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With new facts come new ideas. It won't take long before you have a list of the things the robot can't do, so you have to build a new robot, and send it up. ... Really slows things down, doesn't it?

As Steven Weinberg points out in his excellent article The Wrong Stuff, if we hadn't wasted money on the useless shuttle program, we could instead have simply replaced the Hubble telescope seven times.

Thanks to unmanned space observatories, we now know e.g. that the universe is not "10-20 billion years old", but 13.5-13.9 billion years. With seven Hubbles, could we now have e.g. found extraterrestrial life? Is that worth giving up so that humans can find out what it's like to play a saxophone in space?

Steven Weinberg, Nobel prize winning cosmologist, published this article a few months ago, detailing his reasons for not agreeing with the president's call for manned missions to the moon and mars. Basically, the argument is that science can be done cheaper and more safely by robots, and that people are clumsy and expensive. An interesting read to compare to the parent story, if for nothing else than to see what happens when scientists get old and opinionated.

So, indeed, it can be 'wrong'...but to whome? What is wrong for you can be right for another.

To scientists and engineers. As has been abundantly and repeated stated in the article!

You're the one pushing strawmen when you bring up comparisons between the space program and poverty, or tons and tons of unrelated things. The question we're looking at is very simple: "Is manned or unmanned space exploration better for learning about the solar system and expanding technology?"

That's why, given a finite amount of money one can spend on spacetravel, and the fact that human spacetravel is more expensive, the bigger part of the budget is bound to go to the human-part.

You've wasted 100s of kilobytes of text now, without writing one word to support that assertion.

Noticing that manned flight is more expensive than unmanned and deciding it should get more money is no more sensible than saying that air travel should get more money than car travel, because it too is more expensive.

My argument was that 'you can spend it better elsewhere' is a non-argument.

The only thing you're right about is that "you can spend it better elsewhere" is not the argument. The argument itself is much longer. This is equivalent to noticing that "The Bible" is not a holy book: it's just two words!

My point is, that everyone can say about everything that something would be better spend on something else.

They can say it. And they can be wrong.

This article has just heavily illustrated why manned spaceflight projects are the wrong idea for both scientific and economic reasons.

If you disagree, you have to attack the reasons given, not push out theoretical mumbo-jumbo that attacks the very idea that different things deserve different levels of spending.

definition of what constitutes 'better' and 'more efficient' spenditure is not any more valid then that of anyone else

If you don't even believe that people can validly compare the relative worth of different goals, then why even talking to anybody at all? You seem to have no trust in the effectiveness of human communication.

Well, Steven Weinberg comes up with the same number, plus or minus a couple of hundred million. And he's no slouch.

"640K should be enough for anyone" Bill Gates, 1981

Not according to this: excerpt.

The parent post was copied and pasted from the New York Review of Books.

This has been debated so often over the last 20 years that don't you think someone might have given an actual citation? You will never find such a reference (I tried).

Basically, your evidence sums up to remembering that someone (who you can't name) said it was true at some time and some context you're not sure of. There have been several biographies and uncounted articles about Gates, some by quite hostile writers, and if any of them could show he'd actually said this, despite his denials, that it would have come to light. It hasn't. (Like for instance Schwarzenegger's interview in Oui in the 70s in which he discusses drugs, group sex etc.; that came back to haunt him.)

In an article in the The New York Review of Books , the author quoted the same myth. Gates responded:

This is one of those "quotes" that won't seem to go away.

I've explained that it's wrong when it's come up every few years, including in a newspaper column and in interviews.

There is a lot of irony to this one. Lou Eggebrecht (who really designed the IBM PC original hardware) and I wanted to convince IBM to have a 32-bit address space, but the 68000 just wasn't ready. Lew had an early prototype but it would have delayed things at least a year.

The 8086/8088 architecture has a 20-bit address bus, and the instruction set only generates 20-bit addresses.

I and many others have said the industry "uses" an extra address bit every two years, as hardware and software become more powerful, so going from 16-bit to 20-bit was clearly not going to last us very long. The extra silicon to do 32-bit addressing is trivial, but it wasn't there. The VAX was around and all the 68000 people did was look at the VAX! 2 to the 20th is 1 megabyte (1024K), so you might ask why the difference between 640K and 1024K--where did the last 384K go?

The answer is that in that 1M of address space we had to accommodate RAM, ROM, and I/O addresses, and IBM laid it out so those other things started at 640K and used all the memory space up to 1M. If they had been a bit more careful we could have had 800K instead of 640K available.

In fact, we had 800K on the Sirius machine, which I got to have a lot of input on (designed by Chuck Peddle, who did the Commodore Pet and the 6502, too). The key problem though is not getting to use only 640K of the 1M of address space that was available. It's the 1M limit, which comes from having only 20 bits of address space, which is all that chip can handle!

So, this limit has nothing to do with any Microsoft software.

Although people talk about previous computing as 8-bit, it was 16-bit addressing in the 8080/Z80/6800/6502. So we had only 64K of addressability.

Amazingly people like Bob Harp (Vector Graphics--remember them?) went around the industry saying we should stick with that and just use bank switching techniques. Bank switching comes up whenever an address space is at the end of its life. It's a hack where you have more physical memory than logical memory. Fortunately we got enough applications moved to the 8086/8 machines to get the industry off of 16-bit addressing, but it was clear from the start the extra 4 bits wouldn't be sufficient for long.

Now you MIGHT think that the next time around the chip guys would get it right.

But NO, instead of going from 20 bits to 32 bits, we got the 286 chip next. Intel had its A team working on the 432 (remember that? Fortune had a silly article about how it was so far ahead of everyone, but it was a dead end even though its address space was fine). The 286's address space wasn't fine. It only had 24 bits. It used segments instead of pages and the segments were limited to 24 bits.

When Intel produced the 32-bit 386 chip, IBM delayed doing a 386 machine because they had a special version of the 286 that only they could get, and they ordered w

I was initially suspicious that lawyer's son Bill Gates was being evasive in not distinguishing between the statements "640K of memory should be enough for anybody." and "No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time." Well, nobody's saying you said "all time", Bill. But in Bill's defense, he also said "I did not say that", and one would hope that he's not being Clintonesque in word-niggling.

I did a little poking around to see if there was a more authoritative articulation of what the exact original quote supposedly was, and while I didn't find that, I found a better (and more recent) reference than that Katz Wired article.

Check out a fuller rebuttal including a long and moderately technical Gates email concerning the matter in this New Yorker article by James Fallows. It also touches on "dumb tech statements", the more general topic of this thread.

--LP

Freeman Dyson, of the Dyson Sphere fame, wrote an interesting critique of that book and its physics. Most importantly, he estimates that the nanobots as described in that book would have a speed of about 0.1 inches per second while flying through the air. There are also energy consumption issues.

Oh come on.

Words printed on an apparel is only a matter of opinion, at best; a biography intended to obtain attention and money is often not quite true; and laws here (US) sometimes make sense, sometime don't.

You proof doesn't really stand. "Laogai" in Chinese means "correction with labor" (lao: work, gai: change, reform), and working is mandetory for inmates, but does that make it "slave labor" if working condition is not inhumane (note I am not saying the working condition is good, just not enough reliable evidence to say otherwise)? Or is it better for the prison to be more like a vacation resort, where prisoners ass-rape each other to kill time, like in the US of A?

We built a site for the New York Review of Books years ago with an online subscription model and it's been very successful.

The key -- that some folk seem to miss -- is that you need content that people are willing to pay to access. All too often the content provided by a subscription site isn't worth the price even if it was free. It also helps if your publication's demographic actually has money.

As great of a quote as this is to bash on Bill.. it is simply not true, but is in fact an urban legend of sorts that has been widely circulated on the internet.

Here is an interview with him clarifying the fact.

There is also a good interview in the New York Review of Books that also attempts to shed a better light on the matter.

A recent example of SciFi influencing (predicting?) world polity is the concept of Anglosphere , coined by Neal Stephenson in The Diamond Age. It refers to a "natural", cultural-political unity amongst Anglo-saxon countries. As the war against Iraq appears to illustrate this concept, the phrase has come into widespread use, serving as the title of a recent book apparently intended to rally Britons against the EU.

Bill Gates claims that he never said 640K was enough memory. His denial appeared in an interview in the New York Review of Books. In fact, he says that he believed the opposite. (The slashdot audience can decide on his veracity.) Below is a quote from the article "He's Got Mail" by James Fallows:

One quote from Gates became infamous as a symbol of the company's arrogant attitude about such limits. It concerned how much memory, measured in kilobytes or "K," should be built into a personal computer. Gates is supposed to have said, "640K should be enough for anyone." The remark became the industry's equivalent of "Let them eat cake" because it seemed to combine lordly condescension with a lack of interest in operational details. After all, today's ordinary home computers have one hundred times as much memory as the industry's leader was calling "enough."

It appears that it was Marie Thérèse, not Marie Antoinette, who greeted news that the people lacked bread with qu'ils mangent de la brioche. (The phrase was cited in Rousseau's Confessions, published when Marie Antoinette was thirteen years old and still living in Austria.) And it now appears that Bill Gates never said anything about getting along with 640K. One Sunday afternoon I asked a friend in Seattle who knows Gates whether the quote was accurate or apocryphal. Late that night, to my amazement, I found a long e-mail from Gates in my inbox, laying out painstakingly the reasons why he had always believed the opposite of what the notorious quote implied. His main point was that the 640K limit in early PCs was imposed by the design of processing chips, not Gates's software, and he'd been pushing to raise the limit as hard and as often as he could. Yet despite Gates's convincing denial, the quote is unlikely to die. It's too convenient an expression of the computer industry's sense that no one can be sure what will happen next.

Click here to read the full article.

I researched this a few months ago. Earliest sighting (using Google Groups) was some time in the 90s in people's sigs, though sometimes it was attributed as "Bill Gates, 1981". Bill gave a long explanation of why it's something he wouldn't have said in this NY Times article from last year.

One tends to believe this because no one has ever given any source for this quote.

And how many Iraqui civilians are you prepared to kill to get to that point, 5,000? 50,000? 250,000?

The civilian casualties in vietnam were 1. million of which 325,000 were killed. Little reported in the US media is the fact that repression in Saudi Arabia is actually worse than Iraq. In addition to the state repression, murder of opponemts, torture etc women are treated only slightly better than under the Taliban.

The US, owner of the worlds largest arsenal of weapons of mass deestruction is claiming that it has to go to war to stop Iraq from making any weapons of mass destruction. In order to fight this war they plan to use land mines and cluster bombs - weapons the rest of the world believes should be banned.

Forgive me if I am unable to see the moral clarity in this siutuation that the administration and its appologists claim. From where I stand I see only a bunch of opportunistic hypocrites whose goals appear to be determined by electoral calculations rather the national good of either the US or Iraq.

So last month, the American Physical Society, representing some 40,000 physicists, expanded the ethical guidelines for researchers, in their Statements on Profession Conducts document. The new guidelines call for more ethics training in science and urge all research institutions to adopt the same set of misconduct procedures. The guidelines also clarify co-authors' roles and duties, making it clear that when you put your name on a paper, your reputation is on the line.

Biologists faced similar scandals during the Gallo and Imanishi-Kari cases in the 90's. Unlike Robert Gallo and David Baltimore, who survived the scandal virtually unscathed, the physicists involved in today's scandals are actually being held accountable.

The above info was compiled from an article that originally appeared here.

Urban Legend

Gates is supposed to have said, "640K should be enough for anyone." The remark became the industry's equivalent of "Let them eat cake" because it seemed to combine lordly condescension with a lack of interest in operational details. After all, today's ordinary home computers have one hundred times as much memory as the industry's leader was calling "enough."

It appears that it was Marie Thérèse, not Marie Antoinette, who greeted news that the people lacked bread with qu'ils mangent de la brioche. (The phrase was cited in Rousseau's Confessions, published when Marie Antoinette was thirteen years old and still living in Austria.) And it now appears that Bill Gates never said anything about getting along with 640K. One Sunday afternoon I asked a friend in Seattle who knows Gates whether the quote was accurate or apocryphal. Late that night, to my amazement, I found a long e-mail from Gates in my inbox, laying out painstakingly the reasons why he had always believed the opposite of what the notorious quote implied. His main point was that the 640K limit in early PCs was imposed by the design of processing chips, not Gates's software, and he'd been pushing to raise the limit as hard and as often as he could. Yet despite Gates's convincing denial, the quote is unlikely to die. It's too convenient an expression of the computer industry's sense that no one can be sure what will happen next.

I remembered watching a show about chimpanzees and they mentioned that males and females both, exhibited homosexual behavior.

I did a quick search, and found this:

But recent study shows that the pygmy chimpanzee behavior is very different--copulation takes place throughout the cycle and homosexual behavior is common.

I got that from here: The New York Review of Books.

I'd look for more, better sources, but I really should be working...

In email from Bill Gates he denies the quote, but instead of offering up context for its origin or any explanation of why the quote originated, he waxes on about memory limitations. He even claims credit ("I and many others have said") for "Moore's Law", though he uses a mildly modified form of the assertion (1 extra bit every 2 years).

As rebuttals go, it's pretty weak. I'd love to hear from the original citer on when/where it was quoted from.

To remind me why I rely on publications like the New York Review of Books for book criticism.

Timothy... please! Did you read it once or twice before you posted? Please, please tell me that you would have been able to tell how trite a review this was if you had.

Please.

People like Henry Allen giving dissertations on PacMan. :/

Posted anonymously because, well, who cares?

Stop spreading LIES.

From the referenced email by Bill Gates:

In three or four years the industry will have moved over to 64-bit architecture, and it looks like it will suffice for more than a decade.

- W. Gates, 2002

Maybe you should put it in the bank for fourteen years, to quell the cries of nit pickers everywhere.

For people who don't want to read an entire book on the subject, Powers wrote a very interesting review of the play Copenhagen in the New York Review.

For people who don't want to read an entire book on the subject, Powers wrote a very interesting review of the play Copenhagen in the New York Review.

This book was reviewed by Ken Alibek and Stephen Handelman for the New York Review of Books in April 2001.

http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?20 000413044R is a link to the review

The New York Review of Books recently published a good article on how the current Bush administration policy runs counter to the scientific consensus on climate change.

There's a good review of a Nicholson Baker rant against Librarians in general for their sins of deliberately pulping the paper records of the past 130 years and replacing them with decomposing and badly executed microfilm facsimiles.

It seems that Vannevar Bush's infatuation with microfilm was shared by many in the WW2 OSS community, and this seems to have led to a misguided attempt to replace papers and books with microfilm in the interests of "efficiency".

See Swissair 111, TWA 800, and Electromagnetic Interference and THE FALL OF EGYPTAIR 990

See Swissair 111, TWA 800, and Electromagnetic Interference and THE FALL OF EGYPTAIR 990

Also note how he left out any sort of mention of atheism, and the right to be protected religion. "Our faces and our landscapes are diverse and different - but the spirit of hope and renewal I saw at work in a drug rehabilitation program called Teen Challenge in Colfax, Iowa, is also at work in food pantries and after school programs and crisis pregnancy centers all across America" Here is a line from the Teen Challenge Mission statement:Develop and nurture the transformation of restored individuals into useful, productive, law-abiding citizens; committed to Christian faith, values, and living. Far from being a vaguely worded phrase, Bush's "Compassionate Conservatism" is an expressed ideology to promote an evangelical ideology through the use of "faith based" organizations. (This is a scary but well documented clarification.)

If anything the Biblical literalists of the fundamentalist churches have defined themselves in opposition to science, not the reverse.

If A is in opposition to B, does that not imply that B is in opposition to A?

W.r.t. it being "The" visible opposition I take your correction - there are of course the various political movements. However, I'm willing to bet as a reasonable person, that you, as a reasonable person, would upon a free-association test link creation/evolution pretty quickly. No?

It would appear that evolution makes more than a few people uncomfortable, there are whole states that dislike it. There are a shockingly high number of people that believe in creation. Part of the reason for this is that "evolutionists", whoever they are, have _not_ been careful in the examples that they used to try and convince people that "evolution is a fact". Another part of the reason is that there is socio-cultural opposition to the idea of scientific materialism. See R.Lewontin in the NYRB for an excellent essay

Aside from any of these points I admit that you're correct ;-)

Perutz's conclusion is that many people previously involved in bio-warfare projects are now sowing FUD to enhance their own prestige and to generate opportunities in spurious counterterrorism (as Henry Sokolski notes below, fears of terrorism have generated $10 billion annually in spending by the U.S. government alone).

Perutz quotes an article by Henry Sokolski, the director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington, saying:

Last year President Clinton announced the US would spend $10 billion on countering terrorism, including biological and chemical threats, for fiscal year 2000. Would there be better things to spend such large sums of money on? As for biological attacks worldwide, seventy have occurred in the last century causing nine deaths, but only eighteen of these seventy attacks were made by terrorists. There are risks not only in underestimating the chemical and biological domestic terrorist threat, but in overestimating it as well.

Personally, I have seen TPM three times so far, and I plan to see it again before it closes, so I clearly didn't _dislike_ it. But the plot holes and character problems are there, and bothersome. I think Menand (link above) is pretty close to the mark when he says the problems were probably evident early on, but no one had the nerve to tell the "big guy".

sPh