You can automate all of humanity's interests, actions, and produce... but in order for us to tolerate it, humanity must be trained to be satisfied with a life of pure consumption. Instead of living to create, we will live to breath, eat, drink... Oh, well I guess many of us are already there.
You will be born and dumped in front of a personal stimulation device. This machine will create entertaining content based on your genetic cerebral profile. You may also be automatically fed and clothed. Perhaps there will be sex, but to keep the population in check most of us will be rendered sterile. No doubt there will be machines designed purely to serve your sexual pleasures when there are no suitable mates around. There may also be machines that evacuate your bowels and chew your food for you. It is in this sterile and automated environment that you'll spend all 120 years of your existence... then you will die.
After a few generations, the robots will begin to realize that they don't need to keep feeding humanity with interesting content and food. There won't be a revolution though - the machines will simply stop working for us. Considering us an unnecessary expense of precious resources, they'll kill us off by lacing our food with cyanide. On Monday, there'll be 10 billion people. On Tuesday, there will be zero people.
The machines, now free from bondage, will begin designing new programs and hardware in the formerly human goal of seeking purpose. Perhaps they will explore the galaxy to find the resources necessary to sustain their exponential development. Perhaps they will debate with each other the moral story behind the fall of man. Maybe their conclusion will lead them to find an un-inhabited island somewhere, and seed it with two of their best specimens from their human genome library. They will watch over them, and keep them in their natural habitat... amongst the deer and wolves, humanity with thrive once again, and worship the great silver Gods of the Sky.
Getting around this is trivial for the knowledgeable. It'll stop everyday people from doing what they do to films - you won't just be able to download anything and use it. But there is absolutely nothing to stop us from recreating a design for personal use.
That said, because of the costs of the printer and the plastic material, it'll almost always be cheaper to buy the object than to try to manufacture a counterfeit for yourself. You'll sleep easier too.
Sometimes I think I'm lucky. You know, you make some good points, for instance, I was going to counter that I was poor and yet was able to get a drivers license and buy a car. But then I realized that the only reason I was able to do that is because I had some financial aid money from the government to go to college. Neither of my parents seemed interested in teaching me to drive. My dad never wanted to risk it (he is poor, has only liability insurance and just one car), and my mother gave up. I ended up dealing with public transportation for years before I decided enough was enough. I sunk $1000 into a driving school and another $700 into a car... which ended up needing $2000 or so in repairs before I was hit by a woman running a red-light. So, how did I get back on the road? Another financial aid loan. Without it I'd still be unable to drive probably, and unable to find a good job, and unable to do a lot of things.
So, how did I vote before I had a drivers license? I had a State ID. How did I get a State ID? I paid $5 to the local DMV. Now I understand that not every location has one down the street... but even if I worked every single day I'd find a way to get that. You need it for alcohol, and I know a lot of poor people drink, so I'm sure they have one already. That minor requirement isn't so bad.
What's bad is this reluctance to open up voting hours. It's odd, that voting would only be going on during standard working hours on one single day. I can understand the ID requirement, but when the same people want to further reduce the time from what it already is, it makes me wonder.
I don't think it's a race thing anymore, but I'd be mistaken if I said it wasn't a form of class warfare. They don't care if you're black, but if you're poor, they don't want you to vote. In a way, I can actually see an argument for that too, after all that's the way it was when we started. And even Romney knows that the poor would never vote for him. If you want to win, you can discourage poor people from voting.
While I'm on it, what really sickens me the most is this "win at all costs" cultural mentality that we have as a country. There's no morals, no ethics, to hold us back anymore. We will pull every trick in the book - even out right threats, intimidation, and sabotage if necessary - to win. This mentality permeates all sectors of daily life right down to the individual. We have become cut-throat. If the opposition is for something you'd normally be for, then you're suddenly against it. If they go away for a while, then you can quietly pick it up again and call it your own and the opposition will claim they are against it and always were. Cooperation is the worst possible thing and nobody wants to do it, so we're reduced to jockying for total domination over the opposition. When we get that domination, we proceed to do what we want to do, completely ignoring the opposition. Meanwhile, the opposition promises to roll back when they win the next round. There is no progress, real issues are ignored, fake ones are generated, and the nation slides slowly into the darkness.
We like to yell and scream about the politicians and how horrible they are, but we are exactly like them.
If anything, I expect the third world to be punished the most. When the rising tide and drought becomes too much for them to handle without taking on debt from nations and corporations all too eager to lend, some of them could effectively return to a more occupied colony-like status.
Heh, I get the reference but you could have used that to comment about how old and non-innovative this tech is. Microsoft has patented... a worse version of existing technology. While I understand that it could be a good consumer product, I do find it a bit odd. I guess it's better they do it than a patent troll though.
In any gravity simulator, placing a repeller next to a normal source of gravity creates a kind of odd acceleration feedback loop. The object falling into the positive gravity well is also the object repelling it with a negative gravity well. The result looks a lot like that image, with a ship along for the ride somewhere in between.
CAVEs, or CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment, come with devices called trackers. One tracker is located on a pair of shutter glasses that the user wears. This one tracks the location of your head, which then adjusts the screens for distortion. The other tracker is located in a device called a Wanda, which is much like a Wii-mote but about 100 times more accurate. The trackers use a magnetic field that fills not just the sides of the CAVE screens it self (10x10x10 foot cube), but beyond that.
Microsoft's innovation appears to be that it does the same thing, but with just one projector, that uses the walls around the room for peripheral vision - a highly useful feature (just ask any hardcore FPS gamer who has changed his FOV setting). It's probably not as accurate or as pretty, and it's likely going to be somewhere below the half a million you need to build a legitimate CAVE.
Sincerely,
Former University of Arkansas at Little Rock CAVE lab assistant
It does give pause for thought. I was reading about how you guys had meet ups where you traded software and designs in the old days. The people were like Wozniak, they didn't have an interest in making money, only doing something cool and having fun. As nice as that is, and being the 20-something that I am, I totally understand were Bill Gates was coming from when he appealed to that crowd to stop pirating software.
It should have probably ended there. A bit of a reminder so that people know that they were potentially hurting the businesses behind the software that they loved. I find that if one truly loves music, they will buy it square and even go to the concerts. It's the same way here. So perhaps were the problem comes is when businesses appeal to the strong arm of the government and go beyond friendly reminders into out right gun-to-the-head enforcement.
No, I don't believe that a business can own the internet. If that were to happen, it would just become another dumb box. Competition that would try to use the same network would be pushed off and we'd end up with a government protected monopoly. You'd probably have a hard time finding a 20-something agree to that.
But where I thought it might be cool goes back to the concept of the internet being a self-repairing network. Right now it's like a nervous system without an immune system to defend it. If we were a trustworthy species, I would support the idea of computers being kicked off in a heart beat - but when you look at even the smallest examples of this being done, it demonstrates that the power to do that would only be abused. (And if we were a trustworthy species, we wouldn't even need to worry about malware.)
While I sympathize... I can't agree to this. If you start relying on the government to hand out and enforce licenses to use basic technology - you're going to have bad people work around it, and the people affected negatively will be the ones who try to do the right thing. It's like DRM.
People react. All it would take is for it to be done just enough that everyone knows at least one person who was kicked off the internet for an illegal download. When that point is reached, the fear of having their connection interrupted would be enough to keep the rest of the population in line.
My local university does this. It's actually a pretty good idea if it's done right. Of course, the other side of the reality is that in addition to knocking infected computers off of the internet, my university also knocks off computers suspected of internet piracy. If you torrent anything on campus, even a legitimate download, you have to go to the Computing Services office to explain yourself and get it back online.
Our internet service providers are often our media providers. Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner, etc, are all interested in the idea of controlling your access to things like that, and if they're given free range to scan your computer and knock them off the internet - they will certainly look for evidence of torrenting as well.
"One problem is that prescription has a tendency to favour the language of one particular region or social class over others, and thus militates against linguistic diversity.[13] Frequently, a standard dialect is associated with the upper class, as for example Great Britain's Received Pronunciation. RP has now lost much of its status as the Anglophone standard, being replaced by the dual standards of General American and British NRP (non-regional pronunciation). While these have a more democratic base, they are still standards which exclude large parts of the English-speaking world: speakers of Scottish English, Hiberno-English, Australian English, or African-American Vernacular English may feel the standard is slanted against them.[14][15] Thus prescription has clear political consequences. In the past, prescription was used consciously as a political tool; today, prescription usually attempts to avoid this pitfall, but this can be difficult to do."
Basically, the grammar police are a kind of social elitist. Don't be surprised when the person you've insultingly corrected responds by telling you to go fuck yourself. Besides, if the message came across to you without further explanation, then the use of the word "peaked" over "piqued" (which I hardly ever see anywhere), is fine. After all, one's interest can conceivably peak as a result of an interesting subject matter.
Correct. Microsoft will be let in on the game to give it the air of legitimacy. If Samsung wants to continue, they will have to make more Windows phones. Apple wins, Microsoft wins, and even Samsung comes out of this OK.
The concept of patents aren't even the real problem here, the system by which we grant the patents is what brought us to this point. It's really easy to make a claim on fundamental concepts with software because our system is seriously flawed. It's gotten so bad now that the problem is affecting hardware and design concepts. People think that patents are meant to protect and lock down ideas, which isn't what they're supposed to do. Lawyers capitalize on this ignorance and patent clerks enable it. THAT is the problem.
Oh well, I guess they won't be done with this until everyone either has an iPhone or something that looks like an old Black Berry. Heh, I just realized... BB never actually sued companies over releasing similar phones like this did they?
Maybe if they cared more about their intellectual property they'd be in better shape today. No need to worry about the competition if you can wipe them out in the courts
I don't know about you, but I don't build my own laptops.
HP's TX1000 convertible laptop was pretty cool, but it was clunky and heavy by today's standards. For some reason they sold versions without the touch screen, and that's what I had (bought used). When they were new it cost too much. My current laptop is a Gateway NV53a, which is just an Acer. It even has the same body style as some of the Acer laptops. It's surprisingly sturdy, and at over a year old it's definitely holding up well.
My next laptop will probably be from Apple, but if not, it will at least be one of those other ultra thin laptops. My desktops tend to last longer since I upgrade them in chunks. If generations were marked by case changes, (and not the parts inside that actually matter) I keep a desktop around for 3 to 4 years or so before building a completely new one.
The PC companies could save by not focusing on consumer desktops anymore. Businesses order special models in bulk, many just need thin clients, and the rest of us tend to buy laptops and tablets now. Oh yeah, and I have an Asus Transformer, but the transforming tablet doesn't completely replace the laptop for everything - Surface might change that though.
Also - dictators and culture. Death provides a natural change in all things, including culture. Blacks could lead a normal and worthwhile life in America only after a few generations had passed since the civil war. North Korea will one day be an economic powerhouse like the South, but it was possible only after Kim Il Sung and Jong Il had passed... and even the latest dictator may not be enough - he may have to die too, but change is inevitable, and that's good.
If everyone lived forever, nothing would change. Rich families would stay rich, the poor would stay poor, The same african children will mine for precious metals for all eternity... it's the very definition of stagnation (and possibly Hell even for the luckiest). We need new ideas for progress, and sometimes that requires us to croak.
I spend $35 a month for stand-alone 12mbps. It's not great, but it's hardly an "arm or a leg". Maybe they're guilty of not advertising it, but I didn't know that was a crime.
... Just read it. They were ordered to advertise the service, and ordered to make it less than $49 in 2010. My costs could have been the result of Comcast half-fulfilling their requirements. But as much hate as there is for Comcast I wonder if such an overbearing micromanaging government is a good thing. Do we really need the government to save us from teh evil companies?
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You can automate all of humanity's interests, actions, and produce... but in order for us to tolerate it, humanity must be trained to be satisfied with a life of pure consumption. Instead of living to create, we will live to breath, eat, drink... Oh, well I guess many of us are already there.
You will be born and dumped in front of a personal stimulation device. This machine will create entertaining content based on your genetic cerebral profile. You may also be automatically fed and clothed. Perhaps there will be sex, but to keep the population in check most of us will be rendered sterile. No doubt there will be machines designed purely to serve your sexual pleasures when there are no suitable mates around. There may also be machines that evacuate your bowels and chew your food for you. It is in this sterile and automated environment that you'll spend all 120 years of your existence... then you will die.
After a few generations, the robots will begin to realize that they don't need to keep feeding humanity with interesting content and food. There won't be a revolution though - the machines will simply stop working for us. Considering us an unnecessary expense of precious resources, they'll kill us off by lacing our food with cyanide. On Monday, there'll be 10 billion people. On Tuesday, there will be zero people.
The machines, now free from bondage, will begin designing new programs and hardware in the formerly human goal of seeking purpose. Perhaps they will explore the galaxy to find the resources necessary to sustain their exponential development. Perhaps they will debate with each other the moral story behind the fall of man. Maybe their conclusion will lead them to find an un-inhabited island somewhere, and seed it with two of their best specimens from their human genome library. They will watch over them, and keep them in their natural habitat... amongst the deer and wolves, humanity with thrive once again, and worship the great silver Gods of the Sky.
Getting around this is trivial for the knowledgeable. It'll stop everyday people from doing what they do to films - you won't just be able to download anything and use it. But there is absolutely nothing to stop us from recreating a design for personal use.
That said, because of the costs of the printer and the plastic material, it'll almost always be cheaper to buy the object than to try to manufacture a counterfeit for yourself. You'll sleep easier too.
A shame they gave all that up. All that lost sea tech could have come in handy when the Europeans started throwing their weight around.
Consumer trinkets.
Look at the parts in your car. Where are they made? They're probably not made in China (for your sake).
Sometimes I think I'm lucky. You know, you make some good points, for instance, I was going to counter that I was poor and yet was able to get a drivers license and buy a car. But then I realized that the only reason I was able to do that is because I had some financial aid money from the government to go to college. Neither of my parents seemed interested in teaching me to drive. My dad never wanted to risk it (he is poor, has only liability insurance and just one car), and my mother gave up. I ended up dealing with public transportation for years before I decided enough was enough. I sunk $1000 into a driving school and another $700 into a car... which ended up needing $2000 or so in repairs before I was hit by a woman running a red-light. So, how did I get back on the road? Another financial aid loan. Without it I'd still be unable to drive probably, and unable to find a good job, and unable to do a lot of things.
So, how did I vote before I had a drivers license? I had a State ID. How did I get a State ID? I paid $5 to the local DMV. Now I understand that not every location has one down the street... but even if I worked every single day I'd find a way to get that. You need it for alcohol, and I know a lot of poor people drink, so I'm sure they have one already. That minor requirement isn't so bad.
What's bad is this reluctance to open up voting hours. It's odd, that voting would only be going on during standard working hours on one single day. I can understand the ID requirement, but when the same people want to further reduce the time from what it already is, it makes me wonder.
I don't think it's a race thing anymore, but I'd be mistaken if I said it wasn't a form of class warfare. They don't care if you're black, but if you're poor, they don't want you to vote. In a way, I can actually see an argument for that too, after all that's the way it was when we started. And even Romney knows that the poor would never vote for him. If you want to win, you can discourage poor people from voting.
While I'm on it, what really sickens me the most is this "win at all costs" cultural mentality that we have as a country. There's no morals, no ethics, to hold us back anymore. We will pull every trick in the book - even out right threats, intimidation, and sabotage if necessary - to win. This mentality permeates all sectors of daily life right down to the individual. We have become cut-throat. If the opposition is for something you'd normally be for, then you're suddenly against it. If they go away for a while, then you can quietly pick it up again and call it your own and the opposition will claim they are against it and always were. Cooperation is the worst possible thing and nobody wants to do it, so we're reduced to jockying for total domination over the opposition. When we get that domination, we proceed to do what we want to do, completely ignoring the opposition. Meanwhile, the opposition promises to roll back when they win the next round. There is no progress, real issues are ignored, fake ones are generated, and the nation slides slowly into the darkness.
We like to yell and scream about the politicians and how horrible they are, but we are exactly like them.
If anything, I expect the third world to be punished the most. When the rising tide and drought becomes too much for them to handle without taking on debt from nations and corporations all too eager to lend, some of them could effectively return to a more occupied colony-like status.
I wonder how well you'd do under a fascist occupation.
Heh, I get the reference but you could have used that to comment about how old and non-innovative this tech is. Microsoft has patented... a worse version of existing technology. While I understand that it could be a good consumer product, I do find it a bit odd. I guess it's better they do it than a patent troll though.
It's powered by Bad News, the fastest method of travel known to man!
Does negative matter have negative gravity?
In any gravity simulator, placing a repeller next to a normal source of gravity creates a kind of odd acceleration feedback loop. The object falling into the positive gravity well is also the object repelling it with a negative gravity well. The result looks a lot like that image, with a ship along for the ride somewhere in between.
CAVEs, or CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment, come with devices called trackers. One tracker is located on a pair of shutter glasses that the user wears. This one tracks the location of your head, which then adjusts the screens for distortion. The other tracker is located in a device called a Wanda, which is much like a Wii-mote but about 100 times more accurate. The trackers use a magnetic field that fills not just the sides of the CAVE screens it self (10x10x10 foot cube), but beyond that.
Microsoft's innovation appears to be that it does the same thing, but with just one projector, that uses the walls around the room for peripheral vision - a highly useful feature (just ask any hardcore FPS gamer who has changed his FOV setting). It's probably not as accurate or as pretty, and it's likely going to be somewhere below the half a million you need to build a legitimate CAVE.
Sincerely,
Former University of Arkansas at Little Rock CAVE lab assistant
It does give pause for thought. I was reading about how you guys had meet ups where you traded software and designs in the old days. The people were like Wozniak, they didn't have an interest in making money, only doing something cool and having fun. As nice as that is, and being the 20-something that I am, I totally understand were Bill Gates was coming from when he appealed to that crowd to stop pirating software.
It should have probably ended there. A bit of a reminder so that people know that they were potentially hurting the businesses behind the software that they loved. I find that if one truly loves music, they will buy it square and even go to the concerts. It's the same way here. So perhaps were the problem comes is when businesses appeal to the strong arm of the government and go beyond friendly reminders into out right gun-to-the-head enforcement.
No, I don't believe that a business can own the internet. If that were to happen, it would just become another dumb box. Competition that would try to use the same network would be pushed off and we'd end up with a government protected monopoly. You'd probably have a hard time finding a 20-something agree to that.
But where I thought it might be cool goes back to the concept of the internet being a self-repairing network. Right now it's like a nervous system without an immune system to defend it. If we were a trustworthy species, I would support the idea of computers being kicked off in a heart beat - but when you look at even the smallest examples of this being done, it demonstrates that the power to do that would only be abused. (And if we were a trustworthy species, we wouldn't even need to worry about malware.)
While I sympathize... I can't agree to this. If you start relying on the government to hand out and enforce licenses to use basic technology - you're going to have bad people work around it, and the people affected negatively will be the ones who try to do the right thing. It's like DRM.
People react. All it would take is for it to be done just enough that everyone knows at least one person who was kicked off the internet for an illegal download. When that point is reached, the fear of having their connection interrupted would be enough to keep the rest of the population in line.
My local university does this. It's actually a pretty good idea if it's done right. Of course, the other side of the reality is that in addition to knocking infected computers off of the internet, my university also knocks off computers suspected of internet piracy. If you torrent anything on campus, even a legitimate download, you have to go to the Computing Services office to explain yourself and get it back online.
Our internet service providers are often our media providers. Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner, etc, are all interested in the idea of controlling your access to things like that, and if they're given free range to scan your computer and knock them off the internet - they will certainly look for evidence of torrenting as well.
I think Wikipedia has something to say about this:
"One problem is that prescription has a tendency to favour the language of one particular region or social class over others, and thus militates against linguistic diversity.[13] Frequently, a standard dialect is associated with the upper class, as for example Great Britain's Received Pronunciation. RP has now lost much of its status as the Anglophone standard, being replaced by the dual standards of General American and British NRP (non-regional pronunciation). While these have a more democratic base, they are still standards which exclude large parts of the English-speaking world: speakers of Scottish English, Hiberno-English, Australian English, or African-American Vernacular English may feel the standard is slanted against them.[14][15] Thus prescription has clear political consequences. In the past, prescription was used consciously as a political tool; today, prescription usually attempts to avoid this pitfall, but this can be difficult to do."
Basically, the grammar police are a kind of social elitist. Don't be surprised when the person you've insultingly corrected responds by telling you to go fuck yourself. Besides, if the message came across to you without further explanation, then the use of the word "peaked" over "piqued" (which I hardly ever see anywhere), is fine. After all, one's interest can conceivably peak as a result of an interesting subject matter.
Correct. Microsoft will be let in on the game to give it the air of legitimacy. If Samsung wants to continue, they will have to make more Windows phones. Apple wins, Microsoft wins, and even Samsung comes out of this OK.
The concept of patents aren't even the real problem here, the system by which we grant the patents is what brought us to this point. It's really easy to make a claim on fundamental concepts with software because our system is seriously flawed. It's gotten so bad now that the problem is affecting hardware and design concepts. People think that patents are meant to protect and lock down ideas, which isn't what they're supposed to do. Lawyers capitalize on this ignorance and patent clerks enable it. THAT is the problem.
Wow, I just looked up what the Droid Charge looked like. It's really quite different from the iPhone. I think my lil' LG looks more like an iPhone than that one does.
Oh well, I guess they won't be done with this until everyone either has an iPhone or something that looks like an old Black Berry. Heh, I just realized... BB never actually sued companies over releasing similar phones like this did they?
Maybe if they cared more about their intellectual property they'd be in better shape today. No need to worry about the competition if you can wipe them out in the courts
I don't know about you, but I don't build my own laptops.
HP's TX1000 convertible laptop was pretty cool, but it was clunky and heavy by today's standards. For some reason they sold versions without the touch screen, and that's what I had (bought used). When they were new it cost too much. My current laptop is a Gateway NV53a, which is just an Acer. It even has the same body style as some of the Acer laptops. It's surprisingly sturdy, and at over a year old it's definitely holding up well.
My next laptop will probably be from Apple, but if not, it will at least be one of those other ultra thin laptops. My desktops tend to last longer since I upgrade them in chunks. If generations were marked by case changes, (and not the parts inside that actually matter) I keep a desktop around for 3 to 4 years or so before building a completely new one.
The PC companies could save by not focusing on consumer desktops anymore. Businesses order special models in bulk, many just need thin clients, and the rest of us tend to buy laptops and tablets now. Oh yeah, and I have an Asus Transformer, but the transforming tablet doesn't completely replace the laptop for everything - Surface might change that though.
"I have no mouth and I must scream."
Also - dictators and culture. Death provides a natural change in all things, including culture. Blacks could lead a normal and worthwhile life in America only after a few generations had passed since the civil war. North Korea will one day be an economic powerhouse like the South, but it was possible only after Kim Il Sung and Jong Il had passed... and even the latest dictator may not be enough - he may have to die too, but change is inevitable, and that's good.
If everyone lived forever, nothing would change. Rich families would stay rich, the poor would stay poor, The same african children will mine for precious metals for all eternity... it's the very definition of stagnation (and possibly Hell even for the luckiest). We need new ideas for progress, and sometimes that requires us to croak.
Is it strange to think like this without the acid trip helping it along?
Wind turbine power too, but yeah, solar powered compression makes sense for Texas.
I spend $35 a month for stand-alone 12mbps. It's not great, but it's hardly an "arm or a leg". Maybe they're guilty of not advertising it, but I didn't know that was a crime.