No, RF bandwidth is not finite. This is what the 'cell' in cellular is all about. Different cell tower re-use the same frequency and bandwidth. You can increase the total bandwidth available by increasing the number of cells and decreasing the power of each cell tower.
Surely there are practical limits (only so many tower you can pack in an area), but we are far from optimal utilization of the resource. That's the point of the article.
Overall I think that the application of computers has lead to a remarkable increase in efficiency. But I think you have to keep your business processes simple to realize true efficiencies. Computers do not handle exceptions well, they do not make judgements well. If your business processes are riddled with judgement calls and exceptions you might want to think about replacing your back end system with the good old fashionned pen and paper (or spreadsheet these days).
I recently interviewed at a company that had 400 employees. They had an terribly complicated year end bonus structure. They spent millions of dollars and many man years automating the bonus calculation process. For 400 people. Think about that for a minute. You could hire temps to do the calculations for the next 50 years for what it cost to automate the process. To top it off the rules change every year, forcing a recode of the calculation engine.
But the root cause is needless complexity. Whether you do it with computers or will people complexity adds cost, with usually very little benefit. I have seen executive bonus systems that jump through torturous calculations that end up in a net difference of $50 compared to a simple flat percentage scheme. People just don't think about why they are making rules, and what the cost of those rules will be to the business.
But anyway, my point was, past a certain level of complexity you are better off doing it with people, instead of building fragile and intracate rule based automated systems in an attempt to handle every eventuality.
The bob@fbi.gov was a joke, get it. Perhaps a bad one, but a joke none the less. Meant to highlight how obvious such an email attachment attack would be. I think it would be relatively hard to install such a trojan on my machine by sending it me via email, even if the common virus scanners missed it.
As for screen savers, in windows NT/2000/XP they are relatively secure. On my box you have three chances to get the password right or you are locked out for 15 minutes - and oh yeah, you'd have to guess the username too because that is blanked out, and Administrator don't work either. They could start guessing but it'd take awhile at 12 passwords/users an hour.
Removing the harddrive would be the best tactic, but I think I'd they'd have a hard time getting all the hardware re-detected once they put the thing back in my machine. Something'd be missing, and I'd notice. Certainly you could just map the drive, not boot from it, and install some software on the thing, but they'd have to have some NTFS hacking tools to handle my harddrives. If I wanted to be really nasty I could EFS (encrypted file system) the entire drive and make it even harder for them, though again, not impossible.
Certainly if the FBI really wanted to put this thing on my machine they could, my point is that it would not be as easy for them as in my case as it would be to infect the average win 95 user. Even for someone that takes moderate security precautions the obvious lines of attack are not open, even if their virus checker fails to catch this thing.
Answers to your list:
1) Wrong.
2) Yes they would, for reasons highlighted above. They'd have to be very careful depending on the level of security on the PC and the operating system. Which is not to say that they are not capable of being this careful, but somehow I doubt most agents would be clueful enough.
3) I am the one that does not understand my operating system? If they don't do anything for security, would you care to point out the holes in them?
4) Already addressed, this was an exaggeration to make a point.
5) Wrong.
6) I do not understand this question.
7) Wrong.
8) I use XP, 2000 and Linux exclusively.
9) I do, an average of a book a week.
10) I am in awe of your own.
All of my windows boxes have screen saver passwords, and if I were really paranoid boot passwords - so I doubt getting a warrant to come into my house and install the thing would work all that well unless they want to do some harddrive swapping (even that would require some hardware matching, difficult but not impossible).
So, am I going to be stupid and click on that MagicLatern.exe attachment from bob@fbi.gov? I don't think so. And I read all of my home email over the web, which pretty much eliminates my exposure to VBScript holes in Outlook or Exchange.
Not that the FBI gives a rats ass about anything I type, but if they did they'd have a hard time installing this software on any computer I use.
The only question Symantec should ask itself is 'is this a virus or not?' It seems to me that the FBI software is clearly not a virus if it is installed legally and used in concordance with all existing surveillance laws.
Instead of on massive boondoggles like the ISS. What people don't seem to get is that it all comes down to price per kilo to orbit - if we can't get that price down we are never going to have a sustainable presence in space.
NASA has absolutely no incentive to reasearch alternative (and cheaper) launch methodologies because they are politically committed to the space shuttle (another massive boondoggle).
I say we tell NASA they can keep the ISS, if and only if they can produce a launch vehicle which is capable of sending a thousand pound payload into orbit for 1/10th the current cost. Then we might see some progress on this front.
I played around with the 1.2 port and it was darned slow. Looking at the sourceforge update it seems that performance problems still plague the 2.2.x port.
Still, it's pretty darned cool to be able to run KDE in a window in NT/2000/XP. I look forward to the day when there is an entire cygwin distro. Won't have to dual boot or buy VMWare to try out linux apps.
A Chronological system won't work for a situation like this, it'd take too much of a mental effort -answer this - what did you have for dinner 1 week ago?
I almost always know about when I last worked on something. I once (when I got it working) found MS Outlooks 'Journal' feature to be very useful. It's keep track of when you accessed MS documents on a calendar timeline. Even if I did not know an absolute date I'd know something like 'Oh yeah, I create that document a few days after I create that spreadsheet'. Time is very important metadata and in the current hierarchical metaphor it's relatively difficult to use.
e:\asdf (ok, ok, its easy to type and a throw-back to my 286 days, wee didnt have no stinkeen gooey)
e:\asdf\music
e:\asdf\music\Rock
e:\asdf\music\Rock\Prodigy - minefields.mp3
Yeah, that works, but you are essentially building meta data into the directory structure. Seems to me we have better ways of creating and using metadata. Many of your MP3s might already have the metadata you encoded in the directory structure, stored internally in the file. It seems a waste to duplicate that data.
Your method also can fail if you forget how you organize things, or perhaps slip up and misorganize, or work in a common directory structure you share with others who might think a little differently. 'Gee did my boss put that project plan in "IT\Projects\ERP\New" or "ERP\New Projects"?' Anyone who has worked on a shared lan drive knows what I am talking about.
With some sort of unified meta data scheme I could just search for a project document with key words, 'ERP Project', created in the last few days and most likely find the file my boss had just created for me.
There is a definite need for creating a universally recognized way of storing file meta data that is not specific to a given file system or file format. It need not be complex or 3D, it just needs to allow me to easily enter and search on meta data and quickly create customized views of my files based on the meta data I have entered.
Examples:
"All word documents sorted by name"
"All documents created in the last week"
"All excel spreadsheets for project "Jupiter" sorted by size"
"All documents about dogs"
You can do some of this today with content indexing and local search tools, but think about expanding this to an entire enterprise, encompassing all data on a network. The location of the data becomes irrelevant. The idea of a 'share' becomes meaningless. You just submit a file with appropriate meta data to the operating system and it worries about the details of physical storage.
Once I actually found a reliable provider who could install it I have never had a problem with broadband.
I first got a cable modem about two years ago via RCN. Recently I moved to a new place which is not wired for RCN, so I switched to SBC (Ameritech) DSL. Surprisingly I really have had no major problems with the speed or reliability of their services (though I do take issue with the price).
I did have problems getting DSL service from a few providers, the standard DSL Hell - but they are both now in bakruptcy proceedings or already bankrupt - so go figure.
To go back to a regular modem is just unthinkable for me. Maybe my experience is atypical because I live in a large and competitive urban broadband market.
One of the reason that so many people are now using Windows 9x/ME/2000 is that Microsoft bascially gave away their SDK back in the days of Win 3.x, while IBM was looking to their OS/2 SDK as part of their revenue model, and charging accordingly.
I would have thought Microsoft learned a valuable lesson back then.
What do you mean? We have excellent salad ion machinemachine salad ion machines already. They are not 30 years out. They need only a little of tweaking and them are perfect.
-josh
The real reason for this release
on
MySQL 4.0 Released
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
From the release notes:
"Removed all Gemini hooks"
See:
http://www.mysql.com/news/article-75.html
And you will understand. There probably are not enough changes to warrant a +1 increment in the release number, but this gives them a new version that does not support NuSphere's attempt to usurp MySQL's copyright and trademark rights.
Well, cygwin is now to the point where you can run KDE under it. Within a few years just about every app will have a cygwin port, and there are plans for a whole cygwin distro - to my mind this would be a lot simpler way to run the linux apps I like.
Trust nobody with a with 16-digit user id (binary representation)
-josh
Any easy to use one time pad software out there?
on
Blaming Encryption
·
· Score: 2
Although harder to use than public key because of the neccessity of generating and exchanging the pad (key) are there any user friendly programs out there that automate encrypted communications using one time pads?
The reason being that even if the US gov't intercepts such a communication they could never prove it is an encrypted email - for all intents and purposes, without the pad, it's random data.
Their license states explicitly that THEY own all of the software on the device and that you may not attempt to reverse engineer the product.
So I guess they are saying that they wrote their own OS with utilities supporting all of the same file sharing mechanisms that Linux is known to support and that they own the whole ball of wax. That's a good one.
Sorry, I'd have cut and pasted the license in here but it was in PDF format.
Yesterday I dialed into the internet with my modem and within a few seconds I was chatting with a girl from Singapore (well, at least she said she was a girl). Must be some radiation storm! Cool!
Ok, user friendly with no installer?
on
KDE 2.2 Released
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Such a major project with an emphasis on usability and user friendliness and the package has no installer. Sure different distros can wrap it up in whatever package manager they use, but this is still a pain. Why can't they have something like mozilla's binary installer so end users (who may not know their distro) can download it and just go.
So what? Price is a function of demand, not of costs. (cf. Economics 101
hmmmmmm... And one can observe directly that the demand is low because the price is too high. The makers of e-books are ignoring the fundamental economics of the situation. When demand is low you drop prices until sales pick up.
<p><I>
You're also forgetting that most of the cost of a book, CD, etc has nothing to do with the physical representation of the object. You think that the $50 for a copy of, say, the 3rd Camel book is paper costs?</I><p>
There are some high over head costs associated with printing books. For limited printing runs this can directly effect the price because you do not have a large enough volume acrossed which to dilute the over head.
Anyway my point is that a books is a costly and complex thing to make, it seems to me that a product that does not involve that overhead should cost less.
I am a slow reader, maybe 30 pages an hour, thats 240 pages in 8 hours, which is somewhere near the average novel length, on the outside the 16 hours would get me through a 500 page behemoth which is about the max I will consider reading (short of Colleen McCollough's wonderful 'Ceasar' series, which has 5 books all in the 900+ page range, and I've read every one of them).
Here is what an e-book reader needs to be to be successful:
1. Physical dimensions of a closed paperback.
2. >=200 dpi high contrast display.
3. Internet/wireless enabled. Should be able to plug in a phone line or ethernet cable, or use 802.11b at the book store to download new content.
4. E-Books should never 'expire'. I want to be able to re-read a book ten years from now. I can do it with printed books, why not an e-book.
5. Huge storage capacity - at least 1000 books.
6. Battery life in the 16 hours range (most people could read two average books in this amount of time).
7. Should function on it's own. I don't want to HAVE to use a PC to load books onto the damned thing, see #3 above.
8. Not neccessarily fully voice enabled, but it should be able to listen for something like 'bookmark', 'next page', etc...
9. The books should cost LESS than normal books. Why? Because it does cost less to make an e-book - you are just shoving bits, instead of printing, binding and distributing. Additionally people need a REASON to switch to E-books, making them cheaper might be a good incentive.
You can find very nice old fashionned wood swivel chairs at Pottery Barn and the like - most comfortable thing I have ever sat in. And it creaks when you lean back - don't get that in an Aeron.
Everyone seems to be all wrapped up in 'consciousness' and 'emotion'. Machines must certainly have these things to take our place, right? Nope. All they need is the capability to reproduce themselves and to do it more frequently or more efficiently that the biological systems that came before.
Something as simple as a self replication nano-bot (whatever that is) that consumer oxygen for energy could end up being the only non-plant form of life on the planet if it replicated out of control and drove oxygen levels below that needed to sustain animal life.
Currently machines do replicate and improve themselve, with the help of humans. Over time the amount of help they need is continuely decreasing. I do not think that machines will need to be as intelligent as humans to decrease the amount of human assistance required for replication to near 0.
Why the hell are we working on making our own self contained fusion reactions when we have the solar system's largest self sustaining fusion reaction going on not 93 million miles away?
99.99999% of the sun's energy output flows, wasted, into the interstellar depths. A tiny fraction of this energy falls on our planet's surface and is used by us (either in stored form as fossil fuels, or more or less directly as solar, wind, etc...)
Ultimately the only real solution to our energy woes lies in figuring out how to catch just a little extra sunlight, convert it into usable forms of energy and move it to the Earth's surface.
Solar satellites are the answer. We have the technology now. We know how to make it work now. People have been designing complete, workable systems that use nothing more than existing technology for the last quarter century. Why aren't we funding them instead of this pie in the sky "always another two decades off" technology.
Certainly our skills in manipulating hot plasmas will eventually reach the point where a Fusion plant will become feasible. But by that time we could have built and launched an entire fleet of solar satellites, or paved over every major desert with solar tiles or reflecting concentrators.
Slashdot Mirror
Cable modem bandwidth is finite.
RF bandwidth is finite.
No, RF bandwidth is not finite. This is what the 'cell' in cellular is all about. Different cell tower re-use the same frequency and bandwidth. You can increase the total bandwidth available by increasing the number of cells and decreasing the power of each cell tower.
Surely there are practical limits (only so many tower you can pack in an area), but we are far from optimal utilization of the resource. That's the point of the article.
Overall I think that the application of computers has lead to a remarkable increase in efficiency. But I think you have to keep your business processes simple to realize true efficiencies. Computers do not handle exceptions well, they do not make judgements well. If your business processes are riddled with judgement calls and exceptions you might want to think about replacing your back end system with the good old fashionned pen and paper (or spreadsheet these days).
I recently interviewed at a company that had 400 employees. They had an terribly complicated year end bonus structure. They spent millions of dollars and many man years automating the bonus calculation process. For 400 people. Think about that for a minute. You could hire temps to do the calculations for the next 50 years for what it cost to automate the process. To top it off the rules change every year, forcing a recode of the calculation engine.
But the root cause is needless complexity. Whether you do it with computers or will people complexity adds cost, with usually very little benefit. I have seen executive bonus systems that jump through torturous calculations that end up in a net difference of $50 compared to a simple flat percentage scheme. People just don't think about why they are making rules, and what the cost of those rules will be to the business.
But anyway, my point was, past a certain level of complexity you are better off doing it with people, instead of building fragile and intracate rule based automated systems in an attempt to handle every eventuality.
-josh
Such hostility. Oh the irony.
The bob@fbi.gov was a joke, get it. Perhaps a bad one, but a joke none the less. Meant to highlight how obvious such an email attachment attack would be. I think it would be relatively hard to install such a trojan on my machine by sending it me via email, even if the common virus scanners missed it.
As for screen savers, in windows NT/2000/XP they are relatively secure. On my box you have three chances to get the password right or you are locked out for 15 minutes - and oh yeah, you'd have to guess the username too because that is blanked out, and Administrator don't work either. They could start guessing but it'd take awhile at 12 passwords/users an hour.
Removing the harddrive would be the best tactic, but I think I'd they'd have a hard time getting all the hardware re-detected once they put the thing back in my machine. Something'd be missing, and I'd notice. Certainly you could just map the drive, not boot from it, and install some software on the thing, but they'd have to have some NTFS hacking tools to handle my harddrives. If I wanted to be really nasty I could EFS (encrypted file system) the entire drive and make it even harder for them, though again, not impossible.
Certainly if the FBI really wanted to put this thing on my machine they could, my point is that it would not be as easy for them as in my case as it would be to infect the average win 95 user. Even for someone that takes moderate security precautions the obvious lines of attack are not open, even if their virus checker fails to catch this thing.
Answers to your list:
1) Wrong.
2) Yes they would, for reasons highlighted above. They'd have to be very careful depending on the level of security on the PC and the operating system. Which is not to say that they are not capable of being this careful, but somehow I doubt most agents would be clueful enough.
3) I am the one that does not understand my operating system? If they don't do anything for security, would you care to point out the holes in them?
4) Already addressed, this was an exaggeration to make a point.
5) Wrong.
6) I do not understand this question.
7) Wrong.
8) I use XP, 2000 and Linux exclusively.
9) I do, an average of a book a week.
10) I am in awe of your own.
All of my windows boxes have screen saver passwords, and if I were really paranoid boot passwords - so I doubt getting a warrant to come into my house and install the thing would work all that well unless they want to do some harddrive swapping (even that would require some hardware matching, difficult but not impossible).
So, am I going to be stupid and click on that MagicLatern.exe attachment from bob@fbi.gov? I don't think so. And I read all of my home email over the web, which pretty much eliminates my exposure to VBScript holes in Outlook or Exchange.
Not that the FBI gives a rats ass about anything I type, but if they did they'd have a hard time installing this software on any computer I use.
-josh
The only question Symantec should ask itself is 'is this a virus or not?' It seems to me that the FBI software is clearly not a virus if it is installed legally and used in concordance with all existing surveillance laws.
-josh
Instead of on massive boondoggles like the ISS. What people don't seem to get is that it all comes down to price per kilo to orbit - if we can't get that price down we are never going to have a sustainable presence in space.
NASA has absolutely no incentive to reasearch alternative (and cheaper) launch methodologies because they are politically committed to the space shuttle (another massive boondoggle).
I say we tell NASA they can keep the ISS, if and only if they can produce a launch vehicle which is capable of sending a thousand pound payload into orbit for 1/10th the current cost. Then we might see some progress on this front.
I played around with the 1.2 port and it was darned slow. Looking at the sourceforge update it seems that performance problems still plague the 2.2.x port.
Still, it's pretty darned cool to be able to run KDE in a window in NT/2000/XP. I look forward to the day when there is an entire cygwin distro. Won't have to dual boot or buy VMWare to try out linux apps.
-josh
I almost always know about when I last worked on something. I once (when I got it working) found MS Outlooks 'Journal' feature to be very useful. It's keep track of when you accessed MS documents on a calendar timeline. Even if I did not know an absolute date I'd know something like 'Oh yeah, I create that document a few days after I create that spreadsheet'. Time is very important metadata and in the current hierarchical metaphor it's relatively difficult to use.
e:\asdf (ok, ok, its easy to type and a throw-back to my 286 days, wee didnt have no stinkeen gooey) e:\asdf\music e:\asdf\music\Rock e:\asdf\music\Rock\Prodigy - minefields.mp3
Yeah, that works, but you are essentially building meta data into the directory structure. Seems to me we have better ways of creating and using metadata. Many of your MP3s might already have the metadata you encoded in the directory structure, stored internally in the file. It seems a waste to duplicate that data.
Your method also can fail if you forget how you organize things, or perhaps slip up and misorganize, or work in a common directory structure you share with others who might think a little differently. 'Gee did my boss put that project plan in "IT\Projects\ERP\New" or "ERP\New Projects"?' Anyone who has worked on a shared lan drive knows what I am talking about.
With some sort of unified meta data scheme I could just search for a project document with key words, 'ERP Project', created in the last few days and most likely find the file my boss had just created for me.
There is a definite need for creating a universally recognized way of storing file meta data that is not specific to a given file system or file format. It need not be complex or 3D, it just needs to allow me to easily enter and search on meta data and quickly create customized views of my files based on the meta data I have entered.
Examples: "All word documents sorted by name" "All documents created in the last week" "All excel spreadsheets for project "Jupiter" sorted by size" "All documents about dogs"
You can do some of this today with content indexing and local search tools, but think about expanding this to an entire enterprise, encompassing all data on a network. The location of the data becomes irrelevant. The idea of a 'share' becomes meaningless. You just submit a file with appropriate meta data to the operating system and it worries about the details of physical storage.
-josh
Once I actually found a reliable provider who could install it I have never had a problem with broadband.
I first got a cable modem about two years ago via RCN. Recently I moved to a new place which is not wired for RCN, so I switched to SBC (Ameritech) DSL. Surprisingly I really have had no major problems with the speed or reliability of their services (though I do take issue with the price).
I did have problems getting DSL service from a few providers, the standard DSL Hell - but they are both now in bakruptcy proceedings or already bankrupt - so go figure.
To go back to a regular modem is just unthinkable for me. Maybe my experience is atypical because I live in a large and competitive urban broadband market.
-josh
One of the reason that so many people are now using Windows 9x/ME/2000 is that Microsoft bascially gave away their SDK back in the days of Win 3.x, while IBM was looking to their OS/2 SDK as part of their revenue model, and charging accordingly.
I would have thought Microsoft learned a valuable lesson back then.
-josh
What do you mean? We have excellent salad ion machinemachine salad ion machines already. They are not 30 years out. They need only a little of tweaking and them are perfect.
-josh
From the release notes:
"Removed all Gemini hooks"
See:
http://www.mysql.com/news/article-75.html
And you will understand. There probably are not enough changes to warrant a +1 increment in the release number, but this gives them a new version that does not support NuSphere's attempt to usurp MySQL's copyright and trademark rights.
-josh
Well, cygwin is now to the point where you can run KDE under it. Within a few years just about every app will have a cygwin port, and there are plans for a whole cygwin distro - to my mind this would be a lot simpler way to run the linux apps I like.
-josh
Trust nobody with a 6-digit user id
Trust nobody with a with 16-digit user id (binary representation)
-josh
Although harder to use than public key because of the neccessity of generating and exchanging the pad (key) are there any user friendly programs out there that automate encrypted communications using one time pads?
The reason being that even if the US gov't intercepts such a communication they could never prove it is an encrypted email - for all intents and purposes, without the pad, it's random data.
-josh
Their license states explicitly that THEY own all of the software on the device and that you may not attempt to reverse engineer the product.
So I guess they are saying that they wrote their own OS with utilities supporting all of the same file sharing mechanisms that Linux is known to support and that they own the whole ball of wax. That's a good one.
Sorry, I'd have cut and pasted the license in here but it was in PDF format.
-josh
Yesterday I dialed into the internet with my modem and within a few seconds I was chatting with a girl from Singapore (well, at least she said she was a girl). Must be some radiation storm! Cool!
Such a major project with an emphasis on usability and user friendliness and the package has no installer. Sure different distros can wrap it up in whatever package manager they use, but this is still a pain. Why can't they have something like mozilla's binary installer so end users (who may not know their distro) can download it and just go.
-josh
hmmmmmm... And one can observe directly that the demand is low because the price is too high. The makers of e-books are ignoring the fundamental economics of the situation. When demand is low you drop prices until sales pick up.
<p><I>
You're also forgetting that most of the cost of a book, CD, etc has nothing to do with the physical representation of the object. You think that the $50 for a copy of, say, the 3rd Camel book is paper costs?</I><p>
There are some high over head costs associated with printing books. For limited printing runs this can directly effect the price because you do not have a large enough volume acrossed which to dilute the over head.
Anyway my point is that a books is a costly and complex thing to make, it seems to me that a product that does not involve that overhead should cost less.
-josh
I am a slow reader, maybe 30 pages an hour, thats 240 pages in 8 hours, which is somewhere near the average novel length, on the outside the 16 hours would get me through a 500 page behemoth which is about the max I will consider reading (short of Colleen McCollough's wonderful 'Ceasar' series, which has 5 books all in the 900+ page range, and I've read every one of them).
-josh
Here is what an e-book reader needs to be to be successful:
1. Physical dimensions of a closed paperback.
2. >=200 dpi high contrast display.
3. Internet/wireless enabled. Should be able to plug in a phone line or ethernet cable, or use 802.11b at the book store to download new content.
4. E-Books should never 'expire'. I want to be able to re-read a book ten years from now. I can do it with printed books, why not an e-book.
5. Huge storage capacity - at least 1000 books.
6. Battery life in the 16 hours range (most people could read two average books in this amount of time).
7. Should function on it's own. I don't want to HAVE to use a PC to load books onto the damned thing, see #3 above.
8. Not neccessarily fully voice enabled, but it should be able to listen for something like 'bookmark', 'next page', etc...
9. The books should cost LESS than normal books. Why? Because it does cost less to make an e-book - you are just shoving bits, instead of printing, binding and distributing. Additionally people need a REASON to switch to E-books, making them cheaper might be a good incentive.
You can find very nice old fashionned wood swivel chairs at Pottery Barn and the like - most comfortable thing I have ever sat in. And it creaks when you lean back - don't get that in an Aeron.
-josh
Everyone seems to be all wrapped up in 'consciousness' and 'emotion'. Machines must certainly have these things to take our place, right? Nope. All they need is the capability to reproduce themselves and to do it more frequently or more efficiently that the biological systems that came before.
Something as simple as a self replication nano-bot (whatever that is) that consumer oxygen for energy could end up being the only non-plant form of life on the planet if it replicated out of control and drove oxygen levels below that needed to sustain animal life.
Currently machines do replicate and improve themselve, with the help of humans. Over time the amount of help they need is continuely decreasing. I do not think that machines will need to be as intelligent as humans to decrease the amount of human assistance required for replication to near 0.
-josh
Why the hell are we working on making our own self contained fusion reactions when we have the solar system's largest self sustaining fusion reaction going on not 93 million miles away?
99.99999% of the sun's energy output flows, wasted, into the interstellar depths. A tiny fraction of this energy falls on our planet's surface and is used by us (either in stored form as fossil fuels, or more or less directly as solar, wind, etc...)
Ultimately the only real solution to our energy woes lies in figuring out how to catch just a little extra sunlight, convert it into usable forms of energy and move it to the Earth's surface.
Solar satellites are the answer. We have the technology now. We know how to make it work now. People have been designing complete, workable systems that use nothing more than existing technology for the last quarter century. Why aren't we funding them instead of this pie in the sky "always another two decades off" technology.
Certainly our skills in manipulating hot plasmas will eventually reach the point where a Fusion plant will become feasible. But by that time we could have built and launched an entire fleet of solar satellites, or paved over every major desert with solar tiles or reflecting concentrators.
-josh
josh