No one had the technology to kill everyone on earth until the mid 70s, so that was a pretty implausible claim for all but the last 40ish of those thousands of years.
I think this discussion is more about the long term usefulness of this strategy. What are you going to do against the next generation of lasers that are 10e6 more powerful.
I don't know the laser math well enough to say for sure. I would guess it depends on the level of overkill the laser has in terms of power... I wouldn't be surprised if 99% reflectivity was insufficient. And heat dissipation on a highly aerodynamic vehicle is going to be a challenge. Personally... I'll put my bet with the lasers simply outpowering any defensive measures for some time to come, but you never know, they could invent some clever carbon nanotube thing that changes the equation tomorrow.
There's a difference between maintaining a really good, tiny mirror in the interior vacuum of a laser, and the entire exterior, air exposed surface of a combat fighter.
They stopped upping the ghz because they ran into a power spike. GHz will likely start advancing again after the next breakthrough in device power. It'll happen, it's just not obvious when.
And with a quad core system, you can run 3 crappy applications and still have a responsive system! A hex core system will let you run an outrageous 5 crappy applications!
The 6 core system is slower in non-parallel tasks because the OS has per-core overhead. So all single-threaded tasks get slower as the number of cores rises.
Imagine a task running on an otherwise idle core. It is running as fast as possible, with only OS overhead getting in the way of using 100% of that cpu. Now add more OS overhead to that cpu for core management. There's also cpu (hardware)-level overhead to consider, and the possibility that caches aren't ramped to the same level, so now more cores may be sharing a same-sized cache... etc.
Lots of reasons for the performance of a single core to drop as the number of cores goes up.
The problem is that only a fraction of customers who care at all would be happy with any given benchmark. And if all you do is read email and run trivial processing tasks (the largest customer base) there's no meaningful metric because things have been fast enough for a long time now.
When I had to do that, I couldn't live with the moral qualms, so what I did, I hooked up the kill mechanism to a web server, and created this animated ad where if you punched the monkey it would kill the person.
But the further you get from 'Emergency snack', the further you get from an honest assessment of reality, so given how much nerds like to keep things real, you have to find a balance.
People just need an exposure to some basic math. If even 1 in 1000 people is horrifically evil, and if 1 in 1000 of those like to video their activities and post them, you have a forum of 6000 people posting crazy evil shit.
1) Localized evidence of cooling like an unusually cold winter storm in one area and localized evidence of heating like thousand mile areas of glacier melting are typically not the same in scale.
2) AGW supporters are not one person. Therefore, you have a range of intelligence levels within the community. Therefore, you may have one or more persons in the community who don't realize that making such arguments is ineffective, and that you should just always refer to the global trend data.
Slashdot Mirror
No one had the technology to kill everyone on earth until the mid 70s, so that was a pretty implausible claim for all but the last 40ish of those thousands of years.
A classic story.
But of course, in reality human civilization is probably only going to last another hundred years or so, so nuclear will last plenty long.
I think this discussion is more about the long term usefulness of this strategy. What are you going to do against the next generation of lasers that are 10e6 more powerful.
I don't know the laser math well enough to say for sure. I would guess it depends on the level of overkill the laser has in terms of power ... I wouldn't be surprised if 99% reflectivity was insufficient. And heat dissipation on a highly aerodynamic vehicle is going to be a challenge. Personally ... I'll put my bet with the lasers simply outpowering any defensive measures for some time to come, but you never know, they could invent some clever carbon nanotube thing that changes the equation tomorrow.
There's a difference between maintaining a really good, tiny mirror in the interior vacuum of a laser, and the entire exterior, air exposed surface of a combat fighter.
Perfect mirrors, with not a single imperfection that will melt them in a microsecond, which are completely dust free in spite of being outdoors.
Right, that's why I have the 5 insightful.
They did get that high:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PowerPC_processors#POWER_processors
I believe IBM still has plans to release a 6ghz processor.
They stopped upping the ghz because they ran into a power spike. GHz will likely start advancing again after the next breakthrough in device power. It'll happen, it's just not obvious when.
And with a quad core system, you can run 3 crappy applications and still have a responsive system! A hex core system will let you run an outrageous 5 crappy applications!
The 6 core system is slower in non-parallel tasks because the OS has per-core overhead. So all single-threaded tasks get slower as the number of cores rises.
Imagine a task running on an otherwise idle core. It is running as fast as possible, with only OS overhead getting in the way of using 100% of that cpu. Now add more OS overhead to that cpu for core management. There's also cpu (hardware)-level overhead to consider, and the possibility that caches aren't ramped to the same level, so now more cores may be sharing a same-sized cache ... etc.
Lots of reasons for the performance of a single core to drop as the number of cores goes up.
The problem is that only a fraction of customers who care at all would be happy with any given benchmark. And if all you do is read email and run trivial processing tasks (the largest customer base) there's no meaningful metric because things have been fast enough for a long time now.
Right, these are two completely separate theories for how one might arrive at a career in sales.
I guess I assume most salespeople are idiots because the base rate of psychopathy in the population isn't supposed to be all that high.
When I had to do that, I couldn't live with the moral qualms, so what I did, I hooked up the kill mechanism to a web server, and created this animated ad where if you punched the monkey it would kill the person.
But the further you get from 'Emergency snack', the further you get from an honest assessment of reality, so given how much nerds like to keep things real, you have to find a balance.
People just need an exposure to some basic math. If even 1 in 1000 people is horrifically evil, and if 1 in 1000 of those like to video their activities and post them, you have a forum of 6000 people posting crazy evil shit.
It's what they have a tendency to post, eg threats against specific persons, calls to violence, etc, that can cross the legality line.
I'm weirded out to know that there's a third of the big two I'll have to see sometime.
As far as I know, not one single person in the AGW camp thinks that man is responsible to the exclusion of all other factors.
The AGW argument is, at its base, that man is one factor, and that we have a choice about whether to mitigate that factor or not.
Yes, let's (continue to) ignore the pesky byproducts.
I'll give you two arguments:
1) Localized evidence of cooling like an unusually cold winter storm in one area and localized evidence of heating like thousand mile areas of glacier melting are typically not the same in scale.
2) AGW supporters are not one person. Therefore, you have a range of intelligence levels within the community. Therefore, you may have one or more persons in the community who don't realize that making such arguments is ineffective, and that you should just always refer to the global trend data.
Well, then spread the marketing portion symmetrically into the other categories, the numbers will work out about right.
I put that in management.
Nope. I do tell horror stories to my current colleagues about working there though.