I call BS. Artificial intelligence is more difficult, and gets us more benefits in the end. We get any practical space travel as a side effect of solving AI.
...we'd get the cure for AIDs as a trivial side effect of artificial intellgience development. Oh wait, that would have required imagination! What was I thinking?
Actually, if you've ever seen a candy bar manufacturing plant, we have primitive versions right now. It's not all going to look like a little maker-bot.
Be that as it may, yes, I expect that large scale items (http://www.blueprintmagazine.co.uk/index.php/architecture/the-worlds-first-printed-building/) are next, followed by organics (http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/cliff-kuang/design-innovation/need-artery-just-print-one-out), edible and not and electronics (http://blog.objet.com/2011/11/07/3d-printed-circuit-boards-maybe-with-an-objet-connex/). There's too much money to be made by reducing startup costs AND getting expensive humans out of the process. That money is going to go chase that technology. As a side effect of that technology, which gets faster, cheaper and more advanced, we eventually see an ecology of such bots and widespread, easy availability.
FYI, as someone who grew up with a "party line" wired telephone but now carries an android around, this level of technical change looks fairly plausible.
Ooh, Oooh! An easy one! OK, more and more smart guys come over temporarily. Many choose to stay, get married, raise children and more importantly, start businesses that generate money here, instead of their own countries.
As maker-bot technology gets more sophisticated, can create more complex objects (even foodstuffs) and cheapens, it lends itself to mass production. I'm going to be very interested to see if China's manufacturing sector stands up to this over the next 20 years or so.
1) They were never allowed to physically meet lawmakers, ever.
2) All requests were limited to about 1000 words per week, in email.
3) All such requests were publically viewable via the internet as unformatted text files.
4) All lawmakers submitted their finances to lifelong review after serving with an eye to spotting cash sources from foreign bank accounts. Better still, make having foreign accounts or receiving money from foreign accounts a felony for ex-lawmakers.
5) No ex-lawmaker was ever allowed to act as a lobbyist, ever.
Only coincidentally. Most representatives of big oil tend to be Republican conservatives. Believe me, if there were an energetically and economically profitable alternative energy source, those greedheads would be on it tomorrow. Why not? Current alternative energy efforts by large companies are all for show. Anybody who's looked can see that the energy return on most of the alternative energy sources is pretty poor and on those where it's not so poor, it's not very scalable (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fe/EROI_-_Ratio_of_Energy_Returned_on_Energy_Invested_-_USA.svg/450px-EROI_-_Ratio_of_Energy_Returned_on_Energy_Invested_-_USA.svg.png). Unfortunately, powerdown is inevitable and while oil companies are trying to maximize profit until that happens, they really won't have to do much over the next 40 years as the cheap oil dwindles and inevitably becomes more expensive.
I call BS. Energy companies don't care what kind of energy they sell. If dead grandmothers turned out to be a significant energy sources, Shell and Exxon would just start buying up graveyards. If renewables produced enough energy to matter, Shell and Exxon would be busy transitioning their assets to it.
I call BS. "Works" for whom? From a human and societal standpoint, capitalism fails all the time and this is one example. The USA's "health care" system is another, with emphasis on pharmaceuticals that cost 1/100th of the American price. We could go on to where the bean counters in your company overrode the IT guys or the developers to save a few bucks, but you should be getting the idea by now.
Information hiding, fear and the exploitation of stupid people are the oldest capitalist tricks in the book as Apple has amply demonstrated. Other examples would include the real estate market, hedge funds, the equities market and the derivatives market.
Capitalism only "works" to preserve its hosts, the most successful capitalists. If coincidentally, it helps consumers or workers, then nifty (something that started its decline when the soviet union failed) but top capitalists couldn't care less either way.
Yet another inefficient solar collector that will save the world from oil dependence. I'm so sure we can scale up production to replace the 160 exajoules of energy provided by oil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil#Definition_and_energy_equivalents), which is what's currently required each year by industrial civilization.
Man, I just can't get enough of these "The energy crisis is solved!" stories. I've loved them since I was a kid in the 60s. Funny, how we're still gulping that oil though.
Slave labor or close enough and no safety or environmental safeguards. Excuse me, I have to go. The sound of folks sharpening those guillotines is getting too loud.
I see the results of "engineering-only" education every day. I see co-workers utterly lacking critical thinking skills or any curiosity, passively accepting whatever the mainstream media or the software vendors tell them, and who get insanely defensive when you poke holes in the wet toilet paper of their core political/cultural/technical/economic/religious beliefs. I see walking, living proof every day that technical competence != global intelligence.
Some of this is neurological, of course. I work in the software industry, an area filled with more than its share of mildly autistic souls. The rest, however, could have had their worldview drastically enhanced with a couple of courses in comparative cultural anthropology, a few philosophy courses discussing epistemology and some critical studies of human history, just as the liberal arts crew would benefit hugely from some significant study of math, physics and engineering.
No worries. Those giant plasma cloud events are never as much fun as the brochures make them look. Oh, sure they've got zero gravity, but how entertaining is that really?
To see insider trading going on at a respectable company like Dell of all places. I mean, look at the quality of their products and their stellar technical support (cough, cough).
Excuse me, I must mop up that sarcasm that's been dripping on the floor.
You thought your content was safe. You lost. You thought your content was secure. You lost. You thought your content couldn't be seen or decrypted by third parties. Odds are, you lost there too.
I wish I had more sympathy, but "the cloud" still looks like a sucker's game pushed by government-corporations as a way to acquire, monitor and control digital content for economic and political purposes. Think anything else and you're just being a gullible fool. Sorry, but that's the real world you see in those broken links today.
Slashdot Mirror
I call BS. Artificial intelligence is more difficult, and gets us more benefits in the end. We get any practical space travel as a side effect of solving AI.
It's gotten pretty darned crusty by this time, let me tell you!
...we'd get the cure for AIDs as a trivial side effect of artificial intellgience development. Oh wait, that would have required imagination! What was I thinking?
Actually, if you've ever seen a candy bar manufacturing plant, we have primitive versions right now. It's not all going to look like a little maker-bot.
Be that as it may, yes, I expect that large scale items (http://www.blueprintmagazine.co.uk/index.php/architecture/the-worlds-first-printed-building/) are next, followed by organics (http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/cliff-kuang/design-innovation/need-artery-just-print-one-out), edible and not and electronics (http://blog.objet.com/2011/11/07/3d-printed-circuit-boards-maybe-with-an-objet-connex/). There's too much money to be made by reducing startup costs AND getting expensive humans out of the process. That money is going to go chase that technology. As a side effect of that technology, which gets faster, cheaper and more advanced, we eventually see an ecology of such bots and widespread, easy availability.
FYI, as someone who grew up with a "party line" wired telephone but now carries an android around, this level of technical change looks fairly plausible.
Ooh, Oooh! An easy one! OK, more and more smart guys come over temporarily. Many choose to stay, get married, raise children and more importantly, start businesses that generate money here, instead of their own countries.
You mean like this one? http://store.makerbot.com/thing-o-matic-kit-mk7.html
As maker-bot technology gets more sophisticated, can create more complex objects (even foodstuffs) and cheapens, it lends itself to mass production. I'm going to be very interested to see if China's manufacturing sector stands up to this over the next 20 years or so.
1) They were never allowed to physically meet lawmakers, ever.
2) All requests were limited to about 1000 words per week, in email.
3) All such requests were publically viewable via the internet as unformatted text files.
4) All lawmakers submitted their finances to lifelong review after serving with an eye to spotting cash sources from foreign bank accounts. Better still, make having foreign accounts or receiving money from foreign accounts a felony for ex-lawmakers.
5) No ex-lawmaker was ever allowed to act as a lobbyist, ever.
You need a solar flare for that? Well, *now* you tell me.
Nonsense! You have the causality backwards. Solar eruptions cause software piracy!
when congress at least tried to hide the bribery and corruption? Ahh......
Good luck running an industrial civilization on that.
Only coincidentally. Most representatives of big oil tend to be Republican conservatives. Believe me, if there were an energetically and economically profitable alternative energy source, those greedheads would be on it tomorrow. Why not? Current alternative energy efforts by large companies are all for show. Anybody who's looked can see that the energy return on most of the alternative energy sources is pretty poor and on those where it's not so poor, it's not very scalable (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fe/EROI_-_Ratio_of_Energy_Returned_on_Energy_Invested_-_USA.svg/450px-EROI_-_Ratio_of_Energy_Returned_on_Energy_Invested_-_USA.svg.png). Unfortunately, powerdown is inevitable and while oil companies are trying to maximize profit until that happens, they really won't have to do much over the next 40 years as the cheap oil dwindles and inevitably becomes more expensive.
I call BS. Energy companies don't care what kind of energy they sell. If dead grandmothers turned out to be a significant energy sources, Shell and Exxon would just start buying up graveyards. If renewables produced enough energy to matter, Shell and Exxon would be busy transitioning their assets to it.
I call BS. "Works" for whom? From a human and societal standpoint, capitalism fails all the time and this is one example. The USA's "health care" system is another, with emphasis on pharmaceuticals that cost 1/100th of the American price. We could go on to where the bean counters in your company overrode the IT guys or the developers to save a few bucks, but you should be getting the idea by now.
Information hiding, fear and the exploitation of stupid people are the oldest capitalist tricks in the book as Apple has amply demonstrated. Other examples would include the real estate market, hedge funds, the equities market and the derivatives market.
Capitalism only "works" to preserve its hosts, the most successful capitalists. If coincidentally, it helps consumers or workers, then nifty (something that started its decline when the soviet union failed) but top capitalists couldn't care less either way.
Yet another inefficient solar collector that will save the world from oil dependence. I'm so sure we can scale up production to replace the 160 exajoules of energy provided by oil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil#Definition_and_energy_equivalents), which is what's currently required each year by industrial civilization.
Man, I just can't get enough of these "The energy crisis is solved!" stories. I've loved them since I was a kid in the 60s. Funny, how we're still gulping that oil though.
Slave labor or close enough and no safety or environmental safeguards. Excuse me, I have to go. The sound of folks sharpening those guillotines is getting too loud.
I see the results of "engineering-only" education every day. I see co-workers utterly lacking critical thinking skills or any curiosity, passively accepting whatever the mainstream media or the software vendors tell them, and who get insanely defensive when you poke holes in the wet toilet paper of their core political/cultural/technical/economic/religious beliefs. I see walking, living proof every day that technical competence != global intelligence.
Some of this is neurological, of course. I work in the software industry, an area filled with more than its share of mildly autistic souls. The rest, however, could have had their worldview drastically enhanced with a couple of courses in comparative cultural anthropology, a few philosophy courses discussing epistemology and some critical studies of human history, just as the liberal arts crew would benefit hugely from some significant study of math, physics and engineering.
'Cause I was hoping to move there.
Could you put that in terms of femtocubits per lakh?
And all I got was this lousy plasma burn.
Whoa! Good thing I have several!
No worries. Those giant plasma cloud events are never as much fun as the brochures make them look. Oh, sure they've got zero gravity, but how entertaining is that really?
To see insider trading going on at a respectable company like Dell of all places. I mean, look at the quality of their products and their stellar technical support (cough, cough).
Excuse me, I must mop up that sarcasm that's been dripping on the floor.
You thought your content was safe. You lost. You thought your content was secure. You lost. You thought your content couldn't be seen or decrypted by third parties. Odds are, you lost there too.
I wish I had more sympathy, but "the cloud" still looks like a sucker's game pushed by government-corporations as a way to acquire, monitor and control digital content for economic and political purposes. Think anything else and you're just being a gullible fool. Sorry, but that's the real world you see in those broken links today.
No flame. You're right. Any good escape plans? I'm looking at Chile.