Well, if titanium can be as wide-spread as aluminum, it will be huge already. It doesn't have to replace steel everywhere to "make it". And moreover, there are a lot of places steel is used today where it is welded in plants indoors. For instance, car bodies could be made of titanium if it were much cheaper per pound than steel (offsetting higher welding, forming, and machining costs). From my perspective, I cannot wait until vacuum chambers are made of titanium. Pure titanium is a getter (meaning it absorbs gases) and its use in ultra-high vacuum chambers would allow much better vacuum. Titanium is also strong enough that you could even have conflat knife edges made of the stuff. The days of week-long baking of your chambers to get good vacuum could be over soon. In short, if titanium gets much cheaper than steel per pound, there will be many things to be excited about.
I'd love to have all expansion card be the size of an SD card (you know, those little square ones). Your PC would have slots and you'd just push the card in, et voila, sound, graphics, whatever else. The PC could be the size of a laptop with all the expandability.
Looking at my usb key - it only has four pins and a metal outside, so five total. This should be easy to make into a concentric design, like audio plugs. That way you just plug it in, no orientation required. You could even, you know, rotate the connector in the socket [gasp]. I did not moderate but I also think the gp is insightful.
Dang, I feel like I just fell from the Moon. What is Pirate Bay and why do people care about it? Was it a web-site, a hosting company? I gather so far that it had something to do with the internet, and judging by the name it might have been a warez site or a warez-friendly host, but that's just a guess. Anyone care to enlighten me.
And when you do an insulin shot, is that also injecting yourself with a part of a human? Many drugs are made in e.g. e.coli where a human or modified human gene is expressed to make a protein, then purified and sold. This new approach is just packaging the relevant drug/protein in a capsule which happens to be a rice grain. No ethics problems here.
I also see this error. To reproduce, go to any slashdot comments page and search for "comments" using CTRL-F. Notice how it does not find the string in the drop down combo-box (you may have to press CTRL-N a few times).
There are many problems with this concept but privacy is not one of them. This is like having webcams, only many of them. One problem I see straight off: Let's say that a 14 y.o. decides to have sex and doesn't realise there are cameras. Now anyone who set their VCR or DVR to record the security channel can be arrested for child porn.
I like to browse with larger fonts. So my test was simple: CRTL+ in Firefox and then CRTL+ again (bump font sizes twice). Peter Lada's design is the only one that was OK after that. The rest were horribly broken - the rest of the ones on Taco's page that are accessible. The first two of the finalists are dead as of right now. Peter Lada's design feels very heavy with big thick green bars everywhere. Then again, I like basic html design - grey background and blue links. Imagine Slashdot where all three columns are separate frames... On that note, one more request: make a "clean" version of Slashdot - no right or left columns, just the articles. Put it somewhere like clean.slashdot.org. Keep the ad on top, I guess, but make it clean.
are DVDs chemically stable? I mean if even factory-burned discs give off enough fumes to be detected by dogs then there is no way I would trust this medium for my archival purposes. I want something that is inert and stable.
They mention swallowing a diagnostic tool to see the insides of your stomach. The tool would have this lens, some imaging chip and a wireless link. Now imagine swallowing a cockroach...
So, if I may ask, why do you say that "battery powered electronics will never achieve decent battery life beyond a few GHz"? It would seem that as base stations grow in density of coverage we will be able to drop power requirements. Imagine a base station every 10 m (like e.g. in every lamppost). Already today cell phone coverage is only good in civilized places, i.e. where roads go, so this would not drop quality of service compared to what we have now.
BUSH said that?? (sorry to quote a guy a few posts up). The same guy who is in the process of slashing NIH budget and who will hold NSF budget essentially flat? What am I missing?
Yeah, thanks for the link. Very informative. I knew that I was overestimating since the number of photoreceptors in each eye is like 130 million, so more than 250 megapixel is overkill. You are saying the real number is a factor of ten smaller and that makes sense. But... I started by saying that I was thinking of excess. Today we have people paying exorbitant amounts for "special" cables, tomorrow we will have people pay for extra resolution. Maybe they will rationalize it by saying that they can now freeze a video frame, walk up to the screen with a magnifying glass and see the little details that common folk do not get to see, all I know is that there will be this market and it is those people who will need highest amounts of data storage.
Lossless compression buys you a factor of maybe 2.5, also we do not watch movies every moment of our lives - at least a third is needed for sleeping and the like. I am sure you can save a bit here and there but it will only bring the estimate down by a factor of 10. Notice that at the end I slipped in a factor of 200 "just to be safe", mainly because it is kinda cool to think of a mol of bytes. So OK, maybe all we need is millimol of bytes, though somehow this feels low.
I once ran this calculation trying to guess what excess we could possibly envision and where it ends. So, let's consider movies. Now, we will assume that people in the future watch movies on large screens. Let us assume drive-in size 300" diag. Also let us assume that 300 dpi is enough and 16:9 screen ratio. That is 3.5e9 pixels. You assume 100 fps. OK, then we get 2.5e11 pixels. Three channels for color give us roughly 1e12 bytes. Per second. Of course no future snob will watch compressed movies so we will assume that this is a fair estimate. Now there are 3e7 seconds in a year and we will assume average person lives 100 years. So to get enough movies that you cannot watch them in a lifetime we would need 3e7x100x1e12 = 3e21 bytes. Let us increase that estimate a bit since people collect more than they need. We get that an Avogadro bumber of bytes ought to be enough for anyone for the foreseeable future until 3D media becomes available.
Interesting. Given that I am in fact doing postdoctoral research in molecular biology (though not virology specifically) I wonder what is so ridiculous about what I am saying. Do tell.
Hmm, except that digital viruses do infect many machines. Script kiddies are a real problem. You are right about one thing: there is no rebooting out of a bio script kiddie's masterwork. And no, by the time we understand how to design viruses we will not have created all of them. Besides, creating a virus and knowing how to kill it are two different problems entirely, so even if some yahoo re-creates a known virus, all that matters is whether there is a defense.
Now let me respond to your bullets, assuming that a lone person was at work (rather than an army like you assume): #1 Killing a family is hard for a loner. See my previous post. #2 To quote yourself: "nukes are difficult to acquire". Lots of troops is not the way to go for an individual as it requires lots of money and exposure. By the time you recruit the troops you'll be toast. #3 See #2. #4 See #2.
I think I am being trolled but just to make this clear to those who didn't RTFA. The whole point of TFA was that bioengineering is getting cheap. The main limiting point for bio-incidents today is that custom bio design requires a lot of expertise, which is why it is likely to be contained to large groups and nation states. FOR NOW. What I am saying is that once we have a good idea of how viruses work and design rules become more precise and less black art, we will face a problem where a friendly GUI will ask you to enter a target DNA/RNA sequence, the desired receptor invasion pathway and the desired number of capsid proteins and it will then spit out a finished virus. I contend that this will happen in our lifetimes, and that our current system is unprepared to deal with a flood of custom viruses. CDC is a joke, especially if a virus has high infection rate, long asymptomatic incubation period, short time from onset of symptoms to death (less than a day), and near 100% mortality rate. And lastly, yes the probability of something like this happening is currently pretty much zero. If it ever becomes non-vanishing, then we are risking the entire humanity. This is not like the probability of getting hit by a car, this is the probability that the next species will wonder why the humans died out seemingly at once. Did some huge rock from outer space wipe them out? To compare this to getting hit by a car is so incredibly selfish a viewpoint as to be repugnant.
First, we are assuming that technology gets cheaper and easier to use. Sure, today it is still complicated and requires much education to do this. Tomorrow, it may well be taken for granted. Remember how coding was complicated in the fifties, how programmers were a small group who had training and how designing programs was hard. Now you have ten year olds building viruses that infect half the internet. If you are saying, am I afraid that a virus designed by a lone goon out of spite will strike tomorrow the answer is no. The day after tomorrow is very worrysome though. BTW, what's your obsession with guns? They do minimal damage. They may take out ten people, maybe a few more. If you are pissed at the world or maybe a race then guns aren't up to the task. If you want to kill your neighbor and his family, including those cousins in Australia and kids who moved to Canada, then a virus which infects everyone and strikes with specificity is far more attractive than a gun (need to procure it without leaving a trace, smuggle across borders, dedicate time and money to travel - a virus that could be engineered in an evening for $100 in chemicals is far more attactive). As you can see, it is only a matter of viruses getting more convinient to design and cheaper to make before this explodes. Right now TFA estimates that it takes $10K and untold amount in education expenses to make some agents. We can assume that the complexity will grow and cost will decrease. We are not that far, time to start planning now.
What I meant was that you can use a chemical specific to a particular region or food as a promoter of viral activity. TFA actually mentions this in a different context, where they were using drugs administered to treat one disease as a promoter for another - the point is that this is generic and can potentially be exploited with chemicals other than drugs.
As someone who is doing research in molecular biology right now in a major US university (at a postdoctoral level), let me assure you a lack of decent edumacation in the field of biology is not the problem. The problem is that most people will not consider mutations as something that can affect them. Once this technology becomes available to 14 year olds and doable with classroom equipment, all bets are off. And let's not forget the people who are depressed and want to see their offender dead and they don't care about the world or themselves. And this is before we even mention terrorists and nation states which TFA was concerned with.
You are missing the point. Say your neighbor gets pissed off enough to want to play god. He get your hair, engineers a weapon and the next thing you know all your family is dead and noone else notices. That's what genetic targeting allows (potentially, but I am sure it'll be practical in not too distant future). Also, think KKK developing a color-of-skin based agent. You could exploit local cuisine so that only people who eat, say sushi die. The possibilities are endless. Imagine if every case modder today became humanity modder tomorrow (by killing off unwanted specimens). Aha, now you are seeing the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if titanium can be as wide-spread as aluminum, it will be huge already.
It doesn't have to replace steel everywhere to "make it". And moreover, there
are a lot of places steel is used today where it is welded in plants indoors.
For instance, car bodies could be made of titanium if it were much cheaper
per pound than steel (offsetting higher welding, forming, and machining costs).
From my perspective, I cannot wait until vacuum chambers are made of titanium.
Pure titanium is a getter (meaning it absorbs gases) and its use in ultra-high
vacuum chambers would allow much better vacuum. Titanium is also strong enough
that you could even have conflat knife edges made of the stuff. The days of
week-long baking of your chambers to get good vacuum could be over soon.
In short, if titanium gets much cheaper than steel per pound, there will be many
things to be excited about.
I'd love to have all expansion card be the size of an SD card
(you know, those little square ones). Your PC would have slots
and you'd just push the card in, et voila, sound, graphics,
whatever else. The PC could be the size of a laptop with all
the expandability.
Not to mention the whole NCSA thing. Not quite a datacenter, unless you are a researcher in which
case it very much is.
Looking at my usb key - it only has four pins and a metal outside, so five total.
This should be easy to make into a concentric design, like audio plugs. That way
you just plug it in, no orientation required. You could even, you know, rotate the
connector in the socket [gasp]. I did not moderate but I also think the gp is
insightful.
In this case, firing foreign developers might be good
for morale in the US. Makes people feel more secure.
Dang, I feel like I just fell from the Moon. What is Pirate Bay and why do
people care about it? Was it a web-site, a hosting company? I gather so far that
it had something to do with the internet, and judging by the name it might have
been a warez site or a warez-friendly host, but that's just a guess. Anyone care
to enlighten me.
I copy to notepad first, then copy from there to Word. Works fine.
And when you do an insulin shot, is that
also injecting yourself with a part of a
human? Many drugs are made in e.g. e.coli
where a human or modified human gene is
expressed to make a protein, then purified
and sold. This new approach is just
packaging the relevant drug/protein in a
capsule which happens to be a rice grain.
No ethics problems here.
I also see this error. To reproduce, go to any slashdot comments page
and search for "comments" using CTRL-F. Notice how it does not find the
string in the drop down combo-box (you may have to press CTRL-N a few
times).
There are many problems with this concept
but privacy is not one of them. This is like
having webcams, only many of them.
One problem I see straight off:
Let's say that a 14 y.o. decides to have
sex and doesn't realise there are cameras.
Now anyone who set their VCR or DVR to record
the security channel can be arrested for
child porn.
I like to browse with larger fonts. So my test was simple: CRTL+
in Firefox and then CRTL+ again (bump font sizes twice). Peter Lada's
design is the only one that was OK after that. The rest were horribly
broken - the rest of the ones on Taco's page that are accessible.
The first two of the finalists are dead as of right now.
Peter Lada's design feels very heavy with big thick green bars everywhere.
Then again, I like basic html design - grey background and blue links.
Imagine Slashdot where all three columns are separate frames...
On that note, one more request: make a "clean" version of Slashdot -
no right or left columns, just the articles. Put it somewhere like
clean.slashdot.org. Keep the ad on top, I guess, but make it clean.
are DVDs chemically stable? I mean if even factory-burned discs give off
enough fumes to be detected by dogs then there is no way I would trust
this medium for my archival purposes. I want something that is inert
and stable.
They mention swallowing a diagnostic tool
to see the insides of your stomach. The tool
would have this lens, some imaging chip and
a wireless link.
Now imagine swallowing a cockroach...
So, if I may ask, why do you say that "battery powered electronics will
never achieve decent battery life beyond a few GHz"? It would seem that
as base stations grow in density of coverage we will be able to drop
power requirements. Imagine a base station every 10 m (like e.g. in
every lamppost). Already today cell phone coverage is only good in
civilized places, i.e. where roads go, so this would not drop
quality of service compared to what we have now.
BUSH said that?? (sorry to quote a guy a few posts up).
The same guy who is in the process of slashing NIH
budget and who will hold NSF budget essentially flat?
What am I missing?
Yeah, thanks for the link. Very informative. I knew that I was
overestimating since the number of photoreceptors in each eye is like
130 million, so more than 250 megapixel is overkill. You are saying
the real number is a factor of ten smaller and that makes sense. But...
I started by saying that I was thinking of excess. Today we have people
paying exorbitant amounts for "special" cables, tomorrow we will have
people pay for extra resolution. Maybe they will rationalize it by
saying that they can now freeze a video frame, walk up to the screen
with a magnifying glass and see the little details that common folk
do not get to see, all I know is that there will be this market and
it is those people who will need highest amounts of data storage.
Lossless compression buys you a factor of
maybe 2.5, also we do not watch movies
every moment of our lives - at least a
third is needed for sleeping and the
like. I am sure you can save a bit here
and there but it will only bring the
estimate down by a factor of 10. Notice that
at the end I slipped in a factor of 200
"just to be safe", mainly because it is
kinda cool to think of a mol of bytes.
So OK, maybe all we need is millimol
of bytes, though somehow this feels
low.
Oops, I thought I proof-read it. It should be 3.5e11 pixels (not 2.5e11)
and number (not bumber). Sorry.
I once ran this calculation trying to guess what excess we could
possibly envision and where it ends.
So, let's consider movies. Now, we will assume that people in the future
watch movies on large screens. Let us assume drive-in size 300" diag.
Also let us assume that 300 dpi is enough and 16:9 screen ratio.
That is 3.5e9 pixels. You assume 100 fps. OK, then we get 2.5e11 pixels.
Three channels for color give us roughly 1e12 bytes. Per second.
Of course no future snob will watch compressed movies so we will
assume that this is a fair estimate. Now there are 3e7 seconds in
a year and we will assume average person lives 100 years. So to get
enough movies that you cannot watch them in a lifetime we would
need 3e7x100x1e12 = 3e21 bytes. Let us increase that estimate a bit
since people collect more than they need. We get that an Avogadro
bumber of bytes ought to be enough for anyone for the foreseeable
future until 3D media becomes available.
Interesting. Given that I am in fact doing
postdoctoral research in molecular biology
(though not virology specifically) I wonder
what is so ridiculous about what I am
saying. Do tell.
Hmm, except that digital viruses do infect many machines. Script
kiddies are a real problem. You are right about one thing: there is
no rebooting out of a bio script kiddie's masterwork. And no, by the
time we understand how to design viruses we will not have created all
of them. Besides, creating a virus and knowing how to kill it are two
different problems entirely, so even if some yahoo re-creates a known
virus, all that matters is whether there is a defense.
Now let me respond to your bullets, assuming that a lone person was
at work (rather than an army like you assume):
#1 Killing a family is hard for a loner. See my previous post.
#2 To quote yourself: "nukes are difficult to acquire". Lots of troops
is not the way to go for an individual as it requires lots of money
and exposure. By the time you recruit the troops you'll be toast.
#3 See #2.
#4 See #2.
I think I am being trolled but just to make this clear to those who
didn't RTFA. The whole point of TFA was that bioengineering is getting
cheap. The main limiting point for bio-incidents today is that custom
bio design requires a lot of expertise, which is why it is likely
to be contained to large groups and nation states. FOR NOW.
What I am saying is that once we have a good idea of how viruses work
and design rules become more precise and less black art, we will
face a problem where a friendly GUI will ask you to enter a target
DNA/RNA sequence, the desired receptor invasion pathway and the
desired number of capsid proteins and it will then spit out a
finished virus. I contend that this will happen in our lifetimes,
and that our current system is unprepared to deal with a flood of
custom viruses. CDC is a joke, especially if a virus has high
infection rate, long asymptomatic incubation period, short time from
onset of symptoms to death (less than a day), and near 100%
mortality rate.
And lastly, yes the probability of something like this happening is
currently pretty much zero. If it ever becomes non-vanishing, then
we are risking the entire humanity. This is not like the probability
of getting hit by a car, this is the probability that the next
species will wonder why the humans died out seemingly at once.
Did some huge rock from outer space wipe them out? To compare this
to getting hit by a car is so incredibly selfish a viewpoint as to be
repugnant.
First, we are assuming that technology gets cheaper and easier to use.
Sure, today it is still complicated and requires much education to do
this. Tomorrow, it may well be taken for granted. Remember how coding
was complicated in the fifties, how programmers were a small group who
had training and how designing programs was hard. Now you have ten year
olds building viruses that infect half the internet.
If you are saying, am I afraid that a virus designed by a lone goon
out of spite will strike tomorrow the answer is no. The day after
tomorrow is very worrysome though.
BTW, what's your obsession with guns? They do minimal damage. They may
take out ten people, maybe a few more. If you are pissed at the world or
maybe a race then guns aren't up to the task. If you want
to kill your neighbor and his family, including those cousins in
Australia and kids who moved to Canada, then a virus which infects
everyone and strikes with specificity is far more attractive than a
gun (need to procure it without leaving a trace, smuggle across
borders, dedicate time and money to travel - a virus that could be
engineered in an evening for $100 in chemicals is far more attactive).
As you can see, it is only a matter of viruses getting more
convinient to design and cheaper to make before this explodes. Right
now TFA estimates that it takes $10K and untold amount in education
expenses to make some agents. We can assume that the complexity will
grow and cost will decrease. We are not that far, time to start
planning now.
What I meant was that you can use a chemical specific to a particular
region or food as a promoter of viral activity. TFA actually mentions
this in a different context, where they were using drugs administered to treat
one disease as a promoter for another - the point is that this is
generic and can potentially be exploited with chemicals other than
drugs.
As someone who is doing research in molecular biology right now in a major US
university (at a postdoctoral level), let me assure you a lack of decent edumacation
in the field of biology is not the problem. The problem is that most people will
not consider mutations as something that can affect them. Once this technology
becomes available to 14 year olds and doable with classroom equipment, all bets
are off. And let's not forget the people who are depressed and want to see their
offender dead and they don't care about the world or themselves. And this is before
we even mention terrorists and nation states which TFA was concerned with.
You are missing the point. Say your neighbor gets pissed off enough to
want to play god. He get your hair, engineers a weapon and the next
thing you know all your family is dead and noone else notices. That's
what genetic targeting allows (potentially, but I am sure it'll be
practical in not too distant future).
Also, think KKK developing a color-of-skin based agent. You could exploit
local cuisine so that only people who eat, say sushi die. The possibilities
are endless. Imagine if every case modder today became humanity modder
tomorrow (by killing off unwanted specimens). Aha, now you are
seeing the problem.