During this period in the big bang, particles had not formed yet. If you view the universe at this stage as a single particle (which you could, since it contains all energy and mass in the universe in a single entity), it creates all the other particles, but more than that it is the beginning of our current universe.
AKA, the mother of the universe, mother of all particles, mother of all matter, etc.
However, when the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation was first observed, there was no way to explain its irregularity based on that model.
Actually you have that backwards, without inflation, the CMBR should be extremely irregular. There should be huge blotches of stuff all over. Think of a balloon filled with paint splattering on the floor - it doesn't create a fine coating all over the floor, it creates huge splatters here and there with huge gaps of nothing in between.
The CMBR, however, is extremely uniform. When you look at a picture of the CMBR, the variations in color are artificial (similar to the way the color nebulae from infra-red data) and represent extremely minute changes in radiation (you'll note there are no areas with no radiation, but there should be). The CMBR effectively shows a nice, even "coating" of radiation that covers the universe from one end to the other. This is disturbing, and cannot be explained by any physics we know of.
The only way to explain this is if the big bang wasn't an explosion (huge release, starts fast but decelerates quickly), but actually a controlled inflation - it had to start slow, accelerate, and then decelerate in order to produce the nice, even radiation we see. They had to accelerate the time-line of the Big Bang for a microsecond and then decelerate it immediately after in order to reproduce the uniformity seen in the CMBR. It's completely arbitrary, and has absolutely no grounding in physics, yet it's the only way to fit the physics we do know with the observations we see.
If you think you are disturbed by this, talk to a cosmologist or a physicist sometime. They absolutely hate having to change a model to fit observations without having any idea what is missing in their model to cause that change. It's like Dark Energy and Dark Matter, or the singularity of a Black Hole - cosmologists hate all of them. They use them, because it works, but they hate them all the same. They screw with their nice, neat physics.
Same thing with inflation - there is no known physical property that should cause inflation, yet inflation is the only way to explain the universe as it is now. It means there is something fundamental to the universe that we don't know or understand.
PS: Fun fact: if you tune an analog TV to an unused channel, something like 10% of the fuzz you see is caused by the CMBR.
Read/Write times are always in megabytes, bandwidth is in megabits. This SSD is in the 1+gbit/ per second range bandwidth, or about 9-10 times as wide as a MicroSD. This means to match this single chip's performance you need at least 10 microSD's. This is born out by the fact that the fastest SD cards I've ever heard of run at about 20mb/s write (160mbit/s).
A 64gb microSD isn't going to come close to the performance numbers on this thing, to match the performance you'd want to use at least 8 class 10 cards (guaranteed 10mb/s, many get closer to 20mb/s). Unfortunately these come in a minimum size of 16gb, so you get 128gb of storage at 160mb/s writes for about $300. Twice the storage, but it's 8x bigger too.
More than likely all Sandisk really did for this chip is put 8 8gb flash chips together and put them in a BGA package. The actual size of a microSD flash chip is tiny, most of the size is the package itself, so this seems reasonable. Just adjust your lithography process make the proper connections between adjacent chips, insert a SATA/Flash controller with built-in cache, and away you go (it's more complicated than that, but it's the basic idea).
That also means this chip should be in the $300-$400 range starting out, which is pretty friggin sweet for that much high-speed storage in such a small package. I could see these being implemented as an intermediate cache between the HDD and RAM, so you can have a nice performance boost without sacrificing space. Actually if done right something similar to this could give you close to SSD performance at $0.25 per GB for a 2tb drive. It's still 5x what a normal hard drive would cost, but it's 1/8 what current SSD's cost per GB, and except for extreme cases its performance should be indistinguishable from an SSD's. You could see HDDs with integrated 64gb of cache (instead of the piddly 4gb, that offers only minor speed boosts) popping up real soon.
Furthermore, smaller = faster, smaller = cheaper, and the smaller = denser (that is, more memory in the same package).
Making them smaller accomplishes all your goals, that's why they continue to make them smaller. Saying "don't make them smaller, make them cheaper instead" is like saying "don't add horsepower to my car, just make it go faster"*. Uhh...
Seriously people. The way you make electronics cheaper is by making them smaller. The more chips they can fit on a platter, the cheaper each chip is.
*This is obviously ignoring the minor speed improvements that can be had by reducing weight or removing parasitic losses like the flywheel and AC unit. Changing these invariably changes the purpose of the car (from a comfortable cruiser/street car to an uncomfortable racer) as well, which is assumed to be an undesirable compromise in the analogy.
It was recently leaked that Intel has moved their NAND chips to a 25nm process instead of the much larger 45nm process, which is expected to cut price per GB in half.
The smaller they can make them, the more of them they can make at a time (they don't do these one-off you know). For example, if they have one square foot of space per run and each chip takes up one square inch, that means they can do 144 of them in a single run. If each chip takes up only 1/2 inch squared, they can make 288 in a single run.
The costs per run don't change much, if at all, and it significantly reduces the amount of expensive materials (like pure chip-quality silicon) per chip which leads to a halving of the cost per chip.
What you really pay for when you buy the "latest and greatest" is the engineering and design time, as well as any re-tooling. That's why prices drop so fast - as soon as the money is recovered they drop the price to expand the target market, and they can do that because the manufacturing costs are very low (and continue to drop with smaller chips).
That's why today you can buy a microcontroller that has the same power as the original 486dx processor, but smaller than your pinky-nail, for around $4. The 486 cost $1500 (adjusted for inflation) initially, and still costs around $100-$150 today because the chip itself is so much larger, and therefore more expensive to produce.
The difference is whether or not there is an actual chemical imbalance in the brain, or if the kid is just energetic. Ritalin calms ADHD kids while winding up non-ADHD kids, so the it's pretty obvious whether you got it right or wrong. If you can't tell, the kid's probably borderline.
Oh, sorry, I forgot: whenever free market screws up, it's actually the fault of the sheep population who didn't have sufficient faith in the Invisible Hand, and instead seeked shelter from the Satan Government.
Hey nobody blames the sheep, we all put it where it belongs: squarely on the shoulders of Satan Government.
Sheesh.
Doctors, just like everyone else, work for a wage. I'm not sure where you got your ridiculous strawman from.
Well, you just destroyed your whole argument, because that is completely false.
You obviously have no idea how the medical industry works, or at least the vast majority of it. Very few doctors work for a wage. The vast majority of doctors are effectively one-man businesses. They get paid by the task, they don't make an hourly wage.
That bill your insurance company gets? Yeah, that goes directly to the doctor, and the doctor pays the hospital for things like nurses and medical supplies. They get whatever is left over, which is why the bill tends to be high. They don't get a salary, they don't get paid by the hour, they get paid by each bill they send out.
That's also why when an insurance company dicks around with payment for the procedures that were performed, doctors get really pissed off. They may not get paid for the job for months afterward in those cases, and they may be stuck having to go after the patient just to be able to pay their bills, all because the insurance company is a piece of shit.
Pharmaceutical companies effectively expand that to "paid by the prescription" by offering all-expense paid conference trips to those who sell a lot of their products.
Wow, I have to disagree with you, that site is amazingly ridiculous. At least HAARP is actually shooting radio waves at the upper atmosphere, which means there is at least something could fool the ignorant that the US may be messing with the weather (a basic understanding of radio waves will clear this up for you, though).
Alexi Chiu is just downright out there. Wear this ring and take my Gorgeouspil(tm) and within one day your bones will start to restructure! You will be beautiful and immortal!
The saddest part of the whole thing is he's actually got a patent on the ring, and is working on a patent on the pill.
I'm not sure I follow, it's 6m bits either way, isn't it? Either by incorrectly splitting the pairs, or by correctly expanding base-2 to base-4, right?
I just don't see how he got to 6 billion bits matters at all.
The point is, 6 billion bits is completely wrong. For one, it's more than 6 billion bits no matter how you look at it, because there are various types of hydrogen bonds between the nucleotides that affect how easy the DNA is to pull apart. This is another way of encoding data into the molecule, and it makes a difference (though how much I wouldn't be able to tell you). Also, DNA is the extremely dense compressed format, not the decompressed format which can be further compressed.
To get an idea of how dense the information in DNA is, there are at least 2 million different proteins in the human body, and an estimated 10 million total. Some protiens contain 25,000+ amino acids combined in a unique way. These are described by 25,000-35,000 genes. According to Kurzweil's math, that's about 547 bytes of data, or 22 lines of code.
Slashdot Mirror
During this period in the big bang, particles had not formed yet. If you view the universe at this stage as a single particle (which you could, since it contains all energy and mass in the universe in a single entity), it creates all the other particles, but more than that it is the beginning of our current universe.
AKA, the mother of the universe, mother of all particles, mother of all matter, etc.
Yeah, accept...
Oh shit!
*runs from the grammar nazis*
Yeah, accept the universe is accelerating (the opposite of going to a steady state).
Yeah, but property in subprime space is cheeeeeep!
However, when the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation was first observed, there was no way to explain its irregularity based on that model.
Actually you have that backwards, without inflation, the CMBR should be extremely irregular. There should be huge blotches of stuff all over. Think of a balloon filled with paint splattering on the floor - it doesn't create a fine coating all over the floor, it creates huge splatters here and there with huge gaps of nothing in between.
The CMBR, however, is extremely uniform. When you look at a picture of the CMBR, the variations in color are artificial (similar to the way the color nebulae from infra-red data) and represent extremely minute changes in radiation (you'll note there are no areas with no radiation, but there should be). The CMBR effectively shows a nice, even "coating" of radiation that covers the universe from one end to the other. This is disturbing, and cannot be explained by any physics we know of.
The only way to explain this is if the big bang wasn't an explosion (huge release, starts fast but decelerates quickly), but actually a controlled inflation - it had to start slow, accelerate, and then decelerate in order to produce the nice, even radiation we see. They had to accelerate the time-line of the Big Bang for a microsecond and then decelerate it immediately after in order to reproduce the uniformity seen in the CMBR. It's completely arbitrary, and has absolutely no grounding in physics, yet it's the only way to fit the physics we do know with the observations we see.
If you think you are disturbed by this, talk to a cosmologist or a physicist sometime. They absolutely hate having to change a model to fit observations without having any idea what is missing in their model to cause that change. It's like Dark Energy and Dark Matter, or the singularity of a Black Hole - cosmologists hate all of them. They use them, because it works, but they hate them all the same. They screw with their nice, neat physics.
Same thing with inflation - there is no known physical property that should cause inflation, yet inflation is the only way to explain the universe as it is now. It means there is something fundamental to the universe that we don't know or understand.
PS: Fun fact: if you tune an analog TV to an unused channel, something like 10% of the fuzz you see is caused by the CMBR.
Read/Write times are always in megabytes, bandwidth is in megabits. This SSD is in the 1+gbit/ per second range bandwidth, or about 9-10 times as wide as a MicroSD. This means to match this single chip's performance you need at least 10 microSD's. This is born out by the fact that the fastest SD cards I've ever heard of run at about 20mb/s write (160mbit/s).
A 64gb microSD isn't going to come close to the performance numbers on this thing, to match the performance you'd want to use at least 8 class 10 cards (guaranteed 10mb/s, many get closer to 20mb/s). Unfortunately these come in a minimum size of 16gb, so you get 128gb of storage at 160mb/s writes for about $300. Twice the storage, but it's 8x bigger too.
More than likely all Sandisk really did for this chip is put 8 8gb flash chips together and put them in a BGA package. The actual size of a microSD flash chip is tiny, most of the size is the package itself, so this seems reasonable. Just adjust your lithography process make the proper connections between adjacent chips, insert a SATA/Flash controller with built-in cache, and away you go (it's more complicated than that, but it's the basic idea).
That also means this chip should be in the $300-$400 range starting out, which is pretty friggin sweet for that much high-speed storage in such a small package. I could see these being implemented as an intermediate cache between the HDD and RAM, so you can have a nice performance boost without sacrificing space. Actually if done right something similar to this could give you close to SSD performance at $0.25 per GB for a 2tb drive. It's still 5x what a normal hard drive would cost, but it's 1/8 what current SSD's cost per GB, and except for extreme cases its performance should be indistinguishable from an SSD's. You could see HDDs with integrated 64gb of cache (instead of the piddly 4gb, that offers only minor speed boosts) popping up real soon.
Pfft, if you're going through all the trouble, why not just cut off the connectors and solder the USB drive directly to the internal USB headers?
There's no reason not to, and the solder will make sure the connection never slips.
You apparently have no idea how wires work. (i.e. they can be replaced by copper traces and soldered connections - it's pretty frickin easy)
Furthermore, smaller = faster, smaller = cheaper, and the smaller = denser (that is, more memory in the same package).
Making them smaller accomplishes all your goals, that's why they continue to make them smaller. Saying "don't make them smaller, make them cheaper instead" is like saying "don't add horsepower to my car, just make it go faster"*. Uhh...
Seriously people. The way you make electronics cheaper is by making them smaller. The more chips they can fit on a platter, the cheaper each chip is.
*This is obviously ignoring the minor speed improvements that can be had by reducing weight or removing parasitic losses like the flywheel and AC unit. Changing these invariably changes the purpose of the car (from a comfortable cruiser/street car to an uncomfortable racer) as well, which is assumed to be an undesirable compromise in the analogy.
With electronics, smaller = cheaper.
It was recently leaked that Intel has moved their NAND chips to a 25nm process instead of the much larger 45nm process, which is expected to cut price per GB in half.
The smaller they can make them, the more of them they can make at a time (they don't do these one-off you know). For example, if they have one square foot of space per run and each chip takes up one square inch, that means they can do 144 of them in a single run. If each chip takes up only 1/2 inch squared, they can make 288 in a single run.
The costs per run don't change much, if at all, and it significantly reduces the amount of expensive materials (like pure chip-quality silicon) per chip which leads to a halving of the cost per chip.
What you really pay for when you buy the "latest and greatest" is the engineering and design time, as well as any re-tooling. That's why prices drop so fast - as soon as the money is recovered they drop the price to expand the target market, and they can do that because the manufacturing costs are very low (and continue to drop with smaller chips).
That's why today you can buy a microcontroller that has the same power as the original 486dx processor, but smaller than your pinky-nail, for around $4. The 486 cost $1500 (adjusted for inflation) initially, and still costs around $100-$150 today because the chip itself is so much larger, and therefore more expensive to produce.
Smaller = cheaper.
You could probably get something for harassment though.
The difference is whether or not there is an actual chemical imbalance in the brain, or if the kid is just energetic. Ritalin calms ADHD kids while winding up non-ADHD kids, so the it's pretty obvious whether you got it right or wrong. If you can't tell, the kid's probably borderline.
Ritalin is a stimulant. If you don't have ADHD, it makes you more hyper.
I would wager most of the misdiagnosed kids were off drugs in a month, because the drugs would have made them a hell of a lot worse.
So yeah, a million kids misdiagnosed is bad, but the problem corrects itself.
Were you talking about engineering or sex?
Yes.
I have to stop drinking coffee around noon or I'll have trouble getting to sleep at night.
It seems to get earlier and earlier as I age. :(
So far N_Piper is beating bluefoxlucid by 4, with a +3 to blue's -1.
Stay tuned for more updates!
Oh, sorry, I forgot: whenever free market screws up, it's actually the fault of the sheep population who didn't have sufficient faith in the Invisible Hand, and instead seeked shelter from the Satan Government.
Hey nobody blames the sheep, we all put it where it belongs: squarely on the shoulders of Satan Government.
Sheesh.
Doctors, just like everyone else, work for a wage. I'm not sure where you got your ridiculous strawman from.
Well, you just destroyed your whole argument, because that is completely false.
You obviously have no idea how the medical industry works, or at least the vast majority of it. Very few doctors work for a wage. The vast majority of doctors are effectively one-man businesses. They get paid by the task, they don't make an hourly wage.
That bill your insurance company gets? Yeah, that goes directly to the doctor, and the doctor pays the hospital for things like nurses and medical supplies. They get whatever is left over, which is why the bill tends to be high. They don't get a salary, they don't get paid by the hour, they get paid by each bill they send out.
That's also why when an insurance company dicks around with payment for the procedures that were performed, doctors get really pissed off. They may not get paid for the job for months afterward in those cases, and they may be stuck having to go after the patient just to be able to pay their bills, all because the insurance company is a piece of shit.
Pharmaceutical companies effectively expand that to "paid by the prescription" by offering all-expense paid conference trips to those who sell a lot of their products.
Don't bother, he's obviously an idiot.
That was my thought.
These guys need to wake up: the cold war ended decades ago, when Russia fell to pieces.
Wow, I have to disagree with you, that site is amazingly ridiculous. At least HAARP is actually shooting radio waves at the upper atmosphere, which means there is at least something could fool the ignorant that the US may be messing with the weather (a basic understanding of radio waves will clear this up for you, though).
Alexi Chiu is just downright out there. Wear this ring and take my Gorgeouspil(tm) and within one day your bones will start to restructure! You will be beautiful and immortal!
The saddest part of the whole thing is he's actually got a patent on the ring, and is working on a patent on the pill.
His other site is even worse.
Only if you are a political scientist spreading propaganda in addition to being a wackjob conspiracy theorist.
Then it's ok.
Don't you remember?
There was a moderate earthquake while the scantily clad women were trying to prove that immodest dress didn't cause earthquakes.
Pretty funny actually.
(Obligatory I know, and someone else undoubtedly will beat me to it)
Nope, you got it first - you win the prize*!
*Contest prizes may not actually exist.
Just for reference, the GCC compiler is pushing 1.5 million lines of code. Windows XP supposedly had 40 million lines of code.
Kurzweil is literally saying that the human brain is 2/3 as complex as a C compiler, and 1/40th the complexity of Windows XP.
Complete lunacy.
I'm not sure I follow, it's 6m bits either way, isn't it? Either by incorrectly splitting the pairs, or by correctly expanding base-2 to base-4, right?
I just don't see how he got to 6 billion bits matters at all.
The point is, 6 billion bits is completely wrong. For one, it's more than 6 billion bits no matter how you look at it, because there are various types of hydrogen bonds between the nucleotides that affect how easy the DNA is to pull apart. This is another way of encoding data into the molecule, and it makes a difference (though how much I wouldn't be able to tell you). Also, DNA is the extremely dense compressed format, not the decompressed format which can be further compressed.
To get an idea of how dense the information in DNA is, there are at least 2 million different proteins in the human body, and an estimated 10 million total. Some protiens contain 25,000+ amino acids combined in a unique way. These are described by 25,000-35,000 genes. According to Kurzweil's math, that's about 547 bytes of data, or 22 lines of code.
Does anybody else see the problem here?