I am so happy to hear this. In this crazy world, we need more sanity and realism in how we treat nuclear fission. For those of us who think that climate change might really be a problem down the line, it seems like the obvious place to start making an investment.
I was just going to write this. Good think I had the wisdom to ctrl-F! Nuclear reactors in aircraft carriers and submarines are based on an incredibly mature technology which is incredibly safe and reliable, and we could keep track of all the waste instead of spewing it everywhere. One downside: potentially nuclear pirates!
We're talking about a 10nm layer across the surface of a chip - that's about a square centimeter. If anyone seriously complains about 50% of this being Arsenic, I would happily scrape it off and eat it in front of them. I don't think it would be a quantity large enough for the human eye to see.
All really good questions, I've been wondering that myself. I use a receiver that seems to have a pretty good D/A converter. My Bose 901 speakers usually need their own special (analogue) equalizer to sound right, but I've been able to duplicate the effect of the equalizer in software. I just do all the signal processing in the computer and send it out over optical. I find that to be much less noisy than the feeding of an analogue signal through an equalizer and whatever else - especially because my 901's need a big boost in the (hissy) treble range. I wonder about latency, though. For media use, it's not an issue. I haven't tried gaming on that system.
I agree with you. I expect that Android competitors to the iPad will be able to do that over the network. And yes, this will be a killer feature, because by now, we all have lots of great media in our home network, and wifi bandwidth is plenty good enough to stream anything but 1080p (which would be useless for the iPad anyway). If I see this kind of functionality in a slate device, as well as the power to remote desktop or VNC to my living room computer, I will really be tempted to buy it.
WTF? These foreign sites are by definition not under the jurisdiction of US law. It's like the senate of Saudi Arabia passing a law declaring Californian porn sites illegal. Big fucking deal.
I initially thought this would be a good thing for Facebook relinquishers like me. I still have some friends who use that crap, and sometimes they use it to distribute invitations to potlucks or whatever. I always tell them: Just send a fucking email, I mean, how hard is it to include people in the header? Just copy it from the last email we sent around!
Anyway, insofar at Facebook's messaging standard is inching closer to a public, non-proprietary standard (email), we've made some progress. But then again, I might be missing something.
There is absolutely nothing we could do to Earth, not even a full scale nuclear war, that could make Earth more hostile to life than Mars is. If it doesn't turn into a black hole, it will always be the most comfortable natural body in the solar system, no matter how hard we try to destroy it.
If you're serious about protecting humanity from all possible catastrophes, why would you send people to Mars? Because you think they would be hard to kill? Harder than people in terrestrial bunkers? Harder than people who live on the bottom of the sea? There is no way to keep their location secret, and if we get any bad ideas in the future, it would be trivially cheap to send a nuke to take them out, or a virus to infect their bodies or life support computers. Life on Mars will always be much more fragile than life on Earth.
To protect humanity, you would build a secret self-sustaining superbunker a kilometer underground, maybe under Antarctica. Stock the place with a thousand years worth of uranium fuel to power their life support, growing lights, AC, recycling, etc. This wouldn't be cheap, but it would certainly be cheaper than a Martian colony and a million times more robust.
Yeah, and for that matter, colonists on the bottom of the sea would have a much less hostile environment than colonists on Mars. The motivation of using Mars as a "lifeboat" to preserve humanity is completely moronic.
We will never run out of Uranium and Thorium. Forget about Thorium and focus on Uranium. Imagine ten billion people all using as much energy as Americans do today, and all that energy being made from Uranium fission. If we extracted all that Uranium from sea water, the world's rivers would still be depositing more Uranium into the sea than we would be extracting. Japanese research shows that we should be able to remove Uranium from sea water for about $140 per kilogram. That's orders of magnitudes cheaper than shipping something from Mars. The very same story could also be told for Thorium, which is also extractable from sea water in case our mines dry up. So, no, we're not going to need Martian fissiles as long as the Earth's rivers keep running.
Yeah, we're much bigger pussies than we were 70 years ago. It's not that we lack the volunteers who would happily take on all these risks. We don't have a public that would allow people to volunteer in the first place. I think that's the first problem: A miserable hero suffering and dying on Mars is just too depressing for the collective consciousness.
The second problem is that we don't really know much about self-sustaining sealed-off human habitats. We only did one experiment on this in the 90's, learned amazing stuff, but inexplicably we designated the experiment a "failure" and decided to learn nothing from it. All similar research was abandoned. To me, continuing with this research is the obvious and right way to ramp up for a useful Martian trip. The other obvious research we need to do: Autonomous (robotic) mining and mineral processing. Both of these paths of research would have important spinoffs useful here on Earth, and both could be done independently of NASA because the research doesn't need to have anything to do with space.
We don't need big breakthroughs to make Martian station work. But the things that we do need, we're making no effort to acquire.
I think this is a good idea, and it's something that everyone else can do as well. If there were an academic culture of sharing your art, datasets, etc. as torrents, maybe colleges would never have these harebrained ideas to begin with.
I really wonder: how does this college think it's improving the learning environment for its students? How do they think this will affect the recruitment of talented students who could study elsewhere? Maybe they think their network is clogged and they're too poor to buy extra bandwidth, so they're trying to scare students by this presumption of guilt. That would raise a serious red flag with me if I were applying for college - the fact that the college administration finds this kind of move wise, or even thinkable. Sorry, there are less sketchy colleges in this country, probably even in Georgia.
What's more, it won't reduce in any appreciable way the downloading of illegal music, movies, etc. because nobody needs to use P2P for that purpose in an age of Rapidshare, Mediafire, Megaupload, etc., etc..
Agreed, and it's a bad sign for NVidia's design that though they tried to conserve power, two of the top AMD GPUs use less power than a single one of these chips. Somehow, I feel like there's a lot of headroom left for AMD to crank up the clock on the 6xxx design they have now. They have a huge performance per watt lead, as well as a performance per dollar lead. That's in GPUs, at least.
Wow, it sucks to be in the US! With our old people being less healthy but still living longer, that's a recipe not only for a lot of personal misery, but also for uncontrollable health care spending. The optimal thing economically would be for old people to be healthy until their sudden death. It seems that in the US, just the opposite happens: Sick people are being kept from dying by (I assume) lots of expensive technology. Not only does that not sound like a future I want for myself. It might also help explain why our health care costs are so much higher here than anywhere else. By the way, this is not a question of private v. public medical care, because at that age, both Americans and Brits are getting their health care costs paid by the government. It just seems that the Brits are somehow getting a better deal than we get from Medicare.
I agree. This is a smart and overdue move by MS, and I wouldn't be surprised if their app store didn't become available for older versions of windows. It's just wins all around:
You mentioned security, which is important.
Then there is the cut that they can take from every application. Then there's the bullying power they get when they have the power to include or exclude your app from their store.
Then there's all the data they get about your computer and your apps.
Then there's the chance to repeatedly run piracy verification on your windows installation.
Then there's the circumvention of other market sources for software - their app store can be cheaper (no boxes, no trucks, no pimply kids arranging boxes on shelves) and micropayments will be made much easier, like in the Apple app store.
It makes you wonder why they're willing to wait years before they get this up!
The ssd is already a good value for the function of the boot drive - the place where you host the OS, applications and games. There is no need to approach terabyte territory to hold all this stuff. And my collection of ripped DVDs, etc., wouldn't benefit from being on an ssd. These two technologies make sense in parallel and will continue to do so for so long as the per-terabyte prices keep falling at the present rate.
Look, make fun if you like, but you believe this just as much. I mean, when did God stop approving of slavery? Sometime after the Bible was written, if ever. So you have a question to answer: Is slavery bad, and does God agree? If you answer in the affirmative, you must be one of the people who thinks that God is changing his mind. Of course, I think all this stuff is silly, one of the luxuries of not being religious.
Open Office is just good enough that some stingy businesses are tempted to install it, only to have their employees waste many hours and advance their greying/balding trying to make it work. A friend just told me about a presentation machine that had only OOo, and a very important presentation meeting turned into an unproductive catastrophe as everyone tried guessing at what the slides were actually supposed to say if they had been displayed correctly. People who have OOo forced on them at work have a million stories like this. MS Office is downright cheap if you compare it to the price of a single wasted meeting involving a dozen people.
But here is why OOo really is Microsoft's wet dream come true. It's because OOo is essentially unfixable. It is a ridiculous tangle of spaghetti code dating back to the 90's when it was all a giant proprietary platform-independent semi-OS. Every new version tries to atone for some of this original sin, but only so much progress can be made. Chasing after the many bugs reported in the comments above must be like a nightmare search though a forest of tangled brambles. The point is that OOo's code base will never produce a truly good application. And yet, the OSS community is going to keep fucking that chicken. We're committed and we're sticking to it. We're not going to throw a decent number of developers on much more promising alternatives like koffice, because we've got OOo that can "do more" now. But OOo has no future. It will will always be "almost good enough." And that seems to me like the perfect poison pill: It's good enough to seem worth trying, but when it goes horribly wrong, all of OSS ends up with egg on its face. It seems good enough to be worth an investment of development resources, but putting a bit of polish on that turd is probably harder than just adding features to a much cleaner code base, something that could one day actually be great (unlike OOo, which never can). So OOo is the perfect tool for destroying enthusiasm for OSS, and it's the perfect tool for sucking the oxygen out of OSS projects that might actually become as good as MS Office. Microsoft could not have dreamed of a better ally!
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I am so happy to hear this. In this crazy world, we need more sanity and realism in how we treat nuclear fission. For those of us who think that climate change might really be a problem down the line, it seems like the obvious place to start making an investment.
I was just going to write this. Good think I had the wisdom to ctrl-F! Nuclear reactors in aircraft carriers and submarines are based on an incredibly mature technology which is incredibly safe and reliable, and we could keep track of all the waste instead of spewing it everywhere. One downside: potentially nuclear pirates!
Yeah, but if we need layers of about 10nm, I'm quite sure we have enough Indium to make a cpu that's larger than the entire surface of the Earth.
We're talking about a 10nm layer across the surface of a chip - that's about a square centimeter. If anyone seriously complains about 50% of this being Arsenic, I would happily scrape it off and eat it in front of them. I don't think it would be a quantity large enough for the human eye to see.
All really good questions, I've been wondering that myself. I use a receiver that seems to have a pretty good D/A converter. My Bose 901 speakers usually need their own special (analogue) equalizer to sound right, but I've been able to duplicate the effect of the equalizer in software. I just do all the signal processing in the computer and send it out over optical. I find that to be much less noisy than the feeding of an analogue signal through an equalizer and whatever else - especially because my 901's need a big boost in the (hissy) treble range. I wonder about latency, though. For media use, it's not an issue. I haven't tried gaming on that system.
I agree with you. I expect that Android competitors to the iPad will be able to do that over the network. And yes, this will be a killer feature, because by now, we all have lots of great media in our home network, and wifi bandwidth is plenty good enough to stream anything but 1080p (which would be useless for the iPad anyway). If I see this kind of functionality in a slate device, as well as the power to remote desktop or VNC to my living room computer, I will really be tempted to buy it.
WTF? These foreign sites are by definition not under the jurisdiction of US law. It's like the senate of Saudi Arabia passing a law declaring Californian porn sites illegal. Big fucking deal.
I initially thought this would be a good thing for Facebook relinquishers like me. I still have some friends who use that crap, and sometimes they use it to distribute invitations to potlucks or whatever. I always tell them: Just send a fucking email, I mean, how hard is it to include people in the header? Just copy it from the last email we sent around!
Anyway, insofar at Facebook's messaging standard is inching closer to a public, non-proprietary standard (email), we've made some progress. But then again, I might be missing something.
There is absolutely nothing we could do to Earth, not even a full scale nuclear war, that could make Earth more hostile to life than Mars is. If it doesn't turn into a black hole, it will always be the most comfortable natural body in the solar system, no matter how hard we try to destroy it.
If you're serious about protecting humanity from all possible catastrophes, why would you send people to Mars? Because you think they would be hard to kill? Harder than people in terrestrial bunkers? Harder than people who live on the bottom of the sea? There is no way to keep their location secret, and if we get any bad ideas in the future, it would be trivially cheap to send a nuke to take them out, or a virus to infect their bodies or life support computers. Life on Mars will always be much more fragile than life on Earth.
To protect humanity, you would build a secret self-sustaining superbunker a kilometer underground, maybe under Antarctica. Stock the place with a thousand years worth of uranium fuel to power their life support, growing lights, AC, recycling, etc. This wouldn't be cheap, but it would certainly be cheaper than a Martian colony and a million times more robust.
Yeah, and for that matter, colonists on the bottom of the sea would have a much less hostile environment than colonists on Mars. The motivation of using Mars as a "lifeboat" to preserve humanity is completely moronic.
We will never run out of Uranium and Thorium. Forget about Thorium and focus on Uranium. Imagine ten billion people all using as much energy as Americans do today, and all that energy being made from Uranium fission. If we extracted all that Uranium from sea water, the world's rivers would still be depositing more Uranium into the sea than we would be extracting. Japanese research shows that we should be able to remove Uranium from sea water for about $140 per kilogram. That's orders of magnitudes cheaper than shipping something from Mars. The very same story could also be told for Thorium, which is also extractable from sea water in case our mines dry up. So, no, we're not going to need Martian fissiles as long as the Earth's rivers keep running.
Yeah, we're much bigger pussies than we were 70 years ago. It's not that we lack the volunteers who would happily take on all these risks. We don't have a public that would allow people to volunteer in the first place. I think that's the first problem: A miserable hero suffering and dying on Mars is just too depressing for the collective consciousness.
The second problem is that we don't really know much about self-sustaining sealed-off human habitats. We only did one experiment on this in the 90's, learned amazing stuff, but inexplicably we designated the experiment a "failure" and decided to learn nothing from it. All similar research was abandoned. To me, continuing with this research is the obvious and right way to ramp up for a useful Martian trip. The other obvious research we need to do: Autonomous (robotic) mining and mineral processing. Both of these paths of research would have important spinoffs useful here on Earth, and both could be done independently of NASA because the research doesn't need to have anything to do with space.
We don't need big breakthroughs to make Martian station work. But the things that we do need, we're making no effort to acquire.
I think this is a good idea, and it's something that everyone else can do as well. If there were an academic culture of sharing your art, datasets, etc. as torrents, maybe colleges would never have these harebrained ideas to begin with.
I really wonder: how does this college think it's improving the learning environment for its students? How do they think this will affect the recruitment of talented students who could study elsewhere? Maybe they think their network is clogged and they're too poor to buy extra bandwidth, so they're trying to scare students by this presumption of guilt. That would raise a serious red flag with me if I were applying for college - the fact that the college administration finds this kind of move wise, or even thinkable. Sorry, there are less sketchy colleges in this country, probably even in Georgia.
What's more, it won't reduce in any appreciable way the downloading of illegal music, movies, etc. because nobody needs to use P2P for that purpose in an age of Rapidshare, Mediafire, Megaupload, etc., etc..
I thought the same thing. Maybe it's not enough like batman, dunno.
That reminded me of one of my favorite Simpson's dialogues:
Homer: There's the right way, the wrong way and the MAX POWER way!
Lisa: But isn't that just the wrong way, dad?
Homer: Yes... but... faster!
Agreed, and it's a bad sign for NVidia's design that though they tried to conserve power, two of the top AMD GPUs use less power than a single one of these chips. Somehow, I feel like there's a lot of headroom left for AMD to crank up the clock on the 6xxx design they have now. They have a huge performance per watt lead, as well as a performance per dollar lead. That's in GPUs, at least.
Wow, it sucks to be in the US! With our old people being less healthy but still living longer, that's a recipe not only for a lot of personal misery, but also for uncontrollable health care spending. The optimal thing economically would be for old people to be healthy until their sudden death. It seems that in the US, just the opposite happens: Sick people are being kept from dying by (I assume) lots of expensive technology. Not only does that not sound like a future I want for myself. It might also help explain why our health care costs are so much higher here than anywhere else. By the way, this is not a question of private v. public medical care, because at that age, both Americans and Brits are getting their health care costs paid by the government. It just seems that the Brits are somehow getting a better deal than we get from Medicare.
I agree. This is a smart and overdue move by MS, and I wouldn't be surprised if their app store didn't become available for older versions of windows. It's just wins all around:
You mentioned security, which is important.
Then there is the cut that they can take from every application. Then there's the bullying power they get when they have the power to include or exclude your app from their store.
Then there's all the data they get about your computer and your apps.
Then there's the chance to repeatedly run piracy verification on your windows installation.
Then there's the circumvention of other market sources for software - their app store can be cheaper (no boxes, no trucks, no pimply kids arranging boxes on shelves) and micropayments will be made much easier, like in the Apple app store.
It makes you wonder why they're willing to wait years before they get this up!
I've never seen a virus that's worse than Norton Antivirus.
In Soviet Russia, the photos enhance you.
The ssd is already a good value for the function of the boot drive - the place where you host the OS, applications and games. There is no need to approach terabyte territory to hold all this stuff. And my collection of ripped DVDs, etc., wouldn't benefit from being on an ssd. These two technologies make sense in parallel and will continue to do so for so long as the per-terabyte prices keep falling at the present rate.
Look, make fun if you like, but you believe this just as much. I mean, when did God stop approving of slavery? Sometime after the Bible was written, if ever. So you have a question to answer: Is slavery bad, and does God agree? If you answer in the affirmative, you must be one of the people who thinks that God is changing his mind. Of course, I think all this stuff is silly, one of the luxuries of not being religious.
Open Office is just good enough that some stingy businesses are tempted to install it, only to have their employees waste many hours and advance their greying/balding trying to make it work. A friend just told me about a presentation machine that had only OOo, and a very important presentation meeting turned into an unproductive catastrophe as everyone tried guessing at what the slides were actually supposed to say if they had been displayed correctly. People who have OOo forced on them at work have a million stories like this. MS Office is downright cheap if you compare it to the price of a single wasted meeting involving a dozen people.
But here is why OOo really is Microsoft's wet dream come true. It's because OOo is essentially unfixable. It is a ridiculous tangle of spaghetti code dating back to the 90's when it was all a giant proprietary platform-independent semi-OS. Every new version tries to atone for some of this original sin, but only so much progress can be made. Chasing after the many bugs reported in the comments above must be like a nightmare search though a forest of tangled brambles. The point is that OOo's code base will never produce a truly good application. And yet, the OSS community is going to keep fucking that chicken. We're committed and we're sticking to it. We're not going to throw a decent number of developers on much more promising alternatives like koffice, because we've got OOo that can "do more" now. But OOo has no future. It will will always be "almost good enough." And that seems to me like the perfect poison pill: It's good enough to seem worth trying, but when it goes horribly wrong, all of OSS ends up with egg on its face. It seems good enough to be worth an investment of development resources, but putting a bit of polish on that turd is probably harder than just adding features to a much cleaner code base, something that could one day actually be great (unlike OOo, which never can). So OOo is the perfect tool for destroying enthusiasm for OSS, and it's the perfect tool for sucking the oxygen out of OSS projects that might actually become as good as MS Office. Microsoft could not have dreamed of a better ally!