of having these markers.
Longer term (where "long" == years until we find an affordable, widely applicable way to delete these markers from an individual's genetic heritage) this is a really good thing.
- My boss ran into awful icky troubles getting the IR remote functionality to work.
I took the easy way when it came to installing a remote. I use a compact Infrared keyboard I had on hand. There is mapping between letters and arrows and various remote functions.
- You can't go wrong with a Happauge* PVR-x50. I bought a PVR-150 from a local supplier for under $80. It was way easy to set up. It doesn't have a TV out, so I bought a cheap card with an NVIDIA chipset.
I used the Fedora MythTV project procedure and had little trouble getting Myth working.
I picked the host machine (P4 1.8 MHz HP box, with 768 MB RAM) out of the garbage. The only other thing I had to buy was a 160 GB hard drive, which Office Depot was selling for $40 after rebate.
* FYI: Pronounced "hop ogg;" it's a Native American name, not French.
Internal combustion motors will be around for a long time. We'll be stuck with them as the alternatives work their way into the marketplace and the infrastructure for electrics, biofuels, hydrogen and so on are developed.
So, deploy that lipstick and make the pig as purty as you can get it.
Just don't get to likeing it so much you don't want to move on when the time is right.
The infrastructure required to transfer electricity from centralized facilities, and the losses suffered along the way, don't make this very appealing.
A panel on your roof may not be as efficient, but it's yours. In an sunny place, you may be able to sell power to the local grid during the daytime peak hours. (You might buy it back at night, but the rates are lower then.)
There will always be a need for a grid, and some big power plants, but making as much new capacity decentralized and as local as possible means addressing political, social, and security externalities that have been ignored thus far.
It's like reading a procedures document from the Ministry of Information Retrieval.
You just KNOW that the creepy bureaucratic gnomes who write up this stuff are going to have a hand in designing the "revised Internet" that's made the news lately.
Your computer has been used to violate article IV of the The Working Artists' Protection Act. Please unlock your front door, sit on the ground, place your hands behind your head and wait quietly. Attempts to flee, contact the press, or hire legal counsel is a violation of the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. III Act and may result in detention in an Overseas Protective Facility.
Too much emphasis on software, not enough on hardware, and non-computer items.
Also too much emphasis on marketing flops.
I am SO glad that floppy disks are just about finished with. I threw away hundreds and hundreds of them last year (3.5") and two years ago (5.25"). They still pop up now and then. I hope to eliminate all of them except for emergency boot CDs and the like.
I'm tempted to say "Cripes, This Again," because it comes up in almost every discussion about solar cells.
Instead I'll say: That may have been true once, but it isn't any more. It will become less and less true with time, as learning economies and economies of scale come into effect.
[ ] G'Thak Meld testing out new nova bomb. Gas / dust shell was actually a cloud of mothballed habitats and light collectors towed to the system to see how blast would effect a dyson shphere.
[ ] Elder Race equivalent of Jackson Pollock at work.
[ ] Young Earth creationists are right; like anything more distant that 6,000 LY, this was actually elaborate illusion created by God.
[ ] Extremem upper limit of Mentos / Diet Pepsi reaction now known.
Slashdot Mirror
The forces of coercion and aristocratic statism cannot be allowed to prevail. The world they would create would crush the soul of humanity and bring progress to a grinding stop.
Throwing sand in the gears of this predictive machine means getting weird people.
Date your livestock, but only if you live in an apartment. Borrow a friend's supermarket membership card to do your shopping. Use your own card to make suspiciously large purchases of anchovies, motor oil, bird seed and tampons. Stick macaroni in your cap and do not call it a pipe. Go to church dressed in a furry costume and stuff the donation plate with bizarre foreign currency.
Of course, if enough people did this, people in terrorist sleeper cells would stand right out, since they'd be trying really hard to be normal and square.
In Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker (1937, ISBN 0819566934), a far-future multi-galactic civilization is in a fix. They've embarked on a project to create a mass-mind incorporating all sapient being, past* and present, in order to have the wisdom or knowledge or processing power to unveil the mysteries of the universe and learn the nature of the entity behind the creation of the universe.
Eventually their aeon-spanning telepathic sweeps detect the slow thoughts of primordial sapient dust clouds. With their help they find out that the Star Maker is running through an exhaustive series of universe simulations, tinkering with the parameters until it comes out just right. (Well, actually, in the novel they're described as increasingly sophisticated works of art.)
* You can't tell if you're in it, I guess.
. . . their own truthiness?
. . . of toilet paper that can't stand up to the vigorous wiping of cyborgs, kryptonians, and super-muscled mutants.
If you know enough about that scene you could write up such a section as a humor article.
And maybe some clueless IBM HR drone would buy it to use for real!
"It's well known that reality has a strong liberal bias."
-- Stephen Colbert
Oubliettes
and
Pollution
(Thanks, Joel!)
Screenwriter and comic John Rogers wrote a great polemic called "I Miss Republicans," ruing the disappearance of practical, technocratic Republicans in favor of the screwball ideologues:
Sorry, folks, this isn't "business as usual" or "a pendulum swing" we don't have to worry about because it will swing back. It's the Wedge Strategy. It's Lysenkoism. It's the Ministry of Truth. It's 24 year old college drop-outs micromanaging NASA scientists' press activity.
Thank goodness. We're off the hook!
Millions and millions of little processors hooked up by a ad hoc wireless network . . . I figure we have nine months until it gains consciousness and starts organizing legions of Third World kids.
I won't put one of these on without a radiation-proof 'nad shield.
. . . DON'T SHOWER!
I recently finished listening to a lecture series on the history of ancient Egypt. Fascinating stuff. As I recall, Queen Hatshepsut was kind of erased from history by a later pharaoh. Lady leaders just didn't fit in with the Way Things Were Supposed to Be.
Lots of ancient Egyptians had bad teeth. Flour tended to have lots of sand in it thanks to the grinding process, and chewing wore away tooth enamel very efficiently.
Stefan
Of course, Inner Party members like Dick Cheney will be exempt from this program.
You know, so that they can get Frank and Candid Advice.
It's a very, very large gamma ray laser, created by a very patient race with an enemy living in a globular cluster whose orbit around the galaxy will take it into the path of the polar emission stream.
The other pole's stream will be redirected with a vibrating unobtanium mirror and used to paint advertising slogans in a gas cloud on the edge of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.
I can just picture insurance companies champing at the bit to work market tests into their eligibility rules and rate structure, and employers trying to find ways to discriminate on the basis of having these markers.
Longer term (where "long" == years until we find an affordable, widely applicable way to delete these markers from an individual's genetic heritage) this is a really good thing.
- My boss ran into awful icky troubles getting the IR remote functionality to work.
I took the easy way when it came to installing a remote. I use a compact Infrared keyboard I had on hand. There is mapping between letters and arrows and various remote functions.
- You can't go wrong with a Happauge* PVR-x50. I bought a PVR-150 from a local supplier for under $80. It was way easy to set up. It doesn't have a TV out, so I bought a cheap card with an NVIDIA chipset.
I used the Fedora MythTV project procedure and had little trouble getting Myth working.
I picked the host machine (P4 1.8 MHz HP box, with 768 MB RAM) out of the garbage. The only other thing I had to buy was a 160 GB hard drive, which Office Depot was selling for $40 after rebate.
* FYI: Pronounced "hop ogg;" it's a Native American name, not French.
Sir, this is Happy Thought Hour!
Didn't you see the pictures in the article of pretty young ladies enjoying the sun?
Eliminate the negative! Accentuate the positive!
Visualize palm trees in Germany, and put out of your mind the massive droughts and desertification in the torrid and equatorial zones.
Internal combustion motors will be around for a long time. We'll be stuck with them as the alternatives work their way into the marketplace and the infrastructure for electrics, biofuels, hydrogen and so on are developed.
So, deploy that lipstick and make the pig as purty as you can get it.
Just don't get to likeing it so much you don't want to move on when the time is right.
No.
The best theoretical ion drive I've read about has an Isp of 10,000 seconds. That translates into an exhaust velocity of 100 kps (rounding up a bit).
Speed of light: A touch less than 300,000 kps.
Plugged into the rocket equation:
Mf+Mp / Mp = e^{300000/100) = 2.72 ^ 3000
Well, the Windows calculator tells me that's 5.0899334329769958439246007097416e+1303
That's the ratio of ("fuel" and payload) to payload.
Um, even if I screwed up somewhere, and I'm off by a factor of a million, that ain't good.
The infrastructure required to transfer electricity from centralized facilities, and the losses suffered along the way, don't make this very appealing.
A panel on your roof may not be as efficient, but it's yours. In an sunny place, you may be able to sell power to the local grid during the daytime peak hours. (You might buy it back at night, but the rates are lower then.)
There will always be a need for a grid, and some big power plants, but making as much new capacity decentralized and as local as possible means addressing political, social, and security externalities that have been ignored thus far.
It's like reading a procedures document from the Ministry of Information Retrieval.
You just KNOW that the creepy bureaucratic gnomes who write up this stuff are going to have a hand in designing the "revised Internet" that's made the news lately.
Your computer has been used to violate article IV of the The Working Artists' Protection Act. Please unlock your front door, sit on the ground, place your hands behind your head and wait quietly. Attempts to flee, contact the press, or hire legal counsel is a violation of the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. III Act and may result in detention in an Overseas Protective Facility.
Too much emphasis on software, not enough on hardware, and non-computer items.
Also too much emphasis on marketing flops.
I am SO glad that floppy disks are just about finished with. I threw away hundreds and hundreds of them last year (3.5") and two years ago (5.25"). They still pop up now and then. I hope to eliminate all of them except for emergency boot CDs and the like.
There are a lot of really stupid ideas out there that I wouldn't put on a "most annoying" list because no one used them.
The Cue Cat is one of them. No one forced you to use it. The bar codes on the ads didn't cause leprosy or make your eyes bleed.
Of course, if I was one of the investors who paid to send out thousands of the things for free, then I'd have cause to be annoyed.
I'd put Microsoft Bob on the list too. The ads and promotions were annoying, but again, no one forced you to install or use it.
I'm tempted to say "Cripes, This Again," because it comes up in almost every discussion about solar cells.
Instead I'll say: That may have been true once, but it isn't any more. It will become less and less true with time, as learning economies and economies of scale come into effect.
[ ] G'Thak Meld testing out new nova bomb. Gas / dust shell was actually a cloud of mothballed habitats and light collectors towed to the system to see how blast would effect a dyson shphere.
[ ] Elder Race equivalent of Jackson Pollock at work.
[ ] Young Earth creationists are right; like anything more distant that 6,000 LY, this was actually elaborate illusion created by God.
[ ] Extremem upper limit of Mentos / Diet Pepsi reaction now known.
Stefan
Download The MacGuffin Alphabet.