If you get the nut mod patch working with the open source clone of X-COM, it could be fun. (Coconut being the toughest, walnut for a typical foot soldier, and so on. Replace the different rocket systems with African and European swallows.)
Yellowstone, I believe, has two magma reserves - near-surface and deep. The near-surface magma is associated with massive lava flows (possibly travelling a few hundred miles from the perimeter) whereas the deep reserves are associated with the really massive, Earth-shaping explosive erruptions where ash would bury New York. If I remember correctly, it's the near-surface magma that is expected to form the next erruption. Mind you, there are two, maybe three, other active supervolcanos known - and plenty of regions where the geology is sufficiently unknown that a supervolcano could be in the area.
Besides supervolcanos, you have mega tsunamis that could flatten the first 20 to so miles of the entire US eastern seaboard (not to mention much of the rest of the world). There's a maze of major faultlines off the US western seaboard (and some inland) - any of which could obliterate a sizable chunk of the landscape. A sufficiently sudden magnetic pole reversal wouldn't necessarily damage the terrain, but it would seriously impact humanity and cause massive extinctions within species dependent on the magnetic field for navigation. A gigantic solar flare striking Earth could potentially knock modern computer-controlled aircraft out of the sky and fry a good portion of the satellite system, which would not be "catastrophic" but would still be many hundreds, if not thousands, of times more destructive than Mount St. Helens, whether in terms of lives or financial cost.
As far as the asteroid is concerned, here is the impact calculator. It does not appear to require much of an impact for everything not over the horizon to be incinerated immediately and for earthquakes to be 9 or 10 on the richter scale for many thousands of miles. (In other words, such an asteroid could hit France and the shockwaves alone would destroy much of North America. The ash blotting out the sun for a few decades putting the planet in deep freeze would not kill that many, simply because not many would be left.)
You still haven't said how it is "ranting" for me to point out that new technologies must supercede older ones, and that they can only do so if developed. Technology does not grow on trees, maturity doesn't just happen and your ravings about Greyhound won't make advancement any cleaner.
I agree completely with most of what you say, but you CAN do certain things, though they are very limited. The range of phonemes planetwide is vast (far and away larger than can be produced in a language like English), and in principle you could collect all of those phonemes and see which ones could be reproduced by a Neanderthal. You can then categorize which sounds are correctly reproduced, which are "good enough" (comprehensible to someone with another dialect, or perhaps another native language) and which are nowhere close. The summary suggests that that phonemes associated with a certain specific class of vowels always fall into the "nowhere close" category, meaning that if those phonemes were used, regions would not be mutually intelligable by vocal communication.
This assumes several things. It assumes phonemes were used, for example. There's an island where the native language is communicated by whistles. The language, if I recall the article correctly, is descended from Spanish. The series of whistles constitute a series of samples at regular intervals along Spanish words, so there is a 1:1 translation between the two. Whistles, of course, do not use phonemes at all and therefore such a form of communication is not subject to the intelligability of sounds. (All I need is one example to prove that there exists a real, plausible solution that violates the assumptions made. I don't need to prove that the solution actually applied to Neanderthals, so long as my attempt to falsify really is plausible.)
If phonemes were used, then it assumes that language drifted sufficiently for a communication barrier to exist. That's more reasonable. Neanderthals didn't have that much mobility, so maintaining a unified language and accent across the entire space they occupied, over the entire time Neanderthals existed, would likely have been impossible. I can buy into the idea of there being sufficient drift to cause problems over a large enough distance, but if there is an intelligability problem and communication with nearest neighbour is absolutely essential, that drift was locked within certain parameters and (if you want to look at it in modern networking terms) could not have exceeded some limit on a per-hop basis. That might be an interesting result to have.
It also assumes that the constraints were the same. Modern languages are heavily based on very complex grammars and therefore don't need a particularly wide range of sounds or symbols. Very early written languages directly descend from pictographic systems and require a considerably greater number of symbols and signifiers. By inference, I'm going to say that very early spoken languages would also use a much wider range of sounds and fewer rules for inferring a specific meaning for a specific sound in a specific context. If that is correct, and the parent poster seems to have vastly more knowledge on this than I do so can probably answer this, it should be much rarer for two distinct words to sound alike enough to be confusing even with different accents.
...may I ask, is it a rant to say that progress is non-linear and finite in any field? Did your great-to-the-nth-degree grandfather invest too heavily in the flint mines to notice that stone was close to the limits of what could be done with the medium and copper was the way to go? (Followed by bronze, followed by iron.) Every era has a dawn and a dusk. It's not an anti-this or a pro-that, it's simply the way technology functions. We don't use CISC chips any more, they're RISC or hybrid. Steam-powered trains and cars were consigned to the history books a long time ago, and I'm damn sure you're not using magnetic core for RAM. Everything that is born will die. Silicon isn't dead yet, but it's an old-age pensioner as technology goes. It might very well maintain to Moore's Law for another 20+ years, but it can't maintain it forever. Nothing can. Eventually, the rate of progress will become slow enough that the cost of progress exceeds the returns obtained from that progress. History shows that it is highly desirable for something to be able to replace a technology that hits that point. Stagnant technology is generally not a good thing. Why you're so up in arms about me not liking stagnation, and why you are wilfully confusing that with some absurd notion of not liking silicon, is completely beyond my comprehension. My posts would have applied to any of the decayed and replaced technologies of yester-year, in any society of any culture. Nothing lasts forever and you've got to think enough in advance to allow for that. Entire empires have thought otherwise. The ruins and relics of such deluded thinking make for great tourism.
If you're assuming I mean that the product will sell enough to make a profit, you're either an idiot or a troll. I'm talking about being a serious competitior, which means greater volumes and lower point-of-sale costs of sufficient margin to make it worthwhile for the Microns or the AMDs of the world to switch their entire fabrication infrastructure over. Anything less is not seriously competing, it's merely surviving. For now. Niche markets can dry up at any time.
Yes, it does get more expensive. Inflation's the obvious one. Another obvious one is that the cost of employees, in the higher skill brackets, rises faster than inflation and also increases the total costs. However, you've also got the fact that to be competitive, GaAs would need to do as well or better than Si. Being better than it is now won't significantly change the marketplace. Say that gap can be bridged right now by an investment of $x, but that the gap will widen by $y per year, on average, where y includes the extra time involved and the fact that the target will be moving over that time. Then, in twenty years time, the total initial cost (before any worthwhile returns are seen) would be $(x + 20y). This raises the question of how large y is, relative to x. This depends on the relative amount of research being done, of course, which in the case of Si is gigantic, which means that the target you have to catch and pass is moving very rapidly.
If research progressed linearly, then a year's development in Si would be equal to a year's development in GaAs by the same number of people at the same level of investment. It's not linear. For a start, the tools don't exist for GaAs yet, so you've got to design and build those as well. You've got to train skilled researchers, which isn't cheap, in numbers comparable to the competition (Si), where the competition has an ever-increasing number of skilled workers automatically from Universities. Then, there's the rate at which understanding is built. Understanding is built on prior experience, and there is far less prior experience with GaAs. Understanding won't transfer, because different materials have very different properties.
Finally, there's the ability to do something with that experience. There are two factors here. Si fabrication plants are numerous, and competitiveness is a function of production quantity. If you cannot make the product cost-effective, you won't compete. The second factor is quality control. We're able to produce Si wafers with so few defects that you can get extremely high yields of extremely sophisticated VLSI chips. Motherboard and expansion card manufacturers are going to buy the cheapest chips that perform as required, and won't switch from what already works unless there is a competitive advantage of sufficient size (marketplace inertia). That means you need yields that are equal or better, preferably better. Then there's the problem that Si is cheap in comparison, which means that to have a comparably-priced product, the savings elsewhere must equal or exceed the difference in cost of materials.
Since the price of the product being sold must recoup the entire cost of developing it plus the entire cost of producing the means to produce it plus the entire cost of then producing it plus recover the amount not earned through not investing in what already existed, divided over the units of the product you expect to actually sell by the time investors will expect you to show a positive balance, and since the marketplace inertia will increase as the amount of Si within the marketplace increases relative to other technologies, it is a trivial deduction that you would have to ramp up GaAs production facilities far in excess of all the existing Si production facilities in order to mass-produce enough to reduce the value of each chip sufficiently.
All this assumes, as you say, that knowledge that isn't being utilized remains constant. It doesn't. Knowledge isn't useful without experience and practiced skills. The further ahead Si becomes, the smaller the
I think the key word is "currently". There are some genuinely unsolvable problems, and it's sometimes even possible to prove in advance that those problems are unsolvable (eg: there's a constraints conflict in the problem itself), but as our experience with silicon has shown, material science has plenty of surprises to offer the unwary adventuresome researcher. The key is the research. Someone has to go out and look in order to find. Now, what you find is not necessarily what you are looking for, but the two are nonetheless connected. It's also not a linear progression. Generally, it takes a lot of time and effort to go from zero to a solid basis. Things then progress increasingly rapidly until you hit some point, after which the progress falls off for the same amount of effort. In other words, a classic S-shaped curve, a curve with a point of inflection. You can only ever take a given technology up to some theoretical upper limit, but you can always improve on what you have to get towards that upper limit.
As I see it, silicon is still progressing fairly rapidly, but we've passed the point of maximum progress and developments are going to be more expensive to make and offer less benefit. However, if we continued with silicon, progress should never stop, but progress will tend to a limit and if we want to go past that limit, we need to work with a different material. Some materials will have much lower limits, some will have much higher, and in many case the only way to tell which is which is to do the work and find out.
...caused its own stampede, when it first went online. The Cambridge Coffeepot was perhaps the most famous webcam - and certainy the most famous coffeepot - on the planet for many years. This proves the neoclassic CaffeGeek Theorum which states that (extreme chaos) = (geek quotient) * (caffeine)^2, or e=gc^2. Einstein was close to discovering this, but falsely assumed that he could use the brain's mass rather than the geek quotient, leading to his incorrect conclusion that e=mc^2.
Agencies are reportedly ignoring many requests, placing impossible demands on requestors (such as sending out letters demanding confirmation the request is still active with deadlines so tight that the demand probably won't get to you before the request is considered dead... and then repeating every few weeks until the person gives up or the mail fails to get through), clasifying themselves as outside the executive branch (the VP's office has pulled that one), declaring the information classified, declaring the information missing (as happened with recently-discovered My Lai warcrime trial transcripts), declaring the request too general or vague, and so on.
When the discovery of material by FOIA is announced on the news, I have to wonder if the "news" aspect was the material itself or the fact that it was obtained by FOIA. This, I suspect, is for a whole bunch of reasons, which range from lack of resources to lack of scruples, with absolutely no way of telling from the outside which end of the spectrum any given department is.
I know people detest "big government", but I would argue that although a department should have a say in what material is releasable, it should not have control over that, that information releases should be handled by a neutral (or as neutral as you can get) body. Whether that would be a much-expanded GAO or a whole new department, it would need a fair amount of manpower and far more power to access whatever material they needed. I'd prefer a new department because that much power would need that much more policing, the GAO is the only meaningful policing that happens, and it's never wise for the powerful to police themselves.
Volcanic ash, when mixed with crushed limestone, makes some of the best concrete. At least, the Romans thought so. That's what they used. Set underwater, was strong enough to use on big construction projects like the Colleseum, and so on. (Concrete appears to have been invented by the Egyptians - the upper levels of the pyramids show evidence that the limestone was poured into place, not set as a naturally-formed rock.) I suspect ash from Mount St. Helens would be excellent in a Roman-recipe concrete.
Also on the theme of Mount St. Helens, it stopped building the dome inside the crater at about the same time as swarms of earthquakes were detected off the coast of Oregon (usually a precursor to volcanic activity). There are no volcanos in the area the earthquakes were detected, so vulcanologists have ascribed the tremors (reaching 5.5 on the richter scale) to a shift in the magma flow. There was no suggestion - as far as I can tell - that the lack of mountain-building and the earthquakes were linked, but it wouldn't shock me. If that is corrct, then there's an awful lot of molten rock going somewhere - the dome was building a dumptruck's worth of rock per second, according to one quote I saw - and there are a lot of volcanos considered overdue for exploding.
...but one thing that would improve matters is if sensitive information automatically kicked in compulsary external audits by some independent watchdog. That would require some creative legislation, not only to make acceptable to courts, corporations, etc, but also to keep sufficiently current that poor practices or malpractice aren't actually required. That, I fear, is beyond any Government currently out there, and given the track record of Governments on IT issues, I suspect skepticism and wholesale rejection by the industry to be a more likely response than improvement on practices. Mind you, given that IT is often an afterthought of corporations and security is but a fleeting glint in the eye of IT, I suspect wholesale rejection would be the end result regardless.
Ok, ok, I miscounted the protons. Damn fiddly things. Seriously, though, yes, they will someday exist. Such technology was being touted as the replacement for silicon over twenty years ago, though, and it's not happening except in niche markets. For that matter, even ignoring materials for a second, asynchronous circuits have been "just over the horizon" for a very long time, with little real research going into them. Manchester University built an ARM clone using asynch technology, so you can build functional CPUs that way, but they're hardly poised to become the next Intel. I'm not even certain anyone uses the chips, although they were intended for mobile phones. (The software they used to do the design work is open source and listed on Freshmeat. A glance at the record stats suggests some interest, but hardly great enthusiasm.)
To me, things like racetrack memory and high-k/metal gates are merely a way to eke out the last few drops of life from silicon, which has been pushed far beyond the point anyone imagined was remotely possible even ten years ago. Getting what you can out of the technology is great, but must eventually be subject to diminishing returns. You put more effort in, you get less benefit out. Stuff that has never really reached maturity is still at the ramp-up stage, it takes a lot of investment to get past that, but once you hit a certain point, the returns vastly outweigh the effort. Replacement technology is inevitable - it's in nobody's interest for Moore's Law to vanish - but that necessary ramp-up isn't going to happen all on its own and the further ahead silicon gets, the more it will cost to get a next-generation solution to be a realistic, competitive alternative. If nobody wants to spend that kind of capital now, can you imagine how much harder it will be in, say, another ten to twenty years time? (I seriously doubt silicon can continue profitably advancing much past another twenty years.)
True, it's not ready now, but research and development budgets are finite and therefore the more that is spent on silicon, the less you can spend on graphene and the longer it will take for graphene VLSI to be a practical day-to-day thing. My big concern is that, as is the case with nuclear fusion, the amount spent will be too small in comparison to the amount required to produce useful (in the marketplace) results. The absolute amounts don't matter, if there isn't a viable product being shipped, and although we're hearing about excellent blue-sky and long-term results in silicon, we're not hearing even that for graphene.
Of course, as you're in a research group involved in this field, can you leak a few tidbits now and again to the Slashdot crowd?
But Germanium-Arsonide is a much-neglected technology that could do with more investment, as it should do much better than silicon. Graphene is another technology that risks being ignored for as long as silicon is a viable option. I'd far prefer chip companies to be pushing the boundaries with materials that should offer far more extreme performance. Nonetheless, any progress is good progress.
If AMD has the secret of telepathy (tp), then yes, it can indeed obtain the technology. Oh, access the technology! You'd use electrical circuits for that, not tp.
Skilled workers replaced by machines with child operators (not directly comparable, but the same basic idea that corporations know best, together with very successful corporate propoganda that the disenfrancised were - by definition - ignorant savages and terrorists. Propoganda that has become a part of the common language through the name of one of the campaigners for worker's rights.)
Higher Education (in Britain, at least) being switched from a State-funded right of all to a luxury paid for by the individual
I was going to give a few other examples, such as the health care industry, but realized that in most cases I could think of, the service or provider has always been corrupt and neither the standard of service or our expectations of it have really changed. It's merely less hidden.
That assumes a singularity at t=0, which Professor Hawking has provided a convincing case against. (As t approaches 0, space/time becomes parabolic, which means there is no requirement for a discontinuity and no requirement for a point of creation. He's usually quoted as having said that he's glad Pope John Paul - whom he visited shortly after giving that particular talk - had not heard that particular result at that time.)
It also assumes it's useful to go back to a t=0, assuming one exists. Theoretical models can't usefully go back much further than the point immediately prior to the inflationary universe model kicking in. Since nothing before this point makes any difference to what happens after, we can use this point as the "Big Bang", which means we definitely have non-zero space.
The underlying database was written in COBOL, the programmers only allowed 4 numeric digits for the key field and the database kept reporting it was full?
People can plead "insanity" on the grounds of having trouble telling right from wrong, but not on the grounds of actual mental illness. Rehabilitation is often said to be minimal to non-existant. Reports in the press frequently cover prison violence, gang warfare in the prison system and mental/physical/sexual abuse by both inmates and prison guards. Maximum security prisons are also described as being totally without sunlight (thus depriving the body of vitamin D) and essentially sensory deprivation chambers (driving inmates insane).
Whilst the system may not make a person a criminal (although there are Dickensonian arguments that say otherwise), it's very hard to see how a person can become truly repentent of their actions after such an experience. Repentent of being caught, perhaps, but where in there is a mechanism for establishing what went wrong in the first place, solving underlying issues or providing effective means for a person to not fall back into old patterns on release? The current judicial and prison systems appear geared towards revenge and retribution, not towards corrective action and prevention. In that case, it is entirely reasonable to assume that offenders will re-offend. It's possible you'd end up reaching the same conclusion on a (correctly managed) rehabilitation-oriented system, I won't argue that case, I will only argue that if the typical description of what prevails is accurate, the assumption of lifelong guilt is probably not all that inaccurate.
I have my own theories on what would work better (mostly involving dividing sentencing into two - one segment for punishment, if punishment is called for, and a distinct segment for treatment, if treatment would be useful), however such theories are never going to be tested or meaningfully examined, so in effect constitute un-disprovable hypotheses and therefore merely articles of faith no different from any other system of religious belief.
But your lasers are fitted to sharks on rocket-powered planes in the clouds with lightning bolts and... and... and I can't get the rest of the front page into this, damnit!
Slashdot Mirror
If you get the nut mod patch working with the open source clone of X-COM, it could be fun. (Coconut being the toughest, walnut for a typical foot soldier, and so on. Replace the different rocket systems with African and European swallows.)
Besides supervolcanos, you have mega tsunamis that could flatten the first 20 to so miles of the entire US eastern seaboard (not to mention much of the rest of the world). There's a maze of major faultlines off the US western seaboard (and some inland) - any of which could obliterate a sizable chunk of the landscape. A sufficiently sudden magnetic pole reversal wouldn't necessarily damage the terrain, but it would seriously impact humanity and cause massive extinctions within species dependent on the magnetic field for navigation. A gigantic solar flare striking Earth could potentially knock modern computer-controlled aircraft out of the sky and fry a good portion of the satellite system, which would not be "catastrophic" but would still be many hundreds, if not thousands, of times more destructive than Mount St. Helens, whether in terms of lives or financial cost.
As far as the asteroid is concerned, here is the impact calculator. It does not appear to require much of an impact for everything not over the horizon to be incinerated immediately and for earthquakes to be 9 or 10 on the richter scale for many thousands of miles. (In other words, such an asteroid could hit France and the shockwaves alone would destroy much of North America. The ash blotting out the sun for a few decades putting the planet in deep freeze would not kill that many, simply because not many would be left.)
You still haven't said how it is "ranting" for me to point out that new technologies must supercede older ones, and that they can only do so if developed. Technology does not grow on trees, maturity doesn't just happen and your ravings about Greyhound won't make advancement any cleaner.
This assumes several things. It assumes phonemes were used, for example. There's an island where the native language is communicated by whistles. The language, if I recall the article correctly, is descended from Spanish. The series of whistles constitute a series of samples at regular intervals along Spanish words, so there is a 1:1 translation between the two. Whistles, of course, do not use phonemes at all and therefore such a form of communication is not subject to the intelligability of sounds. (All I need is one example to prove that there exists a real, plausible solution that violates the assumptions made. I don't need to prove that the solution actually applied to Neanderthals, so long as my attempt to falsify really is plausible.)
If phonemes were used, then it assumes that language drifted sufficiently for a communication barrier to exist. That's more reasonable. Neanderthals didn't have that much mobility, so maintaining a unified language and accent across the entire space they occupied, over the entire time Neanderthals existed, would likely have been impossible. I can buy into the idea of there being sufficient drift to cause problems over a large enough distance, but if there is an intelligability problem and communication with nearest neighbour is absolutely essential, that drift was locked within certain parameters and (if you want to look at it in modern networking terms) could not have exceeded some limit on a per-hop basis. That might be an interesting result to have.
It also assumes that the constraints were the same. Modern languages are heavily based on very complex grammars and therefore don't need a particularly wide range of sounds or symbols. Very early written languages directly descend from pictographic systems and require a considerably greater number of symbols and signifiers. By inference, I'm going to say that very early spoken languages would also use a much wider range of sounds and fewer rules for inferring a specific meaning for a specific sound in a specific context. If that is correct, and the parent poster seems to have vastly more knowledge on this than I do so can probably answer this, it should be much rarer for two distinct words to sound alike enough to be confusing even with different accents.
...may I ask, is it a rant to say that progress is non-linear and finite in any field? Did your great-to-the-nth-degree grandfather invest too heavily in the flint mines to notice that stone was close to the limits of what could be done with the medium and copper was the way to go? (Followed by bronze, followed by iron.) Every era has a dawn and a dusk. It's not an anti-this or a pro-that, it's simply the way technology functions. We don't use CISC chips any more, they're RISC or hybrid. Steam-powered trains and cars were consigned to the history books a long time ago, and I'm damn sure you're not using magnetic core for RAM. Everything that is born will die. Silicon isn't dead yet, but it's an old-age pensioner as technology goes. It might very well maintain to Moore's Law for another 20+ years, but it can't maintain it forever. Nothing can. Eventually, the rate of progress will become slow enough that the cost of progress exceeds the returns obtained from that progress. History shows that it is highly desirable for something to be able to replace a technology that hits that point. Stagnant technology is generally not a good thing. Why you're so up in arms about me not liking stagnation, and why you are wilfully confusing that with some absurd notion of not liking silicon, is completely beyond my comprehension. My posts would have applied to any of the decayed and replaced technologies of yester-year, in any society of any culture. Nothing lasts forever and you've got to think enough in advance to allow for that. Entire empires have thought otherwise. The ruins and relics of such deluded thinking make for great tourism.
Yes, it does get more expensive. Inflation's the obvious one. Another obvious one is that the cost of employees, in the higher skill brackets, rises faster than inflation and also increases the total costs. However, you've also got the fact that to be competitive, GaAs would need to do as well or better than Si. Being better than it is now won't significantly change the marketplace. Say that gap can be bridged right now by an investment of $x, but that the gap will widen by $y per year, on average, where y includes the extra time involved and the fact that the target will be moving over that time. Then, in twenty years time, the total initial cost (before any worthwhile returns are seen) would be $(x + 20y). This raises the question of how large y is, relative to x. This depends on the relative amount of research being done, of course, which in the case of Si is gigantic, which means that the target you have to catch and pass is moving very rapidly.
If research progressed linearly, then a year's development in Si would be equal to a year's development in GaAs by the same number of people at the same level of investment. It's not linear. For a start, the tools don't exist for GaAs yet, so you've got to design and build those as well. You've got to train skilled researchers, which isn't cheap, in numbers comparable to the competition (Si), where the competition has an ever-increasing number of skilled workers automatically from Universities. Then, there's the rate at which understanding is built. Understanding is built on prior experience, and there is far less prior experience with GaAs. Understanding won't transfer, because different materials have very different properties.
Finally, there's the ability to do something with that experience. There are two factors here. Si fabrication plants are numerous, and competitiveness is a function of production quantity. If you cannot make the product cost-effective, you won't compete. The second factor is quality control. We're able to produce Si wafers with so few defects that you can get extremely high yields of extremely sophisticated VLSI chips. Motherboard and expansion card manufacturers are going to buy the cheapest chips that perform as required, and won't switch from what already works unless there is a competitive advantage of sufficient size (marketplace inertia). That means you need yields that are equal or better, preferably better. Then there's the problem that Si is cheap in comparison, which means that to have a comparably-priced product, the savings elsewhere must equal or exceed the difference in cost of materials.
Since the price of the product being sold must recoup the entire cost of developing it plus the entire cost of producing the means to produce it plus the entire cost of then producing it plus recover the amount not earned through not investing in what already existed, divided over the units of the product you expect to actually sell by the time investors will expect you to show a positive balance, and since the marketplace inertia will increase as the amount of Si within the marketplace increases relative to other technologies, it is a trivial deduction that you would have to ramp up GaAs production facilities far in excess of all the existing Si production facilities in order to mass-produce enough to reduce the value of each chip sufficiently.
All this assumes, as you say, that knowledge that isn't being utilized remains constant. It doesn't. Knowledge isn't useful without experience and practiced skills. The further ahead Si becomes, the smaller the
...if ISO was paid in euros or dollars. You'd probably want to fast-track to this degree if your bribe goes down in value the longer you take.
As I see it, silicon is still progressing fairly rapidly, but we've passed the point of maximum progress and developments are going to be more expensive to make and offer less benefit. However, if we continued with silicon, progress should never stop, but progress will tend to a limit and if we want to go past that limit, we need to work with a different material. Some materials will have much lower limits, some will have much higher, and in many case the only way to tell which is which is to do the work and find out.
...caused its own stampede, when it first went online. The Cambridge Coffeepot was perhaps the most famous webcam - and certainy the most famous coffeepot - on the planet for many years. This proves the neoclassic CaffeGeek Theorum which states that (extreme chaos) = (geek quotient) * (caffeine)^2, or e=gc^2. Einstein was close to discovering this, but falsely assumed that he could use the brain's mass rather than the geek quotient, leading to his incorrect conclusion that e=mc^2.
When the discovery of material by FOIA is announced on the news, I have to wonder if the "news" aspect was the material itself or the fact that it was obtained by FOIA. This, I suspect, is for a whole bunch of reasons, which range from lack of resources to lack of scruples, with absolutely no way of telling from the outside which end of the spectrum any given department is.
I know people detest "big government", but I would argue that although a department should have a say in what material is releasable, it should not have control over that, that information releases should be handled by a neutral (or as neutral as you can get) body. Whether that would be a much-expanded GAO or a whole new department, it would need a fair amount of manpower and far more power to access whatever material they needed. I'd prefer a new department because that much power would need that much more policing, the GAO is the only meaningful policing that happens, and it's never wise for the powerful to police themselves.
It'd be better off hitting Mt. Rainier. The combined ash and dust should seal off Microsoft's headquarters for some time.
Also on the theme of Mount St. Helens, it stopped building the dome inside the crater at about the same time as swarms of earthquakes were detected off the coast of Oregon (usually a precursor to volcanic activity). There are no volcanos in the area the earthquakes were detected, so vulcanologists have ascribed the tremors (reaching 5.5 on the richter scale) to a shift in the magma flow. There was no suggestion - as far as I can tell - that the lack of mountain-building and the earthquakes were linked, but it wouldn't shock me. If that is corrct, then there's an awful lot of molten rock going somewhere - the dome was building a dumptruck's worth of rock per second, according to one quote I saw - and there are a lot of volcanos considered overdue for exploding.
...but one thing that would improve matters is if sensitive information automatically kicked in compulsary external audits by some independent watchdog. That would require some creative legislation, not only to make acceptable to courts, corporations, etc, but also to keep sufficiently current that poor practices or malpractice aren't actually required. That, I fear, is beyond any Government currently out there, and given the track record of Governments on IT issues, I suspect skepticism and wholesale rejection by the industry to be a more likely response than improvement on practices. Mind you, given that IT is often an afterthought of corporations and security is but a fleeting glint in the eye of IT, I suspect wholesale rejection would be the end result regardless.
To me, things like racetrack memory and high-k/metal gates are merely a way to eke out the last few drops of life from silicon, which has been pushed far beyond the point anyone imagined was remotely possible even ten years ago. Getting what you can out of the technology is great, but must eventually be subject to diminishing returns. You put more effort in, you get less benefit out. Stuff that has never really reached maturity is still at the ramp-up stage, it takes a lot of investment to get past that, but once you hit a certain point, the returns vastly outweigh the effort. Replacement technology is inevitable - it's in nobody's interest for Moore's Law to vanish - but that necessary ramp-up isn't going to happen all on its own and the further ahead silicon gets, the more it will cost to get a next-generation solution to be a realistic, competitive alternative. If nobody wants to spend that kind of capital now, can you imagine how much harder it will be in, say, another ten to twenty years time? (I seriously doubt silicon can continue profitably advancing much past another twenty years.)
Of course, as you're in a research group involved in this field, can you leak a few tidbits now and again to the Slashdot crowd?
But Germanium-Arsonide is a much-neglected technology that could do with more investment, as it should do much better than silicon. Graphene is another technology that risks being ignored for as long as silicon is a viable option. I'd far prefer chip companies to be pushing the boundaries with materials that should offer far more extreme performance. Nonetheless, any progress is good progress.
If AMD has the secret of telepathy (tp), then yes, it can indeed obtain the technology. Oh, access the technology! You'd use electrical circuits for that, not tp.
Kitten Auth is easy to crack - if it asks for a cheeseburger, it's a cat, and if it posts about cheeseburger-eating cats, it's a kitteh.
I was going to give a few other examples, such as the health care industry, but realized that in most cases I could think of, the service or provider has always been corrupt and neither the standard of service or our expectations of it have really changed. It's merely less hidden.
It also assumes it's useful to go back to a t=0, assuming one exists. Theoretical models can't usefully go back much further than the point immediately prior to the inflationary universe model kicking in. Since nothing before this point makes any difference to what happens after, we can use this point as the "Big Bang", which means we definitely have non-zero space.
The underlying database was written in COBOL, the programmers only allowed 4 numeric digits for the key field and the database kept reporting it was full?
Whilst the system may not make a person a criminal (although there are Dickensonian arguments that say otherwise), it's very hard to see how a person can become truly repentent of their actions after such an experience. Repentent of being caught, perhaps, but where in there is a mechanism for establishing what went wrong in the first place, solving underlying issues or providing effective means for a person to not fall back into old patterns on release? The current judicial and prison systems appear geared towards revenge and retribution, not towards corrective action and prevention. In that case, it is entirely reasonable to assume that offenders will re-offend. It's possible you'd end up reaching the same conclusion on a (correctly managed) rehabilitation-oriented system, I won't argue that case, I will only argue that if the typical description of what prevails is accurate, the assumption of lifelong guilt is probably not all that inaccurate.
I have my own theories on what would work better (mostly involving dividing sentencing into two - one segment for punishment, if punishment is called for, and a distinct segment for treatment, if treatment would be useful), however such theories are never going to be tested or meaningfully examined, so in effect constitute un-disprovable hypotheses and therefore merely articles of faith no different from any other system of religious belief.
6,000 year old topsoil is pretty old.
But your lasers are fitted to sharks on rocket-powered planes in the clouds with lightning bolts and... and... and I can't get the rest of the front page into this, damnit!
But... but... Google doesn't do evil. It must be true, because I searched for it - on Google.