Sorry about this, but recently more wars have started or been extensively expanded under the Democratic party than under the Republican party. This wasn't the case in olden times, but it's been true for the last while. (OTOH, the difference isn't significant, and you can easily alter it by dicking with what period of time you consider recent. Or by what you consider a war.)
This mainly matters if you're trying to paint the Democrats as the "party of peace". They aren't. And, obviously, neither are the Republicans, even though Nixon did stake a claim on that by normalizing relations with China.
FWIW, the Republicans seem to be a bit better about keeping campaign promises. I may wish they weren't, but they are. I just don't particularly like the things they promised to do that they carried through on. Both parties, however, are extremely selective about which campaign promises they keep, which they compromise on, and which they just conveniently forget. And they're both after essentially the same goal: More power to the central government with *us* in control.
Sorry, but no party can operate on provable reality. Plausible reality, however, is a different matter. It would be nice if that were required, but because if the difficulty in defining plausible that cannot happen.
IOW, I think that provable lies should disqualify a candidate. (I'm not saying that if he refuses to look at existing evidence he's lying. But he should be able to be called on that by his opponent, and if his opponent can be proven to be lying, the opponent should be disqualified. [Sort of like challenging in the official rules of Scrabble, except that you're allowed to look in the dictionary first.])
I really doubt that Elop lives in denial. What would you expect him to say, whether he as an MS partisan or not?
My personal expectation is that he knew this was in the offing before he signed the deal with MS, and probably before he was hired by Noika. I know, however, that I have no faintest hope of proving this.
I've been told that. I've also been told that a radon detector is wise. But I look at my current situation. I live in a mild climate, so I don't have a house sealed against drafts. Windows are often open, but even when they are closed there is a lot of air circulation. So while I believe the smoke detector advice... I don't believe the others apply TO ME IN MY SITUATION.
So. If I live on a hilltop, I'm likely to assume that flood insurance is unwarranted. (Unless, of course, it covers sibsidence.)
People who live where hurricanes are expectable should take precautions that don't apply to people who live where they are unreasonable. (But those people may want to have a cyclone cellar.)
HOWEVER: Global warming has changed expectable climate patterns. Insects are moving to places previously free of that particular species. Rains are coming in new patterns. Old ways of adapting are likely to be unsuccessful.
Unfortunately, much of this would happen even without global warming. We have left the "little climatic optimum" that started in the 1900's (1930's? I forget). What this means is that weather, even without global warming, would be less predictable than it used to be. This introduces a lot of noise into the signal, making it difficult to detect the new weather patterns that global warming is inducing (not to mention that those are still changing anyway).
If, however, you live near the ocean, measurable sea level change has already made you slightly more susseptible to flooding by a strom that would previously have not flooded you. This is a clear stable signal. Since the weather has always been unpredictable, and is now more unpredictable than it was in the past (because of leaving the little climatic optimum), it's difficult to say that any particular weather variation is due to global warming. You can only really detect the signal by calculating averages, and even there there's lots of noise that makes the signal difficult to read. But when you look at the parts of the signal that aren't masked by noise, then the signal is stronger. This is manifested by sea level rising, glaciers melting, oceanic acidity increasing, etc.
Additionally, Peter caught the wolf. IIRC he brought him back wound up in something. (This may have been a children's version of the story, though. I know my memories are based on a Disney cartoon. I haven't gone looking for the original.)
FWIW, the are BOTH statists. Both Obama and Romney want to increase centralized state power. Romney claims not to because he is out of power, and that's what Republicans say when they are the party that doesn't hold office. (Note: Not what they do, just what they say. Even when they are out of power they will often, perhaps even usually, vote for measures that increase the power of the central government.)
So that's not a valid reason for making a choice.
FWIW, I don't find either to be an acceptable candidate, so I'm going to vote for someone else. I'll agree that it hardly matters who, and there aren't any other candidates that are "full spectrum", but it wouldn't matter anyway, if they got in, they couldn't get anything through congress. But you know what...that would be a big improvement over EITHER Obama or Romney.
Sorry, but I'm rather convinced we've already passed that point. The question now is how to limit the damage. The Greenland ice sheet is probably doomed, and clearly also parts of Antarctica. If, however, we can keep the rest of Antartica from melting we can probably hold the ocean rise to a meter or two. I've seen predictions of 5 meters, but I think that was based on the assumption that we don't do anything effective.
P.S.: (Warning: I am not a geologist/climatologist/etc., so I can't properly evaluate the following stuff, based on various different things I've encountered. But the people who made the projections *were* respected specialists in the appropriate areas.) I've seen higher predictions, but that was definitely based on the assumption that all of the Antarctica glaciers melted. Even then I don't think I believe them. Still...when the Greenland ice sheet melts, that will release a massive amount of weight from the underlying continental plate, so it will start rising. This means the water that is currently over it will flow to someplace with a lower sea level. And if Antarctica does the same thing [for the same reason], then it will also redistribute the waters of the Oceans. So perhaps a 1 Km rise in sea levels isn't totally out of the question. But continental plates change position slowly, so a couple of centuries wouldn't be enough for maximal effect. The Himalayas are still rising because India collided with Asia, and they've been doing it since long before there were humans to notice.
The variance *IS* important. But since we're talking about disjunct sets of 30 years of data, 10 sets = 300 years, putting us back to 1712, and I'm pretty sure they weren't keeping accurate records back then. And variance is unreliable on small datasets.
What they *COULD* do is a yearly hurrican season calculation, and count the variance on that. Of course, it would have a MUCH larger variance that would the 30 average datasets that they are working with.
Still, if the meterologists were setting up their data processing now, I'm pretty sure they'd base it around years. But back when they started, calculations were done on pencil and paper, so they adopted some conventions to limit the number of calculations. Now it's traditional. I'm sure this will eventually change, but that, also, will take time.
Well, that thing about straws and camels came from a story. I think it's in the Koran, but the original version certain involved Arabia, and I think it involved both Mecca and Mohammed. But I don't think even the original was presented as a fact.
I'm not convinced that the DHS, or anything very similar to it, is a "necessary evil" rather than just an evil. It's true that *SOME* safeguards are needed, but the DHS has not shown that it is one of those safeguards. Instead it is a distraction providing the appearance of security in a way that would be humorous in a movie. Perhaps its intended as a distraction from some other agency that's actually doing the job that the DHS pretends to be doing.
Just about every action of the DHS that I can recall was more about "security theater" than improved security. The single most effective prevention was the mandated installation of secure doors on the pilots cabins of airplanes. Perhaps the DHS was allowed to issue that order.
Police work should be done by trained police officers. And THEY require considerable supervision to ensure that they don't abuse their authority. More than they get. I think that all police officers should be required to carry two working life-logs at all times, and if one of them stops working, the officer should return to the office until it is fixed. (Or they could have spares in the squad car.) This wouldn't have been practical a few years ago, but it is now. (Also these life logs should signal that they aren't working if their camera are obscured or their mics are muffled. So that probably means helmet mounts, or some such.)
The DHS appears to be just a bunch of goons with rediculous amounts of authority. They have no wisdom, limited knowledge, and are allowed to exercise rediculous amounts of power given their performance record.
Did you read the place where I said they slipped the EULA changes into a security upgrade? That's not exactly "out in the open", though I suppose technically it is, because everyone has a chance to read the EULA agreement before they agree to it. If you don't though, you don't get the security upgrade.
I disconnected my Apple machines from the net that week, and have never bought an Apple product since.
Either that, or you have poor reading comprehension skills. But given Bayes theorum being a fanboi would be enough that your priors would make your position reasonable.
N.B.: Given Bayes reasoning there is no such thing as objective reasoning. Everyone has priors, and when two sets of priors are sufficiently different it can be the case that no amount of objective information can cause them to agree on what is implied, this with perfect reasoning on both sides. This isn't that kind of extreme case, but I don't think most non-committed people would come to the same conclusion that you did, but most fanbois would, because fanboi-ism requires a set of priors that differs from those of most people.
FWIW, a "prior" is essentially a pre-existing belief that's used in evaluating new information. And you have a large set of priors before you ever learn to speak. S.a. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_probability
FWIW, I have more respect for Apple. They are about equally evil, but Apple at least attempts to make products that are technically good.
OTOH, I say that as someone who hasn't used an Apple product for around 10 years now due to EULA incompatibilities. But they got that EULA language from Microsoft, so there again, I have to rate MS as worse than Apple. Except that MS put the EULA on the installation of the product, and Apple slipped it into a security upgrade. Whoops! Maybe Apple is worse after all.
There is a theory that what you say is true. It isn't, however, the practice.
The enforcement of laws is riddled with favoritism from top to bottom. People will often justify it by saying "But they couldn't have meant it to cover that situation.". Often, however, there is no justification available, but the laws are enforced with favoritism anyway. This is why there is (in the locality I live) a "crime" described informally as "Driving while brown or black." But that's merely an easily observable instance of a widespread effect.
French poet F. Villon once observed "The law, in it's majestic equality, forbids both the rich man and the poor man from sleeping under the bridge." What he ignored is that if the rich man *IS* arrested for sleeping under the bridge, not only is he less likely to be prosecuted, if he is prosecuted, the penalty will be less. (At least proportionally. A $500 fine means a lot less to a rich man than to a poor man.)
I don't think that by "brute force" he meant doing quantum state modeling. FWIW, there is currently in progress an attemt to model the entire nervous system of C. elegans. Admittedly that's only 35 neurons or so, but once that is done we should know what parts of the neuron it's important to model.
So here we have the need for a neuron, or perhaps synapse, level model of the neural system as a "brute force" approach. I.e., we model the neural system as it exists, without understanding it.
OTOH, I've never made an estimate of how many megaflops that would require. If someone wants to claim that 1 exaflop would be enough, my response would be "Could be".
Your comments are interesting, but I'm not sure they describe the current systems. China seems to be producing more capable scientists than does the US, and possibly than does the rest of the world combined. This doesn't prove that they dynamic that you are proposing isn't present, but perhaps it isn't any stronger than the CYA policies of corporate life. And clearly most US students look at a technical degree and figure that it's not worth the time and effort. I, personally, look at it and consider that it has a negative payoff. When I went to college, the payoff was positive relative to, say, English majors. I'm not convinced that's true anymore. In China it appears to be seen as a VERY positive payoff.
OTOH, this is just the first generation of a dramatically new form of government. (Very different from the previous generation, even though many of the forms have been retained.) This is often the time when an organization is at its most successful. It usually depends upon inspired leadership to survive beyond the third generation. And the inspired leadership usually transforms the organization. This doesn't put you back to generation 1, however, as unless there is a massive transformation, much of the culture of the prior version will be retained. In this particular case, I'm thinking of IBM as an example, even though it isn't a government. But I think the general principles apply over a far larger range of organizations than just governments. The traditional summary of this (in technical companies) is: First the Engineers Then the Entrepreneurs Then the Beancounters Then dissolution.
Obviously it doesn't always happen this way, but it does quite often. A more general form would be: First the creators/designers/visionaries: Wide view of possibilities Then the developers/salesmen: Convince people that you want what we have. Then the financial people: Track spending and income carefully. Then dissolution: Nobody want's your system.
And again, a good leader at the top can improve and/or recreate the system at ANY stage, even dissolution.
China has less government interference than you seem to believe, and the US has a lot more.
Of course, this would only make sense if I were to believe in a free market, but it has long been obvious that not only do *I* not believe in a free market, nobody powerful in either politics or the economy does either. What matters is not how much government control there is, but what the governmental controls are. Of course, micro-managing is always destructive, so you need to keep the regulations within sane limits. But when China limits the export of rare resources, this is not necessarily an interference that is harmful to the LONG TERM economy of China. It also may not help, except over the short run, as it inspires others to search for alterntives.
That said, I don't know enough about the Chinese economy or it's governmental regulation to decide whether the government is regulating improperly. At a guess I'd say it was, but this is merely because everyplace I have much knowledge the governmental regulations are not done properly. But note even as sub-optimal as they are, in every place that I'm aware of they are better than no regulation.
It's been getting less successful with increasing speed over the last couple of decades. Not only on a relative scale, where it's success growth is startlingly negative, but even on an absolute scale. You can lay much of the problem on existing IP laws, but there are other laws favoring corporations over others, and other laws favoring the established over the challengers, and other laws favoring the powerful over the weak...do you see a pattern? These aren't the same laws, and they each have different justifications and goals. But they are mutually reinforcing.
FWIW, this is to be expected as the bulk of the population ages. Older people are less likely to perform personally harmful actions to protest unjust laws. Only unreasonable and reckless people act that way. If you can count on the populace to be docile, then there is less cause to treat them fairly.
Additionally, corporate structures have been undermining both family and community stability. If you may be transferred to another job three staes away at any time, you are less attached to the community. If your partner faces the same possibility, and the states aren't the same, then it puts a tremendous stress on the family. And when it happens, families are quite likely to break up, even if they make the move together. Stress does things like that. Ask a building contractor what happens to families that are living in a house when they decide to make a major improvement or repair. And that's to accomplish something that THEY have chosen to improve their living situation.
Centralization of power is inherently destructive of all lesser social groups, even if it attempts not to be. This is a minor reason why it is bad.
It's hard to make a fast chip that uses lots of power that doesn't fry the chip.
Fast means small. Using power means heat. Small + heat means thermal noise + atom migration (gates dying). For each size, there's a maximum reasonable heat dissipation. (And, yeah, less is better, if you can keep the speed that you gained by going smaller.)
LOTS of tradeoffs here. And I'm not a hardware guy, so if one corrects me, believe him. But those are genearlly accepted rules of thumb.
This, and it's close cousins ("grey goo", nuclear apocolapse, etc.) are, indeed, one answer to the Fremi Paradox. (It's famously one of the factors in the Drake equation, i.e., the expected lifetime of a technological civilization.)
There are others. Try Dogbert's answer "I can predict the future by assuming that technology is driven by money and male hormones. When virtual reality becomes cheaper than dating, society is doomed." (That's a paraphrase.) I find this another reasonable answer. There are others. People might become EXTREMELY reluctant to go to areas with no internet coverage, e.g. (There are already plans to extend the internet to Mars, but the lag would be terrible, and I doubt it could ever be usefully extended to beyond the solar system.
So the Fermi Paradox doesn't mean that a existential catastrophe happens. It could be that everyone just turns inwards. And, of course, with so many possible reasons, it could well be that different species fall victim to different ends. (If you can call "withdrawing into virtual reality" falling victim. You may enjoy every minute until the last member of the species dies of old age.)
The thing to note here is that we are just at the beginning of these existential calamities. We've arrived at the cusp of nuclear annihilation. We're approaching a cusp of biological engineering...close enough to see its existence. We can understand, if not believe, withdrawing into virtual reality. There are others that are beyond our current horizon.
It is my belief that the species that survive adopt a macro-life lifestyle. Mobile LARGE space-habitats, each with the population (at climax) of, say, New York or Tokyo. We are not yet at the point where we can really build such things, but we ARE quite close. These things will generally move quite slowly. My current conception is that they would be propelled by a kind of advanced ion engine. Early ones might make do with nuclear fission reactors, but they won't be really independent (able to browse among the comets of the Oort clouds, and even go intestellar...at about a maximum of 0.1c) until we have mastered nuclear fusion. And the current reality is that we can't even maintain a nearly closed ecology on a spacecraft, or even in a test environment down here.
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Sorry about this, but recently more wars have started or been extensively expanded under the Democratic party than under the Republican party. This wasn't the case in olden times, but it's been true for the last while. (OTOH, the difference isn't significant, and you can easily alter it by dicking with what period of time you consider recent. Or by what you consider a war.)
This mainly matters if you're trying to paint the Democrats as the "party of peace". They aren't. And, obviously, neither are the Republicans, even though Nixon did stake a claim on that by normalizing relations with China.
FWIW, the Republicans seem to be a bit better about keeping campaign promises. I may wish they weren't, but they are. I just don't particularly like the things they promised to do that they carried through on. Both parties, however, are extremely selective about which campaign promises they keep, which they compromise on, and which they just conveniently forget. And they're both after essentially the same goal: More power to the central government with *us* in control.
Sorry, but no party can operate on provable reality. Plausible reality, however, is a different matter. It would be nice if that were required, but because if the difficulty in defining plausible that cannot happen.
IOW, I think that provable lies should disqualify a candidate. (I'm not saying that if he refuses to look at existing evidence he's lying. But he should be able to be called on that by his opponent, and if his opponent can be proven to be lying, the opponent should be disqualified. [Sort of like challenging in the official rules of Scrabble, except that you're allowed to look in the dictionary first.])
You can't be sure they learned nothing from the experience. And now they have scavanged skills and materials from Noika. So they might succeed.
I really doubt that Elop lives in denial. What would you expect him to say, whether he as an MS partisan or not?
My personal expectation is that he knew this was in the offing before he signed the deal with MS, and probably before he was hired by Noika. I know, however, that I have no faintest hope of proving this.
It has struck a lot of people who don't check what standard practice is.
I've been told that. I've also been told that a radon detector is wise. But I look at my current situation. I live in a mild climate, so I don't have a house sealed against drafts. Windows are often open, but even when they are closed there is a lot of air circulation. So while I believe the smoke detector advice ... I don't believe the others apply TO ME IN MY SITUATION.
So. If I live on a hilltop, I'm likely to assume that flood insurance is unwarranted. (Unless, of course, it covers sibsidence.)
People who live where hurricanes are expectable should take precautions that don't apply to people who live where they are unreasonable. (But those people may want to have a cyclone cellar.)
HOWEVER: Global warming has changed expectable climate patterns. Insects are moving to places previously free of that particular species. Rains are coming in new patterns. Old ways of adapting are likely to be unsuccessful.
Unfortunately, much of this would happen even without global warming. We have left the "little climatic optimum" that started in the 1900's (1930's? I forget). What this means is that weather, even without global warming, would be less predictable than it used to be. This introduces a lot of noise into the signal, making it difficult to detect the new weather patterns that global warming is inducing (not to mention that those are still changing anyway).
If, however, you live near the ocean, measurable sea level change has already made you slightly more susseptible to flooding by a strom that would previously have not flooded you. This is a clear stable signal. Since the weather has always been unpredictable, and is now more unpredictable than it was in the past (because of leaving the little climatic optimum), it's difficult to say that any particular weather variation is due to global warming. You can only really detect the signal by calculating averages, and even there there's lots of noise that makes the signal difficult to read. But when you look at the parts of the signal that aren't masked by noise, then the signal is stronger. This is manifested by sea level rising, glaciers melting, oceanic acidity increasing, etc.
Additionally, Peter caught the wolf. IIRC he brought him back wound up in something. (This may have been a children's version of the story, though. I know my memories are based on a Disney cartoon. I haven't gone looking for the original.)
FWIW, the are BOTH statists. Both Obama and Romney want to increase centralized state power. Romney claims not to because he is out of power, and that's what Republicans say when they are the party that doesn't hold office. (Note: Not what they do, just what they say. Even when they are out of power they will often, perhaps even usually, vote for measures that increase the power of the central government.)
So that's not a valid reason for making a choice.
FWIW, I don't find either to be an acceptable candidate, so I'm going to vote for someone else. I'll agree that it hardly matters who, and there aren't any other candidates that are "full spectrum", but it wouldn't matter anyway, if they got in, they couldn't get anything through congress. But you know what...that would be a big improvement over EITHER Obama or Romney.
Sorry, but I'm rather convinced we've already passed that point. The question now is how to limit the damage. The Greenland ice sheet is probably doomed, and clearly also parts of Antarctica. If, however, we can keep the rest of Antartica from melting we can probably hold the ocean rise to a meter or two. I've seen predictions of 5 meters, but I think that was based on the assumption that we don't do anything effective.
P.S.: (Warning: I am not a geologist/climatologist/etc., so I can't properly evaluate the following stuff, based on various different things I've encountered. But the people who made the projections *were* respected specialists in the appropriate areas.)
I've seen higher predictions, but that was definitely based on the assumption that all of the Antarctica glaciers melted. Even then I don't think I believe them. Still...when the Greenland ice sheet melts, that will release a massive amount of weight from the underlying continental plate, so it will start rising. This means the water that is currently over it will flow to someplace with a lower sea level. And if Antarctica does the same thing [for the same reason], then it will also redistribute the waters of the Oceans. So perhaps a 1 Km rise in sea levels isn't totally out of the question. But continental plates change position slowly, so a couple of centuries wouldn't be enough for maximal effect. The Himalayas are still rising because India collided with Asia, and they've been doing it since long before there were humans to notice.
The variance *IS* important. But since we're talking about disjunct sets of 30 years of data, 10 sets = 300 years, putting us back to 1712, and I'm pretty sure they weren't keeping accurate records back then. And variance is unreliable on small datasets.
What they *COULD* do is a yearly hurrican season calculation, and count the variance on that. Of course, it would have a MUCH larger variance that would the 30 average datasets that they are working with.
Still, if the meterologists were setting up their data processing now, I'm pretty sure they'd base it around years. But back when they started, calculations were done on pencil and paper, so they adopted some conventions to limit the number of calculations. Now it's traditional. I'm sure this will eventually change, but that, also, will take time.
That's the rolling average that the gp briefly mentioned, but said the article wasn't using.
Well, that thing about straws and camels came from a story. I think it's in the Koran, but the original version certain involved Arabia, and I think it involved both Mecca and Mohammed. But I don't think even the original was presented as a fact.
I'm not convinced that the DHS, or anything very similar to it, is a "necessary evil" rather than just an evil. It's true that *SOME* safeguards are needed, but the DHS has not shown that it is one of those safeguards. Instead it is a distraction providing the appearance of security in a way that would be humorous in a movie. Perhaps its intended as a distraction from some other agency that's actually doing the job that the DHS pretends to be doing.
Just about every action of the DHS that I can recall was more about "security theater" than improved security. The single most effective prevention was the mandated installation of secure doors on the pilots cabins of airplanes. Perhaps the DHS was allowed to issue that order.
Police work should be done by trained police officers. And THEY require considerable supervision to ensure that they don't abuse their authority. More than they get. I think that all police officers should be required to carry two working life-logs at all times, and if one of them stops working, the officer should return to the office until it is fixed. (Or they could have spares in the squad car.) This wouldn't have been practical a few years ago, but it is now. (Also these life logs should signal that they aren't working if their camera are obscured or their mics are muffled. So that probably means helmet mounts, or some such.)
The DHS appears to be just a bunch of goons with rediculous amounts of authority. They have no wisdom, limited knowledge, and are allowed to exercise rediculous amounts of power given their performance record.
Did you read the place where I said they slipped the EULA changes into a security upgrade? That's not exactly "out in the open", though I suppose technically it is, because everyone has a chance to read the EULA agreement before they agree to it. If you don't though, you don't get the security upgrade.
I disconnected my Apple machines from the net that week, and have never bought an Apple product since.
Ok. You're a fanboi.
Either that, or you have poor reading comprehension skills. But given Bayes theorum being a fanboi would be enough that your priors would make your position reasonable.
N.B.: Given Bayes reasoning there is no such thing as objective reasoning. Everyone has priors, and when two sets of priors are sufficiently different it can be the case that no amount of objective information can cause them to agree on what is implied, this with perfect reasoning on both sides. This isn't that kind of extreme case, but I don't think most non-committed people would come to the same conclusion that you did, but most fanbois would, because fanboi-ism requires a set of priors that differs from those of most people.
FWIW, a "prior" is essentially a pre-existing belief that's used in evaluating new information. And you have a large set of priors before you ever learn to speak. S.a. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_probability
FWIW, I have more respect for Apple. They are about equally evil, but Apple at least attempts to make products that are technically good.
OTOH, I say that as someone who hasn't used an Apple product for around 10 years now due to EULA incompatibilities. But they got that EULA language from Microsoft, so there again, I have to rate MS as worse than Apple. Except that MS put the EULA on the installation of the product, and Apple slipped it into a security upgrade. Whoops! Maybe Apple is worse after all.
Sorry, I can't accept their EULA.
There is a theory that what you say is true. It isn't, however, the practice.
The enforcement of laws is riddled with favoritism from top to bottom. People will often justify it by saying "But they couldn't have meant it to cover that situation.". Often, however, there is no justification available, but the laws are enforced with favoritism anyway. This is why there is (in the locality I live) a "crime" described informally as "Driving while brown or black." But that's merely an easily observable instance of a widespread effect.
French poet F. Villon once observed "The law, in it's majestic equality, forbids both the rich man and the poor man from sleeping under the bridge." What he ignored is that if the rich man *IS* arrested for sleeping under the bridge, not only is he less likely to be prosecuted, if he is prosecuted, the penalty will be less. (At least proportionally. A $500 fine means a lot less to a rich man than to a poor man.)
It doesn't seem to have damaged Microsoft very much.
I don't think that by "brute force" he meant doing quantum state modeling.
FWIW, there is currently in progress an attemt to model the entire nervous system of C. elegans. Admittedly that's only 35 neurons or so, but once that is done we should know what parts of the neuron it's important to model.
So here we have the need for a neuron, or perhaps synapse, level model of the neural system as a "brute force" approach. I.e., we model the neural system as it exists, without understanding it.
OTOH, I've never made an estimate of how many megaflops that would require. If someone wants to claim that 1 exaflop would be enough, my response would be "Could be".
Your comments are interesting, but I'm not sure they describe the current systems. China seems to be producing more capable scientists than does the US, and possibly than does the rest of the world combined. This doesn't prove that they dynamic that you are proposing isn't present, but perhaps it isn't any stronger than the CYA policies of corporate life. And clearly most US students look at a technical degree and figure that it's not worth the time and effort. I, personally, look at it and consider that it has a negative payoff. When I went to college, the payoff was positive relative to, say, English majors. I'm not convinced that's true anymore. In China it appears to be seen as a VERY positive payoff.
OTOH, this is just the first generation of a dramatically new form of government. (Very different from the previous generation, even though many of the forms have been retained.) This is often the time when an organization is at its most successful. It usually depends upon inspired leadership to survive beyond the third generation. And the inspired leadership usually transforms the organization. This doesn't put you back to generation 1, however, as unless there is a massive transformation, much of the culture of the prior version will be retained. In this particular case, I'm thinking of IBM as an example, even though it isn't a government. But I think the general principles apply over a far larger range of organizations than just governments.
The traditional summary of this (in technical companies) is:
First the Engineers
Then the Entrepreneurs
Then the Beancounters
Then dissolution.
Obviously it doesn't always happen this way, but it does quite often. A more general form would be:
First the creators/designers/visionaries: Wide view of possibilities
Then the developers/salesmen: Convince people that you want what we have.
Then the financial people: Track spending and income carefully.
Then dissolution: Nobody want's your system.
And again, a good leader at the top can improve and/or recreate the system at ANY stage, even dissolution.
China has less government interference than you seem to believe, and the US has a lot more.
Of course, this would only make sense if I were to believe in a free market, but it has long been obvious that not only do *I* not believe in a free market, nobody powerful in either politics or the economy does either. What matters is not how much government control there is, but what the governmental controls are. Of course, micro-managing is always destructive, so you need to keep the regulations within sane limits. But when China limits the export of rare resources, this is not necessarily an interference that is harmful to the LONG TERM economy of China. It also may not help, except over the short run, as it inspires others to search for alterntives.
That said, I don't know enough about the Chinese economy or it's governmental regulation to decide whether the government is regulating improperly. At a guess I'd say it was, but this is merely because everyplace I have much knowledge the governmental regulations are not done properly. But note even as sub-optimal as they are, in every place that I'm aware of they are better than no regulation.
It's been getting less successful with increasing speed over the last couple of decades. Not only on a relative scale, where it's success growth is startlingly negative, but even on an absolute scale. You can lay much of the problem on existing IP laws, but there are other laws favoring corporations over others, and other laws favoring the established over the challengers, and other laws favoring the powerful over the weak...do you see a pattern? These aren't the same laws, and they each have different justifications and goals. But they are mutually reinforcing.
FWIW, this is to be expected as the bulk of the population ages. Older people are less likely to perform personally harmful actions to protest unjust laws. Only unreasonable and reckless people act that way. If you can count on the populace to be docile, then there is less cause to treat them fairly.
Additionally, corporate structures have been undermining both family and community stability. If you may be transferred to another job three staes away at any time, you are less attached to the community. If your partner faces the same possibility, and the states aren't the same, then it puts a tremendous stress on the family. And when it happens, families are quite likely to break up, even if they make the move together. Stress does things like that. Ask a building contractor what happens to families that are living in a house when they decide to make a major improvement or repair. And that's to accomplish something that THEY have chosen to improve their living situation.
Centralization of power is inherently destructive of all lesser social groups, even if it attempts not to be. This is a minor reason why it is bad.
It's hard to make a fast chip that uses lots of power that doesn't fry the chip.
Fast means small. Using power means heat. Small + heat means thermal noise + atom migration (gates dying). For each size, there's a maximum reasonable heat dissipation. (And, yeah, less is better, if you can keep the speed that you gained by going smaller.)
LOTS of tradeoffs here. And I'm not a hardware guy, so if one corrects me, believe him. But those are genearlly accepted rules of thumb.
This, and it's close cousins ("grey goo", nuclear apocolapse, etc.) are, indeed, one answer to the Fremi Paradox. (It's famously one of the factors in the Drake equation, i.e., the expected lifetime of a technological civilization.)
There are others. Try Dogbert's answer "I can predict the future by assuming that technology is driven by money and male hormones. When virtual reality becomes cheaper than dating, society is doomed." (That's a paraphrase.) I find this another reasonable answer. There are others. People might become EXTREMELY reluctant to go to areas with no internet coverage, e.g. (There are already plans to extend the internet to Mars, but the lag would be terrible, and I doubt it could ever be usefully extended to beyond the solar system.
So the Fermi Paradox doesn't mean that a existential catastrophe happens. It could be that everyone just turns inwards. And, of course, with so many possible reasons, it could well be that different species fall victim to different ends. (If you can call "withdrawing into virtual reality" falling victim. You may enjoy every minute until the last member of the species dies of old age.)
The thing to note here is that we are just at the beginning of these existential calamities. We've arrived at the cusp of nuclear annihilation. We're approaching a cusp of biological engineering...close enough to see its existence. We can understand, if not believe, withdrawing into virtual reality. There are others that are beyond our current horizon.
It is my belief that the species that survive adopt a macro-life lifestyle. Mobile LARGE space-habitats, each with the population (at climax) of, say, New York or Tokyo. We are not yet at the point where we can really build such things, but we ARE quite close. These things will generally move quite slowly. My current conception is that they would be propelled by a kind of advanced ion engine. Early ones might make do with nuclear fission reactors, but they won't be really independent (able to browse among the comets of the Oort clouds, and even go intestellar...at about a maximum of 0.1c) until we have mastered nuclear fusion. And the current reality is that we can't even maintain a nearly closed ecology on a spacecraft, or even in a test environment down here.