They won't be extinct, but they'll be used for storage. If I'm booting my operating system from a spinning disk in 2013, I'll be pretty disappointed with technology!
A recereational scuba diver without a depressurization chamber can safely operate at a depth of 70 meters. I'm sure that scuba gear is easily available everywhere in the world. For a saboteur, that would probably be the easiest method. They could either bring wire cutters or lay delayed-blast charges. It's a pretty big disruption for a pretty small investment.
Man, the US space program at 50 ain't what it used to be! Now we're senile, geriatric and drive around in diapers (and 30+-year-old shuttles). Really hurts to see that, even worse than waching an old, lame Ozzy slobbering on himself in his living room. Oh, we could bring both back to 1969 when they ruled!
Lead might be even better. It doesn't react with air/water, and it doesn't tend to capture neutrons. I know there are some designs for modern breeder reactors that have liquid lead as the coolant, and even if it capacity to move heat are much worse than sodium, the safety issue might be an acceptable tradeoff.
Wow, that was a pretty incoherent post. At first you basically toe the line of "the man" about how protest that's potentially disruptive of your precious classtime is "thuggism." Tell me: How often does that happen? And how often would it happen if campus codes on the matter were more permissive? I suspect the answer is that it might cost you at most an hour of classtime each semester, and I suspect you waste far more of your students' time with your disorganized thoughts. Besides, in that hour of disruption, they probably learn a more important lesson than an a typical hour's worth of "preaceful" lecturing.
So I ask you, how dare you decry the "leftists who promote speech codes and shut down campus debate" when your attitude seems to match theirs perfectly? Just because you're younger doesn't make you more open-minded, it seems. You too want the exchange of ideas to be penned up in carefully delineated zones.
Consider this: Maybe it's wet blankets like you who have cockblocked all the genuine sources of angst, protest and political engagement that college-aged kids would display naturally, if you weren't standing in the way. Of course the pot smoking hippies are not the campus radicals. They never were. Campus radicals cared about issues (and maybe smoked lots of pot on the side). If you think you work on a campus where the only available form of dissent is joining the Republicans, what are you doing about it?
Oh, that's right, your will is already completely broken by the man. You won't in a million years consider lifting a finger to fix this. You will just break the wills of those younger than you. Ah, the circle of academic life.
What you need to do is to pick a side. Are you on the side of those who shut down debate, or aren't you. You can't have it both ways, like you seem to want in your post.
I think it's very odd that these two smart people thoguht that input from volunteers could create a better database than what could be obtained if you just uploaded a good dictionary plus the Wikipedia.
I mean, seriously, with facts like "Brittney Spears is not good at solid-state physics" or whatever, it seems like their database really is a joke, and that they have to introduce a program to cull all that information.
Programs for parsing semantic content are quickly becoming much better. The reason why Google is not interested in the "Semantic Web" is because they think that their smart bots will be able to mine sematic information from websites, emails and books without any help from human interpreters. That seems to me like the proper start of machine intelligence. What those bots will "learn" will be the right basis for a common-sense database, not the input of some pimply teenagers writing about Btrittney.
Good point about the swappable battery and its relevance to road warriors. This looks to me like a silly design mistake by Apple. I mean, if replacing the battery is just a matter of removing some screws, I'm sure their brilliant industrial engineers could have designed a "battery door" with an easy latch, without adding to the overall thickness of the machine. I'm less concerned about the ethernet port. I think that the days of wired-only internet service when you're on the road is numbered. Besides, if you can afford one of these, you can afford a $15 ethernet-to-USB adaptor. Mine is the size of a thumb drive and works very well.
OK, here's something about the Terminator that I want to get off my chest:
The Terminator was a machine, right? OK, so we're supposed to believe that when his non-visual sensors collected information, they converted it into text, then rendered the text in the periphery of his visual field, where it was OCR'd by his visual interpreter back into useable data. Does that make sense to anyone?
It's almost like we're supposed to think that inside the Terminator, there is a little guy who's "looking at" all this information. But that's not how people work, and that's also not how robots work. There is no "inside person" who looks at the data that the senses receive. That's what Dennett calls the Cartesian Theater, and it really is a silly idea when you think about it: It's based on an incoherent analogy in which our sense organs "project" a sensory movie for our consciousness to "see." But our consciousness is not separate from the content of the sensory experience. Consciousness just consists of our expeiences.
The same would be true of machines, even truly conscious machines.
Actually, you got this wrong and you didn't see the pictures. The package of the standard C2D got shrunk - not the die. For the non-technical: The processor from above has two surraces: the silvery one and the green one. Intel shrunk the green part by quite a lot. linky (scroll down).
I take it that the idea would be this: For $100 chip you sell at $200, you get some extra money to subsidize $100 chips that you sell for $100 in order to maintain market share.
If there is performance parity along the entire product line of two processor competitors, like there had been until the Core2 era, that doesn't stop crippling. You don't need collusion - both companies could have parallel reasons to offer tiered prices for differently-crippled variants.
But here's what I think is interesting: If future processors overshoot our needs so much that we'll only be using a small fraction of their available power, it will no longer be so important to be in the technological lead. In fact, if the bulk of the sales are in the $200 range, I wonder who will make more money: A company that makes the greatest processor, worth $800, but mostly sells crippled versions of it, or another company that can't make $800 processors, but makes perfectly acceptable uncrippled $200 - $300 chips?
My point is that in the future, almost all of us will be "low end" customers, in terms of comparing our needs to what is available in the way of processor power. So even if AMD ends up being only a low-end chip manufacturer, maybe that will turn out ok.
AMD's upcoming 3-core chips were actually supposed to be 4-core chips, but one of the cores had a defect in it so it got turned off. Even if there were a way to reverse the "turning off" of the core, it wouldn't do you any good. In the future, AMD might turn off the fourth core not because of a defect, but just because it wants to sell a chip at a lower price point without diluting the margins on their high end. The point is, you wouldn't know which of these reasons are responsible for your chip being thrown into the "three-core" bin.
TFA is written really badly, but from what I gather, the "more advanced" models of figuring out how much to charge for chips goes like this:
1. Everybody gets the same chip, but it will be crippled unless you pay the highest price.
2. Everybody gets the same uncrippled chip, but there's a FLOPS meter on it that phones home, and you pay Intel according to the amount of numbercrunching your chip did for you.
Both of these models seem completely retarded to me, although the first is already sort of in use in the CPU/GPU market. Have modern processors overshot our needs by so much that our big worry now is to find innovative ways to cripple them? If so, maybe this processor war we're fighting is ultimately not even worth winning.
Wha, you wan' distribution? I got yer distribution right here! See, it's a big fucking tube. Actually, there's a series of lots of big motherfuckin tubes, and you can send information through them. How's that for a distribution network?
I'm also not talking about computer output, though you wouldn't be able to read much unless you bumped the font size up by quite a bit at 1080p.
What? My monitor is a mere 20 diagonal visible inches (a Trinitron 500PS) and it runs at 1600X1200, which is about as many pixels as 1080p. At that pixel density, default font sizes look great and are very easy to read.
The LHC's Helium budget is going to be $2 Million per year just to top off losses. That's at today's prices. However, I just read about some British firm making "dry" cryomagnets that don't rely on Helium as a coolant. Link.
I want to know more about the principle on which these work, but if they work and can me made inexpensively, they will be found absolutely everywhere where there is waste heat. Couldn't the go under photovoltaic cells - since they convert heat and not light, they could just use the temperature differential between the hot black cells and the surroundings?
I'm in the same situation as you. My friends and I are using the 1E rulebooks, supplemented with house rules. What's great is that those old books are not hard to find, cost about $10 each, are actual hardbacks that don't come unglued after a month of use. Also, I love the old aesthetic of those books. They made the world seem mysterious and full of adventure. 3E and beyond were obviously the products of marketeers. Actually, it started with 2E, when TSR removed the Devils and Demons - I still think that's unforgivable. I know the shortcomings in 1E. That's why there are house rules.
Recently, I've noticed that many of my house rules are borrowed from Hackmaster. I play that too, and it's brilliant, though a little cumbersome if all you want to do is role playing.
Actually, I think there is another perverse motivation behind the announced changes: It's not only that they want to copy a video game, they want to make rules that are easy to put into a video game. I have no doubt that a MMO D&D will be tried again, probably with 4E rules. At the barest minimum, Bioware games will be using 4E rules in their video games, so I wouldn't be surprised if the rules were made with an eye towards mechanizing them.
In all of this, it's the spirit of roleplaying that loses, of course - since you can't role-play with a computer, at least not with today's AI technology.
My history with D&D only goes back to the Gary Gygax days, and though there are parts of his system that needed improvement, I agree that the spirit of the game should not have been messed with. It's the spirit that was so awesome about AD&D. What made me want to vomit on 3E books was the obvious goal to appeal to 12-year-old munchkins who can't stand to be told "no, you can't do that."
Luckily, WotC were nice enough to license 1E rules to Kenzerco, who amped up that 1E spirit in their outstanding game system Hackmaster. It's what I play now. Hackmaster even preserves the 1E aesthetics, instead of making everything look awesome-to-12-year-olds. (Interestingly, I've found that players who didn't play 1E and went straight to Hackmaster tend to undervalue the roleplaying and overdo the "hack" stuff - but for you, it might be just the right thing.)
Each of them could reclaim 45 pounds of carbon dioxide from the air daily.
Gee, so, given that coal powerplants in the USA alone produce 1.8 millon metric tons of CO2 per year, we would need 11 million of these devices installed in the US to make American coal power carbon neutral.
Maybe this should help everyone realize just what a bad, bad idea coal power really is, especially when we have much better alternatives.
OK, that's really cool - both your specific premise for the novel, and the general idea that magic should be explained as an exploit of buggy universe-code. What I would add to this sort of a plot: realizing that some exploits allow rather limited effects while others allow the execution of arbitrary code. To try to imagine a scenario where that sort of "root access" to the universe-computer is available - and how to best make use of it... that would be the sort of sci-fi that I would pay money for. Just one of many interesting quesitons: How is it that we would interface with the computer that's simulating our universe? I would suggest that it would involve doing something to black holes - like dropping certain sorts of structures into a black hole, where (according to recent work in cosmology) all the information from those structures would have to somehow be preserved at the event horizon. Maybe there would be a way to "program" the event horizon so as to truly destroy some information, which a clever scientist could work into a full universal exploit. Once this is discovered, we realize that we could change certain parameters of the universe, but of course that would be crazy, since the simulation is on the level of physics, so we would be messing with universal laws... and no good would come of it. However, scientists quickly realize that if the computer can run the universe, it must be also able to multitask, and the universe simulation could run simultaneously with some other process which we could launch from inside "our world" - again, using the black hole exploit for both input and output (the latter would be seen in aspects of measurable event-horizon states). Then we'd gradually learn more about about the host computer, to the point where we become confident that we could emulate it on a machine that we build - literally a virtual machine. Of course the emulator would run much more slowly than the universe, but fast enough to allow us to fool around with ever-more complex code, which we could test with impunity, because it's running on a virtual machine and won't accidentally "crash" the universe. Ultimately, this method would lead to the development of a program that takes control of the inputs and outputs of the host computer itself, and through these, a offers us a sort of window on the universe in which the simulation computer is built. (For a banal example: Imagine this computer has a webcam attached to it, and we figure out a way to eavesdrop on the data stream from the webcam. Then we would be "seeing" the higher-universe. But perhaps less banal: What if we could see their Wikipedia?) Like you say, the fact that this would be in a novel would require some sort of an interaction with the builders of the universe computer, which causes them quite a surprise! And how does it end? One of them hacks together a patch that plugs the black-hole exploit! Just kidding!
Or how about the same story in reverse: It is we that build a computer simulation of a world on the level of physics, partly with the aim (and the hope) that the simulated entities will develop an emergent consciousness. However, our own simulation code has a bug, which is exploited by the simulated entities to take control of the computer that's running the simulaiton, and to use it to explore the universe which contains the computer. Actually, something similar to this once happened on the holodeck in ST:TNG, though as usual, the way they did it was a lot more lame than it needed to be.
Anyway, thank you for inspiring in me some amusing ideas!
Actually, this sort of a municipal system could really be awesome for the blind. Imagine if the blind wore a transmitter to indicate that they can't see, and the system would track their position, tell them when they are walking towards something dangerous, when it's safe to cross a street, etc. Two-way communication would also be very easy, through the afforementioned transmitter. Voice recognition is far enough along to where the blind could have all sorts of useful information about their surroundings.
Well, we could do that, but on second thought no... let's instead use this system for running creepy commercials.
Yeah, I totally agree. The only question is whether the page that describes a theorem should contain a proof of that theorem, or whether it should just have a link to a different Wiki page. I would prefer the latter for any proof that's longer than about 10 lines. Also, making an external link would leave space for many different proofs to be referenced, because sometimes the variety of ways to prove a theorem is itself very interesting.
But the basic principle, that the Wikipedia should host as many proofs as anyone cares to type up, seems basically right. Of course, all of it should be in MathML!
Slashdot Mirror
They won't be extinct, but they'll be used for storage. If I'm booting my operating system from a spinning disk in 2013, I'll be pretty disappointed with technology!
A recereational scuba diver without a depressurization chamber can safely operate at a depth of 70 meters. I'm sure that scuba gear is easily available everywhere in the world. For a saboteur, that would probably be the easiest method. They could either bring wire cutters or lay delayed-blast charges. It's a pretty big disruption for a pretty small investment.
Man, the US space program at 50 ain't what it used to be! Now we're senile, geriatric and drive around in diapers (and 30+-year-old shuttles). Really hurts to see that, even worse than waching an old, lame Ozzy slobbering on himself in his living room. Oh, we could bring both back to 1969 when they ruled!
Lead might be even better. It doesn't react with air/water, and it doesn't tend to capture neutrons. I know there are some designs for modern breeder reactors that have liquid lead as the coolant, and even if it capacity to move heat are much worse than sodium, the safety issue might be an acceptable tradeoff.
So I ask you, how dare you decry the "leftists who promote speech codes and shut down campus debate" when your attitude seems to match theirs perfectly? Just because you're younger doesn't make you more open-minded, it seems. You too want the exchange of ideas to be penned up in carefully delineated zones.
Consider this: Maybe it's wet blankets like you who have cockblocked all the genuine sources of angst, protest and political engagement that college-aged kids would display naturally, if you weren't standing in the way. Of course the pot smoking hippies are not the campus radicals. They never were. Campus radicals cared about issues (and maybe smoked lots of pot on the side). If you think you work on a campus where the only available form of dissent is joining the Republicans, what are you doing about it?
Oh, that's right, your will is already completely broken by the man. You won't in a million years consider lifting a finger to fix this. You will just break the wills of those younger than you. Ah, the circle of academic life.
What you need to do is to pick a side. Are you on the side of those who shut down debate, or aren't you. You can't have it both ways, like you seem to want in your post.
I mean, seriously, with facts like "Brittney Spears is not good at solid-state physics" or whatever, it seems like their database really is a joke, and that they have to introduce a program to cull all that information.
Programs for parsing semantic content are quickly becoming much better. The reason why Google is not interested in the "Semantic Web" is because they think that their smart bots will be able to mine sematic information from websites, emails and books without any help from human interpreters. That seems to me like the proper start of machine intelligence. What those bots will "learn" will be the right basis for a common-sense database, not the input of some pimply teenagers writing about Btrittney.
Good point about the swappable battery and its relevance to road warriors. This looks to me like a silly design mistake by Apple. I mean, if replacing the battery is just a matter of removing some screws, I'm sure their brilliant industrial engineers could have designed a "battery door" with an easy latch, without adding to the overall thickness of the machine. I'm less concerned about the ethernet port. I think that the days of wired-only internet service when you're on the road is numbered. Besides, if you can afford one of these, you can afford a $15 ethernet-to-USB adaptor. Mine is the size of a thumb drive and works very well.
The Terminator was a machine, right? OK, so we're supposed to believe that when his non-visual sensors collected information, they converted it into text, then rendered the text in the periphery of his visual field, where it was OCR'd by his visual interpreter back into useable data. Does that make sense to anyone?
It's almost like we're supposed to think that inside the Terminator, there is a little guy who's "looking at" all this information. But that's not how people work, and that's also not how robots work. There is no "inside person" who looks at the data that the senses receive. That's what Dennett calls the Cartesian Theater, and it really is a silly idea when you think about it: It's based on an incoherent analogy in which our sense organs "project" a sensory movie for our consciousness to "see." But our consciousness is not separate from the content of the sensory experience. Consciousness just consists of our expeiences.
The same would be true of machines, even truly conscious machines.
Actually, you got this wrong and you didn't see the pictures. The package of the standard C2D got shrunk - not the die. For the non-technical: The processor from above has two surraces: the silvery one and the green one. Intel shrunk the green part by quite a lot. linky (scroll down).
If there is performance parity along the entire product line of two processor competitors, like there had been until the Core2 era, that doesn't stop crippling. You don't need collusion - both companies could have parallel reasons to offer tiered prices for differently-crippled variants.
But here's what I think is interesting: If future processors overshoot our needs so much that we'll only be using a small fraction of their available power, it will no longer be so important to be in the technological lead. In fact, if the bulk of the sales are in the $200 range, I wonder who will make more money: A company that makes the greatest processor, worth $800, but mostly sells crippled versions of it, or another company that can't make $800 processors, but makes perfectly acceptable uncrippled $200 - $300 chips?
My point is that in the future, almost all of us will be "low end" customers, in terms of comparing our needs to what is available in the way of processor power. So even if AMD ends up being only a low-end chip manufacturer, maybe that will turn out ok.
AMD's upcoming 3-core chips were actually supposed to be 4-core chips, but one of the cores had a defect in it so it got turned off. Even if there were a way to reverse the "turning off" of the core, it wouldn't do you any good. In the future, AMD might turn off the fourth core not because of a defect, but just because it wants to sell a chip at a lower price point without diluting the margins on their high end. The point is, you wouldn't know which of these reasons are responsible for your chip being thrown into the "three-core" bin.
1. Everybody gets the same chip, but it will be crippled unless you pay the highest price.
2. Everybody gets the same uncrippled chip, but there's a FLOPS meter on it that phones home, and you pay Intel according to the amount of numbercrunching your chip did for you.
Both of these models seem completely retarded to me, although the first is already sort of in use in the CPU/GPU market. Have modern processors overshot our needs by so much that our big worry now is to find innovative ways to cripple them? If so, maybe this processor war we're fighting is ultimately not even worth winning.
Wha, you wan' distribution? I got yer distribution right here! See, it's a big fucking tube. Actually, there's a series of lots of big motherfuckin tubes, and you can send information through them. How's that for a distribution network?
I want to know more about the principle on which these work, but if they work and can me made inexpensively, they will be found absolutely everywhere where there is waste heat. Couldn't the go under photovoltaic cells - since they convert heat and not light, they could just use the temperature differential between the hot black cells and the surroundings?
Recently, I've noticed that many of my house rules are borrowed from Hackmaster. I play that too, and it's brilliant, though a little cumbersome if all you want to do is role playing.
Actually, I think there is another perverse motivation behind the announced changes: It's not only that they want to copy a video game, they want to make rules that are easy to put into a video game. I have no doubt that a MMO D&D will be tried again, probably with 4E rules. At the barest minimum, Bioware games will be using 4E rules in their video games, so I wouldn't be surprised if the rules were made with an eye towards mechanizing them.
In all of this, it's the spirit of roleplaying that loses, of course - since you can't role-play with a computer, at least not with today's AI technology.
Luckily, WotC were nice enough to license 1E rules to Kenzerco, who amped up that 1E spirit in their outstanding game system Hackmaster. It's what I play now. Hackmaster even preserves the 1E aesthetics, instead of making everything look awesome-to-12-year-olds. (Interestingly, I've found that players who didn't play 1E and went straight to Hackmaster tend to undervalue the roleplaying and overdo the "hack" stuff - but for you, it might be just the right thing.)
Correction: I messed up the calculation, the actual number is 240,000 units - but stil, a ridiculous quantity.
Gee, so, given that coal powerplants in the USA alone produce 1.8 millon metric tons of CO2 per year, we would need 11 million of these devices installed in the US to make American coal power carbon neutral.
Maybe this should help everyone realize just what a bad, bad idea coal power really is, especially when we have much better alternatives.
Or how about the same story in reverse: It is we that build a computer simulation of a world on the level of physics, partly with the aim (and the hope) that the simulated entities will develop an emergent consciousness. However, our own simulation code has a bug, which is exploited by the simulated entities to take control of the computer that's running the simulaiton, and to use it to explore the universe which contains the computer. Actually, something similar to this once happened on the holodeck in ST:TNG, though as usual, the way they did it was a lot more lame than it needed to be.
Anyway, thank you for inspiring in me some amusing ideas!
Well, we could do that, but on second thought no... let's instead use this system for running creepy commercials.
But the basic principle, that the Wikipedia should host as many proofs as anyone cares to type up, seems basically right. Of course, all of it should be in MathML!