Your points are all good, but don't tie in to each other. The Chinese and Indian programs will heat up the political space race, but not the economic one. The lack of business Boeing complained about was commercial/civilian satellites - mergers have cut back on television satellites, and major failures like Iridium have cut down on demand for communications satellites.
With China, India, and Brazil able to launch satellites, that's even more suppliers, and therefore potentially less business for Boeing. Those countries will eventually want to launch more satellites, both civilian and military, but they'll be doing it themselves, not contracting it out to the US, EU, or Russia. Similarly, the EU equivalent of GPS will be launched by EU rockets.
I still want to see that space elevator cable built...
"When I become old and frail, I hope I can live with the dignity that all people should have at some point in their lives. Especially when they are getting old."
There is no magically conferred "Dignity" that the old recieve by default. When you get old, you WILL lose the ability to do things unassisted, and you WILL be demeaned by needing a nurse just to help you take a crap for your final few years. Walking with motorized assistance may not be as "dignified" as walking normally like a younger person, but it's way the hell better than the current methods. Go spend some more quality time with the aged, and you'll understand.
The "right thing" is to patch the software, not to block everything else and force an upgrade bundled with whatever else Microsoft wants to force on us.
I'll give you one guess as to which solution Microsoft always picks...
Not knowing the specific case, I can't say whether or not it should be thrown out. The laws that let you ask to be banned are there to let people with serious psychological problems recover. Likely in some cases, if you end up in front of a judge because of your gambling problems (bankruptcy, or neglected dependants in order to fund the habit), the judge can ORDER you banned from casinos (such as in part of a settlement that keeps you out of jail).
The courts are not likely to be friendly to a casino that continues to exploit such individuals.
Because there are federal limits on how much casinos are allowed to fsck with the odds. The House is allowed to statistically win more often than it loses, but there's a cap on HOW much of an advantage it can have. Essentially, the games MUST allow the players a fair chance to win.
"or a fairly efficient way of storing excess power capacity in the winter to be used in the summer. "
Storing a season's worth of extra power for a season's worth of time is unworkable. However, storing excess power during the low-demand part of the day to ease spikes in demand later that same day...that is being worked on already. It was in either Discover magazine or the MIT Technology Review, but they're working on what is basically a huge fuel cell battery. Right now it's just at a military base, but the idea is to put one of these big batteries in every major city to act as a buffer. It'd ease both the peak demand on the power plants AND some of the stress on the transmission lines.
No, we would not really be able to control the technology. We can't keep small amounts of traditional nuclear material safe right now. However, since there's no minimum amount of this new material you'd need before you could make a bomb with it, it wouldn't take much.
That's both positive, and negative. Positive: there's no legit way to make it, so you don't need to worry about every nuclear reactor being a potential weapons plant. Negative: since this stuff is so powerful, if there's no treaty keeping us from developing it, its use will be widespread. If it gets down to being used in smaller explosives like tank shells, there's no way we'll be able to keep some from being stolen. Too easy for some low-level military type bribed for a few million to do an inside job.
Since the article says a gram of this stuff is worth 50 kilograms of TNT... well... that means a single zealot with a special vest can take out a bridge, highway, port facility, or city block.
On the upshot, I don't think we'll make many - maybe a dozen just to say we have them. There's very little threat of an arms race breaking out soon, because precious few countries can build and operate the particle accelerator to make the stuff - those countries already have real nukes anyway. At least, not for the next decade or two.
You forget that living things are patterns more than a permanant physical structure. Our actual raw material is constantly being replaced. The food you eat is not just energy, it's also building blocks... and the stuff you void out the other end is not just the part of food you don't use, it's also used bits of yourself being thrown away.
It kind of depends on the exact type of immortality we get. "Physically 20 and fertile forever" would be a massive problem. "Physically an extremely healthy but infertile 50 forever" would pile up the population an awful lot slower, and this version is a lot closer to what we're approaching now than the miracle eternal youth version. We'd have a century to work something out before it started getting seriously bad.
Other factors buy us more time. The Earth is not a single continuous habitat, as far as human society is concerned. There are subdivisions which keep local population problems from becoming global, because the rapidly-growing populations are no longer able to freely spread worldwide - there aren't any open borders anymore. Some regions will hit the max population their land can sustain much earlier than other regions.
Other checks on free population growth still exist and aren't tied to standard life extension science. Life extension won't neccessarily cure HIV or cancer. Malnutrition in developing countries is very harsh on child survival rates. War - especially at a technicalogical level of WW2 or later - massively hinders population growth, and the type of immortal we're talking about is just as easily killed by a bullet as you or I. Losing a few million of your most fertile men and women in a war impacts your population and economy for decades.
If I'm remembering right, Xenogears has about 55 hours of gameplay. Less if you're a die hard RPG player and you skip things, more otherwise. I think I took 60.
True for a jetfighter. Not a big deal for a light bomber - which, with the new bombs, could be faster or carry more fuel, or stay the same speed/length but hit more stuff. A new model light bomber might be designed around the new bombs in a few years if it proves to be worthwhile.
It also means that you can put a single bomb on to a fighter configured for escort/dogfighting, which you normally wouldn't want any heavy loads slowing down. Suddenly all your escorts are also impromptu bombers vs sudden targets of opportunity. This might not be a big deal in wars like the recent ones (with no enemy aircraft), but in a war between near-equals it might come into play. So I figure the military have a way to use the option ready.
It also might improve the firepower of unmanned drones. Right now they fly solo and, if armed, are set up for anti-personnel work. However, there've been plans to have the drones work in flocks covering ground continuously...so if you put the new bombs on a few in each flock, suddenly you've got the ability to very quickly hit targets of opportunity. More impromptu bombers.
The standing army is ancient. The Roman army was a permanant professional force. Each soldier served a 20(?) year term, after which they got full citizenship and some land. And I'm not sure that Rome was the first to do this.
In later post-Roman-Empire centuries Europe had permanant small forces of Knights, and permanant groups of professional mercenaries wandered from country to country. There were border castles being built everywhere, which needed to be manned. During actual war the army was padded with conscripts, but formed around the core units of professionals.
There was no lull from the use of gunpowder, either. Louis XIV's army was as large as Rome's had been. The British army and navy were permanant active entities (maintaining/protecting the empire). Even the newbie United States, while desiring the smallest army possible, had an army (to defend the frontier against natives/Spanish/bandits) and a navy (to preserve the expertise and deter the British/Spanish).
The maintenance of standing armies extends through the 1800s and the world wars and into the present. While many nations don't keep enough troops around to attack, most keep enough to defend - even pacifist modern Japan, which has the Japanese Defense Force, complete with fairly modern tanks, jet fighters, and missle ships.
Re:NOT a privacy victory
on
RIAA Quashed
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
While it's not a complete or assured victory, it's very significant.
1) the RIAA can't choose it's favorite legal district anymore. They can't buy influence in one state and then apply that to the entire country.
2) the RIAA can't inconvenience its victims (as much) - forcing the victims to travel across the country is an unfair hardship when _proper_ procedure is to sue in the district in which the alleged violation was committed.
2b) the now-lessened hardship of fighting the RIAA means the RIAA is less able to use the threat of a lawsuit to extort a settlement out of its accused.
3) the effort the RIAA is now required to exert to sue is now more equal to the effort the accused must exert to defend.
The RIAA being allowed to cheaply sue anyone in the place of their choosing was an asymmetrical attack, an unjust abuse of the spirit of our legal system. It allowed them to arbitrarily punish at will.
The article didn't mention the RIAA's ability to issue subpoenas without a judge's consent, but I hope that's been challenged too, as it is also an abuse of the system.
Since they'd have to allow money IN to the system freely but restrict goods moving OUT of the system to rare hard-to-get items that redeem only to cheap real-life stuff, lest they be run out of business in a week, this is little more than a cheap gimmick.
It's a merging of the game with a store, and as many others have mentioned, it reduces the much-sought-after escapism of the game. It makes the game not fun anymore, by reducing the prestige of a player's accomplishments while simultaneously teasing more money out of the player's wallet. Ick.
"1 a : government by the people; especially : rule of the majority b : a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections"
Gee, republics specifically fall under that definition. Q: What's funnier than a pedant? A: A pedant who's WRONG! Ha ha ha ha..
DNA, to present, is not used as the sole factor in a conviction. It can be used to prove, when there is a lack of other evidence, that a person *wasn't* there, but that's about it.
Factors like motive, alibi, eyewitnesses, and general forensics matter an awful lot more than sifting the whole crime scene for random DNA. In a murder scene, they can tell the murderer's height, handedness, time of the crime, etc, just from the angle of the bloodsplats on the walls and the wounds/bruises/markings on the corpse. It doesn't matter if your DNA coated the entire scene, if you're six inches too short and were provably a hundred miles away at the time of the murder, you will not be convicted.
Except the zip code trick won't work, because once a zip area gets too crowded it gets split into two areas. My town shared a single code with a neighboring city until the town's population got high enough to get its own unique code.
Moving around a lot within the same county/state might work though. If your zip code changes every three years, all the records on you will be "fragmented" and hard to stitch back together. I should have records in 4 different areas now, even though I only moved once (at age 5), because I went to a distant college and my town's codes changed.
I question whether this is an environmental good thing. Using bamboo in stuff means *importing* bamboo - because if you try growing it anywhere other than where it's supposed to be, you can destroy your own local ecology. So it has to be imported, and you're economically tied to the few countries that can grow it in quantity and to the right quality. Steel and aluminum, on the other hand, are easy to get locally, and can be shaped in ways bamboo cannot. Plastics and carbon fiber can also be made locally, and carbon nanostuff will eventually also be available locally. And all of these other materials can be recycled, whereas bamboo can only be burned or mulched.
You also can't mass produce bamboo products - as it says towards the bottom of the article, the guy that makes these needs to hand-select everything for quality. Remember, you can cut the length of these, but not the diameter - you're stuck with whatever diameter it grew to - so precision is extremely difficult.
Monetary donations into a trust fund, book donations, volunteer time, late fees. Traditionally, libraries were not funded by the government. They were put together by people who love books.
Consider minimum wage. Consider also that as the standard of living increases, the minimum wage increases. Consider that hardware, on the other hand, always gets cheaper, and that cheap hardware raises the standard of living.
It follows that although making the robot might be more expensive than grabbing a random person off the street, once you are _able_ to make the robot, the robot is cheaper in the long term. The robot's price is going down, and the human's price is going up. You don't pay the robot. You don't have to follow labor laws if you're using a robot. You can work the robot until it falls apart, and then buy a new one.
Indeed! Cheaper to buy both new than the nokia combo system, and many of the people who would want the nokia already have one/both GBA and cell. Even if the nokia was pure gaming gold, its adoption would be slow for those reasons.
Further, if they're targeting the young new cell owners, success could kill them. Schools already have a dim view of cellphones as it is. If cell gaming in the classroom gets notices, they might outright ban the things from schools. Bad business and bad PR.
They should probably be targeting adult casual-gamers with this, not young "real" gamers. The older types are already willing to dump $300 on a phone with all the extras. And they'll do that for their own personal phone whereas for the kid's phone parents want something cheap and durable.
Just set a ground rule: don't start development of the game until the movie is already done its theatre run, gone to rental, gone to Wal-Mart purchase, and been shown on normal broadcast TV.
By then, the biggest factors that work to make a movie game SUCK are gone:
1) the movie is finished, and the game cannot increase hype for the movie, therefore there is no reason to rush or cut corners. There is no pressure to get the thing out the door before the movie is out.
2) the movie is finished, and therefore the movie's name on the box won't be enough to sell the game. Thus the game will actually have to be good on its own merits.
It isn't a guarantee of success, but it sure helps avoid failure.
Slashdot Mirror
Your points are all good, but don't tie in to each other. The Chinese and Indian programs will heat up the political space race, but not the economic one. The lack of business Boeing complained about was commercial/civilian satellites - mergers have cut back on television satellites, and major failures like Iridium have cut down on demand for communications satellites.
With China, India, and Brazil able to launch satellites, that's even more suppliers, and therefore potentially less business for Boeing. Those countries will eventually want to launch more satellites, both civilian and military, but they'll be doing it themselves, not contracting it out to the US, EU, or Russia. Similarly, the EU equivalent of GPS will be launched by EU rockets.
I still want to see that space elevator cable built...
"When I become old and frail, I hope I can live with the dignity that all people should have at some point in their lives. Especially when they are getting old."
There is no magically conferred "Dignity" that the old recieve by default. When you get old, you WILL lose the ability to do things unassisted, and you WILL be demeaned by needing a nurse just to help you take a crap for your final few years. Walking with motorized assistance may not be as "dignified" as walking normally like a younger person, but it's way the hell better than the current methods. Go spend some more quality time with the aged, and you'll understand.
Reminds me a little of the movie "The Last Starfighter".
:)
I kind of doubt Pac-Man is a training simulator for anything, though.
The "right thing" is to patch the software, not to block everything else and force an upgrade bundled with whatever else Microsoft wants to force on us.
I'll give you one guess as to which solution Microsoft always picks...
Not knowing the specific case, I can't say whether or not it should be thrown out. The laws that let you ask to be banned are there to let people with serious psychological problems recover. Likely in some cases, if you end up in front of a judge because of your gambling problems (bankruptcy, or neglected dependants in order to fund the habit), the judge can ORDER you banned from casinos (such as in part of a settlement that keeps you out of jail).
The courts are not likely to be friendly to a casino that continues to exploit such individuals.
Because there are federal limits on how much casinos are allowed to fsck with the odds. The House is allowed to statistically win more often than it loses, but there's a cap on HOW much of an advantage it can have. Essentially, the games MUST allow the players a fair chance to win.
"or a fairly efficient way of storing excess power capacity in the winter to be used in the summer. "
Storing a season's worth of extra power for a season's worth of time is unworkable. However, storing excess power during the low-demand part of the day to ease spikes in demand later that same day...that is being worked on already. It was in either Discover magazine or the MIT Technology Review, but they're working on what is basically a huge fuel cell battery. Right now it's just at a military base, but the idea is to put one of these big batteries in every major city to act as a buffer. It'd ease both the peak demand on the power plants AND some of the stress on the transmission lines.
No, we would not really be able to control the technology. We can't keep small amounts of traditional nuclear material safe right now. However, since there's no minimum amount of this new material you'd need before you could make a bomb with it, it wouldn't take much.
That's both positive, and negative. Positive: there's no legit way to make it, so you don't need to worry about every nuclear reactor being a potential weapons plant. Negative: since this stuff is so powerful, if there's no treaty keeping us from developing it, its use will be widespread. If it gets down to being used in smaller explosives like tank shells, there's no way we'll be able to keep some from being stolen. Too easy for some low-level military type bribed for a few million to do an inside job.
Since the article says a gram of this stuff is worth 50 kilograms of TNT... well... that means a single zealot with a special vest can take out a bridge, highway, port facility, or city block.
On the upshot, I don't think we'll make many - maybe a dozen just to say we have them. There's very little threat of an arms race breaking out soon, because precious few countries can build and operate the particle accelerator to make the stuff - those countries already have real nukes anyway. At least, not for the next decade or two.
Yes, carbon bonds break.
You forget that living things are patterns more than a permanant physical structure. Our actual raw material is constantly being replaced. The food you eat is not just energy, it's also building blocks... and the stuff you void out the other end is not just the part of food you don't use, it's also used bits of yourself being thrown away.
It kind of depends on the exact type of immortality we get. "Physically 20 and fertile forever" would be a massive problem. "Physically an extremely healthy but infertile 50 forever" would pile up the population an awful lot slower, and this version is a lot closer to what we're approaching now than the miracle eternal youth version. We'd have a century to work something out before it started getting seriously bad.
Other factors buy us more time. The Earth is not a single continuous habitat, as far as human society is concerned. There are subdivisions which keep local population problems from becoming global, because the rapidly-growing populations are no longer able to freely spread worldwide - there aren't any open borders anymore. Some regions will hit the max population their land can sustain much earlier than other regions.
Other checks on free population growth still exist and aren't tied to standard life extension science. Life extension won't neccessarily cure HIV or cancer. Malnutrition in developing countries is very harsh on child survival rates. War - especially at a technicalogical level of WW2 or later - massively hinders population growth, and the type of immortal we're talking about is just as easily killed by a bullet as you or I. Losing a few million of your most fertile men and women in a war impacts your population and economy for decades.
If I'm remembering right, Xenogears has about 55 hours of gameplay. Less if you're a die hard RPG player and you skip things, more otherwise. I think I took 60.
True for a jetfighter. Not a big deal for a light bomber - which, with the new bombs, could be faster or carry more fuel, or stay the same speed/length but hit more stuff. A new model light bomber might be designed around the new bombs in a few years if it proves to be worthwhile.
It also means that you can put a single bomb on to a fighter configured for escort/dogfighting, which you normally wouldn't want any heavy loads slowing down. Suddenly all your escorts are also impromptu bombers vs sudden targets of opportunity. This might not be a big deal in wars like the recent ones (with no enemy aircraft), but in a war between near-equals it might come into play. So I figure the military have a way to use the option ready.
It also might improve the firepower of unmanned drones. Right now they fly solo and, if armed, are set up for anti-personnel work. However, there've been plans to have the drones work in flocks covering ground continuously...so if you put the new bombs on a few in each flock, suddenly you've got the ability to very quickly hit targets of opportunity. More impromptu bombers.
The standing army is ancient. The Roman army was a permanant professional force. Each soldier served a 20(?) year term, after which they got full citizenship and some land. And I'm not sure that Rome was the first to do this.
In later post-Roman-Empire centuries Europe had permanant small forces of Knights, and permanant groups of professional mercenaries wandered from country to country. There were border castles being built everywhere, which needed to be manned. During actual war the army was padded with conscripts, but formed around the core units of professionals.
There was no lull from the use of gunpowder, either. Louis XIV's army was as large as Rome's had been. The British army and navy were permanant active entities (maintaining/protecting the empire). Even the newbie United States, while desiring the smallest army possible, had an army (to defend the frontier against natives/Spanish/bandits) and a navy (to preserve the expertise and deter the British/Spanish).
The maintenance of standing armies extends through the 1800s and the world wars and into the present. While many nations don't keep enough troops around to attack, most keep enough to defend - even pacifist modern Japan, which has the Japanese Defense Force, complete with fairly modern tanks, jet fighters, and missle ships.
While it's not a complete or assured victory, it's very significant.
1) the RIAA can't choose it's favorite legal district anymore. They can't buy influence in one state and then apply that to the entire country.
2) the RIAA can't inconvenience its victims (as much) - forcing the victims to travel across the country is an unfair hardship when _proper_ procedure is to sue in the district in which the alleged violation was committed.
2b) the now-lessened hardship of fighting the RIAA means the RIAA is less able to use the threat of a lawsuit to extort a settlement out of its accused.
3) the effort the RIAA is now required to exert to sue is now more equal to the effort the accused must exert to defend.
The RIAA being allowed to cheaply sue anyone in the place of their choosing was an asymmetrical attack, an unjust abuse of the spirit of our legal system. It allowed them to arbitrarily punish at will.
The article didn't mention the RIAA's ability to issue subpoenas without a judge's consent, but I hope that's been challenged too, as it is also an abuse of the system.
Since they'd have to allow money IN to the system freely but restrict goods moving OUT of the system to rare hard-to-get items that redeem only to cheap real-life stuff, lest they be run out of business in a week, this is little more than a cheap gimmick.
It's a merging of the game with a store, and as many others have mentioned, it reduces the much-sought-after escapism of the game. It makes the game not fun anymore, by reducing the prestige of a player's accomplishments while simultaneously teasing more money out of the player's wallet. Ick.
and the same site's definition of democracy:
"1 a : government by the people; especially : rule of the majority b : a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections"
Gee, republics specifically fall under that definition. Q: What's funnier than a pedant? A: A pedant who's WRONG! Ha ha ha ha..
DNA, to present, is not used as the sole factor in a conviction. It can be used to prove, when there is a lack of other evidence, that a person *wasn't* there, but that's about it.
Factors like motive, alibi, eyewitnesses, and general forensics matter an awful lot more than sifting the whole crime scene for random DNA. In a murder scene, they can tell the murderer's height, handedness, time of the crime, etc, just from the angle of the bloodsplats on the walls and the wounds/bruises/markings on the corpse. It doesn't matter if your DNA coated the entire scene, if you're six inches too short and were provably a hundred miles away at the time of the murder, you will not be convicted.
Except the zip code trick won't work, because once a zip area gets too crowded it gets split into two areas. My town shared a single code with a neighboring city until the town's population got high enough to get its own unique code.
Moving around a lot within the same county/state might work though. If your zip code changes every three years, all the records on you will be "fragmented" and hard to stitch back together. I should have records in 4 different areas now, even though I only moved once (at age 5), because I went to a distant college and my town's codes changed.
I question whether this is an environmental good thing. Using bamboo in stuff means *importing* bamboo - because if you try growing it anywhere other than where it's supposed to be, you can destroy your own local ecology. So it has to be imported, and you're economically tied to the few countries that can grow it in quantity and to the right quality. Steel and aluminum, on the other hand, are easy to get locally, and can be shaped in ways bamboo cannot. Plastics and carbon fiber can also be made locally, and carbon nanostuff will eventually also be available locally. And all of these other materials can be recycled, whereas bamboo can only be burned or mulched.
You also can't mass produce bamboo products - as it says towards the bottom of the article, the guy that makes these needs to hand-select everything for quality. Remember, you can cut the length of these, but not the diameter - you're stuck with whatever diameter it grew to - so precision is extremely difficult.
As in the Northwest? Don't they have the cheapest power in the entire country?
Especially compared to, say, California, which recently didn't have enough power at all, let alone cheap power.
I should add that while I'm skeptical about the power costs, I _do_ like the car.
Monetary donations into a trust fund, book donations, volunteer time, late fees. Traditionally, libraries were not funded by the government. They were put together by people who love books.
Consider minimum wage. Consider also that as the standard of living increases, the minimum wage increases. Consider that hardware, on the other hand, always gets cheaper, and that cheap hardware raises the standard of living.
It follows that although making the robot might be more expensive than grabbing a random person off the street, once you are _able_ to make the robot, the robot is cheaper in the long term. The robot's price is going down, and the human's price is going up. You don't pay the robot. You don't have to follow labor laws if you're using a robot. You can work the robot until it falls apart, and then buy a new one.
Indeed! Cheaper to buy both new than the nokia combo system, and many of the people who would want the nokia already have one/both GBA and cell. Even if the nokia was pure gaming gold, its adoption would be slow for those reasons.
Further, if they're targeting the young new cell owners, success could kill them. Schools already have a dim view of cellphones as it is. If cell gaming in the classroom gets notices, they might outright ban the things from schools. Bad business and bad PR.
They should probably be targeting adult casual-gamers with this, not young "real" gamers. The older types are already willing to dump $300 on a phone with all the extras. And they'll do that for their own personal phone whereas for the kid's phone parents want something cheap and durable.
That is true. It's unlikely to change for new movies, except for the few good game houses that care.
But for _old_ movies that haven't had games made for them yet... we've got a few decades of untapped material with potential.
Just set a ground rule: don't start development of the game until the movie is already done its theatre run, gone to rental, gone to Wal-Mart purchase, and been shown on normal broadcast TV.
By then, the biggest factors that work to make a movie game SUCK are gone:
1) the movie is finished, and the game cannot increase hype for the movie, therefore there is no reason to rush or cut corners. There is no pressure to get the thing out the door before the movie is out.
2) the movie is finished, and therefore the movie's name on the box won't be enough to sell the game. Thus the game will actually have to be good on its own merits.
It isn't a guarantee of success, but it sure helps avoid failure.