Most people seem to be missing the point that Gordon Moore originally postulated his "law" as a joke.
He presented a curve showing what had happened recently, and extrapolated forward in what, at the time, was considered (by him as well) to be an amusing fashion.
He was really demonstrating what an amazing period of development the state of the art had just been through, and his point was that/obviously/ this can't continue, otherwise just/look/ where we'd be 20 years later.
It was a 1964 geek joke which turned out to be true. It was meant, at the time, to be a bit like saying "my 24 hour old daughter doubled in age today. If this continues, she'll be older than the universe by the time she's three months old".
The thing that makes it particularly amazing is that something that could be put forward in jest ended up coming to pass.
Maybe an electron can hold an infinite amount of data, but we'll never know -- what would we write the data down on to check the electron read it back correctly.
Oh, ok, another electron. Alright then, where would be get this infinite amount of data from???
In answer to points (1) and (6), they could probably just use the same navigation system used by most commercial aircraft you've ever been in -- good ol' inertial navigation.
Most commercial aircraft don't use GPS - they use ancient inertial nav, and it works well enough for them.
Re:Sheesh - oxygen will kill you. So will air.
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Caffeine Vault
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Yep, that's the trouble with PADI certified divers - they're so ignorant, they even boast about being PADI certified.
Dive to 300 feet on air and die. Dive to 300 feet on Nitrox and get absolutely narked out of your brain and probably die anyway because you'll do something really stoopid (beyond doing a PADI cert). Dive to 300 feet on Heliox, and survive.
Sheesh - oxygen will kill you. So will air.
on
Caffeine Vault
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· Score: 1
Yep, almost too much of anything will kill you.
Drink too much water and you die, stay too long in the water, and you die.
But too much oxygen will kill you even faster. Just breath pure oxygen under two atmospheres pressure (29.4 psi), and you will convulse and die in minutes. Breath from an oxygen tank at 33 feet underwater (10m), and you will die. Breath plain old air at 300feet, and you will die.
Let's face it, for as long as our means of getting from planet A to planet B involves throwing most of ourselves away at high speed, we're never going to get anywhere in any practical sense.
"Mass Fraction" means you're lucky to get a couple of percent productive payload because you're using a newtonian reaction drive. Unfortunately that's all we know how to do at the moment. But it means you throw 95% of yourself away to get to mars, and then 95% of what's left away to get back.
Clearly the corolory here is you have to start with a lot of stuff, and that's what makes space expensive.
The fault isn't with government or big business, it's with our current state of ignorance of useful physics. What NASA needs to do is more of what it's doing a tiny bit of right now, and that's finance radical new propulsion concepts.
Yeah, sure it sounds like star-trek, but remember that landing on the moon sounded exactly like the most fanciful science fiction only a few decades before. Get over reaction drive limitations, and then we're going places! . Keep throwing yourself away to go somewhere, and you're staying firmly at home.
Clearly the bulk of this is marketing shmaltz - the cameras in the head, for example, seem to be of no practical use whatsoever.
Notwithstanding, mastering bipedal movement is a useful technology to master, in anticipation of such time as the really tricky bits are solved - vision, understanding, communication, etc.
The interesting thing, looking at the movies, is some of the ideosyncratic movements involved. In particular, some small arm movements which serve no apparent useful purpose but are very "human".
Add to that the comment that they chose the centre of gravity for the limbs as the same CG from a human limb, and one wonders whether they did that so they could simply record the movements of some dude wearing a P3 suit, and then play it back throuh a real P3 actuator.
This would save them actually figuring out movement algorithms, and would make P3 and it's control software little more than a mechanical tape recorder - nothing algorithmic at all.
Just seems odd some of the nuances it has. Look at the movies and watch the limbs not involved in the main movements...
Ya wanna talk aging information sharing tools....?
on
Is Usenet Dying?
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· Score: 1
If ya wanna talk aging information sharing tools, go no further than compuserve.
I've been a newbie usenet reader for 6 years, and many of the comments here defending usenet, while totally laudable, apply equally or more to compuserver. Extremely low S/N ratio (because of the expense), and very high quality communities and high quality answers.
Yet who's going to try to preserve compuserve, like some urban club-footed butterfly. It was a real good thing in many of the same ways usenet was (although commercial), but good things wilter and die. Sad, but there you go.
What a load of bunkum. There's a world of difference (yuk yuk yuk) between an optically inescapable region and a gravitationally inescapable one.
Else I just made a black hole by lighting a cylume stick inside a brick, or putting a flashlight in a draw an closing it. Or drawing the blinds.
Rotating fluid faster than the speed of light within it is like putting a brick on the table and saying that it's going faster than the speed of light within it. Or sitting stock still in a vacuum and saying you're going faster than the speed of sound.
Slashdot Mirror
He presented a curve showing what had happened recently, and extrapolated forward in what, at the time, was considered (by him as well) to be an amusing fashion.
He was really demonstrating what an amazing period of development the state of the art had just been through, and his point was that /obviously/ this can't continue, otherwise just /look/ where we'd be 20 years later.
It was a 1964 geek joke which turned out to be true. It was meant, at the time, to be a bit like saying "my 24 hour old daughter doubled in age today. If this continues, she'll be older than the universe by the time she's three months old".
The thing that makes it particularly amazing is that something that could be put forward in jest ended up coming to pass.
Oh, ok, another electron. Alright then, where would be get this infinite amount of data from???
Most commercial aircraft don't use GPS - they use ancient inertial nav, and it works well enough for them.
Dive to 300 feet on air and die. Dive to 300 feet on Nitrox and get absolutely narked out of your brain and probably die anyway because you'll do something really stoopid (beyond doing a PADI cert). Dive to 300 feet on Heliox, and survive.
Drink too much water and you die, stay too long in the water, and you die.
But too much oxygen will kill you even faster. Just breath pure oxygen under two atmospheres pressure (29.4 psi), and you will convulse and die in minutes. Breath from an oxygen tank at 33 feet underwater (10m), and you will die. Breath plain old air at 300feet, and you will die.
"Mass Fraction" means you're lucky to get a couple of percent productive payload because you're using a newtonian reaction drive. Unfortunately that's all we know how to do at the moment. But it means you throw 95% of yourself away to get to mars, and then 95% of what's left away to get back.
Clearly the corolory here is you have to start with a lot of stuff, and that's what makes space expensive.
The fault isn't with government or big business, it's with our current state of ignorance of useful physics. What NASA needs to do is more of what it's doing a tiny bit of right now, and that's finance radical new propulsion concepts.
Check out NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics program.
Yeah, sure it sounds like star-trek, but remember that landing on the moon sounded exactly like the most fanciful science fiction only a few decades before. Get over reaction drive limitations, and then we're going places! . Keep throwing yourself away to go somewhere, and you're staying firmly at home.
But you don't see fish driving limo's now, do you.
What can you conclude from this?
Notwithstanding, mastering bipedal movement is a useful technology to master, in anticipation of such time as the really tricky bits are solved - vision, understanding, communication, etc.
The interesting thing, looking at the movies, is some of the ideosyncratic movements involved. In particular, some small arm movements which serve no apparent useful purpose but are very "human".
Add to that the comment that they chose the centre of gravity for the limbs as the same CG from a human limb, and one wonders whether they did that so they could simply record the movements of some dude wearing a P3 suit, and then play it back throuh a real P3 actuator.
This would save them actually figuring out movement algorithms, and would make P3 and it's control software little more than a mechanical tape recorder - nothing algorithmic at all.
Just seems odd some of the nuances it has. Look at the movies and watch the limbs not involved in the main movements...
If ya wanna talk aging information sharing tools, go no further than compuserve.
I've been a newbie usenet reader for 6 years, and many of the comments here defending usenet, while totally laudable, apply equally or more to compuserver. Extremely low S/N ratio (because of the expense), and very high quality communities and high quality answers.
Yet who's going to try to preserve compuserve, like some urban club-footed butterfly. It was a real good thing in many of the same ways usenet was (although commercial), but good things wilter and die. Sad, but there you go.
You missed my point. I was exactly saying that a gravitational black hole and an optical black hole are *not* the same.
I think you missed the 'Else' in parsing the second para of my post.
A lot of people optimize the "read.. think.. reply" algorithm down to two steps, but lets not shorten it down to *one* !
What a load of bunkum. There's a world of difference (yuk yuk yuk) between an optically inescapable region and a gravitationally inescapable one.
Else I just made a black hole by lighting a cylume stick inside a brick, or putting a flashlight in a draw an closing it. Or drawing the blinds.
Rotating fluid faster than the speed of light within it is like putting a brick on the table and saying that it's going faster than the speed of light within it. Or sitting stock still in a vacuum and saying you're going faster than the speed of sound.
To paraphrase: "12 apples, versus 3 centimetres".
Hmmm... just how many watts are there per amp, so I can make this comparison meaningful?