Since Franklin described nothing but scientific benefits from the experiment, not that he survived getting hit by lightning, I'll say that it's not possible that he performed the experiment and recommended it to the scientific community without malice.
And I'll say that something other than a scientific skepticism allows you to ignore the obvious difference.
Some modern historians say that Franklin's kite lightning was a hoax, designed to electrocute European plagiarists. Others still believe that lightning can strike a kite, run down a string, and energize a key, without the kite, string and kite flyer bursting into flames.
Lenovo says its losses are due to the $1.25B it paid for IBM's PC division. Its revenues are growing at "double digit rates", while its losses are steady. And everyone faces a tough PC market, with so many competitors, some extremely good, and a saturated market, including so many older PCs still working past their planned "obsolete" dates.
That's all a lot rosier picture than IBM painted for its own profitability when it sold the division. But then, IBM originally dismissed the entire PC market when it created its modern version in 1981.
I don't know why this issue is presented as complicated. Google already pays a huge bundle for its Internet connections. It's invested in its own infrastructure, and has to pay for interconnection at its gateways to the rest of the Net. Those gateway companies are paying for their further connections with Google's money, so on across the Net. Just like everyone else.
That is the distributed magic of the Net that defined its growth and resiliency. Google is already paying AT&T, through a series of proxies. AT&T can't just violate its agreements to carry the traffic of the proxy that's directly connected to it just because it wants to doublecharge Google, just because AT&T thinks Google can afford it.
Unless AT&T changes the laws to let it doublecharge. Which of course it will. After over a century of crooks, why does anyone bother arguing with these telcos about whether their "business innovations" are fair? They're always scams, cons and theft. This latest one is among the most blatant. Why be nice and call it "Net Neutrality" when the telcos call it "Net Doublecharge" in their "marketing" offices?
Taxi fares are controlled by the government to prevent exactly the extortion the telcos are seeking with their "Net Doublecharge" plans. Limos, like the event-carriage people use for the prom, are also usually regulated, even though they're not nearly as essential a service.
That kind of fake libertarian capitalism has always resulted in extortion and stunted development of the local economy, Which is why people who want to ensure their local growth ensure "fairness" in access to essential resources. These problems are not theoretical - they're practical, with consistently proven histories to refer to. Net Doublecharge is for people who can't learn from history, or won't admit they learned a historical scam.
Wait, I thought the US computer makers said a $100 laptop was impossible. 8 months later, it's done.
But then, IBM said it was impossible to keep its HD and PC businesses before selling them to Hitachi and Lenovo. Those companies are making big profits continuing the business.
Making money and new products when you're positioned at the top of the computer business is now so easy that it's looped all the way around from "impossible" to "inevitable".
Well, of course the millions of people murdered weren't "their own", but rather "their own internal enemies and competition". Russia, Germany, China, Cambodia, Rwanda, Kashmir, Sudan... not too different from the American genocides which predate them, or the African before that.
All tribalism in the name of ideology for economic gain. There is every reason to expect more, especially in America which has avoided it for centuries. And little reason to believe it won't happen. And ultimately, no reason to believe in god - not the kind people like to believe in, anyway.
Wake me when they make a display that doubles as a scanner, and redoubles as a full-spectrum smart antenna. An FPGA CPU that reconfigures per active process. And a fuelcell I can sip with a chaser.
What I'd really like to see in bootable Flash drives are hybrids. A Write Once Readonly Memory partition for the installed OS, and rewritable Flash for the other working partitions, in a single USB part. Cheap enough (<$20) to discard (or just reuse the rewritable partition) when upgrading. Haven't seen any of those, at least none with the WORM partition writeable by USB.
The Bolsheviks also arrived with railroads, radio, telegraphy, and the discovery of oil across the new Russian vastness. And the US Marines. Funny how those seem to go hand in hand.
Stemcell research in the US has been outlawed by outlawing its funding. Not all of it - I never claimed all of it. Nor did I claim that the Australian research was embryonic, nor that Americans couldn't get funding to do it. I made a basic point about the actual medical research industry in the US. A point about which you have nothing to say. Certainly nothing based on the truth, logic, or anything I've posted.
You're the one spreading bullshit. The existing lines are contaminated, and you know it, and the US research community is crimped by the pandering laws. You're parroting the BushCo lies the rest of us have grown tired of hearing. I'd recommend you go fuck yourself, but you'd probably say that's illegal research in the US.
You're spoiling me:). You just made up for hundreds of abusive posts and moderations I've endured on this timesink website. Maybe that should have been an open-parenthesis.
Do you have any ideas about more appropriate filesystems for Flash drives than, say, ext{2,3}? The 8GB/100x Flash you recommended promises 100K write cycles before failure, but that's an average, so some will fail faster, requiring more writes to the remainder. Most Linux filesystems I know do a lot of rewriting to avoid fragmentation. Maybe a more indirect (extra pointer layer) allocation database that ignores actual fragmentation could consume the extra "seek time" gained from the more randomly accessible HW.
When I was getting my intro to pharmacology in college (no, the premed lectures;), they taught us that most new drugs (as of the mid 1980s) were discovered through ethnopharmacology (whether acknowledged or not) in underdeveloped countries, then extraction of the "active ingredient", followed by synthesis. Increased industrialization of biodiverse developing areas, particularly tropical, suggests even better access. To your asprin I say "morphine". And even aspirin was part of the basis for the German dominance of 19th Century science, as Bayer synthesized it from petroleum.
I'd like to see a breakdown of drug origins by source in labs or foreign forests. Not only didn't a 5 minute google gloss turn up any sign of those stats, I also don't trust the IP-manic drug industry to give credit to anyone but their own genius. But I'd like a credible update to my early education.
It's true that American stemcell inhibitions come covered in morality, while British car inhibitions had no moral basis AFAIK. But I make the point that stemcell morality is a cover for the vested economic interests of the current industry. Though I'm sure British dismissal of cars as supplanting trains and horses was wrapped in similarly selfserving moral rhetoric of some kind. Probably under some version of "socialism" (for or against), the "moral issue" of the day. I'm even less current on the actual British rhetoric dismissing cars while America roared past than I am on pharmalogical discoveries. But I can tell that the economics of the industries are working the same way.
I'm using the clear parallels to see through the transient wrappings that protect the persistent economic patterns. America is forgoing the stemcell evolution of our medical industry the way the British forewent the car evolution of their transit industry. The tools used to ensure that repetition aren't necessarily the same.
There's not that many, compared to the rest of us. But their political success (as exploitable shills) shows how even a tiny bit of organization, which is their advantage in their church networks, trumps no organization, which is the case with the rest of us, with respect to the issues (corporate theocracy) they're pushing.
A tiny little magnet can lift a big pile of iron filings, just because the magnet is highly organized. When it organizes the filings by polarizing the pile, the magnet is in complete control.
Another poster posted $173 8GB "100x" flash. I assume that's 15Mbps, which is perfectly fine for the kind of mobile use I described. And 100K rewrites before failure is also plenty, considering it's removable media that will be upgraded for higher capacity as density:$ increases past that low maximum.
For a "desktop" (or any stationary storage), the volume, weight, power and heat issues are much less important. Which is a perfect complement, with bigger, cheaper HDs, on a network to a Flash mobile.
American railroads created more wealth among more new owners more quickly than ever before in any human endeavor. Britain, too. To complete the picture, America's vast emptiness was an even better home to railroads, with its few endpoints, than was Britain, which was better served by smaller scale vehicles like cars. But Britain was distracted by the shorter-term prospects of "railroading the world", while American entrepreneurs like Ford had to compete with American domestic monopolies. Ford's assembly line was just as viable in Britain as it was in his American competitors' factories.
This is exactly parallel to the current American medical predisposition for "drugging the world", rather than move on to riskier, but longer-term strategies like stemcells.
As for the economic epochs you mention, the car industry started in earnest during the Great Depression.
And I further note that the Benz's car invention was designed to run on fuel grown on farms, not pumped from the ground. Which is more a background on how Britain's investors were more attracted by their colonial oil deposits, as were Americans, than in scaling up domestic farm production for fuel (while losing colonial farm production competition), to the benefit of all their industries. Including the drug industry, which basically extracts ex-colonial plant medicine formulas for mass production from petroleum.
The parallels are not only very complete, they form a virtual parallelogram when considering the independent axes. This framework is extremely solid.
America is probably the only country, let alone "civilization", built on principles rather than merely the expediency of history at its founding. Unless you mean "this guy is now in charge" is a principle. Even the basis for the "embryonic stemcell research will speed the destruction of our civilization" is invalid, to say nothing of its more elaborate political conjectures. Not to mention the founding American principle of public protection of science and individual achievement.
The "creating a demand for abortion" premise for outlawing public investment in embryonic stemcell research also falls apart under any scrutiny. Private investment includes more competition, therefore more waste, therefore a higher demand for more stemcells. We also have a huge glut in embryonic stemcell supply, from the large (and increasing) rate of abortions. Which are increasing under the same policies invalid both theoretically and practically. None of your scary scenarios have any basis in how stemcells, or even American embryos, work in reality.
The threat to America, and the civilization of which we are a part, is pandering to uneducated, antilogical masses to cover for corporate exploitation. In this case, the drug companies protect their subsidies from the threats of stemcell therapy competitors by inciting religious gangs. To whom they then sell more expensive, less effective drug therapies. The process protects the politicians who protect their industry. At the expense in health and money of everyone but the drug corporation owners, and the politicians they own - and even their health is worse off. And the perversion of our science and politics to serve that subjugation does have the makings of at least defeat of America, if not our destruction, but not the rest of our "civilization", which has plenty of other players not turning history, politics, economics, ethics, science, or logic upside down.
Those look good, especially the cheap PCMCIA/CF adapters. With a $175 8GB card, I'm probably done.
I think there is a demand for the benefits. But I also think notebook dealers don't market them (educate the market) because margins are still higher on 2.5" HDs, especially the ones bundled with new notebooks. Just unbundling those HDs opens competition from other HD vendors. And without market education, the unfamiliar products will find only niche markets, which also decreases dealers' economy of monolithic scale.
Then there's the recent cheapness of the new high-density CF technology. Dealers are squeezing the most they still can out of the already-amortized investments in small 2.5" HDs. They'll taper that pipeline as they increase the CF stream.
Sooner than later CF will offer the same superiority to dealers as to consumers. Especially the power/heat benefits will allow dealers to keep using cheaper, older CPUs for a few more cycles.
When all these cycles line up, in 5 years we'll have the equivalent of 2Kg P4/10GHz/128GB-CF running 24h on a fuelcell. Just in time to be obsoleted by a mobile "phone" making it look like a "portable mainframe":).
Re:Foreign Investment Opportunities
on
3D Human Cells Grown
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
A. Some (substantial) stemcell research has been prevented by law. B No one ever mentioned any guarantee.
"B" is the most interesting part of your response. My post explicitly mentioned how outlawing government funds has made the risky research less attractive for investors. And the part where you argue against "everybody acting like stem cells will provide the cure for everything" completes the picture. Not "everyone", not "provide the cure for everything". That's the kind of hyperbolic strawman that people use to defend the US government's unwise policy against some important stemcell research.
By making those illogical arguments defending the US policy, you of course are acting against some kinds of stemcell reserach. Denying that you are doing so is also part of the same political posture that brings us these bad policies, while pandering to the least logical part of our population.
Since it was so easy to ask & get, I'm upping the ante, with a better order;). The board looks like a direct mapping of traces from the IDE to the CF connector, with a few caps and a transistor. How come the many connector/formfactor flavors of Flash don't include native IDE? Then I could just plug multiple cards right into my machine, without $32 extra per card, without the extra space and weight of the PCB adapter?
And for dessert, how about a fanless PIII/1GHz/SVGA or better notebook without a HD, into which to plug those puppies?
Foreign Investment Opportunities
on
3D Human Cells Grown
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Britain's 19th Century industry was so obsessed with railroads that it missed the chance to grow into cars. Britain has an auto industry, but it was easily eclipsed by the American car startups like Henry Ford.
America's 20th Century industry was so obsessed with drugs that it's missing the chance to grow into stemcells. Not just from complacency, but from actually outlawing stemcell research. American medical domination of the world can be eclipsed by foreign startups without such handicaps.
The US laws against stemcell prohibit the public investments in the basic science that the medical industry requires to take risks and develop the science. We have entrepreneurs, but they're both averse to medical science and drawn to the indemnities and subsidies available to drug research instead. Abroad there is much less inhibition, which is an opportunity. So stemcell research isn't stopped worldwide, though it is slowed, and less available to the Americans who should be able to dominate it too, instead of being left behind.
Those high-capacity industrial drives are way overkill for what I was talking about. They cost way more than the $20:GB Flash cards I mentioned, and aren't available in small capacities (and therefore low prices). And their capacities are large enough that they don't save enough on weight or power.
Let me know when you find a simple IDE/Flash adapter that I can plug the cheap commodity Flash stuff into, to replace my 10GB IDE HD.
I've got an Dell notebook with only 10GB (IDE) HD. I'd love to replace it with Flash cards. They're about $45:2GB up to 4GB, in multiple formats. A bank of CF/SDIO/USB slots, or just an IDE/whatever adapter, plus the cards, would fit inside the current drive's slot. And offer much better power, weight and heat loads. With hotswappable filesystems, upgradeable in small chunks and pluggable into other devices, carryable in pockets.
I don't see how <20GB HDs have any place in the portable market anymore (outside of tiny niche multimedia producers), as even $35 80GB HDs are overkill for most people who network, as most everyone does. If every notebook, handheld, iPod, phone and other mobile device used Flash instead of HDs, Flash prices at that industry scale would drop, capacities would multiply, and $5:GB up to 32 or 64GB would be common. While much of the rest of the cost of the device would be lower without extreme measures to accommodate the hungry, inefficient HD.
Today's New York Times has an editorial supporting municipal WiFi policies that help ensure universal access to the Internet. It's a good view of how that infrastructure figures in the broader public consciousness, to the extent that it does.
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Since Franklin described nothing but scientific benefits from the experiment, not that he survived getting hit by lightning, I'll say that it's not possible that he performed the experiment and recommended it to the scientific community without malice.
And I'll say that something other than a scientific skepticism allows you to ignore the obvious difference.
Some modern historians say that Franklin's kite lightning was a hoax, designed to electrocute European plagiarists. Others still believe that lightning can strike a kite, run down a string, and energize a key, without the kite, string and kite flyer bursting into flames.
Lenovo says its losses are due to the $1.25B it paid for IBM's PC division. Its revenues are growing at "double digit rates", while its losses are steady. And everyone faces a tough PC market, with so many competitors, some extremely good, and a saturated market, including so many older PCs still working past their planned "obsolete" dates.
That's all a lot rosier picture than IBM painted for its own profitability when it sold the division. But then, IBM originally dismissed the entire PC market when it created its modern version in 1981.
I don't know why this issue is presented as complicated. Google already pays a huge bundle for its Internet connections. It's invested in its own infrastructure, and has to pay for interconnection at its gateways to the rest of the Net. Those gateway companies are paying for their further connections with Google's money, so on across the Net. Just like everyone else.
That is the distributed magic of the Net that defined its growth and resiliency. Google is already paying AT&T, through a series of proxies. AT&T can't just violate its agreements to carry the traffic of the proxy that's directly connected to it just because it wants to doublecharge Google, just because AT&T thinks Google can afford it.
Unless AT&T changes the laws to let it doublecharge. Which of course it will. After over a century of crooks, why does anyone bother arguing with these telcos about whether their "business innovations" are fair? They're always scams, cons and theft. This latest one is among the most blatant. Why be nice and call it "Net Neutrality" when the telcos call it "Net Doublecharge" in their "marketing" offices?
Taxi fares are controlled by the government to prevent exactly the extortion the telcos are seeking with their "Net Doublecharge" plans. Limos, like the event-carriage people use for the prom, are also usually regulated, even though they're not nearly as essential a service.
That kind of fake libertarian capitalism has always resulted in extortion and stunted development of the local economy, Which is why people who want to ensure their local growth ensure "fairness" in access to essential resources. These problems are not theoretical - they're practical, with consistently proven histories to refer to. Net Doublecharge is for people who can't learn from history, or won't admit they learned a historical scam.
Wait, I thought the US computer makers said a $100 laptop was impossible. 8 months later, it's done.
But then, IBM said it was impossible to keep its HD and PC businesses before selling them to Hitachi and Lenovo. Those companies are making big profits continuing the business.
Making money and new products when you're positioned at the top of the computer business is now so easy that it's looped all the way around from "impossible" to "inevitable".
"Raleigh, N.C.-based company"
Lenovo is a Chinese company. Raleigh is not (yet) Chinese territory.
Who would trust anything coming from the two sides of the mouth of this company based on two sides of the world, depending on to whom they're talking?
Well, of course the millions of people murdered weren't "their own", but rather "their own internal enemies and competition". Russia, Germany, China, Cambodia, Rwanda, Kashmir, Sudan... not too different from the American genocides which predate them, or the African before that.
All tribalism in the name of ideology for economic gain. There is every reason to expect more, especially in America which has avoided it for centuries. And little reason to believe it won't happen. And ultimately, no reason to believe in god - not the kind people like to believe in, anyway.
Wake me when they make a display that doubles as a scanner, and redoubles as a full-spectrum smart antenna. An FPGA CPU that reconfigures per active process. And a fuelcell I can sip with a chaser.
What I'd really like to see in bootable Flash drives are hybrids. A Write Once Readonly Memory partition for the installed OS, and rewritable Flash for the other working partitions, in a single USB part. Cheap enough (<$20) to discard (or just reuse the rewritable partition) when upgrading. Haven't seen any of those, at least none with the WORM partition writeable by USB.
The Bolsheviks also arrived with railroads, radio, telegraphy, and the discovery of oil across the new Russian vastness. And the US Marines. Funny how those seem to go hand in hand.
Stemcell research in the US has been outlawed by outlawing its funding. Not all of it - I never claimed all of it. Nor did I claim that the Australian research was embryonic, nor that Americans couldn't get funding to do it. I made a basic point about the actual medical research industry in the US. A point about which you have nothing to say. Certainly nothing based on the truth, logic, or anything I've posted.
You're the one spreading bullshit. The existing lines are contaminated, and you know it, and the US research community is crimped by the pandering laws. You're parroting the BushCo lies the rest of us have grown tired of hearing. I'd recommend you go fuck yourself, but you'd probably say that's illegal research in the US.
You're spoiling me :). You just made up for hundreds of abusive posts and moderations I've endured on this timesink website. Maybe that should have been an open-parenthesis.
Do you have any ideas about more appropriate filesystems for Flash drives than, say, ext{2,3}? The 8GB/100x Flash you recommended promises 100K write cycles before failure, but that's an average, so some will fail faster, requiring more writes to the remainder. Most Linux filesystems I know do a lot of rewriting to avoid fragmentation. Maybe a more indirect (extra pointer layer) allocation database that ignores actual fragmentation could consume the extra "seek time" gained from the more randomly accessible HW.
When I was getting my intro to pharmacology in college (no, the premed lectures ;), they taught us that most new drugs (as of the mid 1980s) were discovered through ethnopharmacology (whether acknowledged or not) in underdeveloped countries, then extraction of the "active ingredient", followed by synthesis. Increased industrialization of biodiverse developing areas, particularly tropical, suggests even better access. To your asprin I say "morphine". And even aspirin was part of the basis for the German dominance of 19th Century science, as Bayer synthesized it from petroleum.
I'd like to see a breakdown of drug origins by source in labs or foreign forests. Not only didn't a 5 minute google gloss turn up any sign of those stats, I also don't trust the IP-manic drug industry to give credit to anyone but their own genius. But I'd like a credible update to my early education.
It's true that American stemcell inhibitions come covered in morality, while British car inhibitions had no moral basis AFAIK. But I make the point that stemcell morality is a cover for the vested economic interests of the current industry. Though I'm sure British dismissal of cars as supplanting trains and horses was wrapped in similarly selfserving moral rhetoric of some kind. Probably under some version of "socialism" (for or against), the "moral issue" of the day. I'm even less current on the actual British rhetoric dismissing cars while America roared past than I am on pharmalogical discoveries. But I can tell that the economics of the industries are working the same way.
I'm using the clear parallels to see through the transient wrappings that protect the persistent economic patterns. America is forgoing the stemcell evolution of our medical industry the way the British forewent the car evolution of their transit industry. The tools used to ensure that repetition aren't necessarily the same.
There's not that many, compared to the rest of us. But their political success (as exploitable shills) shows how even a tiny bit of organization, which is their advantage in their church networks, trumps no organization, which is the case with the rest of us, with respect to the issues (corporate theocracy) they're pushing.
A tiny little magnet can lift a big pile of iron filings, just because the magnet is highly organized. When it organizes the filings by polarizing the pile, the magnet is in complete control.
Another poster posted $173 8GB "100x" flash. I assume that's 15Mbps, which is perfectly fine for the kind of mobile use I described. And 100K rewrites before failure is also plenty, considering it's removable media that will be upgraded for higher capacity as density:$ increases past that low maximum.
For a "desktop" (or any stationary storage), the volume, weight, power and heat issues are much less important. Which is a perfect complement, with bigger, cheaper HDs, on a network to a Flash mobile.
American railroads created more wealth among more new owners more quickly than ever before in any human endeavor. Britain, too. To complete the picture, America's vast emptiness was an even better home to railroads, with its few endpoints, than was Britain, which was better served by smaller scale vehicles like cars. But Britain was distracted by the shorter-term prospects of "railroading the world", while American entrepreneurs like Ford had to compete with American domestic monopolies. Ford's assembly line was just as viable in Britain as it was in his American competitors' factories.
This is exactly parallel to the current American medical predisposition for "drugging the world", rather than move on to riskier, but longer-term strategies like stemcells.
As for the economic epochs you mention, the car industry started in earnest during the Great Depression.
And I further note that the Benz's car invention was designed to run on fuel grown on farms, not pumped from the ground. Which is more a background on how Britain's investors were more attracted by their colonial oil deposits, as were Americans, than in scaling up domestic farm production for fuel (while losing colonial farm production competition), to the benefit of all their industries. Including the drug industry, which basically extracts ex-colonial plant medicine formulas for mass production from petroleum.
The parallels are not only very complete, they form a virtual parallelogram when considering the independent axes. This framework is extremely solid.
America is probably the only country, let alone "civilization", built on principles rather than merely the expediency of history at its founding. Unless you mean "this guy is now in charge" is a principle. Even the basis for the "embryonic stemcell research will speed the destruction of our civilization" is invalid, to say nothing of its more elaborate political conjectures. Not to mention the founding American principle of public protection of science and individual achievement.
The "creating a demand for abortion" premise for outlawing public investment in embryonic stemcell research also falls apart under any scrutiny. Private investment includes more competition, therefore more waste, therefore a higher demand for more stemcells. We also have a huge glut in embryonic stemcell supply, from the large (and increasing) rate of abortions. Which are increasing under the same policies invalid both theoretically and practically. None of your scary scenarios have any basis in how stemcells, or even American embryos, work in reality.
The threat to America, and the civilization of which we are a part, is pandering to uneducated, antilogical masses to cover for corporate exploitation. In this case, the drug companies protect their subsidies from the threats of stemcell therapy competitors by inciting religious gangs. To whom they then sell more expensive, less effective drug therapies. The process protects the politicians who protect their industry. At the expense in health and money of everyone but the drug corporation owners, and the politicians they own - and even their health is worse off. And the perversion of our science and politics to serve that subjugation does have the makings of at least defeat of America, if not our destruction, but not the rest of our "civilization", which has plenty of other players not turning history, politics, economics, ethics, science, or logic upside down.
Those look good, especially the cheap PCMCIA/CF adapters. With a $175 8GB card, I'm probably done.
:).
I think there is a demand for the benefits. But I also think notebook dealers don't market them (educate the market) because margins are still higher on 2.5" HDs, especially the ones bundled with new notebooks. Just unbundling those HDs opens competition from other HD vendors. And without market education, the unfamiliar products will find only niche markets, which also decreases dealers' economy of monolithic scale.
Then there's the recent cheapness of the new high-density CF technology. Dealers are squeezing the most they still can out of the already-amortized investments in small 2.5" HDs. They'll taper that pipeline as they increase the CF stream.
Sooner than later CF will offer the same superiority to dealers as to consumers. Especially the power/heat benefits will allow dealers to keep using cheaper, older CPUs for a few more cycles.
When all these cycles line up, in 5 years we'll have the equivalent of 2Kg P4/10GHz/128GB-CF running 24h on a fuelcell. Just in time to be obsoleted by a mobile "phone" making it look like a "portable mainframe"
A. Some (substantial) stemcell research has been prevented by law.
B No one ever mentioned any guarantee.
"B" is the most interesting part of your response. My post explicitly mentioned how outlawing government funds has made the risky research less attractive for investors. And the part where you argue against "everybody acting like stem cells will provide the cure for everything" completes the picture. Not "everyone", not "provide the cure for everything". That's the kind of hyperbolic strawman that people use to defend the US government's unwise policy against some important stemcell research.
By making those illogical arguments defending the US policy, you of course are acting against some kinds of stemcell reserach. Denying that you are doing so is also part of the same political posture that brings us these bad policies, while pandering to the least logical part of our population.
Now that is just what the Doctor ordered!
;). The board looks like a direct mapping of traces from the IDE to the CF connector, with a few caps and a transistor. How come the many connector/formfactor flavors of Flash don't include native IDE? Then I could just plug multiple cards right into my machine, without $32 extra per card, without the extra space and weight of the PCB adapter?
Since it was so easy to ask & get, I'm upping the ante, with a better order
And for dessert, how about a fanless PIII/1GHz/SVGA or better notebook without a HD, into which to plug those puppies?
Britain's 19th Century industry was so obsessed with railroads that it missed the chance to grow into cars. Britain has an auto industry, but it was easily eclipsed by the American car startups like Henry Ford.
America's 20th Century industry was so obsessed with drugs that it's missing the chance to grow into stemcells. Not just from complacency, but from actually outlawing stemcell research. American medical domination of the world can be eclipsed by foreign startups without such handicaps.
The US laws against stemcell prohibit the public investments in the basic science that the medical industry requires to take risks and develop the science. We have entrepreneurs, but they're both averse to medical science and drawn to the indemnities and subsidies available to drug research instead. Abroad there is much less inhibition, which is an opportunity. So stemcell research isn't stopped worldwide, though it is slowed, and less available to the Americans who should be able to dominate it too, instead of being left behind.
Those high-capacity industrial drives are way overkill for what I was talking about. They cost way more than the $20:GB Flash cards I mentioned, and aren't available in small capacities (and therefore low prices). And their capacities are large enough that they don't save enough on weight or power.
Let me know when you find a simple IDE/Flash adapter that I can plug the cheap commodity Flash stuff into, to replace my 10GB IDE HD.
I've got an Dell notebook with only 10GB (IDE) HD. I'd love to replace it with Flash cards. They're about $45:2GB up to 4GB, in multiple formats. A bank of CF/SDIO/USB slots, or just an IDE/whatever adapter, plus the cards, would fit inside the current drive's slot. And offer much better power, weight and heat loads. With hotswappable filesystems, upgradeable in small chunks and pluggable into other devices, carryable in pockets.
I don't see how <20GB HDs have any place in the portable market anymore (outside of tiny niche multimedia producers), as even $35 80GB HDs are overkill for most people who network, as most everyone does. If every notebook, handheld, iPod, phone and other mobile device used Flash instead of HDs, Flash prices at that industry scale would drop, capacities would multiply, and $5:GB up to 32 or 64GB would be common. While much of the rest of the cost of the device would be lower without extreme measures to accommodate the hungry, inefficient HD.
Today's New York Times has an editorial supporting municipal WiFi policies that help ensure universal access to the Internet. It's a good view of how that infrastructure figures in the broader public consciousness, to the extent that it does.