Gee, we can't process the information we have. Let's collect some more! Then, next time there's a catastrophe, we can root through all that data and find something relevant and blame it on lack of manpower. And then we can ask for even more money to collect even more data. Gee, isn't life wonderful?
Unfortunately (fortunately?), "Moore's Law" is not a law at all. At best, it is a small portion of a curve whose midsection approximates an 18-month doubling. There are numerous examples of such "laws" in the crafts and trades, and they have even managed to confuse a scientist or two in the form of such abominations as Bode's Law. They are more accurately called "rules of thumb." They invariably break down when taken beyond the middle region of their curves.
To try to prove an impossibility using one is the height of folly.
Actually I was thinking in terms of something like a room whose walls, floor, and ceiling were completely covered with a membrane resembling that used in a Magneplanar speaker, with each point accessed digitally by a computer processor, basically turning the entire room into a large headphone.
Yes, your point about electronic music is well founded, but even there, the point-source speakers are being used as the "instrument" in the sense that they are what actually vibrates the air and produces the sound. Wouldn't this digital music sound better, and wouldn't the composer/artist have access to a much more complex musical vocabulary if he could write for the entire space and not just for isolated speakers?
It just seems to me that air horns driven by electromagnets that are not so terribly different from Edison's original phonograph are on a technological plane with stuffing mercury alloy into drilled out cavities in teeth. Doing advanced research on the electronics that drive those electromagnets, it seems to me, is equivalent to using high speed drills to make the holes in the teeth into which the mercury is stuffed. It may hurt less, but it's still 100-year-old technology.
As an American of Lithuanian and Ukrainian Jewish descent, I suppose I should probably resent your suggestion that I am either a Stalinist or a National Socialist, but from the tenor of the rest of your message, it is quite obvious that you are not interested in any sort of rational discussion. Personally I would like to see the US government lead a massive project to use our vast technological superiority to make fossil fuels and Middle Eastern monarchies and dictatorships and Soviet-style (one candidate) "elected" governments irrelevant to our national well being.
And having had a great grandfather who emigrated from Philadelphia to Palestine after it had been freed from the Ottoman Empire to have it replaced by the just as imperialist British, I do in fact understand the concept of foreign military might on ones soil.
"That's why we have a (mostly) free market, to give us the speed and flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances and technologies."
So, tell me, why exactly haven't we "adapt[ed] to changing circumstances and technologies"? How many Saudi Arabian nutsos have to destroy how many buildings/nuclear power plants/reservoirs before we begin "adapting" to the fact that buying our energy from a bunch of religious zealots halfway around the world is not a self-sustaining proposition?
Take a look at Easter Island. It's rather instructive. They literally exterminated all the trees building statues to the point that they didn't have any wood to build boats. They were then trapped on the island until the Europeans got there.
Now I can see how someone could interpret this as lack of planning. But then we would be losing track of the fact that the "government is supposed to be merely a custodial bureacracy overseeing the day-to-day administration of national defense and infrastructure" and that its primary function was to build statues and not to worry about whether some idiot chopped down the last tree or, as happened on other islands, ate the last breeding pair of pigeons.
In case you haven't figured it out yet, in the grand scheme of things Earth is but a small island in space and if we burn up our last barrel of rocket fuel, we're stuck here until Nyarlathotep and his hordes get here and put us all on reservations or just eat us. This is not a video game. You don't get to hit the reset button and play again.
These idiots keep trying to replace the wheel with a more and more complex regular polygon.
And contrary to Dante, the lowest level of Hell is reserved for audiophiles and wine connoisseurs.
The quality of recorded music is not determined by how accurately it reproduces the sound at the microphone. It's determined by how well it reproduces the experience of the concert hall. And that has more to do with the primitive nature of all point source microphones and speaker systems. Where is the advanced research in that field? The music industry has the same level of openness to change as most dentists, i.e, zero.
Well, there's the SCSI card that comes with a secondary adapter for slower speed connections. That's 2 right there.
Though I have an external serial modem, I have a residual PCI modem (there are no ISA slots on the board) that I bought while I was waiting for the dits at Hayes to write a new XP USB driver, which they never did. I could take that one out if I had to, but for now that's 3 slots.
There's the sound card of course, which again is PCI. The mother board comes with built-in sound but nobody seems to be able to get it to work properly, and if I wanted a really fancy sound card I'd have to go that route anyway. That's 4 slots.
Then there's the USB card. I haven't installed the USB 2.0 card yet, so I still have the 1.0 one I transferred from my old machine when I built this thing. I don't really need a 1.0 since the case has four USB 1.0 connectors that plug directly into the motherboard, but if I want 2.0 I have to install the USB 2.0 card. That's 5 slots.
I have an AGP video card, but some folks still have a PCI card, so it's conceivable they could be using all 6 slots.
And that's without the FireWire.
Of course, the whole point of USB was to allow you to connect a bunch of peripherals without running out of room in the computer. Now there's another format that also allows you to save space by plugging things into the back of the computer, which itself eats up a PCI slot. Can you say "overkill"?
"Another positive effect of learning the languages would be that there would be someone who would understand slang, as I think there's nothing like a bit of slang to throw off any translation software."
What I've noticed from using translation programs on the internet is that it's not slang, per se, that gives them grief, but figures of speech, especially ones like those often found in French that separate parts of the figure with other words. These can be a real bitch.;o)
I'm running out of PCI slots! I only have 6! My motherboard came with USB 2.0, but it's on a PCI card. Now I need FireWire? Tell the idiots at Apple to make up their minds!
FBI? Someone during the Warren Commission investigation suggested that the acronym stood for Federal Bungled Investigations. And it always was, and it always will be, as long as law enforcement agencies sacrifice intelligence in the name of hiring folks who can be expected to follow orders without thinking.
And keep in mind that if you don't create a whole slew of these things from different samples, their progeny will be terribly inbred. Any flaw will be passed down to the nth generation. It's just so much harder to fix something than to prevent it in the first place.
I ran into a guy once who kept a keg in the refrigerator in his club basement with a tap coming through the side so he didn't actually have to open the door.:o) You guys need to think bigger! Put a keg inside of the robot! Now where could we put the tap?;o)
Let me just say that I finally got my throughput ironed out last night and it's a really awesome experience to sit back in the easy chair and listen to Electro through the stereo. I may even break down and send them some money. Convergence is coming! Now some dipwad congresscreeps want to kill it because their friendly neighborhood trough swill suppliers tell them they just can't bear to think that somebody out there is actually enjoying themselves without paying them through the nose. Makes you want to barf.
So you're saying this all comes down to what all Microsoft problems come down to: all the "improvements" and "upgrades" have been bolted on as afterthoughts? Yet, when somebody invents a new OS designed from the ground up, it dies an ignominious death because nobody wants to go to the trouble of learning a whole new system. It's the same story as the stupid qwertyuiop keyboard.
Actually, the Prime Directive hasn't been ratified yet. Unless they traveled in time to get there, and then you don't know *when* they came from and they can come back and fix things if they have to anyway. This all makes my head hurt.
Time travel, like warp drive, is just a plot device.
"Moreover, 'there is no truth to plaintiff's assertion that many of defendants' questions and answers are "nearly identical" to plaintiff's.'"
This does, however, fly in the face of the modernist educational idea that there really is no absolute correct answer to any question. Obviously, if two FAQ writers come up with similar answers to similar questions, there must be some common determinable reality behind the answers to the questions.
Considering they're talking about space stations and shuttles and long-term habitation, it occurs to me they may be planning something along the lines of Von Braun's original plan, which, if I recall correctly after so many years, involved a staged assault with an orbiting construction facility in the middle. If I recall correctly, again, the argument against this involved a longer timeline which led to its deep-sixing by Kennedy, so there's obviously something going on here we don't know about. Either they're much farther along on this than we imagine, or they really have cracked some nut that currently seems unbreakable. My gut feeling is that this has something to do with modular technology and construction, with no concrete evidence at all except the very audacity of the plan.
The finances don't bother me so much. The Chinese economy's been cranking along at double digit growth for years now, and this project could guarantee it keeps on doing so. Pyramid building is always good business, and it leads to full employment that tends to take the wind out of the sails of the malcontents and democracy demonstrators.
In any event, their progress should be interesting to watch, especially when they start pulling the necessary rabbits out of their hats. Stay tuned.
I didn't say I had "The Answer" (which we all know is 42;o). I was just pointing out what has become painfully obvious to me after long years of watching how most large organizations operate. What scares me is not that the problem exists, but that the guys at the top _don't seem to know it's a problem_, and therefore don't attempt to do anything about it.
"min[ing] its riches for the benefit of humanity."
I had the same problem with this concept. And your explanation does make a lot of sense, though it's not specifically discussed in the article. But I wonder if we're not reading too much into the word "mining." This is, after all, a translation of who knows what? It may just be a metaphor for extracting whatever benefits are to be gained from basically ruling our planet-sized moon. The "humanity" business sounds good, but does anyone actually take it seriously? Hmmm...maybe they can institute the "two worlds, two systems" plan, not to be confused with the "one country, two systems" plan?
Seriously, though, it does sound awfully ambitious to me, unless they know something we don't, like how to set up a self-contained environment on an alien body without constant resupply from Earth. *That's* the real rub here. Getting the ore or whatever back to Earth or up into geosynchronous or L5 orbit is child's play compared to the problem of the "Berlin airlift" that would be required to keep them alive.
You might want to start with the fact that it took these guys 10 months just to figure out they had a problem and another 2 months to get around to telling anybody about it. Then you might go on to point out that anybody who lets anyone automatically deduct money from their credit account needs to have their head examined. And you might conclude with a suggestion that companies that put their customers at risk shouldn't have to be sued by those customers to receive satisfaction. They should automatically be held responsible for their lapses.
This all comes down to something I've been painfully aware of for most of my life, though it doesn't seem to be terribly obvious to those who need to recognize it. Which is the very essence of the problem itself: The guys at the top don't know what's going on at the bottom. They have their little meetings where they talk to the guys just under them in the corporate hierachy who in turn have had their little meetings with the folks under them and so on and so forth until you get to the bottom where the first line supervisors are more concerned with protecting their own butts than communicating anything of importance to their own supervisors. The former head of the company where I work once called this an "inversion layer," implying that there was some particular point where communications break down. This is how it looks, but it's not how it is. The lack of communications results from the fact that each individual level of organization in a company is not totally transparent to the level above it. It is simply the accumulation of many layers of less than complete transparency that results in the appearance of this mythical inversion layer. The real problem is too many levels of management and more precisely the whole multi-layered managerial system itself, where the guys at the top really don't won't to "dirty their hands" looking at anything more than one level below them. Not only is it impossible for them to know what's happening using the current organizational model, they don't really want to do anything that would allow them to know.
If they did know, they would have to take responsibility. And nobody sitting behind an expensive desk making obscene amounts of money for having little meetings about his "vision" of the future wants to have to worry about being responsible.
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Gee, we can't process the information we have. Let's collect some more! Then, next time there's a catastrophe, we can root through all that data and find something relevant and blame it on lack of manpower. And then we can ask for even more money to collect even more data. Gee, isn't life wonderful?
"According to Moore's law"
Unfortunately (fortunately?), "Moore's Law" is not a law at all. At best, it is a small portion of a curve whose midsection approximates an 18-month doubling. There are numerous examples of such "laws" in the crafts and trades, and they have even managed to confuse a scientist or two in the form of such abominations as Bode's Law. They are more accurately called "rules of thumb." They invariably break down when taken beyond the middle region of their curves.
To try to prove an impossibility using one is the height of folly.
"what are we suppo[sed] to hit when something doesn't work"
Yeah, but now you really *can* chuck the whole thing in the river like you've been threatening to do for years.
Actually I was thinking in terms of something like a room whose walls, floor, and ceiling were completely covered with a membrane resembling that used in a Magneplanar speaker, with each point accessed digitally by a computer processor, basically turning the entire room into a large headphone.
Yes, your point about electronic music is well founded, but even there, the point-source speakers are being used as the "instrument" in the sense that they are what actually vibrates the air and produces the sound. Wouldn't this digital music sound better, and wouldn't the composer/artist have access to a much more complex musical vocabulary if he could write for the entire space and not just for isolated speakers?
It just seems to me that air horns driven by electromagnets that are not so terribly different from Edison's original phonograph are on a technological plane with stuffing mercury alloy into drilled out cavities in teeth. Doing advanced research on the electronics that drive those electromagnets, it seems to me, is equivalent to using high speed drills to make the holes in the teeth into which the mercury is stuffed. It may hurt less, but it's still 100-year-old technology.
As an American of Lithuanian and Ukrainian Jewish descent, I suppose I should probably resent your suggestion that I am either a Stalinist or a National Socialist, but from the tenor of the rest of your message, it is quite obvious that you are not interested in any sort of rational discussion. Personally I would like to see the US government lead a massive project to use our vast technological superiority to make fossil fuels and Middle Eastern monarchies and dictatorships and Soviet-style (one candidate) "elected" governments irrelevant to our national well being.
And having had a great grandfather who emigrated from Philadelphia to Palestine after it had been freed from the Ottoman Empire to have it replaced by the just as imperialist British, I do in fact understand the concept of foreign military might on ones soil.
"That's why we have a (mostly) free market, to give us the speed and flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances and technologies."
So, tell me, why exactly haven't we "adapt[ed] to changing circumstances and technologies"? How many Saudi Arabian nutsos have to destroy how many buildings/nuclear power plants/reservoirs before we begin "adapting" to the fact that buying our energy from a bunch of religious zealots halfway around the world is not a self-sustaining proposition?
Take a look at Easter Island. It's rather instructive. They literally exterminated all the trees building statues to the point that they didn't have any wood to build boats. They were then trapped on the island until the Europeans got there.
Now I can see how someone could interpret this as lack of planning. But then we would be losing track of the fact that the "government is supposed to be merely a custodial bureacracy overseeing the day-to-day administration of national defense and infrastructure" and that its primary function was to build statues and not to worry about whether some idiot chopped down the last tree or, as happened on other islands, ate the last breeding pair of pigeons.
In case you haven't figured it out yet, in the grand scheme of things Earth is but a small island in space and if we burn up our last barrel of rocket fuel, we're stuck here until Nyarlathotep and his hordes get here and put us all on reservations or just eat us. This is not a video game. You don't get to hit the reset button and play again.
NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!
These idiots keep trying to replace the wheel with a more and more complex regular polygon.
And contrary to Dante, the lowest level of Hell is reserved for audiophiles and wine connoisseurs.
The quality of recorded music is not determined by how accurately it reproduces the sound at the microphone. It's determined by how well it reproduces the experience of the concert hall. And that has more to do with the primitive nature of all point source microphones and speaker systems. Where is the advanced research in that field? The music industry has the same level of openness to change as most dentists, i.e, zero.
"9/11 was a massive success for governments everywhere--more centralization of power, more docile subjects."
As was the sinking of the Maine by George W's hero, Theodore Roosevelt. These things run in cycles.
Well, there's the SCSI card that comes with a secondary adapter for slower speed connections. That's 2 right there.
Though I have an external serial modem, I have a residual PCI modem (there are no ISA slots on the board) that I bought while I was waiting for the dits at Hayes to write a new XP USB driver, which they never did. I could take that one out if I had to, but for now that's 3 slots.
There's the sound card of course, which again is PCI. The mother board comes with built-in sound but nobody seems to be able to get it to work properly, and if I wanted a really fancy sound card I'd have to go that route anyway. That's 4 slots.
Then there's the USB card. I haven't installed the USB 2.0 card yet, so I still have the 1.0 one I transferred from my old machine when I built this thing. I don't really need a 1.0 since the case has four USB 1.0 connectors that plug directly into the motherboard, but if I want 2.0 I have to install the USB 2.0 card. That's 5 slots.
I have an AGP video card, but some folks still have a PCI card, so it's conceivable they could be using all 6 slots.
And that's without the FireWire.
Of course, the whole point of USB was to allow you to connect a bunch of peripherals without running out of room in the computer. Now there's another format that also allows you to save space by plugging things into the back of the computer, which itself eats up a PCI slot. Can you say "overkill"?
"Another positive effect of learning the languages would be that there would be someone who would understand slang, as I think there's nothing like a bit of slang to throw off any translation software."
;o)
What I've noticed from using translation programs on the internet is that it's not slang, per se, that gives them grief, but figures of speech, especially ones like those often found in French that separate parts of the figure with other words. These can be a real bitch.
I'm running out of PCI slots! I only have 6! My motherboard came with USB 2.0, but it's on a PCI card. Now I need FireWire? Tell the idiots at Apple to make up their minds!
FBI? Someone during the Warren Commission investigation suggested that the acronym stood for Federal Bungled Investigations. And it always was, and it always will be, as long as law enforcement agencies sacrifice intelligence in the name of hiring folks who can be expected to follow orders without thinking.
And keep in mind that if you don't create a whole slew of these things from different samples, their progeny will be terribly inbred. Any flaw will be passed down to the nth generation. It's just so much harder to fix something than to prevent it in the first place.
"I doubt Google has anything to worry about."
It can't even find things using the Google engine that Google places at the top of their results. Strange.
"Who cares?"
The Martians?
I ran into a guy once who kept a keg in the refrigerator in his club basement with a tap coming through the side so he didn't actually have to open the door. :o) You guys need to think bigger! Put a keg inside of the robot! Now where could we put the tap? ;o)
Let me just say that I finally got my throughput ironed out last night and it's a really awesome experience to sit back in the easy chair and listen to Electro through the stereo. I may even break down and send them some money. Convergence is coming! Now some dipwad congresscreeps want to kill it because their friendly neighborhood trough swill suppliers tell them they just can't bear to think that somebody out there is actually enjoying themselves without paying them through the nose. Makes you want to barf.
So you're saying this all comes down to what all Microsoft problems come down to: all the "improvements" and "upgrades" have been bolted on as afterthoughts? Yet, when somebody invents a new OS designed from the ground up, it dies an ignominious death because nobody wants to go to the trouble of learning a whole new system. It's the same story as the stupid qwertyuiop keyboard.
Actually, the Prime Directive hasn't been ratified yet. Unless they traveled in time to get there, and then you don't know *when* they came from and they can come back and fix things if they have to anyway. This all makes my head hurt.
Time travel, like warp drive, is just a plot device.
"Moreover, 'there is no truth to plaintiff's assertion that many of defendants' questions and answers are "nearly identical" to plaintiff's.'"
This does, however, fly in the face of the modernist educational idea that there really is no absolute correct answer to any question. Obviously, if two FAQ writers come up with similar answers to similar questions, there must be some common determinable reality behind the answers to the questions.
Reminds me of what I saw at a professionally run estate sale near DC once: "Mars Rock-$2000"
Considering they're talking about space stations and shuttles and long-term habitation, it occurs to me they may be planning something along the lines of Von Braun's original plan, which, if I recall correctly after so many years, involved a staged assault with an orbiting construction facility in the middle. If I recall correctly, again, the argument against this involved a longer timeline which led to its deep-sixing by Kennedy, so there's obviously something going on here we don't know about. Either they're much farther along on this than we imagine, or they really have cracked some nut that currently seems unbreakable. My gut feeling is that this has something to do with modular technology and construction, with no concrete evidence at all except the very audacity of the plan.
The finances don't bother me so much. The Chinese economy's been cranking along at double digit growth for years now, and this project could guarantee it keeps on doing so. Pyramid building is always good business, and it leads to full employment that tends to take the wind out of the sails of the malcontents and democracy demonstrators.
In any event, their progress should be interesting to watch, especially when they start pulling the necessary rabbits out of their hats. Stay tuned.
I didn't say I had "The Answer" (which we all know is 42 ;o). I was just pointing out what has become painfully obvious to me after long years of watching how most large organizations operate. What scares me is not that the problem exists, but that the guys at the top _don't seem to know it's a problem_, and therefore don't attempt to do anything about it.
"min[ing] its riches for the benefit of humanity."
I had the same problem with this concept. And your explanation does make a lot of sense, though it's not specifically discussed in the article. But I wonder if we're not reading too much into the word "mining." This is, after all, a translation of who knows what? It may just be a metaphor for extracting whatever benefits are to be gained from basically ruling our planet-sized moon. The "humanity" business sounds good, but does anyone actually take it seriously? Hmmm...maybe they can institute the "two worlds, two systems" plan, not to be confused with the "one country, two systems" plan?
Seriously, though, it does sound awfully ambitious to me, unless they know something we don't, like how to set up a self-contained environment on an alien body without constant resupply from Earth. *That's* the real rub here. Getting the ore or whatever back to Earth or up into geosynchronous or L5 orbit is child's play compared to the problem of the "Berlin airlift" that would be required to keep them alive.
You might want to start with the fact that it took these guys 10 months just to figure out they had a problem and another 2 months to get around to telling anybody about it. Then you might go on to point out that anybody who lets anyone automatically deduct money from their credit account needs to have their head examined. And you might conclude with a suggestion that companies that put their customers at risk shouldn't have to be sued by those customers to receive satisfaction. They should automatically be held responsible for their lapses.
This all comes down to something I've been painfully aware of for most of my life, though it doesn't seem to be terribly obvious to those who need to recognize it. Which is the very essence of the problem itself: The guys at the top don't know what's going on at the bottom. They have their little meetings where they talk to the guys just under them in the corporate hierachy who in turn have had their little meetings with the folks under them and so on and so forth until you get to the bottom where the first line supervisors are more concerned with protecting their own butts than communicating anything of importance to their own supervisors. The former head of the company where I work once called this an "inversion layer," implying that there was some particular point where communications break down. This is how it looks, but it's not how it is. The lack of communications results from the fact that each individual level of organization in a company is not totally transparent to the level above it. It is simply the accumulation of many layers of less than complete transparency that results in the appearance of this mythical inversion layer. The real problem is too many levels of management and more precisely the whole multi-layered managerial system itself, where the guys at the top really don't won't to "dirty their hands" looking at anything more than one level below them. Not only is it impossible for them to know what's happening using the current organizational model, they don't really want to do anything that would allow them to know.
If they did know, they would have to take responsibility. And nobody sitting behind an expensive desk making obscene amounts of money for having little meetings about his "vision" of the future wants to have to worry about being responsible.