Is she saying that geekiness has made this married man and/or his wife infertile in some way? Hmm.
I'd throw my wooden clogs at this robot, but the dog chewed them up.
It would be only a matter of time before we developed LOLRats, thus solving both problems.
I'm cautiously optimistic about this. The Fukushima disaster was horrible, but the plant design and safety features there seem to have been somewhat poorly planned, and it was, after all, a very extreme situation. With proper caution, nuclear power is very safe. It's definitely safer to live near a nuclear reactor than, say, a coal-burning power plant.
Whether they can make it economical enough to actually be worth it is another issue, however... Still, yay for a possible very slight reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, I guess?
"Star Trek is at least in lip-service a post-scarcity world... [Wasting time and/or fucking around is] a lot of what we do now, and we're not even close to post-much at all. No one is frivolous in the future."
Maybe "Grandma DS9" would argue that the answer is right there in the implied question... :P
Hearted. :D
Indeed, it's a well-known fact that killer whales can't survive in a natural environment, and without human protection would probably all be snatched up by sea-coyotes.
The "military" in Avatar isn't really a national army or something, though -- just a corporate security force. And the movie tries to be relatively realistic about interstellar travel, which means they're severely limited in how much equipment they can bring to Pandora -- interstellar travel is expensive, the starship's cargo capacity is limited, and every last gram counts. They wouldn't be shipping tanks or nuclear bombs to Pandora. They also wouldn't have a lot of spare mass to drop onto Pandora from orbit "rod-of-god" style -- again, that starship couldn't afford to have any mass on it that wasn't actually useful for something. Those mech-like AMP suits were designed to be multi-functional, not pure combat machines, which is why they don't carry rockets or lasers. The AMP suits spend most of their time moving cargo around and helping the humans build shelter and what-not, rather than being some sort of dedicated alien-fighting native-oppressing machines.
Politics and PR are also mentioned in the movie -- Pandora is being mined by a corporation that has to worry about things like marketing, shareholders, and maybe even legal consequences for the actions it takes. Nuking a bunch of giant natives from orbit would probably make BP's oil spill look like good publicity. :P
I'd say that sounds plausible. It'd definitely take time. Of course we can only speculate about how much time. Safe self-driving cars probably won't be saving any lives any time next week... But then, what early-stage technology in development today will?
Yeah, I'm not clear on how behavioural, lifestyle, and social changes are easier to implement. They seem like they're the *hardest* changes to implement. It's easy for one person to decide to change their behaviour and work on that; but how do you convince any significant fraction of the population to do so? In order for such changes to yield "remarkable solutions" on a world-changing scale, a lot of people would have to adopt them. And I don't see how it could be easy to convince a large number of people to change their behaviour, lifestyle, and the way they act socially. In fact, psychology seems to tell us that that's exactly the sort of change that's *hard* to make.
I'd definitely love to see a number of lifestyle and behaviour changes, and a number of broad social changes, and you're right that such things can potentially change the world far more than any technology. But things like that usually evolve slowly and in a somewhat unguided way, and the most any single entity can hope to do is apply a bit of pressure here and there through, say, the media, and even that won't work as intended most of the time.
I mean... Okay, how would a company, or any other entity, go about pursuing such solutions? Would Google put up a bunch of public service ads to try and get people to drive defensively? Because I don't think that would be a very effective way of changing the world...
A technological change is something that seems much more clear-cut and easier for someone to consciously achieve.
Actually, my point was that drunk drivers and animals darting out on the road and the like could be exactly the situations where a hypothetical super-advanced self-driving car could handle things better than a human. Studded with sensors pointed in every direction and with a powerful on-board computer integrating all this input and acting on it with speeds beyond the capacity of any human, it could instantly analyse the situation, calculate the course of action -- applying the breaks, swerving in one direction or another, whatever -- most likely to get the passengers out of the mess alive and well, and then take it.
(Not to mention that there won't be so many drunk drivers on the road to begin with -- a drunk gets into their car, "beep-boop, my integrated breathalyser detects that you are too drunk to drive, manual controls locked out, autopilot for home engaged" -- could save quite a few lives right there).
Even a limited self-driving car that had to follow, say, some sort of indicator along the road like a train on rails would benefit from having near-instant reflexes, applying the breaks in just the right way the moment something appears on the road ahead.
This is definitely something of a sci-fi-ish scenario for now, but 1) that's exactly why it's exciting that some company is working to develop the early stages of the technology today, and 2) while we've had many "where's my jetpack" -- style disappointments about the future, computer technology is the one field where technological progress has been, and seems to still be, fast and exciting, and that's exactly the field of technological progress that may eventually lead to self-driving cars.
Anyway, those are my speculations. You're right that cars are insanely expensive, but processing power, on the other hand, is always getting cheaper, so in the end, once the technology matures, it may not add that much to the cost of cars today. I think that if the technology keeps being developed, there will definitely be a day -- probably several decades in the future, but still -- when insurance companies will give significant breaks to people who are willing to let adrenaline-free, reaction-delay-free, eternally-sober computers do their driving for them, and it will be the old-fashioned and adventurous "manual" drivers who'll be shafted with increased premiums. :P
A *lot* of people are killed in car accidents on a regular basis. If driver-less cars could be made reliable and safe, they actually could potentially save a lot of lives.
The wikipedia page on this says the planets are indeed to scale: [en.wikipedia.org]
The scale Jupiter is about 11.2 times the size of the scale Earth, for example, which matches reality.
I think it's more a case of English-language culture becoming fairly popular amongst younger Swedes, and that would certainly include dirty words and naughty puns.
I'm referring to this: [www.amazon.ca]
I'm just trying to understand -- "The Last of Us" is an upcoming game, right? So, again, would this not be a new image, if it was for that game? I am holding in my hands a book printed four or five years ago that has this exact same picture on its cover. Hence my confusion. Perhaps it is just a stock image that has been used in many places, including book covers, game design, etc.?
But it seems any concept art for that game would be brand-new; I'm sure this particular image has been around for years.
So we need a pirate Twitter, with servers situated on some sort of giant floating platform in the middle of the Pacific...
This sounds like a fairly standard plot, though of course that doesn't mean they can't take it in some fascinating new direction... But the plot of the new-ish War of the Worlds movie was kind of the same, wasn't it? And I'm sure there are plenty of other "family separated during/after the apocalypse" stories out there... So just that, by itself, doesn't excite me terribly, unless this is some unique new twist, or at least has actually interesting characters.
