Yeah, and what about that game "Grand Theft Auto"? It takes place on a planet. It's obviously a ripoff of Gil the ARM, which also took place on a planet.
In other words, if you were able to make 4 round trips to the moon all in a single second, by the time you'd gone the first 37 millimeters, he would already have evaporated.
Wow, those numbers you used before were so confusing, but this analogy makes it easy for me to understand now! Thank you!!
IIRC, the idea of the "singularity" was that with computers designing computers, Moore's Law would speed up. IE, when the computers which design the chips are twice as fast as they used to be, it'll take only one year to double computer speeds, then 6 months, then 3 months, then 6 weeks, etc. In other words, within a period of 2 years, processing power will diverge to infinity. This is, after all, why it's called the "singularity."
The web page you refer to erroneously defines the singularity as the moment when we become "capable of technologically creating smarter-than-human intelligence." This is a misinformed definition, because it does not describe a (mathematical) singularity, which is a vertical asymptote in some function.
A true singularity in intelligence would be a big deal, because it would, in effect, save humanity from the end of the universe; in the time leading up to the singularity, it would be possible to think an infinite number of thoughts, equivalent to living forever.
Unfortunately, such a singularity is impossible if what we know of physics is true. If the universe is discrete, rather than continuous, then it can only contain a finite amount of data. The laws of quantum mechanics are much more fundamental than Moore's law! I'm not saying it'll happen soon, but at some point, computers are doomed to stop getting faster unless some miracle occurs.
To make space tourism economic, we need to either (a) make it possible to get into orbit using far less energy, or (b) make energy available much more cheaply
This is just wrong. People make a big deal about fuel costs, but that's really the smallest part of the cost of getting into space. If fuel was all that mattered, you'd be able to go to space for maybe a thousand dollars. As it stands, it costs millions. This is because NASA's launchers are fiendishly complicated, and require a tremendous staff of engineers to check, recheck, and replace tens of thousands of components.
Even the cost of the components themselves is dwarfed by the cost of paying 10,000 people for the 6 months that it takes to prep the shuttle for launch.
If we can do away with all this personnel by making the designs simpler, then we will have realized the dream of cheap spaceflight.
( and don't think it's not doable! Companies like Armadillo and XCOR may accomplish this! )
I suspect that you are referring to the X-33, not the X-34. In any case, both the X-33 and X-34 were suborbital (goes up, comes down) spacecraft, so they could not have replaced the shuttle.
What really could've gotten us into space for cheap was the team that built the DC-X. That was actually built, for about 1/30th the price of the X-33, and it was a superior design to begin with. There's a video of it at Armadillo.
Slashdot Mirror
Used to? Still does! It's called "AT&T Natural Voices," and there's an online demo.
Don't remember the title, but it was by Asimov.
In that story, they wanted to build manned missiles. Ack!
That is such bullshit.
A: Because 25 DEC == 31 HEX!
No, 25 DEC == 0x0000001f
Yeah, and what about that game "Grand Theft Auto"? It takes place on a planet. It's obviously a ripoff of Gil the ARM, which also took place on a planet.
Um... can you point me to an experiment that's reached breakeven?
The hydrogen bomb test at Enewetak Atoll on November 1st, 1952.
Well? Who would win?
Why do you need a computer to use the toilet?
In other words, if you were able to make 4 round trips to the moon all in a single second, by the time you'd gone the first 37 millimeters, he would already have evaporated.
Wow, those numbers you used before were so confusing, but this analogy makes it easy for me to understand now! Thank you!!
IIRC, the idea of the "singularity" was that with computers designing computers, Moore's Law would speed up. IE, when the computers which design the chips are twice as fast as they used to be, it'll take only one year to double computer speeds, then 6 months, then 3 months, then 6 weeks, etc. In other words, within a period of 2 years, processing power will diverge to infinity. This is, after all, why it's called the "singularity."
The web page you refer to erroneously defines the singularity as the moment when we become "capable of technologically creating smarter-than-human intelligence." This is a misinformed definition, because it does not describe a (mathematical) singularity, which is a vertical asymptote in some function.
A true singularity in intelligence would be a big deal, because it would, in effect, save humanity from the end of the universe; in the time leading up to the singularity, it would be possible to think an infinite number of thoughts, equivalent to living forever.
Unfortunately, such a singularity is impossible if what we know of physics is true. If the universe is discrete, rather than continuous, then it can only contain a finite amount of data. The laws of quantum mechanics are much more fundamental than Moore's law! I'm not saying it'll happen soon, but at some point, computers are doomed to stop getting faster unless some miracle occurs.
The kilogram is not a unit of pressure.
while it's true (I think) that any fininte sequence of digits will eventually appear in a non-repeating, infinite sequence
This is false. I will disprove it with a counterexample. Consider the number:
1.01100111000111100001111100000111111000000...
That is, n ones, n zeroes, n+1 ones, n+1 zeroes, and so on. This number is non-repeating. But the string "1010" will never appear in it.
Storing a number as a number (instead of ASCII) is not "compression." It's just the only thing it should reasonably be stored as.
That would have to be very fast train, seeing how the moose would only end up moving at twice the train.
That should read:
nyy lbhe onfr ner orybat gb hf
Yeah, a 32*32 pixel black and white picture, maybe.
Approval voting is both simpler and mathematically superior to Instant Runoff Voting (though not as good as Condorcet).
IRV has serious problems. IMHO it is worse, not better, than the existing system of plurality voting. Read this and this.
I thought main had to be an int.
To make space tourism economic, we need to either (a) make it possible to get into orbit using far less energy, or (b) make energy available much more cheaply
This is just wrong. People make a big deal about fuel costs, but that's really the smallest part of the cost of getting into space. If fuel was all that mattered, you'd be able to go to space for maybe a thousand dollars. As it stands, it costs millions. This is because NASA's launchers are fiendishly complicated, and require a tremendous staff of engineers to check, recheck, and replace tens of thousands of components.
Even the cost of the components themselves is dwarfed by the cost of paying 10,000 people for the 6 months that it takes to prep the shuttle for launch.
If we can do away with all this personnel by making the designs simpler, then we will have realized the dream of cheap spaceflight.
( and don't think it's not doable! Companies like Armadillo and XCOR may accomplish this! )
So, since you're not using the quarks, you could just remove them and it would be all the same as far as you're concerned. Is that what you're saying?
Quiet, Mr. Shatner.
You are comparing apples to oranges
Dude, Fritz runs on a Compaq, not an Apple!
I suspect that you are referring to the X-33, not the X-34. In any case, both the X-33 and X-34 were suborbital (goes up, comes down) spacecraft, so they could not have replaced the shuttle.
What really could've gotten us into space for cheap was the team that built the DC-X. That was actually built, for about 1/30th the price of the X-33, and it was a superior design to begin with. There's a video of it at Armadillo.
IMHO though, our best chance now is XCOR.
Oops, my mistake.
In the article, they define "nanometers" as "millionths of a meter." Ack! That should be billionths.