No, I think it's more just the standard tech progress thing, where the folks who make the physical screens are continuing (as they must) to compete on technology and performance, not just price (competing on price is generally a losing game). Just as disk manufacturers continue to push the technology for smaller disks with higher capacities (and as a side benefit, faster potential data transfer rates), and leave it up to their customers - computer makers, mostly - to figure out how to take advantage of the new technology. And the prices are in fact dropping like a rock. Seiki was the first to break $1000 for a 50 inch 4K (Tiger Direct, last month), and overall prices are expected by some analysts to drop by 50% over the next year. With that expectation, I think you'll find that the CAD folks have test units inhouse now, and will be bringing out new products based on these over the next year. But they will also need compatible, performant video cards so it's not a single step.
Hear, hear!! (or, rather, See, see!) I'm glad you were able to provide a more technical explanation of some things I've said less well in other comments.
I have been out of the image processing business for a long time, but based on my old experience, it seems to me that as resolutions get higher, compression should become more effective, especially if using more advanced methods. I could see 4K only requiring 20% more bandwidth most of the time. But from what I've heard the cable folks are already downgrading 1080p prior to transmission, so IDK what they might do to screw up 4K. This might be just the thing to finally make 1G cable internet the minimum standard. The cable companies could just eliminate the broadcast channels from the cable itself, put tiny solid-state cacheing/forwarding servers every few blocks (or even use everyone's cable box as a torrent host), and use all their bandwidth to push the video as IP, then convert it to TV in the cable box. This would eliminate a big chunk of their infrastructure costs since they'd only have two support one traffic type instead of two.
Agreed. Most folks don't really think about what any engineer used to work with - E-size drawings, drawn with line widths down to 0.13 mm (that would be a _smooth_ line, not pixelated), and printed at 300 DPI or higher. At the minimal 300 DPI an E-size, which varies from 34x44 inches to 36x48 inches (i.e. approximately similar to A0), would be 10800x14400 pixels. So we have yet to achieve in the common display medium what engineers have been accustomed to for over a century. 400 DPI would be better, and 1000 DPI (36000x48000 pixels) even more so. At that point one could really say that the graphic engineering display has matched a $10 piece of paper.
One of the things I liked the first time I saw an IMAX movie was that with the super-wide screen and the high resolution, I could feel like I was 'there', and at all times some parts of the images were outside my direct vision, but provided valuable visual context. I _like_ having the screen too wide to see all at once. One of the things that TV has gotten us used to is cramming all of the action into the center of the screen. Looking at old movies in letterbox format vs. TV format you discover entire subplots and characters that you missed on the TV
Exactly, plus. Having compared side by side watching motion picture content, it makes a huge difference to me at normal viewing distance. And it _also_ makes a huge difference in ability to read high density print when I'm playing computer geek.
I've tried it and it absolutely is visible, and I've done the analysis, and it absolutely makes sense if you don't accept the lame de minimus analyses that sceptics have been flogging for a long time. Nyquist applies, and the retina-brain system's dynamic resolution synthesis (my term) applies. As a case in point (I mentioned in an earlier comment), the very first 3D head-up display experiment showed that an eye tracker and fast graphics update (over 120 Hz IIRC) made two 128-pixel displays have a perceived resolution of well over 1024 pixels. This experiment essentially duplicated in a backwards way what our eyes do naturally.
Interesting point - since we're already seeing 1080p on 7 inch tables, with 300+ pixels per inch, why not make panels at 300 pixels/inch and four feet wide? It might be necessary to do some fancy parallel processing (like those big TV monitor walls) to spread the work, but that's just a few more identical display processors. Four feet times 300 pixels/inch would be 48*300=14400 pixels wide. Or six feet would be 18000 pixels wide. If the digital image processing could be handled inexpensively, such displays would be adaptable to any future application, and in fact would finally match what I proposed in 1985, looking at a floor-to-ceiling world map, printed at 300 DPI - "When you can display this map on a screen, we wiil finally have achieved high resolution."
Just for perspective, a photographer I used to know who has won national prizes for his work, prints his photographs at 1200 DPI. You can stand _this_ close to the print, and there are leaves on the trees in the background that are too small to make out without a magnifier. Standing back a little bit, you can almost (not quite) think you're looking out a window.
There is a reason why printers can print at 300 to 1200 DPI, or even 2400 DPI for high end glossy stuff. That's really what we want to look at. Everything less than that is a compromise.
Just as in everything, these days there are different kinds of IMAX and different IMAX 3D. I saw Gravity in "IMAX 3D", and found that the theater was using anaglyph (red/green) 3D - shades of the 1950s!! It was OK, but I would much rather have had the 3d using circular polarization. I don't recall the exact numbers but I think the original IMAX was a 105mm frame placed lengthwise on 70MM film, providing 9 times the film area per frame as 35MM film, and also ran at a higher frame rate.
I have been to several of the 'integrated' IMAX venues built in with regular theaters, and none of them had anything close to the display quality of the original IMAX in my experience. The one thing that the last one I went to had was deafening, over-pumped sound.
I think not putting all that 'smart' stuff in it is partly how Seiki manages to get their prices for 4K down so low. I've also read that prices for 4K are projected to drop by 50% by the end of 2014. If you think about it, once you get your production line up and running the cost of a 4K screen is about the same as a 1080P screen. (I wonder if makers will allow more dead pixels on a higher res screen before rejecting the screen.)
I've said this before, but it's worth repeating. Every such analysis I've seen seems to ignore at least two things - one I'll call the Nyquist factor, the other is a perceptual result of the way the eye continuously 'dithers'. The dithering (I won't get into the details here but it has to do with the retinal cells firing and resting, and sharing 'data' (neural impulses) with their neighbors - our brain smooths out the results) gives a higher effective resolution over time, as the same retinal cell is grabbing a slightly different piece of the frame each time it fires. This is a biological equivalent to either half-toning or subpixel rendering, depending on how you look at it.
One of the earliest 3D head-up display experiments, done at NASA Ames in the early-mid 1990s IIRC, used two 128-pixel screens from Citizen brand wrist TVs, IIRC built into a motorcycle helmet, with a custom eye tracker. The very low resolution worked out well, because the eye tracker and the graphics engine used could refresh the displays much faster than 30 Hz, i.e. much faster than the retina refresh rate. As I recall, the effective perceived resolution was in excess of 1024 pixels.
TL;DR - I've tested 4K myself and for me it's much better.
Hmm. I was at Best Buy where they were playing video on a Sony 4K display (I think about 60 inches). I was sitting & standing 10 feet away and could easily see how much better it looked. Every analysis I've read saying 1080P was fine up to some remarkably short distance is missing several mathematical and perceptual factors IMHO, starting with Nyquist and the continuous 'jitter' our eyes do to construct a higher effective resolution than the number of retinal cells would imply. And I could definitely use the additional resolution for my computing work, although there is something to be said for using three or four 1080P monitors rotated to provide 1920x4320 effective resolution for that application.
Heck, what I'd really like would be a wearable display that provided a complete circular or spherical effective display - as I turn my head the piece of the screen in front of me would move. Or maybe I could control it with eyes and/or mouse. But the display would still have to provide better effective resolution than 1080P at the viewing distance.
Re: It was already a dangerous site to visit ...
on
PHP.net Compromised
·
· Score: 1
Hmm. I recall a an analogous bit from the Perl documentation - I don't recall the specifics. And C has lots of WTFs, not least of which is the syntactic mistake of allowing 'if ( a = b )' to be valid, leading to thousands of hours of debugging time when programmers accidentally forget the second ==. We've all done it, many times. I recently found an example that had lain in wait for a couple of years, as that particular piece of code was only rarely executed, and most of the time the fact that 'a' was being set didn't matter. This bug-factory has now been propagated into several languages whose syntax is based on C. It could be prevented by simply requiring that operations that return a value inside an evaluation must be enclosed with braces: 'if ({a = b})' would evaluate, then proceed; 'if (a == b)' would compare then proceed; 'if (a = b)' would fail.
Bottom line, PHP is just another language with historical, and not-so-historical flaws. I personally dislike the unpredictable parameter order in string and array functions; I basically have to look them up every time I use one I haven't used for a while. APL had the cleanest parsing and cleanest operating model of any language I've used - A+B meant the 'right' thing (or at least something reasonable) regardless of whether A and B were scalars, strings or arrays of arbitrary dimension. Its WTF might well have been just the requirement for the special character set.
Indeed. Entropy is another way of saying "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." One definition of life is as a dynamic self-replicating process that reduces entropy locally and increases it externally. As living beings, we are constantly consuming low-entropy highly organized materials (plants and animals) and producing higher entropy, less organized poop. And other life forms use that poop, plus sunlight and some other ingredients, to produce plants. The net sum is that the sunlight in part becomes 'us', and the universe becomes slightly darker among other things.
Now, my extrapolation gene kicks in...
Soon we will be increasing our conversion of chemical, and perhaps nuclear energy to push people and materials into space, where we as the representatives and pioneering species of Earth life, will extract valuable materials from other bodies in the Solar System, bringing some of these materials (or perhaps just the energy in the form of solar-powered microwave beams that replace earthly power stations, who knows?) back to Earth where they will reduce our overall use of those resources, but the Solar System will have a lower entropy; and we will use the rest of those materials and energy to populate new areas of the Solar System, thereby expanding Life As We Know It outward from here.
In that sense we could be considered the Termites Of Space (by analogy - those huge termite mounds in Africa establish an entirely different ecosystem, with their own internal flora and fauna). And many plants that are known as 'pioneering' species will arrive in a desolated region, such as volcanic zone, and establish themselves. They in turn provide essential support for secondary pioneering plants and animals, and in the blink of an eye, a forest appears.
Some day, I hope we will be discussing concerns about how the proliferation of our magnetic-field flitters travelling between stars using the Albuquierre Warp Drive is causing distortions to the galactic magnetic field, and altering the orbital paths of the dust lanes in the local region. "Planet huggers" will be lobbying to reduce these distortions in various ways to preserve the integrity of our region of the Galaxy, and they may well have a point. The extremists will argue that we must cease all faster-than-light travel immediately, and their opponents will note that this will effectively mean the end of human civilization as we know it, and the descent of every human-occupied stellar system into its own isolated evolutionary island.
I think I recall reading that one of the people who first discovered this problem, (a researcher at U Washington?) has been running research ships out there to see if that can be done. There are two big problems. First, the stuff isn't all that thick - while it sounds like the ocean looks like a venue after a rock festival, the stuff is not very thick in the open ocean. Second, it actually degrades - the sun breaks it down to smaller and smaller bits as the plasticizers get broken down until it's basically molecular, then if it hasn't already been eaten by something, it gets eaten by bacteria but still not digested. So whatever you do has to be able to pull it out of the ocean at a very, very fine scale.
The advantageous bit is that most of the great gyres where it collects are in open ocean which is a kind of blue desert - there's not a lot of biological activity; while the stuff that lands on island beaches can be collected locally. So my brilliant idea is to use the power of wind, geography and sun - build very large (possibly miles wide) autonomous sail-trawlers with fine net-like structures that are made of oil-attracting materials (possibly in a dual-element - one with enough strength to capture actual physical bits, one possibly in the form of jellyfish-like streamers to attract and capture the molecular stuff). The macro scale would have the sailing components connected by the net-like structures, and would look analogously like the Solar Eagle (which has several engine pods connected by wing structure).
To avoid capturing sea life, rather than a regular net, the 'net-like' system would be more like a long complex of jellyfish streamers, or perhaps some form of kelp or very flexible feathers; many individual streamers that branch into smaller and smaller branches, all covered or made with the stuff that attracts oil and plastics.
The key technology is the oil-attracting material. This exists, and it also is attracted to/attracts molecular-level plastics (think how hard it can be to remove oily stuff from a plastic container - it takes a strong detergent!). I think the feathery net-like structures would wrap themselves around larger pieces until they are covered, but fish should be able to get away. And as noted, that part of the ocean tends to be relatively poor in nutrients, and sea life. However three would almost certainly be casualties.
So these systems would basically float around in the gyre, being pushed gently against the water in various directions according to wind, waves, and the coriolis effect. Periodically a tender vessel (possibly also autonomous) would come out and pull the net-like structures through a cleaning device to remove the plastic particles of all sizes. It could then use the material collected as fuel, or return it to a recycling facility.
Alternatively, perhaps the system could work catalytically to break the plastics down to smaller molecules that then become real food for ocean bacteria and such. That seems like a few more steps up the technology ladder though.
Indeede. For another example, I just saw on History Detectives, the first transistor pocket radio (the Regency TR-1) came out in 1954, at a price of $49.95. That would be over $500 today. This was apparently the first consumer use of transistors. What-became-Sony's first effort came out in 1957 and didn't quite fit in your pocket.
I'll just note that some uni students, funded by NASA (IIRC about $5000), successfully fired a 3D printed one-piece titanium rocket engine. This engine cost less than 1/10 as much as the original fabricated engine it is destined to replace, and took a few weeks instead of over a year to manufacture. Another group are building entire housing structures by 3D printing, essentially, dirt. 3D printing is now recognized as critical to long term space habitation, development, exploration, etc.
Of course proponents prefer to call it 'additive manufacturing', which makes sense because it gives a better idea of just how it fits into the grand scheme of things. It's just another way of making things, that has huge advantages for some (many) applications. I predict that your local auto parts store will soon have one that can print a replacement for that taillight lens that you busted last week - saving you 70% of the cost versus a dealer part.
On another tack, a company has just come out with a machine that you can put your old water bottles and other plastic bits into, and it will melt them down and turn them into the 'wire' that goes into another company's 3D printer, so you can make your own widgets and toys. AFAIK no home models yet include color but it will come.
HP has announced that it will bring out an office/home model next year, which means it's already running in the dev group.
Sure it's optional. It may or may not be a good idea (that's a separate topic), but the choice is pretty plainly available. Considering that when dinosaurs roamed and ferns grew 20 feet tall and dragonflies had two foot wingspans, the mean global temp was from 3 to 10 degrees hotter than it is now, and Antarctica had trees growing on it, it's not all bad. Things might be kinda tough for most of us humans and probably a lot of other species, but there are encouraging indications that the increased CO2 is causing the deserts to green up. Interestingly, levels of O2 and CO2 also seem to be a big influence on the size of insects, so those big dragonflies may not even be an evolutionary process.
OTOH, we may be well on our way into another ice age, and the CO2 (along with cleared land, which has been shown to have a large warming effect that dates back to 3000 years ago) may be preventing us from descending into a new episode of ice a mile thick over New York City.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I think it's more just the standard tech progress thing, where the folks who make the physical screens are continuing (as they must) to compete on technology and performance, not just price (competing on price is generally a losing game). Just as disk manufacturers continue to push the technology for smaller disks with higher capacities (and as a side benefit, faster potential data transfer rates), and leave it up to their customers - computer makers, mostly - to figure out how to take advantage of the new technology. And the prices are in fact dropping like a rock. Seiki was the first to break $1000 for a 50 inch 4K (Tiger Direct, last month), and overall prices are expected by some analysts to drop by 50% over the next year. With that expectation, I think you'll find that the CAD folks have test units inhouse now, and will be bringing out new products based on these over the next year. But they will also need compatible, performant video cards so it's not a single step.
Hear, hear!! (or, rather, See, see!) I'm glad you were able to provide a more technical explanation of some things I've said less well in other comments.
No, he just likes immersion.
I have been out of the image processing business for a long time, but based on my old experience, it seems to me that as resolutions get higher, compression should become more effective, especially if using more advanced methods. I could see 4K only requiring 20% more bandwidth most of the time. But from what I've heard the cable folks are already downgrading 1080p prior to transmission, so IDK what they might do to screw up 4K. This might be just the thing to finally make 1G cable internet the minimum standard. The cable companies could just eliminate the broadcast channels from the cable itself, put tiny solid-state cacheing/forwarding servers every few blocks (or even use everyone's cable box as a torrent host), and use all their bandwidth to push the video as IP, then convert it to TV in the cable box. This would eliminate a big chunk of their infrastructure costs since they'd only have two support one traffic type instead of two.
And I thought my local theater was crappy. You need to go to better theaters.
Agreed. Most folks don't really think about what any engineer used to work with - E-size drawings, drawn with line widths down to 0.13 mm (that would be a _smooth_ line, not pixelated), and printed at 300 DPI or higher. At the minimal 300 DPI an E-size, which varies from 34x44 inches to 36x48 inches (i.e. approximately similar to A0), would be 10800x14400 pixels. So we have yet to achieve in the common display medium what engineers have been accustomed to for over a century. 400 DPI would be better, and 1000 DPI (36000x48000 pixels) even more so. At that point one could really say that the graphic engineering display has matched a $10 piece of paper.
Get too close and you start failing to perceive things on one side while you're looking at the other.
- much like reality! :) that other stuff still provides visual context, and you can (and I do) move my focus around to see more.
One of the things I liked the first time I saw an IMAX movie was that with the super-wide screen and the high resolution, I could feel like I was 'there', and at all times some parts of the images were outside my direct vision, but provided valuable visual context. I _like_ having the screen too wide to see all at once. One of the things that TV has gotten us used to is cramming all of the action into the center of the screen. Looking at old movies in letterbox format vs. TV format you discover entire subplots and characters that you missed on the TV
Exactly, plus. Having compared side by side watching motion picture content, it makes a huge difference to me at normal viewing distance. And it _also_ makes a huge difference in ability to read high density print when I'm playing computer geek.
I've tried it and it absolutely is visible, and I've done the analysis, and it absolutely makes sense if you don't accept the lame de minimus analyses that sceptics have been flogging for a long time. Nyquist applies, and the retina-brain system's dynamic resolution synthesis (my term) applies. As a case in point (I mentioned in an earlier comment), the very first 3D head-up display experiment showed that an eye tracker and fast graphics update (over 120 Hz IIRC) made two 128-pixel displays have a perceived resolution of well over 1024 pixels. This experiment essentially duplicated in a backwards way what our eyes do naturally.
Tiger Direct had Seiki 50" 4K displays for $949 earlier in October - I almost bought one. I think the same one is on Amazon now for $1100+.
Interesting point - since we're already seeing 1080p on 7 inch tables, with 300+ pixels per inch, why not make panels at 300 pixels/inch and four feet wide? It might be necessary to do some fancy parallel processing (like those big TV monitor walls) to spread the work, but that's just a few more identical display processors. Four feet times 300 pixels/inch would be 48*300=14400 pixels wide. Or six feet would be 18000 pixels wide. If the digital image processing could be handled inexpensively, such displays would be adaptable to any future application, and in fact would finally match what I proposed in 1985, looking at a floor-to-ceiling world map, printed at 300 DPI - "When you can display this map on a screen, we wiil finally have achieved high resolution."
Just for perspective, a photographer I used to know who has won national prizes for his work, prints his photographs at 1200 DPI. You can stand _this_ close to the print, and there are leaves on the trees in the background that are too small to make out without a magnifier. Standing back a little bit, you can almost (not quite) think you're looking out a window.
There is a reason why printers can print at 300 to 1200 DPI, or even 2400 DPI for high end glossy stuff. That's really what we want to look at. Everything less than that is a compromise.
Just as in everything, these days there are different kinds of IMAX and different IMAX 3D. I saw Gravity in "IMAX 3D", and found that the theater was using anaglyph (red/green) 3D - shades of the 1950s!! It was OK, but I would much rather have had the 3d using circular polarization. I don't recall the exact numbers but I think the original IMAX was a 105mm frame placed lengthwise on 70MM film, providing 9 times the film area per frame as 35MM film, and also ran at a higher frame rate.
I have been to several of the 'integrated' IMAX venues built in with regular theaters, and none of them had anything close to the display quality of the original IMAX in my experience. The one thing that the last one I went to had was deafening, over-pumped sound.
How the mighty have fallen...
the original Star Trek was never made with HD in mind.
Heck, it looked tacky even back then! :O
I think not putting all that 'smart' stuff in it is partly how Seiki manages to get their prices for 4K down so low. I've also read that prices for 4K are projected to drop by 50% by the end of 2014. If you think about it, once you get your production line up and running the cost of a 4K screen is about the same as a 1080P screen. (I wonder if makers will allow more dead pixels on a higher res screen before rejecting the screen.)
I've said this before, but it's worth repeating. Every such analysis I've seen seems to ignore at least two things - one I'll call the Nyquist factor, the other is a perceptual result of the way the eye continuously 'dithers'. The dithering (I won't get into the details here but it has to do with the retinal cells firing and resting, and sharing 'data' (neural impulses) with their neighbors - our brain smooths out the results) gives a higher effective resolution over time, as the same retinal cell is grabbing a slightly different piece of the frame each time it fires. This is a biological equivalent to either half-toning or subpixel rendering, depending on how you look at it.
One of the earliest 3D head-up display experiments, done at NASA Ames in the early-mid 1990s IIRC, used two 128-pixel screens from Citizen brand wrist TVs, IIRC built into a motorcycle helmet, with a custom eye tracker. The very low resolution worked out well, because the eye tracker and the graphics engine used could refresh the displays much faster than 30 Hz, i.e. much faster than the retina refresh rate. As I recall, the effective perceived resolution was in excess of 1024 pixels.
TL;DR - I've tested 4K myself and for me it's much better.
Hmm. I was at Best Buy where they were playing video on a Sony 4K display (I think about 60 inches). I was sitting & standing 10 feet away and could easily see how much better it looked. Every analysis I've read saying 1080P was fine up to some remarkably short distance is missing several mathematical and perceptual factors IMHO, starting with Nyquist and the continuous 'jitter' our eyes do to construct a higher effective resolution than the number of retinal cells would imply. And I could definitely use the additional resolution for my computing work, although there is something to be said for using three or four 1080P monitors rotated to provide 1920x4320 effective resolution for that application.
Heck, what I'd really like would be a wearable display that provided a complete circular or spherical effective display - as I turn my head the piece of the screen in front of me would move. Or maybe I could control it with eyes and/or mouse. But the display would still have to provide better effective resolution than 1080P at the viewing distance.
Hmm. I recall a an analogous bit from the Perl documentation - I don't recall the specifics. And C has lots of WTFs, not least of which is the syntactic mistake of allowing 'if ( a = b )' to be valid, leading to thousands of hours of debugging time when programmers accidentally forget the second ==. We've all done it, many times. I recently found an example that had lain in wait for a couple of years, as that particular piece of code was only rarely executed, and most of the time the fact that 'a' was being set didn't matter. This bug-factory has now been propagated into several languages whose syntax is based on C. It could be prevented by simply requiring that operations that return a value inside an evaluation must be enclosed with braces: 'if ({a = b})' would evaluate, then proceed; 'if (a == b)' would compare then proceed; 'if (a = b)' would fail.
Bottom line, PHP is just another language with historical, and not-so-historical flaws. I personally dislike the unpredictable parameter order in string and array functions; I basically have to look them up every time I use one I haven't used for a while. APL had the cleanest parsing and cleanest operating model of any language I've used - A+B meant the 'right' thing (or at least something reasonable) regardless of whether A and B were scalars, strings or arrays of arbitrary dimension. Its WTF might well have been just the requirement for the special character set.
Indeed. Entropy is another way of saying "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." One definition of life is as a dynamic self-replicating process that reduces entropy locally and increases it externally. As living beings, we are constantly consuming low-entropy highly organized materials (plants and animals) and producing higher entropy, less organized poop. And other life forms use that poop, plus sunlight and some other ingredients, to produce plants. The net sum is that the sunlight in part becomes 'us', and the universe becomes slightly darker among other things.
Now, my extrapolation gene kicks in ...
Soon we will be increasing our conversion of chemical, and perhaps nuclear energy to push people and materials into space, where we as the representatives and pioneering species of Earth life, will extract valuable materials from other bodies in the Solar System, bringing some of these materials (or perhaps just the energy in the form of solar-powered microwave beams that replace earthly power stations, who knows?) back to Earth where they will reduce our overall use of those resources, but the Solar System will have a lower entropy; and we will use the rest of those materials and energy to populate new areas of the Solar System, thereby expanding Life As We Know It outward from here.
In that sense we could be considered the Termites Of Space (by analogy - those huge termite mounds in Africa establish an entirely different ecosystem, with their own internal flora and fauna). And many plants that are known as 'pioneering' species will arrive in a desolated region, such as volcanic zone, and establish themselves. They in turn provide essential support for secondary pioneering plants and animals, and in the blink of an eye, a forest appears.
Some day, I hope we will be discussing concerns about how the proliferation of our magnetic-field flitters travelling between stars using the Albuquierre Warp Drive is causing distortions to the galactic magnetic field, and altering the orbital paths of the dust lanes in the local region. "Planet huggers" will be lobbying to reduce these distortions in various ways to preserve the integrity of our region of the Galaxy, and they may well have a point. The extremists will argue that we must cease all faster-than-light travel immediately, and their opponents will note that this will effectively mean the end of human civilization as we know it, and the descent of every human-occupied stellar system into its own isolated evolutionary island.
I think I recall reading that one of the people who first discovered this problem, (a researcher at U Washington?) has been running research ships out there to see if that can be done. There are two big problems. First, the stuff isn't all that thick - while it sounds like the ocean looks like a venue after a rock festival, the stuff is not very thick in the open ocean. Second, it actually degrades - the sun breaks it down to smaller and smaller bits as the plasticizers get broken down until it's basically molecular, then if it hasn't already been eaten by something, it gets eaten by bacteria but still not digested. So whatever you do has to be able to pull it out of the ocean at a very, very fine scale.
The advantageous bit is that most of the great gyres where it collects are in open ocean which is a kind of blue desert - there's not a lot of biological activity; while the stuff that lands on island beaches can be collected locally. So my brilliant idea is to use the power of wind, geography and sun - build very large (possibly miles wide) autonomous sail-trawlers with fine net-like structures that are made of oil-attracting materials (possibly in a dual-element - one with enough strength to capture actual physical bits, one possibly in the form of jellyfish-like streamers to attract and capture the molecular stuff). The macro scale would have the sailing components connected by the net-like structures, and would look analogously like the Solar Eagle (which has several engine pods connected by wing structure).
To avoid capturing sea life, rather than a regular net, the 'net-like' system would be more like a long complex of jellyfish streamers, or perhaps some form of kelp or very flexible feathers; many individual streamers that branch into smaller and smaller branches, all covered or made with the stuff that attracts oil and plastics.
The key technology is the oil-attracting material. This exists, and it also is attracted to/attracts molecular-level plastics (think how hard it can be to remove oily stuff from a plastic container - it takes a strong detergent!). I think the feathery net-like structures would wrap themselves around larger pieces until they are covered, but fish should be able to get away. And as noted, that part of the ocean tends to be relatively poor in nutrients, and sea life. However three would almost certainly be casualties.
So these systems would basically float around in the gyre, being pushed gently against the water in various directions according to wind, waves, and the coriolis effect. Periodically a tender vessel (possibly also autonomous) would come out and pull the net-like structures through a cleaning device to remove the plastic particles of all sizes. It could then use the material collected as fuel, or return it to a recycling facility.
Alternatively, perhaps the system could work catalytically to break the plastics down to smaller molecules that then become real food for ocean bacteria and such. That seems like a few more steps up the technology ladder though.
Indeede. For another example, I just saw on History Detectives, the first transistor pocket radio (the Regency TR-1) came out in 1954, at a price of $49.95. That would be over $500 today. This was apparently the first consumer use of transistors. What-became-Sony's first effort came out in 1957 and didn't quite fit in your pocket.
I'll just note that some uni students, funded by NASA (IIRC about $5000), successfully fired a 3D printed one-piece titanium rocket engine. This engine cost less than 1/10 as much as the original fabricated engine it is destined to replace, and took a few weeks instead of over a year to manufacture. Another group are building entire housing structures by 3D printing, essentially, dirt. 3D printing is now recognized as critical to long term space habitation, development, exploration, etc.
Of course proponents prefer to call it 'additive manufacturing', which makes sense because it gives a better idea of just how it fits into the grand scheme of things. It's just another way of making things, that has huge advantages for some (many) applications. I predict that your local auto parts store will soon have one that can print a replacement for that taillight lens that you busted last week - saving you 70% of the cost versus a dealer part.
On another tack, a company has just come out with a machine that you can put your old water bottles and other plastic bits into, and it will melt them down and turn them into the 'wire' that goes into another company's 3D printer, so you can make your own widgets and toys. AFAIK no home models yet include color but it will come.
HP has announced that it will bring out an office/home model next year, which means it's already running in the dev group.
And he knows wherever we are, we'll come running
And no that is not optional.
Sure it's optional. It may or may not be a good idea (that's a separate topic), but the choice is pretty plainly available. Considering that when dinosaurs roamed and ferns grew 20 feet tall and dragonflies had two foot wingspans, the mean global temp was from 3 to 10 degrees hotter than it is now, and Antarctica had trees growing on it, it's not all bad. Things might be kinda tough for most of us humans and probably a lot of other species, but there are encouraging indications that the increased CO2 is causing the deserts to green up. Interestingly, levels of O2 and CO2 also seem to be a big influence on the size of insects, so those big dragonflies may not even be an evolutionary process.
OTOH, we may be well on our way into another ice age, and the CO2 (along with cleared land, which has been shown to have a large warming effect that dates back to 3000 years ago) may be preventing us from descending into a new episode of ice a mile thick over New York City.
That's also pretty much what Edison did, btw.