Western Digital's warranty is still 3 years, although their drives straight up lie about reallocated sector counts in SMART (whereas Seagate does not). This makes failure planning hard, since you can't see if a drive is throwing bad sectors until you run out of replacements and get an uncorrectable error (i.e. data construction).
Most of my WDs are in a RAIDZ3 though, so it's not so much of a problem.
otherwise they would manufacture it in a 3.5" format
The standard form factor for SSD's is 2.5" no matter how you intend to use them. I am not really commenting on what you say aside from that. I was honestly curious when I read that because I have never seen a 3.5" SSD (I haven't looked very hard). There are a few from OCZ on newegg but that's all a brief scan could find.
That's because a 3.5" form factor drive would still cost a fortune, since capacity is limited by the cost of the chips, rather then the physical number of them you can fit inside a certain volume.
Or, civilizations which advance to the point where they could send out self-replicating probes generally don't bother (or actively engage in policing and killing off the ones from those that do).
It would only take a very small number of space travellers to significantly curtail the self-replicating probe population, and there's a pretty significant interest in doing so if there of the "replicate at all costs" sort. Otherwise, who's to say we simply missed them - the responsible probe builder would design his probes not to wipe out life on other planets - maybe one passed by millions of years ago, landed, took some samples and then left - or just shutdown and rusted away?
At relativistic only velocities there are pretty significant limits on how many probe swarms can be out there, and how frequently they might visit - there could be many, but the mean-time to probe arrival might still be measured in thousands or millions of years. Humans have not been civilized and in communication long enough to reasonably have seen one in that case.
It's also worth considering that the self-replicating probes might not be very reliable. Since a self-replicator is basically what life is in the first place, depending how you built them it's possible probe-swarms tend to either die out, or mutate and turn into life itself which then decides interstellar distances are just slightly too long to be left at home (after all - an individual, but sentient probe, might have quite a real mortality which it would worry about trying to avoid).
And 100% of that bandwidth is spoken for at any given time,
Right. The limitation is the power at the transmit end, not a bottleneck at the receive end.
Not really. Example: ethernet networks have been getting steadily faster, but power consumption to drive them has not increased appreciably.
Bandwidth is a product of your signal-to-noise, which in turn is a product of both the original transmit power, and the receiver's ability to distinguish the signal from background (speaking in very loose terms).
Over interplanetary distances we're always going to have problems with transmit power and weight. I'm not arguing "moon relay" is necessarily a good solution, but the notion that space probes don't need more bandwidth is ridiculous.
There's a whole bunch of work that's been done on using lasers at interplanetary range to provide high bandwidth communications for this exact reason - more bandwidth means you can use all those sensors more often and collect more data.
Advocating for no government as a solution for a corrupt government makes about as much sense as proposing decapitation to cure a headache.
Well, it's good then that the tea party movement isn't advocating for no government. The basic planks of the platform are in no particular order, reduction in government extent and power, a return to law which respects the US Constitution, and at least reducing government spending to match income (often extended to reducing taxes as well).
Again, I don't know how you think a reduction in the extent and power of the government is going to lead to less corruption. Your proposition is "limit the ability of the government to enforce the law".
Really? Do you know what the uplink rate from the rover actually is? Hint. it's not 9600bps anymore.
NASA says 12Kb/s back to Earth Rover to orbiter is 128Kb/s, but that's then spooled slowly back over the long-range data link.
And 100% of that bandwidth is spoken for at any given time, and has to built to the limitations of what NASA is working with at the time. There's no point building a rover with 100 mbit transmit capacity if there's no possible way to have the infrastructure on Earth to receive it when you launch.
If we had more deep space bandwidth, then you'd probably be surprised to find that there's any number of things we could do with it.
I think the reality is if we had the capability to do anything like this, then we'd actually have the capability to stick it all at Lagrange points, and run enough space missions that repair/refuel/replacement were not such a big deal.
Underground coal fire fighting is actually a whole area of active research. There's a whole bunch of them in Indonesia, that they'd really like to put out because the heat periodically starts fires in the jungle above it.
Everybody in America who cares about their health should make it a point to live as far away from exploitable natural resources as possible
I see you've chosen to live as far away from the natural resource of rationality as you can.
In third world countries, living near resources should be a boon--a ticket out of poverty. What usually happens though is some multinational corporation comes in, aided by a corrupt government
There we go. Complaining about tea partiers when the real problems you complain about are the same problems that the tea partiers are complaining about.
Advocating for no government as a solution for a corrupt government makes about as much sense as proposing decapitation to cure a headache.
The tea partiers are idiots who are going to solve government corruption by making it legal.
"That's not unique to the military signal. It's just a matter of how much money you want to throw at the problem."
The U.S. military GPS system was designed to work properly with only 3 visible satellites.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it, or do whatever the hell you want with it. I didn't invent the system. But I do know just a little about it.
The US military system is, these days, no different to the civilian system. The system was descrambled in the 90s because it became apparent that it was just too expensive to keep building more complex and relatively low-run GPS chips for the military, when what they wanted to do was put them in bombs and things.
By and large though, even the airforce doesn't need GPS elevation data since laser altimeters are faster and very standard on all aircraft.
Speak for yourself, I blame the kernel developers.
And you'd be wrong - the problem is the US legal system (and others) which has ruled that a derivative work is created by linking to a program library.
I doubt Linux kernel developers would be too cut up if that particular provision were overturned, since the benefits would be enormous (we could finally distribute pre-compiled ZFS kernel modules without infringing CDDL, for example).
I remain deeply skeptical of a stable ABI being the problem it's made out to be - I have a fundamental suspicion of the idea that hardware drivers should be proprietary or secret code. The hardware manufacturer is supposed to be selling me a great hardware product - not a great software product to allow basic interface with it's functions.
The problem facing research and development today is that there is not nearly enough focus on basic research - everything is about immediate, applied applications - which is the highest risk type of research you can do, since the goal is "build a very specific thing".
Clearly a quote from someone working in basic research, So I'm to believe that there's research out there for which you can't come up with an "elevator pitch" of near future benefits? Why fund it then? My view is that if you can't justify your efforts with near future benefits, then it is welfare not research.
Define near-future benefits. Because if this:
One merely needs to look at history to see that every significant development has had near future application. Electricity? Lightning rods. Relativity? Explains much of those funky astronomy and physics observations. Number theory? Codes for encryption, better algorithm development (eg, among the earliest would be how to add, multiply, and divide by hand), and astronomy calculations.
is you definition, then guess what - you support fundamental research projects!
Because there was no immediate application for General Relativity when it was developed. But it was generally understood that a more complete understanding of the physical behavior of the universe would probably enable future developments. We didn't know what they were at the time - but here we are in 2012 and every modern cellphone has a chip that does Lorentz force calculations to make GPS data accurate. GPS was not even imagined at the time the work was done.
When the LASER was built, initially, there was no idea what it would be useful for - it was built because theory showed that the sample principles of the MASER should be applicable to optical systems, and were investigated. We then had no idea what we would use them for - but that we knew how to make them meant when others encountered a problem which required a coherent light source, hey, that research and knowledge existed.
Scientific progress grinds to a halt - you won't find revolutionary discoveries - if we start predicating that on whether we should try to understand something on the basis of whether we think it will be immediately useful. We should try to understand things if we don't understand them.
Yeah, I agree except that wasn't really how his argument goes...and yes, old stuff works. But new stuff works too (also, new here could be 5 years old). Anyway, I'm not really (or at least overly) questioning their rationale. I've just seen too many programs where the same people have been there forever and it's easier to keep doing the same thing rather than try something new. Again, hopefully that's not the case at NASA but it's sure as hell the case at the Pentagon.
On the other hand, NASA really doesn't have the budget to spend working up for something new either. A processor switch means new simulators, new architectures etc. I imagine for a space probe - i.e. something you can't get at ever if it breaks down - then you go with the processor you have when you start designing it, and you pick the most reliable thing you can.
The classic example is the Pentium math error: imagine if you were 2 years into the mission and then discovered that the new high speed chip you put in gives incorrect floating point calculations.
Very few businesses ever invest in fundamental research, and even fewer in trying to open up new fields of inquiry. This is sensible - it's standard business logic - stick to your core business.
The history of the modern world is that all the big ideas were funded by the government and spun off into tech companies once commercial viability had been proved, but this was not a quick process, and there's plenty of stuff which never is - that's the whole point of Linux and GNU to some extent: they're basic computer tools which are so fundamental that everyone benefits from them existing, but would be very difficult to justify creating if they had to be created by just the one company, or a group which needs to show immediate commercial viability.
3d printing will probably make traditional manufacturing a bygone technology in the next twenty years.
Not if the copyright maximalists that control our government--or at least those that do--have anything to say about it.
Trying to enforce Fabrication Rights Management seems like it'll be even more of a comical failure - not to mention far more likely to raise the ire of the general public.
And we have tons of people insisting that it's totally not necessary at all!
(which I find staggering in a country dominated by distance and sparse population, in a world where the largest growing sector is coming from internet business startups).
This is a good one: general research in micro-scale materials extraction and processing is exactly what we need, since it's the big unanswered challenge to 3D printing: creating a group of machines which, working together on a small scale, can replicate all the processes needed to manufacture them.
You can really go long with this idea too: I for one have always wondered where the limits on small-scale semiconductor manufacture might lie. Namely: could sand and rock be used to ALSO create the logic circuits for such a thing (or maybe we'd do it some other way - inkjet printed assemblies of nanoparticles?)
Thorium motherfucking reactors. Goddamn we've had this technology for how long and it isn't used because of some asshole president? Yeah I'm mad as hell. Practically free energy right at our fingertips -- completely free, virtually clean -- AND WERE NOT USING IT.
You beat yourself with your statement. Something that is already known, being developed, and kept in reserve can hardly be the Next Big Thing.
That's not true: there's plenty of design and technical challenges to implementing Thorium reactors in a scalable way. And the concept could easily be expanded to a re-investment in the development of nuclear fission power generating technology - which, broadly, should go under the umbrella of a widespread investment in fusion projects of all types.
Too much emphasis has been put into basic research.
Clearly a quote from someone not working in research. The problem facing research and development today is that there is not nearly enough focus on basic research - everything is about immediate, applied applications - which is the highest risk type of research you can do, since the goal is "build a very specific thing". And it doesn't broaden your horizons since you're aiming at specific targets informed by existing theory.
I agree, its a utility (in the power grid sense) with increasing utility (in the economist jargon sense).
Right now I know plenty of people who don't have broadband internet (for various reasons). And I don't think their human rights are being violated but I do feel they are at an economic disadvantage (in the same sense that country folk have more expenses tied to sewer issues than city folk etc).
For me it is a necessity, I rely on fast internet to provide me income, information, etc. For them its a luxury because they can get by with out it.
Calling broadband a human right is a bit far fetched. A human right by definition is something you cannot be a full human without. Life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness comes to mind. Internet access can be a tool to these ends, but not an end to its self.
Though it's probably worth recognizing that the first step to denying people those things is trying to inhibit or shutdown access to the internet and other types of communications.
That the actual research is about the rate of degradation of DNA in fossils, and not the viability of cloning from DNA recovered?
It should be obvious that the half-life doesn't imply ubiquitous degradation, and with 25-bases ensuring a very reliably unique match, it's conceivable you could recover enough to start a cloning project provided the initial reservoir was very large.
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Western Digital's warranty is still 3 years, although their drives straight up lie about reallocated sector counts in SMART (whereas Seagate does not). This makes failure planning hard, since you can't see if a drive is throwing bad sectors until you run out of replacements and get an uncorrectable error (i.e. data construction).
Most of my WDs are in a RAIDZ3 though, so it's not so much of a problem.
otherwise they would manufacture it in a 3.5" format
The standard form factor for SSD's is 2.5" no matter how you intend to use them. I am not really commenting on what you say aside from that. I was honestly curious when I read that because I have never seen a 3.5" SSD (I haven't looked very hard). There are a few from OCZ on newegg but that's all a brief scan could find.
That's because a 3.5" form factor drive would still cost a fortune, since capacity is limited by the cost of the chips, rather then the physical number of them you can fit inside a certain volume.
Or, civilizations which advance to the point where they could send out self-replicating probes generally don't bother (or actively engage in policing and killing off the ones from those that do).
It would only take a very small number of space travellers to significantly curtail the self-replicating probe population, and there's a pretty significant interest in doing so if there of the "replicate at all costs" sort. Otherwise, who's to say we simply missed them - the responsible probe builder would design his probes not to wipe out life on other planets - maybe one passed by millions of years ago, landed, took some samples and then left - or just shutdown and rusted away?
At relativistic only velocities there are pretty significant limits on how many probe swarms can be out there, and how frequently they might visit - there could be many, but the mean-time to probe arrival might still be measured in thousands or millions of years. Humans have not been civilized and in communication long enough to reasonably have seen one in that case.
It's also worth considering that the self-replicating probes might not be very reliable. Since a self-replicator is basically what life is in the first place, depending how you built them it's possible probe-swarms tend to either die out, or mutate and turn into life itself which then decides interstellar distances are just slightly too long to be left at home (after all - an individual, but sentient probe, might have quite a real mortality which it would worry about trying to avoid).
And 100% of that bandwidth is spoken for at any given time,
Right. The limitation is the power at the transmit end, not a bottleneck at the receive end.
Not really. Example: ethernet networks have been getting steadily faster, but power consumption to drive them has not increased appreciably.
Bandwidth is a product of your signal-to-noise, which in turn is a product of both the original transmit power, and the receiver's ability to distinguish the signal from background (speaking in very loose terms).
Over interplanetary distances we're always going to have problems with transmit power and weight. I'm not arguing "moon relay" is necessarily a good solution, but the notion that space probes don't need more bandwidth is ridiculous.
There's a whole bunch of work that's been done on using lasers at interplanetary range to provide high bandwidth communications for this exact reason - more bandwidth means you can use all those sensors more often and collect more data.
Advocating for no government as a solution for a corrupt government makes about as much sense as proposing decapitation to cure a headache.
Well, it's good then that the tea party movement isn't advocating for no government. The basic planks of the platform are in no particular order, reduction in government extent and power, a return to law which respects the US Constitution, and at least reducing government spending to match income (often extended to reducing taxes as well).
Again, I don't know how you think a reduction in the extent and power of the government is going to lead to less corruption. Your proposition is "limit the ability of the government to enforce the law".
Which is the same as "make corruption legal".
Really? Do you know what the uplink rate from the rover actually is? Hint. it's not 9600bps anymore.
NASA says 12Kb/s back to Earth Rover to orbiter is 128Kb/s, but that's then spooled slowly back over the long-range data link.
And 100% of that bandwidth is spoken for at any given time, and has to built to the limitations of what NASA is working with at the time. There's no point building a rover with 100 mbit transmit capacity if there's no possible way to have the infrastructure on Earth to receive it when you launch.
If we had more deep space bandwidth, then you'd probably be surprised to find that there's any number of things we could do with it.
I think the reality is if we had the capability to do anything like this, then we'd actually have the capability to stick it all at Lagrange points, and run enough space missions that repair/refuel/replacement were not such a big deal.
Always a handout when it goes to a person, but a smart business decision when it goes to a company ay?
Underground coal fire fighting is actually a whole area of active research. There's a whole bunch of them in Indonesia, that they'd really like to put out because the heat periodically starts fires in the jungle above it.
Everybody in America who cares about their health should make it a point to live as far away from exploitable natural resources as possible
I see you've chosen to live as far away from the natural resource of rationality as you can.
In third world countries, living near resources should be a boon--a ticket out of poverty. What usually happens though is some multinational corporation comes in, aided by a corrupt government
There we go. Complaining about tea partiers when the real problems you complain about are the same problems that the tea partiers are complaining about.
Advocating for no government as a solution for a corrupt government makes about as much sense as proposing decapitation to cure a headache.
The tea partiers are idiots who are going to solve government corruption by making it legal.
"That's not unique to the military signal. It's just a matter of how much money you want to throw at the problem."
The U.S. military GPS system was designed to work properly with only 3 visible satellites.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it, or do whatever the hell you want with it. I didn't invent the system. But I do know just a little about it.
The US military system is, these days, no different to the civilian system. The system was descrambled in the 90s because it became apparent that it was just too expensive to keep building more complex and relatively low-run GPS chips for the military, when what they wanted to do was put them in bombs and things.
By and large though, even the airforce doesn't need GPS elevation data since laser altimeters are faster and very standard on all aircraft.
people are trying to blame Nvidia because of it.
Speak for yourself, I blame the kernel developers.
And you'd be wrong - the problem is the US legal system (and others) which has ruled that a derivative work is created by linking to a program library.
I doubt Linux kernel developers would be too cut up if that particular provision were overturned, since the benefits would be enormous (we could finally distribute pre-compiled ZFS kernel modules without infringing CDDL, for example).
I remain deeply skeptical of a stable ABI being the problem it's made out to be - I have a fundamental suspicion of the idea that hardware drivers should be proprietary or secret code. The hardware manufacturer is supposed to be selling me a great hardware product - not a great software product to allow basic interface with it's functions.
The problem facing research and development today is that there is not nearly enough focus on basic research - everything is about immediate, applied applications - which is the highest risk type of research you can do, since the goal is "build a very specific thing".
Clearly a quote from someone working in basic research, So I'm to believe that there's research out there for which you can't come up with an "elevator pitch" of near future benefits? Why fund it then? My view is that if you can't justify your efforts with near future benefits, then it is welfare not research.
Define near-future benefits. Because if this:
One merely needs to look at history to see that every significant development has had near future application. Electricity? Lightning rods. Relativity? Explains much of those funky astronomy and physics observations. Number theory? Codes for encryption, better algorithm development (eg, among the earliest would be how to add, multiply, and divide by hand), and astronomy calculations.
is you definition, then guess what - you support fundamental research projects!
Because there was no immediate application for General Relativity when it was developed. But it was generally understood that a more complete understanding of the physical behavior of the universe would probably enable future developments. We didn't know what they were at the time - but here we are in 2012 and every modern cellphone has a chip that does Lorentz force calculations to make GPS data accurate. GPS was not even imagined at the time the work was done.
When the LASER was built, initially, there was no idea what it would be useful for - it was built because theory showed that the sample principles of the MASER should be applicable to optical systems, and were investigated. We then had no idea what we would use them for - but that we knew how to make them meant when others encountered a problem which required a coherent light source, hey, that research and knowledge existed.
Scientific progress grinds to a halt - you won't find revolutionary discoveries - if we start predicating that on whether we should try to understand something on the basis of whether we think it will be immediately useful. We should try to understand things if we don't understand them.
Yeah, I agree except that wasn't really how his argument goes...and yes, old stuff works. But new stuff works too (also, new here could be 5 years old). Anyway, I'm not really (or at least overly) questioning their rationale. I've just seen too many programs where the same people have been there forever and it's easier to keep doing the same thing rather than try something new. Again, hopefully that's not the case at NASA but it's sure as hell the case at the Pentagon.
On the other hand, NASA really doesn't have the budget to spend working up for something new either. A processor switch means new simulators, new architectures etc. I imagine for a space probe - i.e. something you can't get at ever if it breaks down - then you go with the processor you have when you start designing it, and you pick the most reliable thing you can.
The classic example is the Pentium math error: imagine if you were 2 years into the mission and then discovered that the new high speed chip you put in gives incorrect floating point calculations.
Very few businesses ever invest in fundamental research, and even fewer in trying to open up new fields of inquiry. This is sensible - it's standard business logic - stick to your core business.
The history of the modern world is that all the big ideas were funded by the government and spun off into tech companies once commercial viability had been proved, but this was not a quick process, and there's plenty of stuff which never is - that's the whole point of Linux and GNU to some extent: they're basic computer tools which are so fundamental that everyone benefits from them existing, but would be very difficult to justify creating if they had to be created by just the one company, or a group which needs to show immediate commercial viability.
3d printing will probably make traditional manufacturing a bygone technology in the next twenty years.
Not if the copyright maximalists that control our government--or at least those that do--have anything to say about it.
Trying to enforce Fabrication Rights Management seems like it'll be even more of a comical failure - not to mention far more likely to raise the ire of the general public.
"high speed internet everywhere in the USA and then eventually abroad"
We are already doing this in Australia http://www.nbnco.com.au/
And we have tons of people insisting that it's totally not necessary at all!
(which I find staggering in a country dominated by distance and sparse population, in a world where the largest growing sector is coming from internet business startups).
This is a good one: general research in micro-scale materials extraction and processing is exactly what we need, since it's the big unanswered challenge to 3D printing: creating a group of machines which, working together on a small scale, can replicate all the processes needed to manufacture them.
You can really go long with this idea too: I for one have always wondered where the limits on small-scale semiconductor manufacture might lie. Namely: could sand and rock be used to ALSO create the logic circuits for such a thing (or maybe we'd do it some other way - inkjet printed assemblies of nanoparticles?)
Easy.
Thorium motherfucking reactors. Goddamn we've had this technology for how long and it isn't used because of some asshole president? Yeah I'm mad as hell. Practically free energy right at our fingertips -- completely free, virtually clean -- AND WERE NOT USING IT.
You beat yourself with your statement. Something that is already known, being developed, and kept in reserve can hardly be the Next Big Thing.
That's not true: there's plenty of design and technical challenges to implementing Thorium reactors in a scalable way. And the concept could easily be expanded to a re-investment in the development of nuclear fission power generating technology - which, broadly, should go under the umbrella of a widespread investment in fusion projects of all types.
Too much emphasis has been put into basic research.
Clearly a quote from someone not working in research. The problem facing research and development today is that there is not nearly enough focus on basic research - everything is about immediate, applied applications - which is the highest risk type of research you can do, since the goal is "build a very specific thing". And it doesn't broaden your horizons since you're aiming at specific targets informed by existing theory.
I agree, its a utility (in the power grid sense) with increasing utility (in the economist jargon sense).
Right now I know plenty of people who don't have broadband internet (for various reasons). And I don't think their human rights are being violated but I do feel they are at an economic disadvantage (in the same sense that country folk have more expenses tied to sewer issues than city folk etc).
For me it is a necessity, I rely on fast internet to provide me income, information, etc. For them its a luxury because they can get by with out it.
Calling broadband a human right is a bit far fetched. A human right by definition is something you cannot be a full human without. Life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness comes to mind. Internet access can be a tool to these ends, but not an end to its self.
Though it's probably worth recognizing that the first step to denying people those things is trying to inhibit or shutdown access to the internet and other types of communications.
It should be obvious that the half-life doesn't imply ubiquitous degradation
I'm no expert on this, but that's... not how this sounds.
My assumption was that the article was almost certainly mis-stating the actual research.
That the actual research is about the rate of degradation of DNA in fossils, and not the viability of cloning from DNA recovered?
It should be obvious that the half-life doesn't imply ubiquitous degradation, and with 25-bases ensuring a very reliably unique match, it's conceivable you could recover enough to start a cloning project provided the initial reservoir was very large.