But, can it fly with 1km of power cable hanging off it? My guess is about 125g / m, but even 1/5th that you can get 25g / m or 25kg of additional weight. That's as much as my 9yo son and I'm pretty sure the current rig couldn't lift him. Where are my numbers wrong or do you really think this is doable? I realize the flight time of current batteries is low, but there aren't many other options. Perhaps supplemented with solar energy or at worst a gas-power motor with an alternator.
Maybe a pure cable would be too heavy, but Edison showed us that an aerodynamic cable would work. His aerodynamic cable was a kite on a wire. Insulate and hang on tight.
It is a barrier, but that being said it just means no one has done it yet. It doesn't mean it's impossible. A barrier is something to strive to overcome and in spite of all the striving, it feels like a fully blown case of Zeno's paradox, for a while. Only now that we're so much closer to the day that an exaflops will be reached, it seems that we must all chatter about it lest no one will have enough motivation to actually make it happen.
Computers don't "understand" what they are doing. And to the extent that they can, they do already. It is a stupid semantic game with nothing to win. Does your calculator "understand" what it is doing when you're adding up a parts list? Most people are going to say "no." And that answers scales up to whatever calculations your exabyte supercomputer is doing. It is a basic philosophical question. Computers do not "think," they do not "understand," and yet, (or therefore) they make great expert systems.
One may even say that the human brain does not understand. It is capable of logic and hammers out bazillions of logical derivations, evaluates and reevaluates until it determines a select few ideas that are granted the highest usability or belief.
But from this view of the mind, what is to say a fast enough computer, with some elegant programming, can't compete with people in the department of "producing text that is considered valuable"? People are not even close to perfect in this department, when you think of all the crapola making its way into physical publication, so if a machine is even marginally better, look out Nellie.
A thinking machine might not be all that smart at the beginning. But if a remotely intelligent machine is found possible, there will be an incredible push to achieve the most intelligent machine, and even human intelligence will be surpassed.
Ironically, he made something for us to experience a virtual reality where the end of the game did not mean life was over in the real world. Yet in reality the same circumstances really mean life is over. So tactics for staying alive in a game need to be applied in the real world all the time: having an out, acquiring protection, etc. The world is friendly enough to let us develop the science and technology to simulate a virtual world but the real world isn't always that friendly either.
> MTBF... the machine will fail before it can compute anything meaningful
MTBF is statistical though. This can be overcome. Look at it this way. Surely the totality of servers on the Internet would exceed exascale computing power but how many servers fail at any instant in time? Perhaps a few. Ok, but somehow when I surf to my favorite sites, they are almost always up. That means they are doing something to keep them reliable. Such measures may increase the cost of each node but if you want to achieve the necessary uptime in order to finish the job, that would be required.
Node reliability might receive less investment for the sake of keeping nodes compact though. So it comes down to the manufacturers to increase MTBF for all consumers. And assemblers have to be careful not to slam the hardware around
Also, each node or cluster has to be periodically tested or probed to determine whether it is reliable. If a node or cluster can perform a calculation reliably at random times, then the results from the node may be deemed correct. If not, then the circumstances that cause the node to misbehave may have to be worked around or the node has to be replaced. A highly reliable system may emerge.
The exascale system will be built but there may be a limit on the number of nodes that any organization is willing to pony up for because if there is a huge leap of size from the previous #1 system, there is the obvious expense to consider as well as the obsolescence factor as new technology makes the same speed achievable for less only a few years later.
It's never fast enough. If I can cut every little 5 second wait to 1 second or 1/4 second, I'll buy a new machine every time.
But if the manufacturers don't make higher clock speeds, people start thinking they will never get any faster. They lose interest in one-upping each other. What does that do for PC sales?
> China has been willing to do it on the cheap for the rest of the world. More recently they have realized that other nations have been exporting their environmental issue to China by buying cheap Chinese rare earths. This is coming to an end as China sensibly restricts exports of these materials.
Economics of the moment is all it is. A few years from now and the price of this shit will go up to the point where a serious look will be taken at refining it domestically while the Chinese refuse to roll over for everyone else in the world. Once the technology is in place for clean mining (may take some time) it'll be as though this whole debate never happened, pricewise.
>> If we progress to the point where all of our jobs can be done by computers... what should we do?
In the future cheap unprofitable or low-margin jobs that machines will do (that might include a lot of things that today's highly-paid people struggle with) will have to be run by government. No one else want to do that work anyways.
People will want to be in control of things that matter, things that are challenging, such as finding a way to move out of the solar system. Even the computers will agree to that.
But where is the divider between higher and lower? If there are 100 atoms where 98 are at energy level 2 and 2 are at energy level 1, the total is 198 and the average is 1.98 so most are above average. However if one is bumped up to 3, then would 3 be the new high?
enabled us to have, in the long run, the 40hr work week
Short term it can be a disaster though. For example the 2nd industrial revolution caused massive unemployment in industrial England... momentous labour force disruption
I we are not financially worse off with a 20 hr work week, that's one way to go.
It would give people more time to pursue their dreams
The main reason for sluggish PC sales is that the technology has reached a peak at the moment (or you might say it has finally matured)
But what kind of peak? Is it Mt. Everest? or is it just a local maximum?
Bold prediction: with the advent of self-driving cars, the next generation of PC will be portable and massively powerful because they will be in an automobile or Segway form factor. This way, tablets (plural and still easy to carry) can be used for the user interface but the real CPU will be on the same block. You don't want to lug your rack around on a shopping cart, but if it knows how to follow you around or even chauffeur you around, why the heck not?
The point is that the little guy is not going to "invest" in a faster computer until government shows that the faster computer is actually a game changer. The government is the economic guinea pig.
I think the supercomputer race is a very big deal. Even in a land whose people are marginally better at mathematics, they still just want to throw their problems at a faster computer. People who use math more will require quadratically or exponentially more computer speed because they want to solve more difficult problems not now but right now. They're not like, Gee I know math really well so I'm taking the day off, while people who don't know math need to use their electronic brains to do the thinking.
A country with more supercomputing is actually more likely to have the people that offer a greater "solid basis for real strength and prosperity."
Being self sufficient is quite handy if you were trying to run within a spaceship for example, but a setup that merely relies on off-grid power such as solar still requires an external source. Pretty much it means if you need to consume lots of power you end up building your own grid (or else figure out how to use less power to compute the same result).
This month the Top 500 supercomputer list is being updated again, and exaflops is supposed to be just a few years away. This amount of compute speed is projected to burn 1 gigawatt, which is typical for a city of 1 million. To put into perspective, this kind of computer would be possible in a net zero installation so long as it has its own power plant, though a power plant of this magnitude would generally need a crew of people who come to work daily riding fossil fueled vehicles and buy groceries generated from sunlit farms. And yet, the exascale computer is the bare minimum required for simulation of the human brain, a contraption that operates well enough on the caloric content of a chocolate bar. The vast difference in energy consumption between the electronic brain and the organic one shows the potential for improvement in computing efficiency.
It's not really that interesting until we know when and if the big one is going to hit because nature has many other ways to cause catastrophes yet there's no way to prevent them either.
There are no concurrent operations in a Turing machine, and hence, no concurrency problem
Theory for the Speed of Light
Concurrent computing on a single core PC is nothing but a sequential machine running fast enough to make you think it is computing in parallel.
Hypothesis: the laws of the universe are upheld by a sequential computer that is running at amazing speed but not infinite speed. In order for the activity in the universe to stay predictable, the speed of light is bounded.
You're hinging your life-success not on how smart you are, but how stupid people are around you. That isn't a good way to go through life. Success comes from enlightening everyone, including yourself and most especially others. Knowledge begets more knowledge. A truly intelligent person would realize that.
The problem is getting the experience, not just being smart. We live in a world where being intelligent has been rewarded, but the paradox is that it is also punished.
There are different kinds of smart actions
1. Routine or ordinary activities done well. In many cases a person doesn't need to invent a method. Brushing and flossing, folding clothes, changing a tire. These are tasks in order of decreasing frequency. There are already good techniques, but without experience they can be done very stupidly.
2. Problem solving. A trained person can come up with a clever solution given enough time. Being smart or experienced helps a lot.
3. Urgent problem solving in a new situation. Intelligence may be a great asset. Experience also helps a lot.
Current economic conditions let people have good careers in problem solving where some time is available, and people try to avoid problems where they have high risk. For example, most people don't want to test their intelligence where they have to figure out how to escape from a bear when said bear is immediately present. They would rather make a plan and ensure resources are available before approaching the bear.
We have a culture that inhibits us from using our intelligence, largely for our own good, but that can prevent us from advancing to our greatest good. In other words, society is not conducive to arbitrary persons gaining experience in many aspects of life and thus people find it hard to realize their full potential.
On a different tack, rather than money, it may be due to another theory of economics, the law of diminishing returns. As more discoveries are made, it becomes harder to make discoveries, but with the human population growing at least linearly and the population of researchers keeping pace, the rate of good research results is under great pressure to keep up. Add to this the specter of funding cuts and people not wanting to lose their research jobs, and the sheer volume of research results being reported. Human nature completes the syllogism: there will be more falsification.
Treatment methodology has progressed. My condition was first identified about 60 years ago, and the treatment is to inject immuneglobin. Initially treatment was an intramuscular shot, extremely painful and not very effective. It evolved to intravenous, which is a great improvement over IM, but requires going to a cancer treatment center (really cheery place!) or having a home nurse come out. I do the latest, which has only been around for about a decade in the U.S., and that's subcutaneous. So treatment has evolved even though the drug is fundamentally the same. Blood parts is blood parts.
Speculation sure is fun. If Moore's law doesn't fail us, body parts might be replaceable with synthetics. Eventually our consciousness might all "live" alternate lives in mainframes sent to the stars.
Why are we wondering (again) what is going to happen if we live twice as long? Presumably it's the economy (follow the money). It goes without saying that if the economic numbers (including the first, second, third,... nth derivatives) stay the same people will have to work longer, there will be more people and on a finitely sized Earth, people will compete like mad for every scrap of opportunity.
Currently the productivity gains and constant unemployment imply putting more people to work will build up inventories, depress prices, and lead to deflation. Deflation may even make things affordable to the vast numbers of poor people around the world. One laptop per child? Maybe it'll become one laptop + a household with many modern conveniences per child (such as TV, Internet, clean running water). So the real question isn't what happens when everyone lives a lot longer. It's what is going to happen when (as the Earth population closes on 7000000000) another x billion people rise up the food chain within maybe 5 years.
I understand the gist. If fewer than 10% believe, the asymptote of belief stays under 10%. Whatever the percentage is, is not important. And some ideas are more sellable than others.
Blasted by by media and bullshit our cynicism and skepticism antenna have become very active, and we like checking out the wackier ideas. There are many shades of grey, so to speak. Some plausible theories such as evolution have gained our approval in terms of viability but not necessarily full acceptance. A simple test: if someone has proved or disproved evolution but before telling you which it is, you can make a bet based on what you already know or believe. Which way would you bet? Deep down, many of us don't really believe in anything but are willing to make a gamble as long as the stakes are low. We hedge and try to maneuver ideas so that they don't have any effect. Does the Higgs boson exist? Whatever. Life goes on.
Truth is truth, regardless of how many people or what authority wants to fight it. People can start a crusade to spread a belief that is wrong, even win over the masses, but if the masses actually rely on this belief to the nth degree, there will be a day of reckoning and the falsehood will be exposed. In the immediate term the 10% rule indicates willingness to give credence to a large number of agreeing minds. In the longer term, we're all advised to think for ourselves.
--
critic, n.: A person who boasts himself hard to please because nobody tries to please him. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Did it ever occur to you that fat chance and slim chance mean the same thing? Or that we drive on parkways and park on driveways?
Notice how much fun we would have if citizens reported the locations of all the police cars and speed traps?
That's what happens in Soviet Russia, you track the police.
This tracking is so pointless anyways. Except for a few notorious streets, there's hardly ever a patrol car. Unless you see a car parked near a place "of interest" for more than a few times, what of it?
But at our crazy numbers of files stored we see it (and fix it) daily.
I do a lot of MD5 checks on my files. But I have yet to encounter a file that has gone bad on a hard drive over time while the rest of the drive stays good. If the file was written badly (rare but it happens), then the MD5 will be wrong. I have huge multigigabyte files and of course many smaller.
As a rule I try to buy hard disks with more than one year of warranty. They used to be 5 years but a lot of them are now 1 year and 2 year. The 1 year models tended to be flaky, and the 2 year models tend to be quite reliable even with a lot of usage.
They sold too many web development books in the 90's to Amazon employees.
Well put. Definitely a good point. Books have enabled and empowered us all since Gutenberg. And now we turn the page, perhaps, with a possibility to revise the way the media market operates.
The demise of a bookstore is not pleasant. Speculate if you will about technology overpowering print. There is still a long way to go before all books are available digitally. Also, a digital copy anchors you to an Internet account and/or to a fragile device, while not always letting you read on a large screen.
It isn't all about how great digital books are and how cheap it is to buy online. It's about the economy and the applicability of knowledge. When you want to solve a problem, you don't read up from a set of books, you Google.
On the downside is the desire of authors to write. We all need to agree to a system that compensates authors to the point they do not complain about digital copies floating all over the place, basically implying they are being rewarded while consumers are not forced to pay exorbitantly in order to fill a hard disk. A book case is quickly filled with physical books, which deters acquisition, but people are voracious if it comes to filling a little gadget that is even smaller than a book yet can hold a library. Setting up social and political mechanisms, aka culture and legislation, for the economics of media will have profound impacts on the economy in general.
I suggest that the real-time consumption of media be tracked or monitored (anonymously). Authors and artists would be compensated from tax base, with a proportional relationship between payment and popularity. That would take care of the icky problems of copyright, pricing, and incentives to create new works. All at once, people would be free to acquire, though it is their interest in specific items that is used to compute the distribution of funds. This should boost the economy, as people will develop interests and have the knowledge to start initiatives, thus taking care of the tax issue. It's a positive feedback loop, which should be a lot more effective than the negative feedback loops messing up the world.
Slashdot Mirror
But, can it fly with 1km of power cable hanging off it? My guess is about 125g / m, but even 1/5th that you can get 25g / m or 25kg of additional weight. That's as much as my 9yo son and I'm pretty sure the current rig couldn't lift him. Where are my numbers wrong or do you really think this is doable? I realize the flight time of current batteries is low, but there aren't many other options. Perhaps supplemented with solar energy or at worst a gas-power motor with an alternator.
Maybe a pure cable would be too heavy, but Edison showed us that an aerodynamic cable would work. His aerodynamic cable was a kite on a wire. Insulate and hang on tight.
It is a barrier, but that being said it just means no one has done it yet. It doesn't mean it's impossible. A barrier is something to strive to overcome and in spite of all the striving, it feels like a fully blown case of Zeno's paradox, for a while. Only now that we're so much closer to the day that an exaflops will be reached, it seems that we must all chatter about it lest no one will have enough motivation to actually make it happen.
Computers don't "understand" what they are doing. And to the extent that they can, they do already. It is a stupid semantic game with nothing to win. Does your calculator "understand" what it is doing when you're adding up a parts list? Most people are going to say "no." And that answers scales up to whatever calculations your exabyte supercomputer is doing. It is a basic philosophical question. Computers do not "think," they do not "understand," and yet, (or therefore) they make great expert systems.
One may even say that the human brain does not understand. It is capable of logic and hammers out bazillions of logical derivations, evaluates and reevaluates until it determines a select few ideas that are granted the highest usability or belief.
But from this view of the mind, what is to say a fast enough computer, with some elegant programming, can't compete with people in the department of "producing text that is considered valuable"? People are not even close to perfect in this department, when you think of all the crapola making its way into physical publication, so if a machine is even marginally better, look out Nellie.
A thinking machine might not be all that smart at the beginning. But if a remotely intelligent machine is found possible, there will be an incredible push to achieve the most intelligent machine, and even human intelligence will be surpassed.
Ironically, he made something for us to experience a virtual reality where the end of the game did not mean life was over in the real world. Yet in reality the same circumstances really mean life is over. So tactics for staying alive in a game need to be applied in the real world all the time: having an out, acquiring protection, etc. The world is friendly enough to let us develop the science and technology to simulate a virtual world but the real world isn't always that friendly either.
> MTBF ... the machine will fail before it can compute anything meaningful
MTBF is statistical though. This can be overcome. Look at it this way. Surely the totality of servers on the Internet would exceed exascale computing power but how many servers fail at any instant in time? Perhaps a few. Ok, but somehow when I surf to my favorite sites, they are almost always up. That means they are doing something to keep them reliable. Such measures may increase the cost of each node but if you want to achieve the necessary uptime in order to finish the job, that would be required.
Node reliability might receive less investment for the sake of keeping nodes compact though. So it comes down to the manufacturers to increase MTBF for all consumers. And assemblers have to be careful not to slam the hardware around
Also, each node or cluster has to be periodically tested or probed to determine whether it is reliable. If a node or cluster can perform a calculation reliably at random times, then the results from the node may be deemed correct. If not, then the circumstances that cause the node to misbehave may have to be worked around or the node has to be replaced. A highly reliable system may emerge.
The exascale system will be built but there may be a limit on the number of nodes that any organization is willing to pony up for because if there is a huge leap of size from the previous #1 system, there is the obvious expense to consider as well as the obsolescence factor as new technology makes the same speed achievable for less only a few years later.
Surely, someone who thinks a Dyson sphere is a useful appliance is a firm believer in the goodness of global warming.
It's never fast enough. If I can cut every little 5 second wait to 1 second or 1/4 second, I'll buy a new machine every time.
But if the manufacturers don't make higher clock speeds, people start thinking they will never get any faster. They lose interest in one-upping each other. What does that do for PC sales?
> China has been willing to do it on the cheap for the rest of the world. More recently they have realized that other nations have been exporting their environmental issue to China by buying cheap Chinese rare earths. This is coming to an end as China sensibly restricts exports of these materials.
Economics of the moment is all it is. A few years from now and the price of this shit will go up to the point where a serious look will be taken at refining it domestically while the Chinese refuse to roll over for everyone else in the world. Once the technology is in place for clean mining (may take some time) it'll be as though this whole debate never happened, pricewise.
Why do you live so far from work?
Calling for major tax breaks to move within a 5 minute commute.
>> If we progress to the point where all of our jobs can be done by computers... what should we do?
In the future cheap unprofitable or low-margin jobs that machines will do (that might include a lot of things that today's highly-paid people struggle with) will have to be run by government. No one else want to do that work anyways.
People will want to be in control of things that matter, things that are challenging, such as finding a way to move out of the solar system. Even the computers will agree to that.
But where is the divider between higher and lower? If there are 100 atoms where 98 are at energy level 2 and 2 are at energy level 1, the total is 198 and the average is 1.98 so most are above average. However if one is bumped up to 3, then would 3 be the new high?
enabled us to have, in the long run, the 40hr work week
Short term it can be a disaster though. For example the 2nd industrial revolution caused massive unemployment in industrial England ... momentous labour force disruption
I we are not financially worse off with a 20 hr work week, that's one way to go.
It would give people more time to pursue their dreams
The main reason for sluggish PC sales is that the technology has reached a peak at the moment (or you might say it has finally matured)
But what kind of peak? Is it Mt. Everest? or is it just a local maximum?
Bold prediction: with the advent of self-driving cars, the next generation of PC will be portable and massively powerful because they will be in an automobile or Segway form factor. This way, tablets (plural and still easy to carry) can be used for the user interface but the real CPU will be on the same block. You don't want to lug your rack around on a shopping cart, but if it knows how to follow you around or even chauffeur you around, why the heck not?
The point is that the little guy is not going to "invest" in a faster computer until government shows that the faster computer is actually a game changer. The government is the economic guinea pig.
I think the supercomputer race is a very big deal. Even in a land whose people are marginally better at mathematics, they still just want to throw their problems at a faster computer. People who use math more will require quadratically or exponentially more computer speed because they want to solve more difficult problems not now but right now. They're not like, Gee I know math really well so I'm taking the day off, while people who don't know math need to use their electronic brains to do the thinking.
A country with more supercomputing is actually more likely to have the people that offer a greater "solid basis for real strength and prosperity."
Being self sufficient is quite handy if you were trying to run within a spaceship for example, but a setup that merely relies on off-grid power such as solar still requires an external source. Pretty much it means if you need to consume lots of power you end up building your own grid (or else figure out how to use less power to compute the same result).
This month the Top 500 supercomputer list is being updated again, and exaflops is supposed to be just a few years away. This amount of compute speed is projected to burn 1 gigawatt, which is typical for a city of 1 million. To put into perspective, this kind of computer would be possible in a net zero installation so long as it has its own power plant, though a power plant of this magnitude would generally need a crew of people who come to work daily riding fossil fueled vehicles and buy groceries generated from sunlit farms. And yet, the exascale computer is the bare minimum required for simulation of the human brain, a contraption that operates well enough on the caloric content of a chocolate bar. The vast difference in energy consumption between the electronic brain and the organic one shows the potential for improvement in computing efficiency.
A miss is as good as a mile.
It's not really that interesting until we know when and if the big one is going to hit because nature has many other ways to cause catastrophes yet there's no way to prevent them either.
There are no concurrent operations in a Turing machine, and hence, no concurrency problem
Theory for the Speed of Light
Concurrent computing on a single core PC is nothing but a sequential machine running fast enough to make you think it is computing in parallel.
Hypothesis: the laws of the universe are upheld by a sequential computer that is running at amazing speed but not infinite speed. In order for the activity in the universe to stay predictable, the speed of light is bounded.
I feel better already.
You're hinging your life-success not on how smart you are, but how stupid people are around you. That isn't a good way to go through life. Success comes from enlightening everyone, including yourself and most especially others. Knowledge begets more knowledge. A truly intelligent person would realize that.
The problem is getting the experience, not just being smart. We live in a world where being intelligent has been rewarded, but the paradox is that it is also punished.
There are different kinds of smart actions
1. Routine or ordinary activities done well. In many cases a person doesn't need to invent a method. Brushing and flossing, folding clothes, changing a tire. These are tasks in order of decreasing frequency. There are already good techniques, but without experience they can be done very stupidly.
2. Problem solving. A trained person can come up with a clever solution given enough time. Being smart or experienced helps a lot.
3. Urgent problem solving in a new situation. Intelligence may be a great asset. Experience also helps a lot.
Current economic conditions let people have good careers in problem solving where some time is available, and people try to avoid problems where they have high risk. For example, most people don't want to test their intelligence where they have to figure out how to escape from a bear when said bear is immediately present. They would rather make a plan and ensure resources are available before approaching the bear.
We have a culture that inhibits us from using our intelligence, largely for our own good, but that can prevent us from advancing to our greatest good. In other words, society is not conducive to arbitrary persons gaining experience in many aspects of life and thus people find it hard to realize their full potential.
There's more money in it now.
On a different tack, rather than money, it may be due to another theory of economics, the law of diminishing returns. As more discoveries are made, it becomes harder to make discoveries, but with the human population growing at least linearly and the population of researchers keeping pace, the rate of good research results is under great pressure to keep up. Add to this the specter of funding cuts and people not wanting to lose their research jobs, and the sheer volume of research results being reported. Human nature completes the syllogism: there will be more falsification.
Treatment methodology has progressed. My condition was first identified about 60 years ago, and the treatment is to inject immuneglobin. Initially treatment was an intramuscular shot, extremely painful and not very effective. It evolved to intravenous, which is a great improvement over IM, but requires going to a cancer treatment center (really cheery place!) or having a home nurse come out. I do the latest, which has only been around for about a decade in the U.S., and that's subcutaneous. So treatment has evolved even though the drug is fundamentally the same. Blood parts is blood parts.
Speculation sure is fun. If Moore's law doesn't fail us, body parts might be replaceable with synthetics. Eventually our consciousness might all "live" alternate lives in mainframes sent to the stars.
Why are we wondering (again) what is going to happen if we live twice as long? Presumably it's the economy (follow the money). It goes without saying that if the economic numbers (including the first, second, third, ... nth derivatives) stay the same people will have to work longer, there will be more people and on a finitely sized Earth, people will compete like mad for every scrap of opportunity.
Currently the productivity gains and constant unemployment imply putting more people to work will build up inventories, depress prices, and lead to deflation. Deflation may even make things affordable to the vast numbers of poor people around the world. One laptop per child? Maybe it'll become one laptop + a household with many modern conveniences per child (such as TV, Internet, clean running water). So the real question isn't what happens when everyone lives a lot longer. It's what is going to happen when (as the Earth population closes on 7000000000) another x billion people rise up the food chain within maybe 5 years.
I understand the gist. If fewer than 10% believe, the asymptote of belief stays under 10%. Whatever the percentage is, is not important. And some ideas are more sellable than others.
Blasted by by media and bullshit our cynicism and skepticism antenna have become very active, and we like checking out the wackier ideas. There are many shades of grey, so to speak. Some plausible theories such as evolution have gained our approval in terms of viability but not necessarily full acceptance. A simple test: if someone has proved or disproved evolution but before telling you which it is, you can make a bet based on what you already know or believe. Which way would you bet? Deep down, many of us don't really believe in anything but are willing to make a gamble as long as the stakes are low. We hedge and try to maneuver ideas so that they don't have any effect. Does the Higgs boson exist? Whatever. Life goes on.
Truth is truth, regardless of how many people or what authority wants to fight it. People can start a crusade to spread a belief that is wrong, even win over the masses, but if the masses actually rely on this belief to the nth degree, there will be a day of reckoning and the falsehood will be exposed. In the immediate term the 10% rule indicates willingness to give credence to a large number of agreeing minds. In the longer term, we're all advised to think for ourselves.
--
critic, n.: A person who boasts himself hard to please because nobody tries to please him. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Did it ever occur to you that fat chance and slim chance mean the same thing? Or that we drive on parkways and park on driveways?
Notice how much fun we would have if citizens reported the locations of all the police cars and speed traps?
That's what happens in Soviet Russia, you track the police.
This tracking is so pointless anyways. Except for a few notorious streets, there's hardly ever a patrol car. Unless you see a car parked near a place "of interest" for more than a few times, what of it?
But at our crazy numbers of files stored we see it (and fix it) daily.
I do a lot of MD5 checks on my files. But I have yet to encounter a file that has gone bad on a hard drive over time while the rest of the drive stays good. If the file was written badly (rare but it happens), then the MD5 will be wrong. I have huge multigigabyte files and of course many smaller.
As a rule I try to buy hard disks with more than one year of warranty. They used to be 5 years but a lot of them are now 1 year and 2 year. The 1 year models tended to be flaky, and the 2 year models tend to be quite reliable even with a lot of usage.
They sold too many web development books in the 90's to Amazon employees.
Well put. Definitely a good point. Books have enabled and empowered us all since Gutenberg. And now we turn the page, perhaps, with a possibility to revise the way the media market operates.
The demise of a bookstore is not pleasant. Speculate if you will about technology overpowering print. There is still a long way to go before all books are available digitally. Also, a digital copy anchors you to an Internet account and/or to a fragile device, while not always letting you read on a large screen.
It isn't all about how great digital books are and how cheap it is to buy online. It's about the economy and the applicability of knowledge. When you want to solve a problem, you don't read up from a set of books, you Google.
On the downside is the desire of authors to write. We all need to agree to a system that compensates authors to the point they do not complain about digital copies floating all over the place, basically implying they are being rewarded while consumers are not forced to pay exorbitantly in order to fill a hard disk. A book case is quickly filled with physical books, which deters acquisition, but people are voracious if it comes to filling a little gadget that is even smaller than a book yet can hold a library. Setting up social and political mechanisms, aka culture and legislation, for the economics of media will have profound impacts on the economy in general.
I suggest that the real-time consumption of media be tracked or monitored (anonymously). Authors and artists would be compensated from tax base, with a proportional relationship between payment and popularity. That would take care of the icky problems of copyright, pricing, and incentives to create new works. All at once, people would be free to acquire, though it is their interest in specific items that is used to compute the distribution of funds. This should boost the economy, as people will develop interests and have the knowledge to start initiatives, thus taking care of the tax issue. It's a positive feedback loop, which should be a lot more effective than the negative feedback loops messing up the world.