So hard drives are about 10 years ahead of RAM in terms of $/MB? Sounds about right. 1GB hard drives were on the high end of normal users at the time, as is 1GB of RAM today (though I seem to recall having more than 10MB RAM at the time). Assuming the same increases in the next decade... 100GB RAM and 10TB drives. I like.
Solid state everyting would be great (wasn't there an article on solid state cooling fans a while back?), but it may take a while for RAM drives to bridge that big a gap, especially given the volatility problem. One big step is the drastic increase in RAM speeds, compared to hard drives which have increased only slightly in that regard.
As someone else said, it is only a matter of time.
still applies to us even if we "find a way around it"
As a law of physics, sure. Physics defines gravity is a force that attracts two bodies of mass. It makes no distinction between stars, planets, rocks, and animals.
Evolution, on the other hand, defines gravity as 'that thing that keeps stuff on the ground'. It doesn't care about esoteric notions like free-fall and black holes; no living thing exists in such environments. Gravity influences basic biological capabilities; greater strength to weight ratios for an organsism means greater ability to ignore gravity. Flying birds and insects are at one end of the spectrum. Humans are on the other. Any yet, as a force limiting our basic biological capabilities gravity no longer affects us. My cat and his fleas, despite being biologically more able to overcome gravity (ie, relative to height, they can jump much higher), are far more at it's mercy than myself, no? No matter how high a bird may soar, we can go higher.
Ok, so one guy in a million kills himself by tipping a coke machine onto him or riding a JATO into a cliff. That is an insanely far cry from the mortality rates women used to suffer in childbirth or infants before their 2nd birthday or anyone from simple diseases that we cure with ease today. The Darwin Awards are entertaining, but statistically speaking they mean absolutely nothing.
The idea is that since Darwinian evolution no longer affects us, social evolution is all we've got left. I agree, the 19th century form is largely bunk. A lot of extremely successful people started off amongst the poor. Andrew Carnegie comes to mind. But while being poor doesn't make a person stupid, it does indeed make them less likely to live as long or have as great an education. Look at the life expectancies in the West compared to the 3rd World and tell me that affluence doesn't affect quality of life.
What the parent was trying to point out is that under normal biological evolution, the more fit you are, the more children you have. One would think that the same might be true of surviving in a technological society. That is, those that are incapable of creating a good environment to raise their children would bear fewer children than those who could. Yet the opposite is the case. What this means for the future, if anything at all, is unclear.
The big question here is whether or not that is affecting anything genetic. The only biological trait I can think of that is being selected for would be intelligence, but given how many stupid rich people there are (just look at Congress!), it seems unlikely. It is purely social; children of the poor are more likely to remain lower down on the social totem pole than the children of the affluent.
BTW, I think the article that started all this is as silly as saying "gravity doesn't apply to us now that we have rockets."
I think what he meant was that all the forces of nature that are normally extremely prohbitive to a species' abiltities, inability to fly or swim deeply or see at night or whatever, no longer apply to us. If we need an ability, we don't have to breed for it for thousands of years, probably sacrificing some other useful ability. We just put some engineers to work on it. In a real sense, gravity no longer applies to us because ignoring it has become an almost trivial application of our technology. As unenhanced individuals, sure it still affects us; you jump up, you come back down. But as a species, we can now cross oceans, mountains, deserts, and reach all levels of elevation from the "deepest inner mine to the Outer Limits" (haha!).
Well, evolution is a statistical process. You can look at a scenario, like proto-humans on their way to intelligence, and say "Given their environment and current set of abilities, it is likely that intelligence will be selected for."
Technological mishaps just don't kill enough people to be significant. Even in the US, the sum total of deaths from crime, auto accidents, drug related, the high level of obesity, and you're still far less than the death rate of a few centuries ago. And as medical science gets better, it will matter even less. Fortunately, genetics offers a way to consciously direct our own evolution without some of the problems of eugenics.
Yes, we are like fish that have stepped into a new environment. But unlike fish, we own this new environment. We control virtually every aspect of it. If something in it has a tendency to kill us, it is the environment that changes, not us.
Not to us it's not. We alter the environment now, it doesn't alter us anymore. Hasn't for a very long time.
There might be secondary affects, like our crops finding themselves in poor climates, but again, we can adapt the plants and animals that provide us infinitely quicker than species that are totally at the mercy of nature.
Very true. And it'll be a very good day when NASA has as much power over access to space as the DoD has over the internet. But it is going to take a while. Entry into this particular market is a bit more expensive than getting access to a network backbone.
Yes, hiding aspects of the computer so you don't have to worry about them is great. What most of us hate about Apple is that they make it impossible to unhide them, to get into the guts of the thing and change it as we see fit. We don't really want a hermetically sealed box with a note saying "We are 100% sure you will never ever need to know the slightest thing about how this machine works." It would be great if Linux could be installed, run, and maintained by a complete amateur who never cares about what version of the kernel he's got right now. But if something goes wrong or you need just this one little thing changed or whatever it may be, it would then be possible to sit an expert down and hack away at the inner workings. Apple thinks that is a waste of time.
Would you write only one page of documentation for a word processing program? Or a spreadsheet app? Or how about a compiler/development suite? Gonna learn the whole language in 3 paragraphs, huh? There are some aspects of computing it is just stupid to condense to that level, and clustering computers for shared processing is one of them.
That's what I thought. An ideal machine has no waste energy whatsoever; the useful work you get out of it is equal to the energy you put into it in the first place. "Better than ideal" would violate the 1st Law of Thermodynamics. This just brings it a bit closer to the ideal.
Try the Aware Home at Georgia Tech. I'm told the sheer volume of stray RF emissions from the place will do things like keep your car alarm remote from working.
It may not be robotic per se, but they do have automated pet washers. Can't seem to find a link...
Anyway, it's like a miniature car wash with doors. You stick the pet in and it soaks and soaps and all the goodies. Cats, I'm told, really freak out in it, but calm down once they're thoroughly soaked.
Aha! Found it. On Wired, of all places. Hmm, "The Lavakan is not intended for homes but is designed for use at professional grooming shops. It costs about $20,000 or can be leased for about $500 a month.". Oh well.
That exact thought went through my mind. MARTA, Atlanta's rail/bus system publishes schedules of the routes and whatnot on the web, but they're all in pdf format. Full of nice little graphics that would be totally irrelevant and downright confusing to a program trying to parse it. You gonna handcraft the algorithm for every city's transit system? Same thing applies to weather, airports, stores' opening and closing times, etc. They'd all have to standardize a way of presenting info to computers.
There's also the problem of trying to add a new gadget to your home. There is currently almost no continuity between the command systems used for home appliances. Virtually none of them, electronic or otherwise, are designed to be remotely controlled by other equipment. Possibly in 10 years your new toaster oven will come with drivers for integrating it into your home computer, but till then...
Why bring fusion and antimatter into the mix? Laser launch vehicles come to mind. They wouldn't need onboard fuel until where the atmosphere is very thin. Nearly free boost upwards, then all you need is the orbital motion. Scramjets can use the air for some of the trip, less O2 needed. Given how much O2 the Shuttle uses, that's saying a lot.
Sure, it's barely proof of concept at this point, just like all the others. So were rockets 60 years ago. So was the gadget I use to type this, I might add. Point is, they halfheartedly tried one alternative to rockets, in the process spending a fraction of what they already have on the ISS. And they don't seem to have any plans to try again. Guess they think a couple thousand dollars per kilo is good enough.
Oh, NASA, how do I hate thee. Let me count the ways...
We've got a space station that does nothing, a shuttle fleet that's an aging joke, some moon rocks, and a bunch of unmanned probes sending back some truly amazing data about the solar system which, incidentally, is useful only if we follow up with real people.
We have universities to do research in space, we have industries to build factories in space, we have millions of entrepreneurs with ideas on how to use space and make a buck in the process. But they can't do a thing as long as they're down here.
I think we're trying to argue the same point here. NASA has had 40 years to open up space to the general population; by any account, their performance towards that end has been abysmal. With the kind of money they threw at Apollo and are throwing now at the ISS, we should have seen some progress by now. No such luck.
Personally, I think they should take NASA's budget for the next 10 years and offer it as a reward to anyone who can build a LEO launch system that works for under $100/kg.
There's lots of money to be made in space, but it's difficult to make it when everyone is way down here.
For instance, how much would you pay to spend a week-long vacation in orbit? Or move to a retirement home in Luna's 1/6th gravity? Did you know there's more metals, a lot of them quite valuable, sitting in that hunk o' junk Eros than the human race has mined from the ground in it's entire existence? Any idea the kind of stuff manufacturing could do with abundant vacuum, near Zero K temperatures, and microgravity? How big you can make a space habitat when you're not limited to earth-made materials?
Again, none of this exists today because it's insanely expensive just to get off the ground.
Well, it's basically a magnetic catapault. Great in theory, except that the payload has to leave the muzzle at 8 kilometers per second while still fairly low in the atmosphere.
Possibly more economical would be to build one that launches a plane at mach 7 (a mere 2.3 kps), whereupon the scramjet kicks in and takes it up to the mach 26 or so needed for orbit. There's bunches of optimizations you can use, but suffice to say it works best in a vacuum.
Of course manned spaceflight's not feasible, it costs more than it's weight in gold to put something in orbit. As you said, when we have cheap launch costs then we can talk. Except NASA isn't interested in cheap launches. I noticed that 'improve launch technology beyond ancient rocket levels' isn't on the survey anywhere. They have zero interest in expanding our presence in space. Left to them, we'll have the finest satellite system in the world and nothing else.
If Javascript were decades old and had standards up the whazoo, sure. It's not, so foulups are to be expected. Though MS's efforts to bastardize Java certainly aren't helping, either.
Email on the other hand is older than dirt and far, far simpler to boot. To screw up an email client to the extent that MS has in Outlook is obviously the result of special effort towards that end. There's already new LookOut viruses that use some of these particuar bugs.
To be sure, I don't think this is particularly mature behavior, but then neither does Moffit. If he wants to cut from his potential audience everyone who uses Outlook, he has every right to.
Naw, it's more like "Your email client is so poorly coded and I'll prove it to you like so..." Let's say IE barfed at any webpage that didn't, for example, have a '/body' tag. Would you get mad if someone purposely left it out of their webpage for the purpose of preventing IE users from seeing it? It's rather stupid that the browser would care about something so inane and I have no problem with doing so as a gentle 'suggestion' that you get a client that doesn't suck.
Just make a simple little phone call? Ok. And if you want to get a printer for that computer, you have to make another little phone call to activate _it_. Want to add more memory? Make a call. Install any application whatsoever? Why should activting your product be limited to the OS? How about activating your new TV through the cable company? Or a new phone through the phone company? Or a new CD with whoever makes the player?
Do you see that if everyone had the same mentality as MS, using any kind of electronics would be a hassle of a ridiculous order and nobody would do it. There are only a few apps that require this kind of nonsense and I truly hate them for it.
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Solid state everyting would be great (wasn't there an article on solid state cooling fans a while back?), but it may take a while for RAM drives to bridge that big a gap, especially given the volatility problem. One big step is the drastic increase in RAM speeds, compared to hard drives which have increased only slightly in that regard.
As someone else said, it is only a matter of time.
As a law of physics, sure. Physics defines gravity is a force that attracts two bodies of mass. It makes no distinction between stars, planets, rocks, and animals.
Evolution, on the other hand, defines gravity as 'that thing that keeps stuff on the ground'. It doesn't care about esoteric notions like free-fall and black holes; no living thing exists in such environments. Gravity influences basic biological capabilities; greater strength to weight ratios for an organsism means greater ability to ignore gravity. Flying birds and insects are at one end of the spectrum. Humans are on the other. Any yet, as a force limiting our basic biological capabilities gravity no longer affects us. My cat and his fleas, despite being biologically more able to overcome gravity (ie, relative to height, they can jump much higher), are far more at it's mercy than myself, no? No matter how high a bird may soar, we can go higher.
Ok, so one guy in a million kills himself by tipping a coke machine onto him or riding a JATO into a cliff. That is an insanely far cry from the mortality rates women used to suffer in childbirth or infants before their 2nd birthday or anyone from simple diseases that we cure with ease today. The Darwin Awards are entertaining, but statistically speaking they mean absolutely nothing.
What the parent was trying to point out is that under normal biological evolution, the more fit you are, the more children you have. One would think that the same might be true of surviving in a technological society. That is, those that are incapable of creating a good environment to raise their children would bear fewer children than those who could. Yet the opposite is the case. What this means for the future, if anything at all, is unclear.
The big question here is whether or not that is affecting anything genetic. The only biological trait I can think of that is being selected for would be intelligence, but given how many stupid rich people there are (just look at Congress!), it seems unlikely. It is purely social; children of the poor are more likely to remain lower down on the social totem pole than the children of the affluent.
I think what he meant was that all the forces of nature that are normally extremely prohbitive to a species' abiltities, inability to fly or swim deeply or see at night or whatever, no longer apply to us. If we need an ability, we don't have to breed for it for thousands of years, probably sacrificing some other useful ability. We just put some engineers to work on it. In a real sense, gravity no longer applies to us because ignoring it has become an almost trivial application of our technology. As unenhanced individuals, sure it still affects us; you jump up, you come back down. But as a species, we can now cross oceans, mountains, deserts, and reach all levels of elevation from the "deepest inner mine to the Outer Limits" (haha!).
Technological mishaps just don't kill enough people to be significant. Even in the US, the sum total of deaths from crime, auto accidents, drug related, the high level of obesity, and you're still far less than the death rate of a few centuries ago. And as medical science gets better, it will matter even less. Fortunately, genetics offers a way to consciously direct our own evolution without some of the problems of eugenics.
Yes, we are like fish that have stepped into a new environment. But unlike fish, we own this new environment. We control virtually every aspect of it. If something in it has a tendency to kill us, it is the environment that changes, not us.
There might be secondary affects, like our crops finding themselves in poor climates, but again, we can adapt the plants and animals that provide us infinitely quicker than species that are totally at the mercy of nature.
It's doing it without making too large a crater that's the hard part...
Very true. And it'll be a very good day when NASA has as much power over access to space as the DoD has over the internet. But it is going to take a while. Entry into this particular market is a bit more expensive than getting access to a network backbone.
Would you write only one page of documentation for a word processing program? Or a spreadsheet app? Or how about a compiler/development suite? Gonna learn the whole language in 3 paragraphs, huh? There are some aspects of computing it is just stupid to condense to that level, and clustering computers for shared processing is one of them.
That's what I thought. An ideal machine has no waste energy whatsoever; the useful work you get out of it is equal to the energy you put into it in the first place. "Better than ideal" would violate the 1st Law of Thermodynamics. This just brings it a bit closer to the ideal.
You really have to ask?
Try the Aware Home at Georgia Tech. I'm told the sheer volume of stray RF emissions from the place will do things like keep your car alarm remote from working.
Anyway, it's like a miniature car wash with doors. You stick the pet in and it soaks and soaps and all the goodies. Cats, I'm told, really freak out in it, but calm down once they're thoroughly soaked.
Aha! Found it. On Wired, of all places. Hmm, "The Lavakan is not intended for homes but is designed for use at professional grooming shops. It costs about $20,000 or can be leased for about $500 a month.". Oh well.
There's also the problem of trying to add a new gadget to your home. There is currently almost no continuity between the command systems used for home appliances. Virtually none of them, electronic or otherwise, are designed to be remotely controlled by other equipment. Possibly in 10 years your new toaster oven will come with drivers for integrating it into your home computer, but till then...
Sure, it's barely proof of concept at this point, just like all the others. So were rockets 60 years ago. So was the gadget I use to type this, I might add. Point is, they halfheartedly tried one alternative to rockets, in the process spending a fraction of what they already have on the ISS. And they don't seem to have any plans to try again. Guess they think a couple thousand dollars per kilo is good enough.
Scramjet in an atmosphere. Pure catapault in a vacuum. Sorry, it looked clear enough when I wrote it.
We've got a space station that does nothing, a shuttle fleet that's an aging joke, some moon rocks, and a bunch of unmanned probes sending back some truly amazing data about the solar system which, incidentally, is useful only if we follow up with real people.
We have universities to do research in space, we have industries to build factories in space, we have millions of entrepreneurs with ideas on how to use space and make a buck in the process. But they can't do a thing as long as they're down here.
I think we're trying to argue the same point here. NASA has had 40 years to open up space to the general population; by any account, their performance towards that end has been abysmal. With the kind of money they threw at Apollo and are throwing now at the ISS, we should have seen some progress by now. No such luck.
Personally, I think they should take NASA's budget for the next 10 years and offer it as a reward to anyone who can build a LEO launch system that works for under $100/kg.
For instance, how much would you pay to spend a week-long vacation in orbit? Or move to a retirement home in Luna's 1/6th gravity? Did you know there's more metals, a lot of them quite valuable, sitting in that hunk o' junk Eros than the human race has mined from the ground in it's entire existence? Any idea the kind of stuff manufacturing could do with abundant vacuum, near Zero K temperatures, and microgravity? How big you can make a space habitat when you're not limited to earth-made materials?
Again, none of this exists today because it's insanely expensive just to get off the ground.
Possibly more economical would be to build one that launches a plane at mach 7 (a mere 2.3 kps), whereupon the scramjet kicks in and takes it up to the mach 26 or so needed for orbit. There's bunches of optimizations you can use, but suffice to say it works best in a vacuum.
Of course manned spaceflight's not feasible, it costs more than it's weight in gold to put something in orbit. As you said, when we have cheap launch costs then we can talk. Except NASA isn't interested in cheap launches. I noticed that 'improve launch technology beyond ancient rocket levels' isn't on the survey anywhere. They have zero interest in expanding our presence in space. Left to them, we'll have the finest satellite system in the world and nothing else.
If Javascript were decades old and had standards up the whazoo, sure. It's not, so foulups are to be expected. Though MS's efforts to bastardize Java certainly aren't helping, either.
Email on the other hand is older than dirt and far, far simpler to boot. To screw up an email client to the extent that MS has in Outlook is obviously the result of special effort towards that end. There's already new LookOut viruses that use some of these particuar bugs.
To be sure, I don't think this is particularly mature behavior, but then neither does Moffit. If he wants to cut from his potential audience everyone who uses Outlook, he has every right to.
Naw, it's more like "Your email client is so poorly coded and I'll prove it to you like so..." Let's say IE barfed at any webpage that didn't, for example, have a '/body' tag. Would you get mad if someone purposely left it out of their webpage for the purpose of preventing IE users from seeing it? It's rather stupid that the browser would care about something so inane and I have no problem with doing so as a gentle 'suggestion' that you get a client that doesn't suck.
I built my desk with some 2x4's and an solid 80" door. No lack of surface space for me, no sir.
No, but it certianly is nasty and malicious.
Do you see that if everyone had the same mentality as MS, using any kind of electronics would be a hassle of a ridiculous order and nobody would do it. There are only a few apps that require this kind of nonsense and I truly hate them for it.