If you purchase an RFID-tagged item using a credit or debit card, your name, credit history, and possibly other demographic data can be associated with it.
Walk into a store wearing a tagged garment, and your presence could be noted. Prices could magically change as you approach a shelf. Security could get alerted based on your pauper status.
This is a far from perfect association, of course. You could be buying a garment as a gift, or for a child. Of course, if a person wearing a tagged garment makes a purchase, and the association doesn't match, the information could be updated.
Computing can potentially take place on a biological platform. There's already been some work on this. Very preliminary, but you have to start somewhere.
And DNA is an encoding system. It stores information. RNA copies it.
I'm probably quite a bit older than the average slashdotter, and I've seen far more seasons worth of Saturday Mornings. It's interesting seeing folks wax nostalgic for shows that were on when I was going to college!
I was a TV kid; a real obsessive little dweeb. I watched far, far too much kiddie crap, and for too long. (Think Milhous van Houton.) But I was also an observant, skeptical, and curious little dweeb. (Good training for my career in QA!) I recognized before most kids the difference between first run and syndicated shows, film and video tape, and the value of different time slots.
Well, my point: There is a conservation of crappiness in Saturday Morning TV. Most of it has always been awful. Much of what we liked as kids was awful. It wouldn't hold up if you saw it now. At least, if you've grown up even a little.
The bright lights, then as now, were few, and usually died quickly. (There was a whole slew of live-action poetry-and-storytelling shows in the early 70s; well-meaning post-hippie artiness like "Animals, Animals, Animals." Anyone remember an early-90s FOX show called "Nightmare Ned?" Or the artsy, weird, "ZaZu U?")
If Saturday Morning dies, I can't feel too sad. Give the kids books, or video tapes, or shove them outside so they can build up their immune systems by rolling in the dirt.
God, I probably shouldn't write this down, because it could get implemented for real and then even if the developer never saw this post I'd get blamed and . ..
Anyway.
Imagine if the price tags fixed on stores shelves were made of this stuff. Not only would it allow Wal-Mart to slash prices without using that hideous flying yellow smile-face robot*, but the prices could be CUSTOMIZED to YOU, flickering to show a new value as you enter an aisle.
People who try to avoid this scheme by wearing retina-shield glasses or digging out there ID implant would be charged full price
Stefan
* Wal-Mart has done an excellent job covering up the Toledo incident, in which the store's slashbot disembowelled a kid wearing a number jersey. The splatter of blood on that diabolical smiling yellow face inspired a protest button that, for some reason, is still worn by comic book afficianodoes.
Re:Swift, merciless, brutal death is required
on
Prince of Pop-ups
·
· Score: 1
I recommend "The Song That Never Ends," as sung by Lampchop.
You only have to play it once. Just playing a song once isn't harassment, is it?
Stefan
10 PRINT "THIS IS THE SONG THAT NEVER ENDS" 20 PRINT "IT JUST GOES ON AND ON MY FRIEND" 30 PRINT "SOME PEOPLE STARTED SINGING IT" 40 PRINT "NO KNOWING WHAT IT WAS" 50 PRINT "AND THEY'LL CONTINUE SINGING IT" 60 PRINT "FOREVER JUST BECAUSE" 70 GOTO 10
. . . I think. The book might have been _Venus Equilateral_.
A very elderly Smith attended one of the first SF conventions I went to. What I best remember about the con was the shameful way a young snot of a fan treated him when he was given an honorary spot on a panel.
I went to the National kinetic sculpture race in Eureka, CA a couple of times.
Actually, the first time was an accident. I was driving up 101 for fun, heard the coverage on the radio, and made sure to drive through town. I saw a giant warthog driving across a bridge. Quite neat! But the hotels were all booked and I didn't know where to go to spectate.
I went for "real" a couple of years back. Booked a hotel, got the schedule and map. The race started in Arcata (famed for its on-line police blotter), up the highway a bit. The racers assembled around the town square for inspection and brake trials. I took a lot of pictures. The floats^H^H^H^H^H^H Kinetic Sculptures ranged from barely modified bicycles to WILD, elaborate machines with teams in matching uniforms. Best were a giant dinosaur skeleton (with cavemen drivers armed with clubs) and a pink rabid poodle with a beer stine.
The Burned Out Hippy ethic of the race first became evident here. Very entertaining and charming, if you're into vague non-competitive niceness.
After leaving town, the racers headed for the beach, for a five-mile or so drag over the dunes overlooking the Pacific. I was going to follow on foot, but my ill-footing gumshoes tore up my toes. I ended up taking a lift to the next exciting spot, a hill that the races had to crawl up. There was a CLIFF on the other side. Most of the machines made it, but rarely gracefully. After another few miles through sand and brush the racers crossed a bridge into town for the night.
I decided another full day of this wasn't in the cards, but I stayed long enough in the morning to watch the racers go into water mode at the foot of a bridge. Very neat. Some racers were water-ready as is. Others had to deploy pontoons. Some were paddled, others had pedal-operated paddle wheels or even propellors.
The least well designed craft had to be rescued by the harbor patrol. (According to the Burned Out Hippy Ethic, the foundering craft were "pushing the coast guard cutters with stiff ropes.") The best really tore along. The best, as I recall, was "Rolling Blackout," which was made from black PVC barrels and had rotary paddles.
Anyway, I'd recommend this event, especially for families, but make sure you have other activities lined up.
Stefan
Neal Stephenson: Tripoli's first Cert Level 4?
on
Jeff Bezos' Shot At Space
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Stephenson is into high-power rocketry. I once asked him, at a signing, what Tripoli / NAR* Cert Level (the internally-administered skill level which determines the size of rocket motors one can purchase) he'd achieved.
He'd gotten to Level Two, which requires a written test and successfully launching a carefully inspected large rocket. As I recall, it lets you use "J" and "K" motors. (For those who flew Estes motors as kids, this is the equivalent of 64 and 128 D motors.)
Level Three requires a really large and sturdy rocket, and lets you use monstrous M motors.
(I was certified in the early 90s before there were levels, but let it lapse during grad school; when I tried for level one last year I failed because my model's nose cone popped off due to internal pressure. Nothing damaged, but that was enough to scuttle the attempt.)
Now I'm picturing him filling out the paperwork for Cert Level 4: Manned Flight.
Stefan
* Tripoli Rocketry Association / National Association of Rocketry
The one scene I recall being cut was where Obi-Wan visits the archives. (I think they may have PLANNED this to be cut; the next scene, where Obi-Wan visits Yoda in the training room, goes over much the same material.)
Ah, yes: The introduction of Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen was also cut. So, while they're there in the Tatooine farm scenes, we don't really know there names!
I've seen and enjoyed many IMAX features, including a few 3D titles ("Across the Sea of Time," a NYC travelogue, was just amazing).
Last fall, a local (Portland, Oregon) science museum advertised a super-large screen version of Attack of the Clones. WOW! I wanted to see the movie again, and here it was being presented in 70mm format on a BIG SCREEN! Golly, how could I lose? I gladly paid the ten dollars and . ..
Cripes . ..
It turns out that the Portland OMSI theater had an OMNIMAX screen. Not IMAX. The latter is a gently curved, huge, conventional movie screen. The former is basically hemispherical.
There was NO correction for the curvature. Everything was BENT. Ships travelled in curved lines.
It was SUCKY experience. To rub things in, it was a CUT version of the film. Nothing crucial was cut, but it was noticiable.
My experience might have been totally different in an IMAX theater.
Sorry, that should have been "boosting a capsule to ORBIT." Not office. A huge cluster of big model rocket motors might be enough to lob the capsule into the side of an office building, however.
Solid fuel won't get any reasonably sized manned capsule into orbit. Suborbital, maybe.
[M(f)+M(0) / M(0)] = e^(Vd/Vex)
Bennet's early "tests" were HP model rocket flight
on
Starchaser Plans Test Drop
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The High Power rocketry community is fairly amused by Bennet.
A lot of his early tests, some of which were filmed for an X Prize documentary, appeared to be flights of a big model rocket, powered by commercially available rocket motors.
Nothing wrong with that, but you can't really learn anything of value by doing this that would be applicable in making a rocket capable of boosting a capsule to office.
I would be more impressed to see Bennet testing liquid fuel rocket motors. Amatuers on this side of the pond (e.g., the Pacific Rocket Society) have been doing this for YEARS without coming up with a "man rated" motor.
I liked MULE a lot, but this Bunten gem was my favorite.
When looking at a prototype for COLONIZATION at a trade show, I mentioned to the guy next to me that it looked like an update to Seven Cities. He said, yes, it was meant as a tribute/update. My first run-in with Sid Meier . . .
I had the same reaction -- nice to hear about Warren -- only in my case the "awhile" is a lot longer. He was the editor of one of the pencil-and-paper RPG magazines* I wrote for in the early 1980s!
It's interesting, how some game industry people I knew stayed with the pencil-and-paper stuff, while others leapt into the big time. In 1995, I "gophered" at the CGDC; some of my fellow lowly gophers were fellow RPG designer types, some well known for their work. Not a gopher was Tom Dowd, who started as a stock boy at Fantasy Games Unlimited (long-dead boardgame and RPG maker) and as I recalled had risen to become FASA's computer game honcho.
Gibson wrote his early stories on a typewriter, but he got an Apple in the eighties and has been using them ever since.
Is he a UNIX head? No. Does he spend his spare time overclocking hardware? I don't think so. But he reads and surfs a hell of a lot, and carries around a wireless laptop.
From Dyson's autobiography, Disturbing the Universe:
"Some science fiction writers have wrongly given me the credit for inventing the idea of an artificial biosphere. In fact, I took the idea from Olaf Stapledon, one of their own colleagues:
'Not only was every solar system now surrounded by a gauze of light traps, which focused the escaping solar energy for intelligent use, so that the whole galaxy was dimmed, but many stars that were not suited to be suns were disintegrated, and rifled of their prodigious stores of subatomic energy.'
"This passage I found in a tattered copy of Stapledon's Star Maker which I picked up in Paddington Station in London in 1945."
I wonder if this case will be accidentally read by legal researchers when real "are they human?" cases start hitting the courts fifteen or twenty years from now. Imagine some paralegal doing a double-take when she realizes it dealt with plastic dolls^H^H^H^H^H action figures.
I'm kind of looking forward to cases over whether robots and uplifted meerkats and kids with tendencies toward dyslexia deleted from their genome and such are human. Cuz' It's The Business of the Future to Be Dangerous.*
Stefan
* Alfred North Whitehead.
Re:Where I have heard this before?
on
Kiln People
·
· Score: 1
I was a Kiln People reader / critiquer.
I can testify that Dr. Brin hadn't read the Roger Rabbit novel when he came up with Kil'n People, so the 'dit' concept evolved on its own.
I did mention the parallels it to him!
Points out need for android Aunts, Uncles
on
Uncle Tungsten
·
· Score: 3, Funny
This book made me way jealous of Sacks. His family was bursting at the seams with brainy engineer, scientist, and doctor types. (Like: "During the time I was interested in airships, Uncle Lyle gave me a tour of his dirigible factory in Sussex.")
This convinces me that we need to make available to every family a set of android relatives who can visit and tell the kids about their fascinating professions. This would make up for the fact that most parents these days work in malls and offices and haven't thought about science since their last week in High School.
You wouldn't need to make a set of Aunt & Uncle teacher androids for each family. They could be shared around, and use different names and face-prosthetics so that they appear to be unique.
Slashdot Mirror
Walk into a store wearing a tagged garment, and your presence could be noted. Prices could magically change as you approach a shelf. Security could get alerted based on your pauper status.
This is a far from perfect association, of course. You could be buying a garment as a gift, or for a child. Of course, if a person wearing a tagged garment makes a purchase, and the association doesn't match, the information could be updated.
Interdimensional Gateway Opens in Suffolk County.
Elder Gods awake from aeons of slumber.
Film at Eleven.
Um, no.
Computing can potentially take place on a biological platform. There's already been some work on this. Very preliminary, but you have to start somewhere.
And DNA is an encoding system. It stores information. RNA copies it.
Damn them and their evil black collektivist souls!
Quick Martha, git me my gun!
I was a TV kid; a real obsessive little dweeb. I watched far, far too much kiddie crap, and for too long. (Think Milhous van Houton.) But I was also an observant, skeptical, and curious little dweeb. (Good training for my career in QA!) I recognized before most kids the difference between first run and syndicated shows, film and video tape, and the value of different time slots.
Well, my point: There is a conservation of crappiness in Saturday Morning TV. Most of it has always been awful. Much of what we liked as kids was awful. It wouldn't hold up if you saw it now. At least, if you've grown up even a little.
The bright lights, then as now, were few, and usually died quickly. (There was a whole slew of live-action poetry-and-storytelling shows in the early 70s; well-meaning post-hippie artiness like "Animals, Animals, Animals." Anyone remember an early-90s FOX show called "Nightmare Ned?" Or the artsy, weird, "ZaZu U?")
If Saturday Morning dies, I can't feel too sad. Give the kids books, or video tapes, or shove them outside so they can build up their immune systems by rolling in the dirt.
Stefan
God, I probably shouldn't write this down, because it could get implemented for real and then even if the developer never saw this post I'd get blamed and . . .
Anyway.
Imagine if the price tags fixed on stores shelves were made of this stuff. Not only would it allow Wal-Mart to slash prices without using that hideous flying yellow smile-face robot*, but the prices could be CUSTOMIZED to YOU, flickering to show a new value as you enter an aisle.
People who try to avoid this scheme by wearing retina-shield glasses or digging out there ID implant would be charged full price
Stefan
* Wal-Mart has done an excellent job covering up the Toledo incident, in which the store's slashbot disembowelled a kid wearing a number jersey. The splatter of blood on that diabolical smiling yellow face inspired a protest button that, for some reason, is still worn by comic book afficianodoes.
I recommend "The Song That Never Ends," as sung by Lampchop.
You only have to play it once. Just playing a song once isn't harassment, is it?
Stefan
10 PRINT "THIS IS THE SONG THAT NEVER ENDS"
20 PRINT "IT JUST GOES ON AND ON MY FRIEND"
30 PRINT "SOME PEOPLE STARTED SINGING IT"
40 PRINT "NO KNOWING WHAT IT WAS"
50 PRINT "AND THEY'LL CONTINUE SINGING IT"
60 PRINT "FOREVER JUST BECAUSE"
70 GOTO 10
. . . I think. The book might have been _Venus Equilateral_.
A very elderly Smith attended one of the first SF conventions I went to. What I best remember about the con was the shameful way a young snot of a fan treated him when he was given an honorary spot on a panel.
Just the other day I was wondering whether Dr. Jerry had given up on SF. When was the last time a novel of his was published?
Actually, the first time was an accident. I was driving up 101 for fun, heard the coverage on the radio, and made sure to drive through town. I saw a giant warthog driving across a bridge. Quite neat! But the hotels were all booked and I didn't know where to go to spectate.
I went for "real" a couple of years back. Booked a hotel, got the schedule and map. The race started in Arcata (famed for its on-line police blotter), up the highway a bit. The racers assembled around the town square for inspection and brake trials. I took a lot of pictures. The floats^H^H^H^H^H^H Kinetic Sculptures ranged from barely modified bicycles to WILD, elaborate machines with teams in matching uniforms. Best were a giant dinosaur skeleton (with cavemen drivers armed with clubs) and a pink rabid poodle with a beer stine.
The Burned Out Hippy ethic of the race first became evident here. Very entertaining and charming, if you're into vague non-competitive niceness.
After leaving town, the racers headed for the beach, for a five-mile or so drag over the dunes overlooking the Pacific. I was going to follow on foot, but my ill-footing gumshoes tore up my toes. I ended up taking a lift to the next exciting spot, a hill that the races had to crawl up. There was a CLIFF on the other side. Most of the machines made it, but rarely gracefully. After another few miles through sand and brush the racers crossed a bridge into town for the night.
I decided another full day of this wasn't in the cards, but I stayed long enough in the morning to watch the racers go into water mode at the foot of a bridge. Very neat. Some racers were water-ready as is. Others had to deploy pontoons. Some were paddled, others had pedal-operated paddle wheels or even propellors.
The least well designed craft had to be rescued by the harbor patrol. (According to the Burned Out Hippy Ethic, the foundering craft were "pushing the coast guard cutters with stiff ropes.") The best really tore along. The best, as I recall, was "Rolling Blackout," which was made from black PVC barrels and had rotary paddles.
Anyway, I'd recommend this event, especially for families, but make sure you have other activities lined up.
Stefan
He'd gotten to Level Two, which requires a written test and successfully launching a carefully inspected large rocket. As I recall, it lets you use "J" and "K" motors. (For those who flew Estes motors as kids, this is the equivalent of 64 and 128 D motors.)
Level Three requires a really large and sturdy rocket, and lets you use monstrous M motors.
(I was certified in the early 90s before there were levels, but let it lapse during grad school; when I tried for level one last year I failed because my model's nose cone popped off due to internal pressure. Nothing damaged, but that was enough to scuttle the attempt.)
Now I'm picturing him filling out the paperwork for Cert Level 4: Manned Flight.
Stefan
* Tripoli Rocketry Association / National Association of Rocketry
Someone asked.
It's been a few months.
The one scene I recall being cut was where Obi-Wan visits the archives. (I think they may have PLANNED this to be cut; the next scene, where Obi-Wan visits Yoda in the training room, goes over much the same material.)
Ah, yes: The introduction of Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen was also cut. So, while they're there in the Tatooine farm scenes, we don't really know there names!
Perhaps 2-3 other bits like that were missing.
Stefan
Last fall, a local (Portland, Oregon) science museum advertised a super-large screen version of Attack of the Clones. WOW! I wanted to see the movie again, and here it was being presented in 70mm format on a BIG SCREEN! Golly, how could I lose? I gladly paid the ten dollars and . . .
Cripes . . .
It turns out that the Portland OMSI theater had an OMNIMAX screen. Not IMAX. The latter is a gently curved, huge, conventional movie screen. The former is basically hemispherical.
There was NO correction for the curvature. Everything was BENT. Ships travelled in curved lines.
It was SUCKY experience. To rub things in, it was a CUT version of the film. Nothing crucial was cut, but it was noticiable.
My experience might have been totally different in an IMAX theater.
So . . . beware.
Stefan
Sorry, that should have been "boosting a capsule to ORBIT." Not office. A huge cluster of big model rocket motors might be enough to lob the capsule into the side of an office building, however.
Solid fuel won't get any reasonably sized manned capsule into orbit. Suborbital, maybe.
[M(f)+M(0) / M(0)] = e^(Vd/Vex)
The High Power rocketry community is fairly amused by Bennet.
A lot of his early tests, some of which were filmed for an X Prize documentary, appeared to be flights of a big model rocket, powered by commercially available rocket motors.
Nothing wrong with that, but you can't really learn anything of value by doing this that would be applicable in making a rocket capable of boosting a capsule to office.
I would be more impressed to see Bennet testing liquid fuel rocket motors. Amatuers on this side of the pond (e.g., the Pacific Rocket Society) have been doing this for YEARS without coming up with a "man rated" motor.
Stefan
I liked MULE a lot, but this Bunten gem was my favorite.
When looking at a prototype for COLONIZATION at a trade show, I mentioned to the guy next to me that it looked like an update to Seven Cities. He said, yes, it was meant as a tribute/update. My first run-in with Sid Meier . . .
It's interesting, how some game industry people I knew stayed with the pencil-and-paper stuff, while others leapt into the big time. In 1995, I "gophered" at the CGDC; some of my fellow lowly gophers were fellow RPG designer types, some well known for their work. Not a gopher was Tom Dowd, who started as a stock boy at Fantasy Games Unlimited (long-dead boardgame and RPG maker) and as I recalled had risen to become FASA's computer game honcho.
Me, I just burned out.
Stefan
* "The Space Gamer"
http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com
I liked his entry about the Columbia (2/1/2003). I had one of the Space Taxi models he describes.
Stefan
Gibson wrote his early stories on a typewriter, but he got an Apple in the eighties and has been using them ever since.
Is he a UNIX head? No. Does he spend his spare time overclocking hardware? I don't think so. But he reads and surfs a hell of a lot, and carries around a wireless laptop.
"Some science fiction writers have wrongly given me the credit for inventing the idea of an artificial biosphere. In fact, I took the idea from Olaf Stapledon, one of their own colleagues:
"This passage I found in a tattered copy of Stapledon's Star Maker which I picked up in Paddington Station in London in 1945."
I'm kind of looking forward to cases over whether robots and uplifted meerkats and kids with tendencies toward dyslexia deleted from their genome and such are human. Cuz' It's The Business of the Future to Be Dangerous.*
Stefan
* Alfred North Whitehead.
I was a Kiln People reader / critiquer.
I can testify that Dr. Brin hadn't read the Roger Rabbit novel when he came up with Kil'n People, so the 'dit' concept evolved on its own.
I did mention the parallels it to him!
This convinces me that we need to make available to every family a set of android relatives who can visit and tell the kids about their fascinating professions. This would make up for the fact that most parents these days work in malls and offices and haven't thought about science since their last week in High School.
You wouldn't need to make a set of Aunt & Uncle teacher androids for each family. They could be shared around, and use different names and face-prosthetics so that they appear to be unique.
Stefan
The bottom of the Hudson is littered with wrecks containing priceless cargo from the Golden Age of industrialism in upstate New York.
Imagine the riches that await:
Of course, if they succeed, we'll have big potatoid wafers the size of dinner plates.
Stefan