1) The current version of Internet Explorer (7.0) is actually a pretty decent web browser, and works reasonably well for average users.
2) Firefox 3.0, which should arrive some time in June 2008 in the final version, will get plentiful third-party support and the revised memory management has drastically reduced the memory "footprint" of the browser.
Why bother with another web browser that is not really a viable alternative to IE 7.0 and the upcoming Firefox 3.0?
The weapon that caused the most damage in Japan during World War II was the M-69 incendiary cluster bomb, which started hundreds of fires from a single bomb casing that spread out nearly 100 little incendiary devices. Given that Japan's cities at the time were mostly built of wood, that's why low-altitude incendiary bombing at night was so devestatingly effective against Japanese cities.
I often wondered why Japan didn't improve fire safety regulations after the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923, which a large fraction of the 143,000 dead was caused by uncontrolled fires AFTER the earthquake.
Actually, there is a solution to the issue of developing a jet engine that can meet even the stringent ICAO Stage IV noise emission rules and still be able to fly supersonically: a variable-cycle engine.
GE Aero Engines developed this idea as one of the possible engines for the Advanced Tactical Fighter (ATF) project (the project that became today's F-22A Raptor). By scaling up this technology, you can have an engine that runs in high-bypass mode at low speeds and lower-bypass mode at higher-speeds. Also, thanks to modern engine design and better noise-reduction technology for the engine nacelles, a future SST with such an engine would burn far less fuel and make much less noise, especially if they limit the top speed to around Mach 1.6 to 1.7 (which means much less usage of running the engine in fuel-wasting and noisy afterburner or reheat mode).
What's interesting is that a number of plants that would normally be considered weeds--like kudzu--could be harvested and sent to cellulosic processing plants to be turned into biofuel. It'll be a nice incentive for people to cut down all that overgrown kudzu and make it a useful product.
I see these sources of plant matter for cellulosic processing:
1) Fast-growing plants like kudzu and switchgrass 2) Agricultural waste such as the remaining stalks from the harvesting of corn, wheat, rice, etc. 3) Wood chips and parts of a lumber tree that can't be processed into wood products
I think using enzymes to break down the ENTIRE plant is the way to go if we're going to do biofuels. The reason is simple: by using the entire plant, it means all the agricultural waste from conventional farming can be turned into almost any fuel you can imagine using enzyme processing, avoiding the major issue of having to overgrow corn and sugar cane/beets just to make more ethanol.
Suddenly, all those weeds out there become a biomass base, and farmers will be more than happy to ship the plant waste from growing corn, wheat, rice, etc. to a cellulosic processing plant to turn into biofuels.
Your idea is actually a good one, as since the detonation of a 1 MT nuclear bomb will occur as Apophis goes away from Earth, it will change the orbital path and that will ensure the remains of Apophis will miss Earth by a substantial margin when it returns in 2036.
It also had the bad luck of using poor-quality steel in its construction, which made very brittle when subjected to the cold North Atlantic waters. Even if the Titanic had made it safely to New York on that first voyage the ship would probably ended up in drydock in a few year's time to fix a lot of structural problems caused by that poor steel quality.
If I remember correctly, when the metal from the Titanic was first brought up in the late 1980's and analyzed they noticed a huge amount of impurities in the steel that Harland and Wolff (the company that built the ship) used to build the ship. Because of these impurities, when Titanic was running in the very cold waters of the North Atlantic on that fateful trip the low temperatures made the steel quite brittle, and as such when the ship hit the iceberg the increased brittleness caused a worse structural failure than necessary. If Harland and Wolff used steel with less impurities it's like the ship would have structurally stayed together much longer, which would not only have allowed the ship to stay afloat much longer (and more people rescued) but likely that the Titanic would continued to stay afloat.
I think you're forgetting that both the Ikonos and Quick Bird satellites have one meter resolution, good enough to identify fairly closely the type of ship at that anchorage. And it will get even better when a new satellite going up soon with twice the resolution comes online later this year.
If they can get this to work (including withstanding billions of re-writes), we're talking a completely solid-state storage device that could store at minimum couple of terabytes in the same form factor as today's ATA-100/133 and Serial ATA drives. Imagine loading Linux--including the full graphical environment!--or even Windows in under 10 seconds!:-)
I think with the rapid improvement in even ground-based telescope technology over the past 10 years (and with even bigger ground-based telescopes coming in the next 15 years), we may actually find a rocky-crust planet orbiting around another star within 100 light years of Earth. And by examining the atmosphere, we find gases such as nitrogen, oxygen and water vapor in substantial quantities, then chances are good that planet could have life on it.
The prices are still high because the chipsets used for Blu-ray players are still very expensive to implement. However, new, more integrated chipsets unveiled at CES in January 2008 will cut production costs dramatically, and by fall 2008 we could see players costing around 35-40% less than now, which will dramatically increase player sales.
The reason why Apple chose Intel over AMD was simple: the Conroe CPU core ran faster and way cooler than its AMD equivalent. Today, Intel's Core 2 Duo CPU's are well-liked for its speed and reasonable cooling needs, thanks to the fact the CPU was based heavily on the CPU core developed for the mobile version of the Pentium III CPU.
I think with the multi-core CPU revolution of the past three-four years, what really scares the RIAA is that the technology to record and edit audiophile-quality music on a desktop computer is just about here. It's probably very likely you can create music files in audiophile-quality formats such as FLAC and Apple Lossless and near-audiophile quality formats such as 320 kbps MP3, AAC and WMA now, and soon master your own HDCD or DVD Audio music disc, too.
This allows many musicians to create audiophile-quality music minus the RIAA middleman, and that could obselete a lot of jobs at RIAA companies.
The thing that scares the RIAA is that with modern desktop computers (especially the more recent ones that have dual-core and quad-core CPU's!), people can now do professional quality audio recording and editing right on their desktop computer. I'm sure you can now encode on a desktop computer music in higher-quality HDCD and DVD Audio formats.
As such, you can create FLAC, Apple Lossless, or 320 kbps data rate MP3, AAC or WMA audio files for online distribution, completely cutting out the RIAA middleman.
Given your suggestions, I think we'll see the following on the 2G Apple iPhone:
1) 3G high-speed data download support through HSDPA (which AT&T is implementing in major metropolitan areas). 2) Maximum flash memory increased to 32 GB, the same as the top-line iPod Touch. 3) Improved onboard camera with 4-5 megapixel capability. 4) Bigger capacity battery (though this will increase the thickness of the iPhone about 2-3 mm). 5) Improved transceiving antenna, very necessary for HSDPA connections. 6) Optional software GPS support, using software sold through iTunes Music Store.
I personally think that the espionage by the Soviets over the atomic bomb design was essentially pretty much to "verify" research done by the Soviet Academy of Sciences internally over how to build a nuclear bomb. (People conveniently forget the Soviets had SUPERB basic scientific researchers. The main physicist on the Soviet bomb program, Igor Kurchatov, probably would have figured out how to implode plutonium to create a runaway nuclear chain reaction even if the Soviets had not known about the the Manhattan Project.)
By the way, I don't think an improvised nuclear bomb will be based on an plutonium implosion device, due to the rather extreme precision needed to detonate the explosives for compressing the plutonium core. It's more likely such a device would be based on ramming two pieces of U-235 together at high velocity, which is technically much easier to do.
I think the limitations on how much fresh water we can get and how much food we can grow on a per acre/hectare basis will limit how far human population can grow. It's also an issue of how we can transport foodstuffs around at reasonable prices, too. I see a possible dramatic drop in human population growth until new technologies that replace most of our current petroleum usage become widely available.
Prices are high now because player electronics are still pretty expensive to implement, considering how big Blu-ray players are nowadays.
But with more intergrated, smaller Blu-ray player chipsets now in full production, expect Blu-ray players to get physically smaller and less expensive to manufacture. This will lead to dramatic price drops, probably starting early this summer.
Actually, I expect Blu-ray player prices to start dropping because by this summer, we'll be seeing players that implement vastly less expensive, more integrated player chipsets with full Profile 1.1 and 2.0 compliance that will be physically a lot smaller than current players. After all, the physical size of current production stand-alone DVD players are vastly smaller than earlier design machines, thanks to modern DVD player chipsets.
The slow screen redraw issues of LCD computer monitors pretty much vanished once LCD response times dropped under 25 ms--most LCD's built in the past two years now have response times under 8 ms (I use an older Samsung SyncMaster 930B with 8 ms response time and never had a problem with playing DVD's through WinDVD in full-screen mode).
A huge advantage for LCD's is that unlike CRT's, LCD's take up vastly less desk space--that's why the corporate world have embraced them very quickly.
...is very important because it paves the way to make highly-advanced products that use carbon nanotubes.
The best example of this are supercapacitor batteries that use carbon nanotubes to dramatically increase the storage capacity of the battery itself. That could make it possible for real plug-in hybrid vehicles with extremely long range or even the possibility by 2020 of a fully-electric vehicle that could seat 4-5 passenger comfortably yet have a range of around 400 km with charging times essentially the same as the time needed to fill a 16-20 gallon fuel tank on a medium-sized family car!:-)
And best of all, the latest turbodiesel engines aren't the smokey, no-power, clattering engines of the past. The Mercedes-Benz E320CDI--which is available in 45 US states now and all 50 states starting this fall--drives likes the E350 sedan powered by the gasoline-fuelled engine but with 33-35% better fuel efficiency.
In fact, Honda will likely start offering this fall in the USA market the new i-DTEC 160 bhp I-4 turbodiesel engine on the Acura TSX sedan first, then eventually offer the engine on Honda's Accord sedan and the CR-V and Element small SUV's.
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The reasons are simple:
1) The current version of Internet Explorer (7.0) is actually a pretty decent web browser, and works reasonably well for average users.
2) Firefox 3.0, which should arrive some time in June 2008 in the final version, will get plentiful third-party support and the revised memory management has drastically reduced the memory "footprint" of the browser.
Why bother with another web browser that is not really a viable alternative to IE 7.0 and the upcoming Firefox 3.0?
The weapon that caused the most damage in Japan during World War II was the M-69 incendiary cluster bomb, which started hundreds of fires from a single bomb casing that spread out nearly 100 little incendiary devices. Given that Japan's cities at the time were mostly built of wood, that's why low-altitude incendiary bombing at night was so devestatingly effective against Japanese cities.
I often wondered why Japan didn't improve fire safety regulations after the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923, which a large fraction of the 143,000 dead was caused by uncontrolled fires AFTER the earthquake.
Actually, there is a solution to the issue of developing a jet engine that can meet even the stringent ICAO Stage IV noise emission rules and still be able to fly supersonically: a variable-cycle engine.
GE Aero Engines developed this idea as one of the possible engines for the Advanced Tactical Fighter (ATF) project (the project that became today's F-22A Raptor). By scaling up this technology, you can have an engine that runs in high-bypass mode at low speeds and lower-bypass mode at higher-speeds. Also, thanks to modern engine design and better noise-reduction technology for the engine nacelles, a future SST with such an engine would burn far less fuel and make much less noise, especially if they limit the top speed to around Mach 1.6 to 1.7 (which means much less usage of running the engine in fuel-wasting and noisy afterburner or reheat mode).
What's interesting is that a number of plants that would normally be considered weeds--like kudzu--could be harvested and sent to cellulosic processing plants to be turned into biofuel. It'll be a nice incentive for people to cut down all that overgrown kudzu and make it a useful product.
I see these sources of plant matter for cellulosic processing:
1) Fast-growing plants like kudzu and switchgrass
2) Agricultural waste such as the remaining stalks from the harvesting of corn, wheat, rice, etc.
3) Wood chips and parts of a lumber tree that can't be processed into wood products
I think using enzymes to break down the ENTIRE plant is the way to go if we're going to do biofuels. The reason is simple: by using the entire plant, it means all the agricultural waste from conventional farming can be turned into almost any fuel you can imagine using enzyme processing, avoiding the major issue of having to overgrow corn and sugar cane/beets just to make more ethanol.
Suddenly, all those weeds out there become a biomass base, and farmers will be more than happy to ship the plant waste from growing corn, wheat, rice, etc. to a cellulosic processing plant to turn into biofuels.
Your idea is actually a good one, as since the detonation of a 1 MT nuclear bomb will occur as Apophis goes away from Earth, it will change the orbital path and that will ensure the remains of Apophis will miss Earth by a substantial margin when it returns in 2036.
It also had the bad luck of using poor-quality steel in its construction, which made very brittle when subjected to the cold North Atlantic waters. Even if the Titanic had made it safely to New York on that first voyage the ship would probably ended up in drydock in a few year's time to fix a lot of structural problems caused by that poor steel quality.
If I remember correctly, when the metal from the Titanic was first brought up in the late 1980's and analyzed they noticed a huge amount of impurities in the steel that Harland and Wolff (the company that built the ship) used to build the ship. Because of these impurities, when Titanic was running in the very cold waters of the North Atlantic on that fateful trip the low temperatures made the steel quite brittle, and as such when the ship hit the iceberg the increased brittleness caused a worse structural failure than necessary. If Harland and Wolff used steel with less impurities it's like the ship would have structurally stayed together much longer, which would not only have allowed the ship to stay afloat much longer (and more people rescued) but likely that the Titanic would continued to stay afloat.
I think you're forgetting that both the Ikonos and Quick Bird satellites have one meter resolution, good enough to identify fairly closely the type of ship at that anchorage. And it will get even better when a new satellite going up soon with twice the resolution comes online later this year.
If they can get this to work (including withstanding billions of re-writes), we're talking a completely solid-state storage device that could store at minimum couple of terabytes in the same form factor as today's ATA-100/133 and Serial ATA drives. Imagine loading Linux--including the full graphical environment!--or even Windows in under 10 seconds! :-)
I think with the rapid improvement in even ground-based telescope technology over the past 10 years (and with even bigger ground-based telescopes coming in the next 15 years), we may actually find a rocky-crust planet orbiting around another star within 100 light years of Earth. And by examining the atmosphere, we find gases such as nitrogen, oxygen and water vapor in substantial quantities, then chances are good that planet could have life on it.
The prices are still high because the chipsets used for Blu-ray players are still very expensive to implement. However, new, more integrated chipsets unveiled at CES in January 2008 will cut production costs dramatically, and by fall 2008 we could see players costing around 35-40% less than now, which will dramatically increase player sales.
The reason why Apple chose Intel over AMD was simple: the Conroe CPU core ran faster and way cooler than its AMD equivalent. Today, Intel's Core 2 Duo CPU's are well-liked for its speed and reasonable cooling needs, thanks to the fact the CPU was based heavily on the CPU core developed for the mobile version of the Pentium III CPU.
1) Want faster than EDGE (3G)
Very likely with 3G HSDPA support.
2) Want more memory (16GB is bare minimum, 32GB preferable)
Very likely given that Apple has bought a bunch of high-capacity flash memory lately.
3) Real GPS would be very nice
Possibly with the new antenna but only by downloading software from the iTunes Music Store.
4) Full Bluetooth abilities
Very likely, especially since more states are requiring hands-free cellphone operation in a car.
5) Better camera with flash (megapixes doesn't matter to me as much as photo quality and ability to take photos in low lighting conditions, etc)
We could see that, but it really depends on how much more battery capacity is available.
I think with the multi-core CPU revolution of the past three-four years, what really scares the RIAA is that the technology to record and edit audiophile-quality music on a desktop computer is just about here. It's probably very likely you can create music files in audiophile-quality formats such as FLAC and Apple Lossless and near-audiophile quality formats such as 320 kbps MP3, AAC and WMA now, and soon master your own HDCD or DVD Audio music disc, too.
This allows many musicians to create audiophile-quality music minus the RIAA middleman, and that could obselete a lot of jobs at RIAA companies.
The thing that scares the RIAA is that with modern desktop computers (especially the more recent ones that have dual-core and quad-core CPU's!), people can now do professional quality audio recording and editing right on their desktop computer. I'm sure you can now encode on a desktop computer music in higher-quality HDCD and DVD Audio formats.
As such, you can create FLAC, Apple Lossless, or 320 kbps data rate MP3, AAC or WMA audio files for online distribution, completely cutting out the RIAA middleman.
Given your suggestions, I think we'll see the following on the 2G Apple iPhone:
1) 3G high-speed data download support through HSDPA (which AT&T is implementing in major metropolitan areas).
2) Maximum flash memory increased to 32 GB, the same as the top-line iPod Touch.
3) Improved onboard camera with 4-5 megapixel capability.
4) Bigger capacity battery (though this will increase the thickness of the iPhone about 2-3 mm).
5) Improved transceiving antenna, very necessary for HSDPA connections.
6) Optional software GPS support, using software sold through iTunes Music Store.
I personally think that the espionage by the Soviets over the atomic bomb design was essentially pretty much to "verify" research done by the Soviet Academy of Sciences internally over how to build a nuclear bomb. (People conveniently forget the Soviets had SUPERB basic scientific researchers. The main physicist on the Soviet bomb program, Igor Kurchatov, probably would have figured out how to implode plutonium to create a runaway nuclear chain reaction even if the Soviets had not known about the the Manhattan Project.)
By the way, I don't think an improvised nuclear bomb will be based on an plutonium implosion device, due to the rather extreme precision needed to detonate the explosives for compressing the plutonium core. It's more likely such a device would be based on ramming two pieces of U-235 together at high velocity, which is technically much easier to do.
I think the limitations on how much fresh water we can get and how much food we can grow on a per acre/hectare basis will limit how far human population can grow. It's also an issue of how we can transport foodstuffs around at reasonable prices, too. I see a possible dramatic drop in human population growth until new technologies that replace most of our current petroleum usage become widely available.
Prices are high now because player electronics are still pretty expensive to implement, considering how big Blu-ray players are nowadays.
But with more intergrated, smaller Blu-ray player chipsets now in full production, expect Blu-ray players to get physically smaller and less expensive to manufacture. This will lead to dramatic price drops, probably starting early this summer.
Actually, I expect Blu-ray player prices to start dropping because by this summer, we'll be seeing players that implement vastly less expensive, more integrated player chipsets with full Profile 1.1 and 2.0 compliance that will be physically a lot smaller than current players. After all, the physical size of current production stand-alone DVD players are vastly smaller than earlier design machines, thanks to modern DVD player chipsets.
The slow screen redraw issues of LCD computer monitors pretty much vanished once LCD response times dropped under 25 ms--most LCD's built in the past two years now have response times under 8 ms (I use an older Samsung SyncMaster 930B with 8 ms response time and never had a problem with playing DVD's through WinDVD in full-screen mode).
A huge advantage for LCD's is that unlike CRT's, LCD's take up vastly less desk space--that's why the corporate world have embraced them very quickly.
Good as it was in terms of contrast and color quality, CRT's are disappearing as computer monitors for a couple of reasons:
1) They use WAY more power on a per-size basis compared to modern LCD panels.
2) Adjust CRT displays for proper geometry can be a frustrating experience--most LCD panels usually don't have such problems.
3) Today's latest LCD panels now have pretty good picture quality.
...is very important because it paves the way to make highly-advanced products that use carbon nanotubes.
:-)
The best example of this are supercapacitor batteries that use carbon nanotubes to dramatically increase the storage capacity of the battery itself. That could make it possible for real plug-in hybrid vehicles with extremely long range or even the possibility by 2020 of a fully-electric vehicle that could seat 4-5 passenger comfortably yet have a range of around 400 km with charging times essentially the same as the time needed to fill a 16-20 gallon fuel tank on a medium-sized family car!
And best of all, the latest turbodiesel engines aren't the smokey, no-power, clattering engines of the past. The Mercedes-Benz E320CDI--which is available in 45 US states now and all 50 states starting this fall--drives likes the E350 sedan powered by the gasoline-fuelled engine but with 33-35% better fuel efficiency.
In fact, Honda will likely start offering this fall in the USA market the new i-DTEC 160 bhp I-4 turbodiesel engine on the Acura TSX sedan first, then eventually offer the engine on Honda's Accord sedan and the CR-V and Element small SUV's.