There's a brief discussion of Cell's "Design for Manufacturing" feature redundancy's effect on higher yields at the link from one of the Inquirer links you just included. But of course that redundancy isn't all that's required for high yields. They improved the rest of the process which increased the base yield.
What I'd accomplish with a Cell with 1 SPE would be a 3.4GHz PPC, a 20GFLOPS DSP, and a superfast bus, using a part that would be extremely cheap because its inclusion in the yields mean it would otherwise have been thrown out. The fact that a chip uses an onchip coprocessor as the MMX/SSE chips did, and indeed every x86 chip since the 80486 did, does not mean that it's a bad architecture. In fact, that demonstrates that it's a good architecture.
One advantage other than the CPU's native features would be the common development platform, as Linux runs on Cell and SPEs. Indeed, lots of the same SW would run on both the "desktop" (ie. PS3) Cell machine and a 1 SPE device, because most of the SW doesn't use the SPEs at all, but rather just the PPC. That cheaper and generic, even open, development platform, was one reason why Sony designed the Cell into the PS3. The PITA programming the Cell lies in its multiprocessor SPE architecture, which is unfamiliar and needs new techniques. A single SPE is not multiprocessor in that application tier, so doesn't present those problems.
Though indeed the Cell was not designed specifically for the PS3. It was designed as a whole class of new CPUs, the highest end ones for IBM workstations and servers (where they are also used today), but the lower ones in the increased yields ready to go into cheaper and less powerful equipment, like DVDs, big TVs, etc.
Not all the power supplied to a CPU is emitted as heat. Much, sometimes most, of the energy moves the chips electrons in an orderly fashion through the chip and out to the ground, not the disorderly motion that is dissipated heat.
See, there are reasonable answers to even the bad questions and wrong responses that you posed. I'm not defensive, I'm just correcting you. But since you haven't acknowledged even a single point you got wrong, though you got them all wrong, and you're getting even more insulting than your original obnoxious response, I'm not giving you any more free clues. It's obvious that you are interested in being aggressively wrong and obnoxious, and burrowing into your ignorance. I'm not wasting any more time depriving you of your sad little hobby.
1: They do not disable the SPEs to increase yield. The manufacturing process loses one or more SPEs despite their best efforts, because the defects of any CPU manufacturing that usually take out the whole chip in the Cell instead take out only one of the 8 SPEs owing to the designed redundancy if the defect is on an SPE (other parts aren't redundant). A typical CPU would have lowered yield by that chip with even a single defect to it, but a Cell can survive up to 7 defects if they're all on SPEs, by blowing the fuses to a dead SPE when testing it at the end of manufacturing. This is a process that can tolerate the defects that come with CPU manufacturing by keeping chips in the yield that would previously have been discarded with a less redundant design, but in the Cell can be used even though one or more SPEs is unavailable. That approach is pretty novel, and widely misreported in oversimplified summaries.
2: As someone else in this thread mentioned, a Cell with a single SPE, like I suggested be used in a mobile device, would use only about 15W, not the full 60-80W. But you should have been able to figure that out since so many of the Cell's elements aren't being used, therefore not consuming power. BTW, it's the dissipated power that burns your hand, not the power consumed. If a chip consumed 80W but ran 100% efficient, it wouldn't heat up at all. The Cell, like any other CPU, is far from 100% power efficient, but it's not 0% efficient, either.
3: The PS3 Cell runs Linux on the PPE and any or all of the available SPEs. Though indeed the Linux PS3 runs under its Hypervisor dedicating one of the SPEs to managing the rest of the 6. So while apps have access to only 6 under Linux, the 7th is doing useful work that the apps don't have to do, therefore not negligible.
4: The SPEs are DSPs. They are optimized to process matrix multiplication as SIMD. which is what DSPs do. DSPs like the SPEs are also vector processors - the terms are not mutually exclusive.
The whole "Playstation-based mobile handset" is "mythical". The story we're discussing calls it a "possibility", and what I suggested was only a possibility itself. No one claimed it was an existing device.
Now, as the other response in this thread pointed out, Cell even with 1 SPE might not be good for a mobile, compared to other CPUs, because it still consumes a lot of power. But that has nothing to do with your complaints, which are 100% wrong.
It's pretty evident that you don't really know anything about the Cell, but are trying to disagree with me based on a hazy understanding of some poorly reported details of a novel architecture - and a hazy understanding of multiprocessing and DSP. You should know what you're talking about before disagreeing so disagreeably.
If I could apt-get install any Debian or Ubuntu package that runs on the Android phone's HW, perhaps from my desktop cross-compiling it to the phone, I'd be really psyched.
What's much more useful is a mobile hotspot that gives cell service, connected over WiFi to a gateway to the PSTN. Because there are so many holes in cell coverage, including in my house.
It doesn't even really need to be mobile, though that's a plus. Or WiFi - ethernet would be good. If I could just use my usual cellphone to the device, then across the broadband Net to a gateway (like Asterisk at a datacenter) to the PSTN, all would be groovy. But I've never seen any small, cheap cell transponders sold to the public, and certainly not with an 802.X interface.
The Playstation 3 runs on the Cell CPU, which an extremely powerful multiprocessing chip. It's also extremely high yield in manufacturing, because defective chips usually just lose one or more of the parallel DSPs, but otherwise work just great. Which makes each chip cheaper, since the expense of the whole manufacturing (and R&D) run is spread across a lot more chips sold, many of which are discarded in less efficient processes.
Mobile Cell chips could be simply the lower-grade chips with just one or a few DSPs working, but otherwise superfast (3.2GHz PPC, wicked fast bus, etc). They're programmed exactly the same as the higher grade Cells, because the Cell itself allocates however many DSPs are working. The dead DSPs don't even suck power.
And Linux already runs great on the Cell (as in Linux on Playstation), with the main OS on the PPC and multimedia offloaded to the DSPs.
I would love to see a Linux "PlayPhone" that runs the same SW as a PS3, as a desktop, as a server, etc, but with different features depending on the full complement of HW in the device.
Under the pilot program, $60,000 will reportedly be used to provide 50 lucky Princeton students with $489 Kindle DX devices loaded with materials for three courses.
50 * $489 is $24,450. Sounds like Amazon is even luckier than the students, since Princeton is spending $60,000 on $25,000 worth of Kindles.
All secrets encrypted using the old SHA-1 process will remain vulnerable to attacks unless reencrypted with a new, safe process. Is there any SW that tracks the secrets, which cipher/process protects them, and then reencrypts them with the new, safe one?
Note that any secrets that got out there but were considered safely encrypted with SHA-1 might now be cracked, now that SHA-1 is vulnerable. Those copies out there cannot be reencrypted, since it's safe to assume that bad guys have them. This situation is necessary to consider when letting even encrypted secrets out into the wild. Encryption can at best delay decryption, by an unknown duration.
There are no free laptops. In order to receive a laptop, children need to give a small monetary donation -- the project coordinators say a dollar or two is sufficient.
Why is the dollar or two necessary to pay? Some kids don't even have enough money to eat properly every day. An extra dollar or two means skipping an (inadequate) meal or two. Why should they have to go hungrier? What's the point of extracting that dollar or two from them? What goes on in South Carolina that pressures the OLPC suppliers to be "adamant" that kids pay a dollar or two they don't have?
Sure, storing nuke waste and a big laser weapon require science. But they're not science. They're giant contractor employment programmes, both spawned by the Pentagon.
Giving the money directly to science programmes is better for science.
After the US won the Cold War, we agreed to buy their huge nuke stockpile that they agreed to give up. Then Bush Sr didn't buy it with the money (the Democratic) Congress put out. Then the Republican Congress that took over deleted the money so Clinton couldn't buy it.
Now the Russians have a nuke stockpile, and we don't even have enough plutonium to run a space program.
Nice work. Notice who prevented the proper processing of the most essential peace dividend.
QM is a general theoretical framework. Like all science, its principles apply universally. To the extent that QM does not describe some phenomena, people work to improve QM.
Like every other general theoretical framework, it was first produced to explain something specific, but it was found accurate enough to apply to wider and wider scopes. Eventually to a complete scope of everything.
So, regardless of any syntactical argument, I have it right. You have it wrong.
My favorite Borland product was Paradox for Windows, a RDBMS engine and GUI with IDE. The engine was available as a C++ library for embedding. It brought together programming and data techniques from spreadsheets, databases, languages and GUIs that made "Windows" a complete and consistent platform.
Borland, or somebody, could do exactly that with existing OSS code today. The software world could use such a tidy tool, and especially a competent company to market it. Maybe that's Oracle now, but the game is just getting rebooted again.
I retune my guitar in a microsecond by bending the strings, which I feel with my hands as I play them.
That's why physical instruments are different from gestural ones: that physical feedback connects lots of our body to the instrument, not just our ears and our motor cortex. Humans have a lot of body language to use.
Feedback is why we're good with our hands. Waving them in the air without touching something for feedback denies us our monkey skills in moving our hands to control something. Like a theremin, which doesn't rock, because it's handflapping, not manipulating something.
I don't see what's such a big deal to touch something. How about a wireless ball that pulls apart into two hemispheres connected to a toothpick-thin telescoping segmented rod (like a car radio antenna) by a 1mm ball joint at the center of each circle of each hemisphere.Move it around in the air as a 3D clickable/draggable cursor, or pull it apart to make two points, each of which can click and drag in 3space. If it's got a little battery to shake each hemisphere when it "touches" something virtual, the control surface will make even more sense to our hands than the resulting tracking images do on the screen.
Photosynthesis is a process that processes individual electrons. Therefore its workings will require QM to accurately describe, because that scale phenomena behaves in a way that QM most accurately describes. There's quite a lot of quantum biology being reported, now that QM tools and training are both widely available and applicable to biological applications. The larger audience educated in at least the basics of QM (and not just the "it's surreal/magic" of its first several decades) also makes for greater demand for the reports, which encourages more reports.
What I expect we'll see is photovoltaic thin films tweaked to use some of the processes photosynthesis evolved. And perhaps applications to absorbing a much broader spectrum than plants have evolved, since the synthetic devices won't be selected to leave much of the energy to power other parts of the environment. Though just understanding the processes enough to go search for more efficient but cheap natural species we can cultivate would be a better approach. But I think we're better at the physics than at the ecology.
Just because a framework is for describing everything doesn't mean it will. Just because a framework is incomplete doesn't mean it ever will be complete.
I didn't say that QM explains everything, just that what it is for. Nor did I say that it's ever going to explain gravity.
If a framework that explains all of what QM explains also explains gravity, but contradicts enough of QM's explanations that it's not QM, then we will use the new framework instead when we must explain more than QM can explain.
The point is that the phenomena and our explanations of them are two very different things. A point you clearly got - scientists understand the difference. The rest is syntactical disagreement based on your reading somewhat different words than I wrote.
Sure, but QM is still a framework for describing everything that exists. That doesn't mean it's a complete framework, even though it's largely complete, and more complete all the time.
Photosynthesis is fully described by QED. That doesn't mean that photosynthesis "uses QM", any more than it "used phlogistons" if it were described analytically in the early 1800s. Or rather, photosynthesis "uses" QM, or phlogistics, or whatever other framework is being used to describe photosynthesis more or less accurately.
The point is that QM is not a process, like "electron cascade", that photosynthesis "uses". It's a framework within which to describe processes like electron cascades that photosynthesis uses.
If we were describing photosynthesis solely in terms of gravitational phenomena, then it might be remarkable to say that our explanation uses QM to describe what happens, because QM doesn't accurately describe gravitation. But that's not what we've got in this case.
Besides, the QM of photosynthesis has been described for quite a while. A new wrinkle in it does not merit a headline announcing that QM is involved.
Quantum mechanics isn't some tool in nature's toolbox. QM is a way that humans describe all natural phenomena when we explain details of how it all works. QM is a universal framework for describing all the actions of everything that exists.
If scientists are coming up with a new QM description of a physical process like photosynthesis, it's not because they're just discovering that QM is involved. It's because they're figuring out how to describe the process in terms of QM.
In other news, physics turns out to be involved in how the brain works.
Where were you complaining the last 8 years as the government ran up $TRILLIONS in debt, like on an unnecessary and neverending war? Or on unleashing free credit money while wages stayed the same?
From where are you pulling "75% taxes"? What else can we do to work our way out of the hole "we" dug ourselves into?
You're right about corporate lying. That's why US oil corps flood the info markets (like news) with lies about domestic oil production.
The amount of remaining US reserves that could be tapped is very small. Opening it up would put new oil on the market starting at earliest 10 years from now, and probably 20 before a significant fraction of its total contribution. Its contribution would last maybe another 10-20 years. The tiny new US amount in the global supply would not affect prices by more than a cent or two a barrel, even at scarcity prices around $150-200 per barrel.
The amount of extra oil we'd have if we just kept all our car tires properly inflated would exceed the total annual contribution of all potential new US oil even once it's at peak production in 20-30 years from now. Any number of other conservation measures would do more to free up more oil, and to reduce prices.
And of course that extra oil would do more intolerable damage to the environment. The exploration, drilling and delivery destroys ecosystems in the already stressed environments, especially marine fisheries we've already fished to exhaustion. The burning would further increase how far we've already gone past our atmosphere's capacity to absorb the pollution, which we should be substantially reducing instead of increasing even a little. The extra benefit would be insignificant in our huge global energy market, but even its relatively tiny addition to the pollution would be 100% too much, since we're already producing way too much.
Oil corps know all that. But they want new leases (dirt cheap from the government, instead of compensating the public for exploiting all that public territory). Not for drilling, as they haven't even explored for new oil on the large majority of all the leases they've already got, but idled. The new leases they want are for harvesting methane hydrate deposits from ocean floors. Even though that "frozen gas" would be even more damaging to our atmosphere (methane is 17x more potent a Greenhouse pollutant than is CO2). They know new oil leases would take decades to pay off and net just a small amount for a short time, but they're using the idea as propaganda to get even more dangerous methane hydrate into production, instead of working on alternates (like clean/scalabe geothermal power).
Because corporations lie to get what they want. They're not people (though legally they have the "rights" of "persons"), so there's no conscience or morality involved, only cost:benefit*risk. The oil corps are lying about "drill, baby, drill", just as they've lied about everything else they ever wanted to.
I set up a webserver with Slackware. In 1994, on a 486 (DX50!). Sure beat the proprietary BSDi, even though I preferred BSD (which we ran as SunOS4). Because Usenet was full of Linux people who not only happily answered technical questions, but actually knew what they were talking about most of the time, for free.
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There's a brief discussion of Cell's "Design for Manufacturing" feature redundancy's effect on higher yields at the link from one of the Inquirer links you just included. But of course that redundancy isn't all that's required for high yields. They improved the rest of the process which increased the base yield.
What I'd accomplish with a Cell with 1 SPE would be a 3.4GHz PPC, a 20GFLOPS DSP, and a superfast bus, using a part that would be extremely cheap because its inclusion in the yields mean it would otherwise have been thrown out. The fact that a chip uses an onchip coprocessor as the MMX/SSE chips did, and indeed every x86 chip since the 80486 did, does not mean that it's a bad architecture. In fact, that demonstrates that it's a good architecture.
One advantage other than the CPU's native features would be the common development platform, as Linux runs on Cell and SPEs. Indeed, lots of the same SW would run on both the "desktop" (ie. PS3) Cell machine and a 1 SPE device, because most of the SW doesn't use the SPEs at all, but rather just the PPC. That cheaper and generic, even open, development platform, was one reason why Sony designed the Cell into the PS3. The PITA programming the Cell lies in its multiprocessor SPE architecture, which is unfamiliar and needs new techniques. A single SPE is not multiprocessor in that application tier, so doesn't present those problems.
Though indeed the Cell was not designed specifically for the PS3. It was designed as a whole class of new CPUs, the highest end ones for IBM workstations and servers (where they are also used today), but the lower ones in the increased yields ready to go into cheaper and less powerful equipment, like DVDs, big TVs, etc.
Not all the power supplied to a CPU is emitted as heat. Much, sometimes most, of the energy moves the chips electrons in an orderly fashion through the chip and out to the ground, not the disorderly motion that is dissipated heat.
See, there are reasonable answers to even the bad questions and wrong responses that you posed. I'm not defensive, I'm just correcting you. But since you haven't acknowledged even a single point you got wrong, though you got them all wrong, and you're getting even more insulting than your original obnoxious response, I'm not giving you any more free clues. It's obvious that you are interested in being aggressively wrong and obnoxious, and burrowing into your ignorance. I'm not wasting any more time depriving you of your sad little hobby.
1: They do not disable the SPEs to increase yield. The manufacturing process loses one or more SPEs despite their best efforts, because the defects of any CPU manufacturing that usually take out the whole chip in the Cell instead take out only one of the 8 SPEs owing to the designed redundancy if the defect is on an SPE (other parts aren't redundant). A typical CPU would have lowered yield by that chip with even a single defect to it, but a Cell can survive up to 7 defects if they're all on SPEs, by blowing the fuses to a dead SPE when testing it at the end of manufacturing. This is a process that can tolerate the defects that come with CPU manufacturing by keeping chips in the yield that would previously have been discarded with a less redundant design, but in the Cell can be used even though one or more SPEs is unavailable. That approach is pretty novel, and widely misreported in oversimplified summaries.
2: As someone else in this thread mentioned, a Cell with a single SPE, like I suggested be used in a mobile device, would use only about 15W, not the full 60-80W. But you should have been able to figure that out since so many of the Cell's elements aren't being used, therefore not consuming power. BTW, it's the dissipated power that burns your hand, not the power consumed. If a chip consumed 80W but ran 100% efficient, it wouldn't heat up at all. The Cell, like any other CPU, is far from 100% power efficient, but it's not 0% efficient, either.
3: The PS3 Cell runs Linux on the PPE and any or all of the available SPEs. Though indeed the Linux PS3 runs under its Hypervisor dedicating one of the SPEs to managing the rest of the 6. So while apps have access to only 6 under Linux, the 7th is doing useful work that the apps don't have to do, therefore not negligible.
4: The SPEs are DSPs. They are optimized to process matrix multiplication as SIMD. which is what DSPs do. DSPs like the SPEs are also vector processors - the terms are not mutually exclusive.
The whole "Playstation-based mobile handset" is "mythical". The story we're discussing calls it a "possibility", and what I suggested was only a possibility itself. No one claimed it was an existing device.
Now, as the other response in this thread pointed out, Cell even with 1 SPE might not be good for a mobile, compared to other CPUs, because it still consumes a lot of power. But that has nothing to do with your complaints, which are 100% wrong.
It's pretty evident that you don't really know anything about the Cell, but are trying to disagree with me based on a hazy understanding of some poorly reported details of a novel architecture - and a hazy understanding of multiprocessing and DSP. You should know what you're talking about before disagreeing so disagreeably.
If I could apt-get install any Debian or Ubuntu package that runs on the Android phone's HW, perhaps from my desktop cross-compiling it to the phone, I'd be really psyched.
What's much more useful is a mobile hotspot that gives cell service, connected over WiFi to a gateway to the PSTN. Because there are so many holes in cell coverage, including in my house.
It doesn't even really need to be mobile, though that's a plus. Or WiFi - ethernet would be good. If I could just use my usual cellphone to the device, then across the broadband Net to a gateway (like Asterisk at a datacenter) to the PSTN, all would be groovy. But I've never seen any small, cheap cell transponders sold to the public, and certainly not with an 802.X interface.
Sadly, you are propbably right. I'm always optimistic about design win chances for Cell.
Do you happen to know how much power a full PS3 Cell (7 SPUs) draws?
The Playstation 3 runs on the Cell CPU, which an extremely powerful multiprocessing chip. It's also extremely high yield in manufacturing, because defective chips usually just lose one or more of the parallel DSPs, but otherwise work just great. Which makes each chip cheaper, since the expense of the whole manufacturing (and R&D) run is spread across a lot more chips sold, many of which are discarded in less efficient processes.
Mobile Cell chips could be simply the lower-grade chips with just one or a few DSPs working, but otherwise superfast (3.2GHz PPC, wicked fast bus, etc). They're programmed exactly the same as the higher grade Cells, because the Cell itself allocates however many DSPs are working. The dead DSPs don't even suck power.
And Linux already runs great on the Cell (as in Linux on Playstation), with the main OS on the PPC and multimedia offloaded to the DSPs.
I would love to see a Linux "PlayPhone" that runs the same SW as a PS3, as a desktop, as a server, etc, but with different features depending on the full complement of HW in the device.
$233 per digital textbook copy seems reasonable?
50 * $489 is $24,450. Sounds like Amazon is even luckier than the students, since Princeton is spending $60,000 on $25,000 worth of Kindles.
All secrets encrypted using the old SHA-1 process will remain vulnerable to attacks unless reencrypted with a new, safe process. Is there any SW that tracks the secrets, which cipher/process protects them, and then reencrypts them with the new, safe one?
Note that any secrets that got out there but were considered safely encrypted with SHA-1 might now be cracked, now that SHA-1 is vulnerable. Those copies out there cannot be reencrypted, since it's safe to assume that bad guys have them. This situation is necessary to consider when letting even encrypted secrets out into the wild. Encryption can at best delay decryption, by an unknown duration.
Each kid gets one. How does that have anything to do with what you just said?
Why is the dollar or two necessary to pay? Some kids don't even have enough money to eat properly every day. An extra dollar or two means skipping an (inadequate) meal or two. Why should they have to go hungrier? What's the point of extracting that dollar or two from them? What goes on in South Carolina that pressures the OLPC suppliers to be "adamant" that kids pay a dollar or two they don't have?
Sure, storing nuke waste and a big laser weapon require science. But they're not science. They're giant contractor employment programmes, both spawned by the Pentagon.
Giving the money directly to science programmes is better for science.
After the US won the Cold War, we agreed to buy their huge nuke stockpile that they agreed to give up. Then Bush Sr didn't buy it with the money (the Democratic) Congress put out. Then the Republican Congress that took over deleted the money so Clinton couldn't buy it.
Now the Russians have a nuke stockpile, and we don't even have enough plutonium to run a space program.
Nice work. Notice who prevented the proper processing of the most essential peace dividend.
QM is a general theoretical framework. Like all science, its principles apply universally. To the extent that QM does not describe some phenomena, people work to improve QM.
Like every other general theoretical framework, it was first produced to explain something specific, but it was found accurate enough to apply to wider and wider scopes. Eventually to a complete scope of everything.
So, regardless of any syntactical argument, I have it right. You have it wrong.
My favorite Borland product was Paradox for Windows, a RDBMS engine and GUI with IDE. The engine was available as a C++ library for embedding. It brought together programming and data techniques from spreadsheets, databases, languages and GUIs that made "Windows" a complete and consistent platform.
Borland, or somebody, could do exactly that with existing OSS code today. The software world could use such a tidy tool, and especially a competent company to market it. Maybe that's Oracle now, but the game is just getting rebooted again.
I retune my guitar in a microsecond by bending the strings, which I feel with my hands as I play them.
That's why physical instruments are different from gestural ones: that physical feedback connects lots of our body to the instrument, not just our ears and our motor cortex. Humans have a lot of body language to use.
Now we can finally start to guess what species that old fossil Arlen Specter is.
Feedback is why we're good with our hands. Waving them in the air without touching something for feedback denies us our monkey skills in moving our hands to control something. Like a theremin, which doesn't rock, because it's handflapping, not manipulating something.
I don't see what's such a big deal to touch something. How about a wireless ball that pulls apart into two hemispheres connected to a toothpick-thin telescoping segmented rod (like a car radio antenna) by a 1mm ball joint at the center of each circle of each hemisphere.Move it around in the air as a 3D clickable/draggable cursor, or pull it apart to make two points, each of which can click and drag in 3space. If it's got a little battery to shake each hemisphere when it "touches" something virtual, the control surface will make even more sense to our hands than the resulting tracking images do on the screen.
Photosynthesis is a process that processes individual electrons. Therefore its workings will require QM to accurately describe, because that scale phenomena behaves in a way that QM most accurately describes. There's quite a lot of quantum biology being reported, now that QM tools and training are both widely available and applicable to biological applications. The larger audience educated in at least the basics of QM (and not just the "it's surreal/magic" of its first several decades) also makes for greater demand for the reports, which encourages more reports.
What I expect we'll see is photovoltaic thin films tweaked to use some of the processes photosynthesis evolved. And perhaps applications to absorbing a much broader spectrum than plants have evolved, since the synthetic devices won't be selected to leave much of the energy to power other parts of the environment. Though just understanding the processes enough to go search for more efficient but cheap natural species we can cultivate would be a better approach. But I think we're better at the physics than at the ecology.
Just because a framework is for describing everything doesn't mean it will. Just because a framework is incomplete doesn't mean it ever will be complete.
I didn't say that QM explains everything, just that what it is for. Nor did I say that it's ever going to explain gravity.
If a framework that explains all of what QM explains also explains gravity, but contradicts enough of QM's explanations that it's not QM, then we will use the new framework instead when we must explain more than QM can explain.
The point is that the phenomena and our explanations of them are two very different things. A point you clearly got - scientists understand the difference. The rest is syntactical disagreement based on your reading somewhat different words than I wrote.
Sure, but QM is still a framework for describing everything that exists. That doesn't mean it's a complete framework, even though it's largely complete, and more complete all the time.
Photosynthesis is fully described by QED. That doesn't mean that photosynthesis "uses QM", any more than it "used phlogistons" if it were described analytically in the early 1800s. Or rather, photosynthesis "uses" QM, or phlogistics, or whatever other framework is being used to describe photosynthesis more or less accurately.
The point is that QM is not a process, like "electron cascade", that photosynthesis "uses". It's a framework within which to describe processes like electron cascades that photosynthesis uses.
If we were describing photosynthesis solely in terms of gravitational phenomena, then it might be remarkable to say that our explanation uses QM to describe what happens, because QM doesn't accurately describe gravitation. But that's not what we've got in this case.
Besides, the QM of photosynthesis has been described for quite a while. A new wrinkle in it does not merit a headline announcing that QM is involved.
Quantum mechanics isn't some tool in nature's toolbox. QM is a way that humans describe all natural phenomena when we explain details of how it all works. QM is a universal framework for describing all the actions of everything that exists.
If scientists are coming up with a new QM description of a physical process like photosynthesis, it's not because they're just discovering that QM is involved. It's because they're figuring out how to describe the process in terms of QM.
In other news, physics turns out to be involved in how the brain works.
Where were you complaining the last 8 years as the government ran up $TRILLIONS in debt, like on an unnecessary and neverending war? Or on unleashing free credit money while wages stayed the same?
From where are you pulling "75% taxes"? What else can we do to work our way out of the hole "we" dug ourselves into?
You're right about corporate lying. That's why US oil corps flood the info markets (like news) with lies about domestic oil production.
The amount of remaining US reserves that could be tapped is very small. Opening it up would put new oil on the market starting at earliest 10 years from now, and probably 20 before a significant fraction of its total contribution. Its contribution would last maybe another 10-20 years. The tiny new US amount in the global supply would not affect prices by more than a cent or two a barrel, even at scarcity prices around $150-200 per barrel.
The amount of extra oil we'd have if we just kept all our car tires properly inflated would exceed the total annual contribution of all potential new US oil even once it's at peak production in 20-30 years from now. Any number of other conservation measures would do more to free up more oil, and to reduce prices.
And of course that extra oil would do more intolerable damage to the environment. The exploration, drilling and delivery destroys ecosystems in the already stressed environments, especially marine fisheries we've already fished to exhaustion. The burning would further increase how far we've already gone past our atmosphere's capacity to absorb the pollution, which we should be substantially reducing instead of increasing even a little. The extra benefit would be insignificant in our huge global energy market, but even its relatively tiny addition to the pollution would be 100% too much, since we're already producing way too much.
Oil corps know all that. But they want new leases (dirt cheap from the government, instead of compensating the public for exploiting all that public territory). Not for drilling, as they haven't even explored for new oil on the large majority of all the leases they've already got, but idled. The new leases they want are for harvesting methane hydrate deposits from ocean floors. Even though that "frozen gas" would be even more damaging to our atmosphere (methane is 17x more potent a Greenhouse pollutant than is CO2). They know new oil leases would take decades to pay off and net just a small amount for a short time, but they're using the idea as propaganda to get even more dangerous methane hydrate into production, instead of working on alternates (like clean/scalabe geothermal power).
Because corporations lie to get what they want. They're not people (though legally they have the "rights" of "persons"), so there's no conscience or morality involved, only cost:benefit*risk. The oil corps are lying about "drill, baby, drill", just as they've lied about everything else they ever wanted to.
I set up a webserver with Slackware. In 1994, on a 486 (DX50!). Sure beat the proprietary BSDi, even though I preferred BSD (which we ran as SunOS4). Because Usenet was full of Linux people who not only happily answered technical questions, but actually knew what they were talking about most of the time, for free.