Safe money says PCs stay at 8 CPUs or below for the next 15 years.
I think you've underestimated the consumer's appetite for applications that can take advantage of large numbers of cores. Things like image processing (panorama generation, object recognition, 3D reconstruction from images), better speech recognition, HD video editing and encoding, and especially realtime 3D graphics (eventually raytracing) are applications consumers can use and will want in the next 15 years, and can easily scale to use many cores.
In 2010 Intel is planning to finish Larrabee, which is ostensibly a 3D graphics chip but is really nothing more than an array of 24 or 32 small x86 processors. It may not run Windows out of the box, but I think it is inevitable that it will run Linux, and I would not be at all surprised to see computers without a "CPU"; only a Larrabee chip.
The initial allocation of spectrum doesn't have to be *perfectly* just for the market to be beneficial in the long run. We can do our best to start fairly; we can have auctions, etc. There will be winners; there will be losers; but the important thing is to get the market established, so that it can work going *forward*. Saying we shouldn't have a market at all because we can't guarantee total fairness of the initial conditions is not a good argument.
Besides, nobody is in a position to be screwed as badly as the Indians were; nobody is living in this spectrum and nobody's going to get killed. The entities with the most to lose are the huge telecommunications corporations with billions invested in infrastructure, but nobody is proposing that their spectrum be taken away during the transition. I just don't see any disasters resulting from a transition to a free market; certainly nothing on the scale of what happened to the Indians; the benefits far outweigh the startup costs.
Moreover, we still have the problem of geography in the ownership of a frequency.
These problems aren't unique to a free market system. They exist in the system we have today and have been mostly solved to the satisfaction of the current spectrum users. There are disputes, but the system of enforcement works today. The system we have now resembles ownership in some important ways and should be a starting point for any market system we would establish.
I would suggest looking at historical cases of economic laissez-faire
And how do you think those rules came about? There was a time when there was lots of land in the West that *nobody* owned (well it belonged to the Indians but that was ignored), and it was not at all obvious how to go about assigning ownership. Conventions were established, laws were made and eventually it was all allocated. The situation with the spectrum is *easier*, because the spectrum is already allocated; owners already assigned. The current allocations can serve as a starting point.
Obviously there must be a *lot* of rules regarding how a market could be started, the nature of the property rights involved, and so forth. I don't think I'm qualified to come up with a complete set of rules right now, but I hardly think it is impossible to do.
I think you misunderstand me when I say "enforcement". I don't mean that private "security" firms would be hired to bust people's kneecaps in a might-makes-right free-for-all. You are confusing Libertarianism with anarchy, perhaps. I'm not promoting anarchy here. There would be a spectrum property rights enforcement department of the government; perhaps it would become another duty of the police. It *is* one of the few responsibilities of the government to enforce property rights so that markets can function properly. Perhaps a really radical Libertarian would disagree, but that's not me.
Copyright is an interesting case. Copyright definitely is an issue on which Libertarians might disagree. I'll give you my take on it.
Libertarians are definitely *for* property rights and free markets, so private property ownership stays for sure. Copyright, on its face, appears to create a market for information, and Libertarians like markets. However, Libertarians also like individual liberty. Property rights restrict individual liberty, but a market in private property is required (one might say it's a necessary evil) because there is a limited supply of property which needs to be allocated fairly. Information does not need to be allocated, because there is an unlimited supply of any particular piece of information. The justification for restricting individual liberty to establish the market doesn't exist in this case. So I would say a true Libertarian would be against copyright.
Yes. Libertarians are for strong individual property rights. If telecom providers wanted to string wires, they would have to get approval from individual property owners. There would be no exclusive "franchise" deals. "Ideal" libertarianism would do the same for roads and utilities; they would be provided by private enterprise instead of the government and there would be no eminent domain or right-of-way laws allowing seizure of private property to build them.
Personally, I wouldn't go quite this far. I do believe that a few industries, such as electrical distribution, roads, and telecom infrastructure, are "natural monopolies" and should probably be managed by government. But we must clearly delineate the areas of government involvement. Government should put up and maintain the electrical distribution wires, but should not generate the electricity. Government should provide a fiber-optic cable infrastructure, but should not provide or regulate telephone, Internet, or TV service. Government should build the roads, but not provide transportation services. But that's merely my personal belief and not one all Libertarians would share. It certainly introduces plenty of opportunities for corruption and expanding government.
Libertarians aren't against allocation *or* enforcement a priori. They simply believe that all allocation and enforcement should be done the same way: property rights in a free market. The Libertarian alternative to the FCC would be a free market of property rights to parts of the spectrum, with no regulation governing who can own it or what they can do with it. Right now the FCC sometimes has auctions, but it's a long way from a free market.
Some people believe that there should be no property rights in the electromagnetic spectrum, and everyone should be free to transmit as they see fit. This attitude stems from a belief that it could work technically; that the spectrum is large enough that there would be no tragedy of the commons. This belief about the (non-)necessity of property rights stems from an opinion about the technical feasibility of ultrawideband communication, not Libertarianism per se. Libertarians would not object to a sensible system of property rights for the spectrum (with enforcement) if one is determined to be necessary or beneficial.
The Libertarian philosophy is anything but "vague". In fact, Libertarianism is the most well-defined and internally consistent political philosophy I've ever heard, which is probably why I like it, as a computer scientist. It's so clear cut that you can actually apply the core philosophy directly to voting decisions and get an unambiguous answer in many cases, which is not something you can say of conservatism or liberalism.
As an example, let me run down some of the items on Barack Obama's issue pages (since I just happened to be reading them) and tell you the Libertarian answer to each point, off the top of my head:
Provide a Tax Cut for Working Families: Libertarians are for tax cuts; they reduce the size of government.
Simplify Tax Filings for Middle Class Americans: Reducing the complexity of the tax code is good, as it would tend to reduce the size of government, though Libertarians would prefer to eliminate the income tax and thus the need for individual tax filings.
Fight for Fair Trade: Free trade is good, but Obama proposes using trade deals to enforce our rules on other countries and protect our jobs from foreign competition. Libertarians are against this and for completely free trade.
Amend the North American Free Trade Agreement: Obama wants to "fix" NAFTA, and I don't know what that means but it sounds like protectionism, which Libertarians are against.
Improve Transition Assistance: Obama wants the government to pay to retrain workers. This increases the size of government so Libertarians are against it.
Support Job Creation: Obama wants to double spending on research and education. This increases the size of government so Libertarians are against it, believing that it will produce corruption and waste; a free market can do a better job of allocating those resources than fickle politicians can, without the corruption and waste.
Invest in U.S. Manufacturing: More spending; bigger government; Libertarians say no.
Create New Job Training Programs for Clean Technologies: Again, Spending. Bigger government. No.
Boost the Renewable Energy Sector and Create New Jobs: Spending. Bigger government. No.
Protect the Openness of the Internet: Libertarians believe that the Internet should not be regulated.
Invest in Rural Areas: Spending. Bigger government. No.
I could go on, but as you can see, the Libertarian viewpoint is very well-defined, and not at all vague. As for whether it's "unworkable" or whether people can "get behind" it, well, that's debatable. But vague is the one thing it's certainly not.
Lessig acknowledges that the goal is to get to a smaller government
He practically contradicts himself about this. He says nice things about wanting smaller government, and I want to believe him, but he says other things that don't sound like small government at all. Also, he calls himself a Democrat and unreservedly endorses Barack Obama. Obama is many things, but I wouldn't call him a small-government candidate. A national health insurance plan is not small government. Extending the Universal Service Fund to broadband is not small government. Obama has a "comprehensive plan" for every issue, and they almost all involve expanding programs, creating funds, and "investing" in things, which is the opposite of small government. Don't get me wrong; there are things about Obama I like (technology for open government, foreign policy), and I'm no McCain fan either, but you can't support Obama wholeheartedly and simultaneously be for small government.
As for what I'm doing about it, I vote. I'm not required to work harder than Lessig to offer my opinion about him on Slashdot, so don't get self-righteous with me. The Libertarian solution is simple in concept and implementation; the only hard part is getting people to see that it's a good idea when they could be voting themselves government handouts instead. As opposed to the big-government solution, which is easy to get people to vote for, but well-nigh impossible to keep from getting unmaintainably complex and corrupted.
Lessig doesn't really seem to agree with this. He says he knows government is corrupted by money. The Libertarian answer is to reduce the size of government to reduce the amount of corruption, but Lessig somehow thinks that the amount of corruption can be dramatically reduced without taking that step. But he can't explain concretely how.
His only plan is to get politicians to promise they won't take lobbyist money, and to "abolish earmarks", and to add more campaign finance restrictions. Sorry Larry, but politicians are professional promise-skirters, and I see no reason to believe that them making yet another promise is going to significantly change how the government works at all levels.
The "abolish earmarks" thing is especially quixotic; you might as well make them promise to stop gerrymandering while you're at it. They'll find another way to do it, and just call it something else, or outright deny that's what they're doing, playing with the word definitions. As for the lobbyist thing, lobbyists have *plenty* of ways to influence politicians besides outright giving them money, and there's not even a way to enumerate all of them, much less make every politician promise to ignore them, and then enforce that promise.
I don't see any part of Larry's plan that makes me think it's more sensible than the Libertarian point of view. The problem of government corruption is just too complex to confront head-on, and it's okay to admit that. "Special Interests" are ingenious, well-funded, and determined; thinking that they can be outmaneuvered forever is just hubris. There is a simple solution, and we know what it is: the way to *truly* remove corruption from a part of the government is to eliminate that part of the government.
I don't see how anyone could think that BitTorrent doesn't lower the total cost of distributing the bits. BitTorrent is simply the poor man's implementation of multicast. Imagine measuring the cost of distributing information; you might use the unit bit-meters: 1 bit-meter is the cost to transfer one bit one meter; more generally you multiply the amount of information transferred by the distance it traveled. BitTorrent reduces the total distance the information has to travel because peers can download from nearby peers instead of a far away single source. The number of copies eventually distributed is the same (plus a very small overhead), but the distance traveled by each bit is radically shorter, so the cost measured in bit-meters is much smaller.
What this really means is that BitTorrent, implemented properly, can reduce the load on the Internet backbones compared to traditional distribution for the same number of copies, just like multicast. If the ISPs cooperated with BitTorrent instead of blocking it, they would reap these advantages. Why don't they? It's due to the stupid and counter-productive practice of selling "unlimited" broadband. An ISP's best customer is one who doesn't use the product at all, and a customer who tries to use the bandwidth they were sold costs the ISP money; they are a liability to be liquidated as soon as possible. This distorts the market for broadband.
The only real solution is usage-based pricing for ISPs. I know everyone on the Internet hates the very idea, and seem to consider it a nefarious plot by the ISPs to squeeze money from them. But nobody stops to consider the benefits: suddenly, the ISPs would become our friends! Today they hate us because everything we do costs them money; instead they would love us for using lots of bandwidth. Today ISPs throttle BitTorrent; instead they would be accelerating it. Today ISPs hand our information to the MPAA; instead they would safeguard our privacy. Today ISPs block ports and prohibit servers; instead they would encourage us to install every kind of network-using application, including servers. Today ISPs refuse to sell us the highest speeds their networks can handle until competition forces their hand; instead they would offer everyone the highest speed possible with their equipment. Today ISPs drag their feet on network upgrades because they see no direct benefit; instead they would immediately see revenues go up from increased usage, and want to upgrade as fast as possible.
Usage-based pricing would solve so many problems in the ISP market that I am really disappointed when I see how much resistance to it exists all over the Internet, from people who haven't even considered the benefits it could bring.
I'm still left wondering if the free SDK can do native debugging, or if you're only allowed to use the simulator until you cough up $99. If the free SDK allows uploading arbitrary native code to your personal iPhone, there's no way Apple is going to be able to prevent jailbreaks going forward. But if the free SDK doesn't allow running code on any real iPhone hardware, then it sucks.
It's unlikely that anything significant from Singularity could make it into Windows 7, more's the pity. The important parts of Singularity rely on the "software isolated process" concept, but you can't run C++ in a software isolated process because you have to be able to guarantee memory safety. IMHO what Microsoft needs to do for Windows 8 is turn Singularity into a hypervisor running legacy Windows in virtualization. The unsafe and bloated C/C++ legacy of Windows could be contained inside the VM and Microsoft would be finally free from the shackles of maintaining compatibility all the way back to Windows 3.
Since Microsoft owns Windows and would be designing Singularity specifically for virtualization of Windows, they could do plenty of user-friendly integration between virtualized and native applications; much better than what Parallels can now achieve. The virtualization could also support legacy device drivers and have very little performance overhead. Near-perfect compatibility could be provided in the VM for eternity with little effort, while new development (both inside Microsoft and elsewhere) could move to the modern Singularity environment over a period of tens of years, with incentives provided by new libraries and development tools not available in legacy Windows.
Wow, you have quite some bile built up there. Moore's law has always been about the number of transistors (despite clueless journalists getting it wrong, don't blame Moore's law for their faults), it *is* still holding, and, crucially, it *is* still producing exponential gains in the performance of GPUs, which again crucially *are* translating into exponential gains on real-world non-graphics problems. GPUs are becoming more general-purpose all the time, while retaining the ability to translate more transistors into more performance. A whole industry has sprung up around using GPUs for general purpose computation and the fruits of that labor are already being put to practical use today. I've written such an application; have you even used a GPU before? Perhaps you would be interested to know that Intel is producing a GPU, due out in 2010 (engineering samples by the end of this year), whose major component is, guess what, general-purpose x86 processor cores with expanded vector units. By 2015 or so the distinction between GPUs and CPUs may be so blurry as to be irrelevant.
did you not hear of this project which attempts to harness the power of millions of home computers to attempt to simulate, in a matter of weeks and months folding of a single protein!
I was beginning to think *you* hadn't heard of it. Did you not notice that Folding@Home is in fact using Turing machines to simulate quantum phenomena? Randomness is trivially added to a Turing machine, producing a probabilistic Turing machine. With the simple addition of a hardware random number generator computers can simulate all the probabilistic quantum phenomena you want. And, incidentally, did you also not hear that Folding@Home has been able to realize large performance gains by running on modern GPUs? Those very things you insist are useful for nothing but graphics?
You should explain how are you planning to achieve this feat to the physicists of the world
I believe you are deliberately misunderstanding me, but let me clarify: [probabilistic, i.e. with a hardware random number generator] Turing machines can simulate any quantum phenomena [that we have a theory for]. It's possible that, at the bottom, quantum physics is unknowable and we will never be able to construct a coherent theory of it. It will be a sad day for science if we discover this. I tend to think this is not the case, and quantum phenomena have a coherent theory. Furthermore, I believe, though this is just opinion, that we already know all the quantum physics we need to understand how the brain works and it's more a matter of figuring out how the entire system works together. You have no real evidence to the contrary, so any speculation on your part is no more or less trustworthy than mine; certainly not enough so to calculate any "astronomically unlikely" probability of human-level AI in 20 years.
I think I understand what you are thinking now. You are extrapolating from simulating one atom, to one protein, to simulating an entire cell full of proteins, to simulating an entire brain's worth of cells. I think you are beyond foolish if you really believe that's what it would take to reproduce the exterior behavior of the brain. We don't simulate a car's movement by directly calculating the trajectories of oxygen atoms in the combustion chamber, and we won't simulate the brain's behavior by directly calculating the movement of individual amino acids in proteins. There will be massive simplifications at multiple scales during the transition from simulating proteins to simulating the brain. The behavior of proteins will be characterized in these exhaustive simulations, then modeled at a higher level with much less calculation. The behavior of a number of complete neurons will be characterized with detailed simulations, then distilled into the parts that are essential to calculation (possibly including some quantum effects; IMHO l
Neither there is a "physcal law" preventing a computer made from quadrillions of vacuum-tubes... What prevents such a pipe-dream from occuring however are practical concerns.
The practical concerns of a vacuum tube computer of such scale are obvious; on the other hand the practical concerns of a transistor one are not at all. The problems are almost entirely of nano-fabrication; unlike the vacuum tube case, the resources required are not at all prohibitive. There may be insurmountable practical concerns we do not yet know, but for you to proclaim they exist is no more defensible than Kurzweil's position that they do not.
We do not know if a traditional Turing machine [can simulate the brain]
Perhaps, but we *certainly* don't know that they can't. In fact we have zero evidence that brains do anything that can't be simulated by Turing machines, while on the other hand the pile of brain activities that Turing machines *have* done is ever-expanding (useful vision seems poised to fall next).
IMHO the likelihood that the brain performs quantum computing is small; however even so, Turing machines *can* simulate quantum phenomena to any desired precision. If you want to say that brains can't be simulated, you're going to have to do better than that. You need something like a "soul" that is completely inscrutable for it to be out of reach of Turing machines.
I admit consciousness is still a mystery, but our computers don't necessarily need to be conscious to exhibit human-level intelligence for useful tasks (and it may turn out that consciousness naturally "falls out" of any system complex enough to support it; I know it sounds lame but not more so than any other explanation of consciousness I've ever heard).
Moore's "law" fizzled out nearly half a decade ago
Um... surely you are not under the mistaken impression that Moore's law predicts clock rates? If so, you ought to visit Wikipedia. Moore's law is and always has been about the number of transistors on a chip. It has not failed to this day; the roadmaps look good for years, and the research looks promising in any number of new directions. Furthermore, you must not be following the latest in processor technology; innovation in that field has moved to GPUs, which unlike multicore CPUs are having great success in utilizing every transistor Moore's law can throw at them.
You know, you could have just said "Yes, I am disputing that Moore's law will hold for the next 20 years". That would have been a much more concise way to make your point, yet just as effective. And if you had bothered to fully read my two previous posts you would have found that I already explicitly acknowledged (twice) that Moore's law is anything but a certainty, and there was no need to construct ridiculous strawman arguments and vacuum tube analogies in an attempt to convince me of such.
If any such technology comes along, it will not be transistor based.
The very notion of a system composed of 100 billion times hundreds of thousands of transistors...
Transistors are simply woefully inadequate for the job
Listen to yourself; you're making the same predictions as Kurzweil, just in the opposite direction. There's no physical law preventing a supercomputer with quadrillions of transistors. There's no physical law preventing such a computer from simulating a biological system such as the brain. Your statements are merely opinionated predictions of our future nanotech fabrication capability, or lack thereof, in exactly the same vein as Kurzweil's, and with no more backing (somewhat less, I should say).
And while you rant about how people have been promising fusion for years, let me remind you that people have been predicting the end of Moore's law for years too, and so far they've been just as wrong.
there is a finite amount of suitable radioactive material in this world
Yeah, and the sun's going to run out too. As Keynes said: "In the long run, we're all dead." But that's not really useful when debating practical economic issues...
what happens when you go to the market to buy food for your family and find that vegetables have gone up in price 10-fold because China has started importing en masse?
Go to work for a farmer. America runs the best farms in the world, and if China was to import more from us it would be *great* for our economy. Of course, if the price of vegetables went up 10-fold overnight it would cause economic upheaval, but that's not likely to happen (the Chinese can't afford to pay that for vegetables any more than we can). A more reasonable increase moderated over a relatively long period of time, to allow the economy to adjust, would not necessarily be terrible. Farmers could go back to employing Americans, instead of illegal aliens.
I think it's you who's forgetting something; namely the power of exponential growth. Try doing the math yourself. In 20 years, if Moore's law holds, a supercomputer will have enough transistors to dedicate tens of thousands to simulating each and every one of the brain's 100 billion neurons. The chemical interaction of two neurons may be complex but it's not magic; it can be simulated by a finite number of transistors. Personally I find it hard to believe that number is larger than the low thousands, especially considering how much faster transistors are than neurons. Even supposing it requires millions, that only pushes the timeline out a few more years. Unless you're disputing Moore's law, then arguing that the brain is too complex to even think about simulating it in a 20 year timespan is just silly. (Again, it's a valid argument to dispute Moore's law; it's got to end sometime after all.)
20 billion neurons? Intel just announced an Itanium chip with 2 billion transistors. Assuming Moore's law, that gives us 20 billion transistor chips in just 7 years. I don't think the next 7 years of Moore's law are that controversial. Of course, it's possible many transistors are necessary to simulate one neuron, but you also have to consider that transistors communicate much faster than neurons, and chips can be clustered into supercomputers while brains cannot.
If you assume Moore's law, computers will easily surpass the complexity of the human brain in a 20 year timeframe. Of course, you can always argue that Moore's law won't hold; Kurzweil's argument is that it will.
we'll have no way to configure the linking and weights of those neurons [...] It's just too complex
We don't have to generate a gigantic 20-billion-neuron map of every connection in the brain to get this right. The brain is made of repeating simple structures, as laid out in the DNA blueprint; the complexity of the brain's behavior comes from the learning process, not the initial configuration. The process of mapping these structures is well underway.
Clipping planes are one of the features NVIDIA cripples in the gaming drivers (as games hardly use them); it has nothing to do with hardware. Buy a GeForce and flash it with the Quadro firmware if you really care about clipping planes, but honestly features like clipping planes, hardware overlays, etc are better implemented in your application and in your shaders anyway, where they will run equally fast on gaming and workstation cards.
can anybody explain the difference between a high-end workstation card and a high-end gaming card?
About $2000 (check Quadro 5600 vs GeForce 8800)
Seriously, there is no difference in the hardware any more, and anyone who tells you different has no idea what they're talking about. The only substantiative difference is in the drivers; for gaming cards NVIDIA and ATI omit certain driver features that games tend not to use, and omit performance tweaks for modeling programs, in a blatant attempt at price discrimination. Nothing more than that. Quadro/FireGL cards are for funneling cash to NVIDIA/ATI when an "enterprise" user specs out a computer with the best of everything because it's not his money he's wasting (I've watched it happen).
Actually, I say that now, and it's been true for a long time, but in the near future NVIDIA plans to release a Quadro card with double-precision floating point support, which may not make it into gaming hardware for some time (we'll see though). It will be better than a GeForce for the small subset of the small number of people doing GPGPU programming who also need double precision. Everyone else can keep using GeForces and saving beaucoup bucks.
Actually, I seem to recall reading about a guy who had proven that there was no theoretical lower bound on the amount of energy it would take to do a given computation (assuming the computation was 'reversible'). Contrast this to an electric motor, where the desired result is mechanical power output, so obviously at least as much electrical energy must go in as mechanical energy comes out. When the desired output is merely 'computation', there may be no lower bound on the energy input required.
Contrary to popular belief, voltage is *not* power. To use the analogy properly, what this article says is closer to "low horsepower key to better gas mileage". Which, while still obvious, is at least not a tautology.
It is possible for a low voltage system to transfer more energy than a high voltage one in the same amount of time if the low voltage one transfers more current (current is measured in amps, not volts). The exact relation is volts * amps = power (in watts). So if this chip ran at lower voltage but needed more amps, it could still use more power.
The reason tech people don't worry about a Google monopoly is we realize Google is not and can not be a monopoly, because the markets Google operates in have low barriers to entry. Yes, techies trust Google more than they trust Microsoft, but trust in Google is not necessary to realize that Google simply can't acquire monopoly power the way Microsoft did. Without high barriers to entry it is impossible for Google to come anywhere *near* the market share percentages Microsoft continues to enjoy in the OS and office software markets (>90%).
Furthermore, Google shows little interest in erecting barriers to entry; quite the opposite in fact, Google has always fought to keep those barriers *low*. Witness the ease of switching from GMail to another webmail provider: automatic forwarding and free POP/IMAP access make it far easier than, say, Microsoft's Hotmail. Also witness their lobbying for net neutrality: while there is obviously an element of self-interest in not wanting to pay ISP extortion fees, a non-neutral net could be a huge barrier to entry in Google's market, potentially in the end being to Google's benefit. So far, Google has rejected such tactics.
I'm sorry, but your understanding of ballistics is wrong. Think about the ellipse traced by the orbit of the projectile (in earth-centered inertial space). The ellipse does not change unless a force other than Earth's gravity acts on the projectile. Orbits do not spontaneously change. Do you agree? OK, now the last point on the projectile's path where a force other than gravity acts upon it is at the mouth of the railgun (ignoring the atmosphere, which generally makes things worse). Thus, the mouth of the railgun at the time of launch, in inertial space, is the beginning and therefore the end of the projectile's elliptical orbit. The ellipse can be any shape you want, but it *must* have one focus at the center of the Earth and it *must* intersect the railgun's position at time of launch. Do you disagree? It's a perfectly valid orbit from gravity's point of view; if the Earth suddenly collapsed into a black hole with the same mass but a radius of nanometers, then the projectile would happily continue in this elliptical orbit. Unfortunately for the projectile, the Earth is still there and it interrupts the orbit.
The other method I described just shoots chunks of spacecraft into a big orbiting net. At about 11.2Km:s, very close to the orbital velocity of the net (and the Space Station, and its astronauts).
I'm sorry again, but you simply can't launch things such that they have low relative velocity when they reach the net. The only way for things to have almost the same velocity as the net when they reach the net's position is for them to have almost the same *orbit* as the net, and I have explained above why that is not possible. Things in radically different orbits can *never* meet at the same place and have approximately the same velocity at the same time.
Let me say it another way: your position and velocity *define* your orbit; having them be approximately the same is equivalent to being in approximately the same orbit. I have already explained that the orbit of the projectile cannot be stable, so the net cannot both be in a stable orbit and simultaneously be in an orbit suitable for catching the projectiles.
My understanding of ballistics is that the right trajectory and velocity insert objects into orbit
The projectile will be inserted into *an* orbit, for sure. An object in orbit will always return to its starting point (assuming no other forces, i.e. no rocket, and ignoring the oblateness of the Earth, solar and lunar gravity, etc which are negligible). If that starting point is on the surface of the Earth, then the orbit intersects the surface of the Earth, which obviously leads to crashing. In other words, the perigee (lowest point) of the orbit is always at or below the altitude of the railgun, because the railgun launch point is the beginning and therefore end of the orbit. If the payload had a rocket, or if one docked with it in orbit, the orbit could be modified in flight to raise the perigee, preventing the projectile from crashing.
A railgun, or any other type of stationary launching device on the surface of the Earth, could in principle launch things into *solar* orbit, or perhaps even lunar orbit, but never a stable Earth orbit without help after launch. Actually, perhaps if it could reach the moon it could slingshot the projectile around the moon and achieve a stable Earth orbit that way (though it wouldn't be a very *useful* Earth orbit).
And extra energy for tweaking the payload into orbit could be generated by the Station from solar
How do you propose to fuel a rocket with solar power? Ion engines are far too low thrust for this purpose, and they still need reaction mass. I don't think you can get around the need to launch rocket fuel.
Shooting payloads at a big net that's already travelling orbital speeds
"A big net" is not going to work. You can't build a net to catch something that's going at multiple km/s relative to you. Perhaps you could build some sort of "reverse railgun" to catch the projectiles, but I can't imagine that such a thing would be agile enough to catch the likely poorly-aimed projectiles, and if you missed slightly you'd destroy the catcher. The only real way to do it is to have a spacecraft match orbit and dock. And I don't see any particular reason to have people in the spacecraft; a robotic or remote-controlled tug would work fine. Better, probably.
I've also suggested in this thread that the railgun exit at the top of an Andean mountain
Putting the railgun on a mountain is a start, but it won't eliminate the atmosphere problem. Almost half of the atmosphere will still be above the railgun.
It's a cool idea, though. Probably more realistic than a space elevator.
Slashdot Mirror
In 2010 Intel is planning to finish Larrabee, which is ostensibly a 3D graphics chip but is really nothing more than an array of 24 or 32 small x86 processors. It may not run Windows out of the box, but I think it is inevitable that it will run Linux, and I would not be at all surprised to see computers without a "CPU"; only a Larrabee chip.
Besides, nobody is in a position to be screwed as badly as the Indians were; nobody is living in this spectrum and nobody's going to get killed. The entities with the most to lose are the huge telecommunications corporations with billions invested in infrastructure, but nobody is proposing that their spectrum be taken away during the transition. I just don't see any disasters resulting from a transition to a free market; certainly nothing on the scale of what happened to the Indians; the benefits far outweigh the startup costs.These problems aren't unique to a free market system. They exist in the system we have today and have been mostly solved to the satisfaction of the current spectrum users. There are disputes, but the system of enforcement works today. The system we have now resembles ownership in some important ways and should be a starting point for any market system we would establish.Any specific examples in mind?
Obviously there must be a *lot* of rules regarding how a market could be started, the nature of the property rights involved, and so forth. I don't think I'm qualified to come up with a complete set of rules right now, but I hardly think it is impossible to do.
I think you misunderstand me when I say "enforcement". I don't mean that private "security" firms would be hired to bust people's kneecaps in a might-makes-right free-for-all. You are confusing Libertarianism with anarchy, perhaps. I'm not promoting anarchy here. There would be a spectrum property rights enforcement department of the government; perhaps it would become another duty of the police. It *is* one of the few responsibilities of the government to enforce property rights so that markets can function properly. Perhaps a really radical Libertarian would disagree, but that's not me.
Copyright is an interesting case. Copyright definitely is an issue on which Libertarians might disagree. I'll give you my take on it.
Libertarians are definitely *for* property rights and free markets, so private property ownership stays for sure. Copyright, on its face, appears to create a market for information, and Libertarians like markets. However, Libertarians also like individual liberty. Property rights restrict individual liberty, but a market in private property is required (one might say it's a necessary evil) because there is a limited supply of property which needs to be allocated fairly. Information does not need to be allocated, because there is an unlimited supply of any particular piece of information. The justification for restricting individual liberty to establish the market doesn't exist in this case. So I would say a true Libertarian would be against copyright.
Yes. Libertarians are for strong individual property rights. If telecom providers wanted to string wires, they would have to get approval from individual property owners. There would be no exclusive "franchise" deals. "Ideal" libertarianism would do the same for roads and utilities; they would be provided by private enterprise instead of the government and there would be no eminent domain or right-of-way laws allowing seizure of private property to build them.
Personally, I wouldn't go quite this far. I do believe that a few industries, such as electrical distribution, roads, and telecom infrastructure, are "natural monopolies" and should probably be managed by government. But we must clearly delineate the areas of government involvement. Government should put up and maintain the electrical distribution wires, but should not generate the electricity. Government should provide a fiber-optic cable infrastructure, but should not provide or regulate telephone, Internet, or TV service. Government should build the roads, but not provide transportation services. But that's merely my personal belief and not one all Libertarians would share. It certainly introduces plenty of opportunities for corruption and expanding government.
Libertarians aren't against allocation *or* enforcement a priori. They simply believe that all allocation and enforcement should be done the same way: property rights in a free market. The Libertarian alternative to the FCC would be a free market of property rights to parts of the spectrum, with no regulation governing who can own it or what they can do with it. Right now the FCC sometimes has auctions, but it's a long way from a free market.
Some people believe that there should be no property rights in the electromagnetic spectrum, and everyone should be free to transmit as they see fit. This attitude stems from a belief that it could work technically; that the spectrum is large enough that there would be no tragedy of the commons. This belief about the (non-)necessity of property rights stems from an opinion about the technical feasibility of ultrawideband communication, not Libertarianism per se. Libertarians would not object to a sensible system of property rights for the spectrum (with enforcement) if one is determined to be necessary or beneficial.
As an example, let me run down some of the items on Barack Obama's issue pages (since I just happened to be reading them) and tell you the Libertarian answer to each point, off the top of my head:
- Provide a Tax Cut for Working Families: Libertarians are for tax cuts; they reduce the size of government.
- Simplify Tax Filings for Middle Class Americans: Reducing the complexity of the tax code is good, as it would tend to reduce the size of government, though Libertarians would prefer to eliminate the income tax and thus the need for individual tax filings.
- Fight for Fair Trade: Free trade is good, but Obama proposes using trade deals to enforce our rules on other countries and protect our jobs from foreign competition. Libertarians are against this and for completely free trade.
- Amend the North American Free Trade Agreement: Obama wants to "fix" NAFTA, and I don't know what that means but it sounds like protectionism, which Libertarians are against.
- Improve Transition Assistance: Obama wants the government to pay to retrain workers. This increases the size of government so Libertarians are against it.
- Support Job Creation: Obama wants to double spending on research and education. This increases the size of government so Libertarians are against it, believing that it will produce corruption and waste; a free market can do a better job of allocating those resources than fickle politicians can, without the corruption and waste.
- Invest in U.S. Manufacturing: More spending; bigger government; Libertarians say no.
- Create New Job Training Programs for Clean Technologies: Again, Spending. Bigger government. No.
- Boost the Renewable Energy Sector and Create New Jobs: Spending. Bigger government. No.
- Deploy Next-Generation Broadband: Spending. Bigger government. No.
- Protect the Openness of the Internet: Libertarians believe that the Internet should not be regulated.
- Invest in Rural Areas: Spending. Bigger government. No.
I could go on, but as you can see, the Libertarian viewpoint is very well-defined, and not at all vague. As for whether it's "unworkable" or whether people can "get behind" it, well, that's debatable. But vague is the one thing it's certainly not.As for what I'm doing about it, I vote. I'm not required to work harder than Lessig to offer my opinion about him on Slashdot, so don't get self-righteous with me. The Libertarian solution is simple in concept and implementation; the only hard part is getting people to see that it's a good idea when they could be voting themselves government handouts instead. As opposed to the big-government solution, which is easy to get people to vote for, but well-nigh impossible to keep from getting unmaintainably complex and corrupted.
Lessig doesn't really seem to agree with this. He says he knows government is corrupted by money. The Libertarian answer is to reduce the size of government to reduce the amount of corruption, but Lessig somehow thinks that the amount of corruption can be dramatically reduced without taking that step. But he can't explain concretely how.
His only plan is to get politicians to promise they won't take lobbyist money, and to "abolish earmarks", and to add more campaign finance restrictions. Sorry Larry, but politicians are professional promise-skirters, and I see no reason to believe that them making yet another promise is going to significantly change how the government works at all levels.
The "abolish earmarks" thing is especially quixotic; you might as well make them promise to stop gerrymandering while you're at it. They'll find another way to do it, and just call it something else, or outright deny that's what they're doing, playing with the word definitions. As for the lobbyist thing, lobbyists have *plenty* of ways to influence politicians besides outright giving them money, and there's not even a way to enumerate all of them, much less make every politician promise to ignore them, and then enforce that promise.
I don't see any part of Larry's plan that makes me think it's more sensible than the Libertarian point of view. The problem of government corruption is just too complex to confront head-on, and it's okay to admit that. "Special Interests" are ingenious, well-funded, and determined; thinking that they can be outmaneuvered forever is just hubris. There is a simple solution, and we know what it is: the way to *truly* remove corruption from a part of the government is to eliminate that part of the government.
I don't see how anyone could think that BitTorrent doesn't lower the total cost of distributing the bits. BitTorrent is simply the poor man's implementation of multicast. Imagine measuring the cost of distributing information; you might use the unit bit-meters: 1 bit-meter is the cost to transfer one bit one meter; more generally you multiply the amount of information transferred by the distance it traveled. BitTorrent reduces the total distance the information has to travel because peers can download from nearby peers instead of a far away single source. The number of copies eventually distributed is the same (plus a very small overhead), but the distance traveled by each bit is radically shorter, so the cost measured in bit-meters is much smaller.
What this really means is that BitTorrent, implemented properly, can reduce the load on the Internet backbones compared to traditional distribution for the same number of copies, just like multicast. If the ISPs cooperated with BitTorrent instead of blocking it, they would reap these advantages. Why don't they? It's due to the stupid and counter-productive practice of selling "unlimited" broadband. An ISP's best customer is one who doesn't use the product at all, and a customer who tries to use the bandwidth they were sold costs the ISP money; they are a liability to be liquidated as soon as possible. This distorts the market for broadband.
The only real solution is usage-based pricing for ISPs. I know everyone on the Internet hates the very idea, and seem to consider it a nefarious plot by the ISPs to squeeze money from them. But nobody stops to consider the benefits: suddenly, the ISPs would become our friends! Today they hate us because everything we do costs them money; instead they would love us for using lots of bandwidth. Today ISPs throttle BitTorrent; instead they would be accelerating it. Today ISPs hand our information to the MPAA; instead they would safeguard our privacy. Today ISPs block ports and prohibit servers; instead they would encourage us to install every kind of network-using application, including servers. Today ISPs refuse to sell us the highest speeds their networks can handle until competition forces their hand; instead they would offer everyone the highest speed possible with their equipment. Today ISPs drag their feet on network upgrades because they see no direct benefit; instead they would immediately see revenues go up from increased usage, and want to upgrade as fast as possible.
Usage-based pricing would solve so many problems in the ISP market that I am really disappointed when I see how much resistance to it exists all over the Internet, from people who haven't even considered the benefits it could bring.
I'm still left wondering if the free SDK can do native debugging, or if you're only allowed to use the simulator until you cough up $99. If the free SDK allows uploading arbitrary native code to your personal iPhone, there's no way Apple is going to be able to prevent jailbreaks going forward. But if the free SDK doesn't allow running code on any real iPhone hardware, then it sucks.
It's unlikely that anything significant from Singularity could make it into Windows 7, more's the pity. The important parts of Singularity rely on the "software isolated process" concept, but you can't run C++ in a software isolated process because you have to be able to guarantee memory safety. IMHO what Microsoft needs to do for Windows 8 is turn Singularity into a hypervisor running legacy Windows in virtualization. The unsafe and bloated C/C++ legacy of Windows could be contained inside the VM and Microsoft would be finally free from the shackles of maintaining compatibility all the way back to Windows 3.
Since Microsoft owns Windows and would be designing Singularity specifically for virtualization of Windows, they could do plenty of user-friendly integration between virtualized and native applications; much better than what Parallels can now achieve. The virtualization could also support legacy device drivers and have very little performance overhead. Near-perfect compatibility could be provided in the VM for eternity with little effort, while new development (both inside Microsoft and elsewhere) could move to the modern Singularity environment over a period of tens of years, with incentives provided by new libraries and development tools not available in legacy Windows.
I was beginning to think *you* hadn't heard of it. Did you not notice that Folding@Home is in fact using Turing machines to simulate quantum phenomena? Randomness is trivially added to a Turing machine, producing a probabilistic Turing machine. With the simple addition of a hardware random number generator computers can simulate all the probabilistic quantum phenomena you want. And, incidentally, did you also not hear that Folding@Home has been able to realize large performance gains by running on modern GPUs? Those very things you insist are useful for nothing but graphics?
I believe you are deliberately misunderstanding me, but let me clarify: [probabilistic, i.e. with a hardware random number generator] Turing machines can simulate any quantum phenomena [that we have a theory for]. It's possible that, at the bottom, quantum physics is unknowable and we will never be able to construct a coherent theory of it. It will be a sad day for science if we discover this. I tend to think this is not the case, and quantum phenomena have a coherent theory. Furthermore, I believe, though this is just opinion, that we already know all the quantum physics we need to understand how the brain works and it's more a matter of figuring out how the entire system works together. You have no real evidence to the contrary, so any speculation on your part is no more or less trustworthy than mine; certainly not enough so to calculate any "astronomically unlikely" probability of human-level AI in 20 years.
I think I understand what you are thinking now. You are extrapolating from simulating one atom, to one protein, to simulating an entire cell full of proteins, to simulating an entire brain's worth of cells. I think you are beyond foolish if you really believe that's what it would take to reproduce the exterior behavior of the brain. We don't simulate a car's movement by directly calculating the trajectories of oxygen atoms in the combustion chamber, and we won't simulate the brain's behavior by directly calculating the movement of individual amino acids in proteins. There will be massive simplifications at multiple scales during the transition from simulating proteins to simulating the brain. The behavior of proteins will be characterized in these exhaustive simulations, then modeled at a higher level with much less calculation. The behavior of a number of complete neurons will be characterized with detailed simulations, then distilled into the parts that are essential to calculation (possibly including some quantum effects; IMHO l
IMHO the likelihood that the brain performs quantum computing is small; however even so, Turing machines *can* simulate quantum phenomena to any desired precision. If you want to say that brains can't be simulated, you're going to have to do better than that. You need something like a "soul" that is completely inscrutable for it to be out of reach of Turing machines.
I admit consciousness is still a mystery, but our computers don't necessarily need to be conscious to exhibit human-level intelligence for useful tasks (and it may turn out that consciousness naturally "falls out" of any system complex enough to support it; I know it sounds lame but not more so than any other explanation of consciousness I've ever heard).Um... surely you are not under the mistaken impression that Moore's law predicts clock rates? If so, you ought to visit Wikipedia. Moore's law is and always has been about the number of transistors on a chip. It has not failed to this day; the roadmaps look good for years, and the research looks promising in any number of new directions. Furthermore, you must not be following the latest in processor technology; innovation in that field has moved to GPUs, which unlike multicore CPUs are having great success in utilizing every transistor Moore's law can throw at them.
Listen to yourself; you're making the same predictions as Kurzweil, just in the opposite direction. There's no physical law preventing a supercomputer with quadrillions of transistors. There's no physical law preventing such a computer from simulating a biological system such as the brain. Your statements are merely opinionated predictions of our future nanotech fabrication capability, or lack thereof, in exactly the same vein as Kurzweil's, and with no more backing (somewhat less, I should say).
And while you rant about how people have been promising fusion for years, let me remind you that people have been predicting the end of Moore's law for years too, and so far they've been just as wrong.
I think it's you who's forgetting something; namely the power of exponential growth. Try doing the math yourself. In 20 years, if Moore's law holds, a supercomputer will have enough transistors to dedicate tens of thousands to simulating each and every one of the brain's 100 billion neurons. The chemical interaction of two neurons may be complex but it's not magic; it can be simulated by a finite number of transistors. Personally I find it hard to believe that number is larger than the low thousands, especially considering how much faster transistors are than neurons. Even supposing it requires millions, that only pushes the timeline out a few more years. Unless you're disputing Moore's law, then arguing that the brain is too complex to even think about simulating it in a 20 year timespan is just silly. (Again, it's a valid argument to dispute Moore's law; it's got to end sometime after all.)
If you assume Moore's law, computers will easily surpass the complexity of the human brain in a 20 year timeframe. Of course, you can always argue that Moore's law won't hold; Kurzweil's argument is that it will.We don't have to generate a gigantic 20-billion-neuron map of every connection in the brain to get this right. The brain is made of repeating simple structures, as laid out in the DNA blueprint; the complexity of the brain's behavior comes from the learning process, not the initial configuration. The process of mapping these structures is well underway.
Clipping planes are one of the features NVIDIA cripples in the gaming drivers (as games hardly use them); it has nothing to do with hardware. Buy a GeForce and flash it with the Quadro firmware if you really care about clipping planes, but honestly features like clipping planes, hardware overlays, etc are better implemented in your application and in your shaders anyway, where they will run equally fast on gaming and workstation cards.
Seriously, there is no difference in the hardware any more, and anyone who tells you different has no idea what they're talking about. The only substantiative difference is in the drivers; for gaming cards NVIDIA and ATI omit certain driver features that games tend not to use, and omit performance tweaks for modeling programs, in a blatant attempt at price discrimination. Nothing more than that. Quadro/FireGL cards are for funneling cash to NVIDIA/ATI when an "enterprise" user specs out a computer with the best of everything because it's not his money he's wasting (I've watched it happen).
Actually, I say that now, and it's been true for a long time, but in the near future NVIDIA plans to release a Quadro card with double-precision floating point support, which may not make it into gaming hardware for some time (we'll see though). It will be better than a GeForce for the small subset of the small number of people doing GPGPU programming who also need double precision. Everyone else can keep using GeForces and saving beaucoup bucks.
Actually, I seem to recall reading about a guy who had proven that there was no theoretical lower bound on the amount of energy it would take to do a given computation (assuming the computation was 'reversible'). Contrast this to an electric motor, where the desired result is mechanical power output, so obviously at least as much electrical energy must go in as mechanical energy comes out. When the desired output is merely 'computation', there may be no lower bound on the energy input required.
Contrary to popular belief, voltage is *not* power. To use the analogy properly, what this article says is closer to "low horsepower key to better gas mileage". Which, while still obvious, is at least not a tautology.
It is possible for a low voltage system to transfer more energy than a high voltage one in the same amount of time if the low voltage one transfers more current (current is measured in amps, not volts). The exact relation is volts * amps = power (in watts). So if this chip ran at lower voltage but needed more amps, it could still use more power.
The reason tech people don't worry about a Google monopoly is we realize Google is not and can not be a monopoly, because the markets Google operates in have low barriers to entry. Yes, techies trust Google more than they trust Microsoft, but trust in Google is not necessary to realize that Google simply can't acquire monopoly power the way Microsoft did. Without high barriers to entry it is impossible for Google to come anywhere *near* the market share percentages Microsoft continues to enjoy in the OS and office software markets (>90%).
Furthermore, Google shows little interest in erecting barriers to entry; quite the opposite in fact, Google has always fought to keep those barriers *low*. Witness the ease of switching from GMail to another webmail provider: automatic forwarding and free POP/IMAP access make it far easier than, say, Microsoft's Hotmail. Also witness their lobbying for net neutrality: while there is obviously an element of self-interest in not wanting to pay ISP extortion fees, a non-neutral net could be a huge barrier to entry in Google's market, potentially in the end being to Google's benefit. So far, Google has rejected such tactics.
Let me say it another way: your position and velocity *define* your orbit; having them be approximately the same is equivalent to being in approximately the same orbit. I have already explained that the orbit of the projectile cannot be stable, so the net cannot both be in a stable orbit and simultaneously be in an orbit suitable for catching the projectiles.
A railgun, or any other type of stationary launching device on the surface of the Earth, could in principle launch things into *solar* orbit, or perhaps even lunar orbit, but never a stable Earth orbit without help after launch. Actually, perhaps if it could reach the moon it could slingshot the projectile around the moon and achieve a stable Earth orbit that way (though it wouldn't be a very *useful* Earth orbit).How do you propose to fuel a rocket with solar power? Ion engines are far too low thrust for this purpose, and they still need reaction mass. I don't think you can get around the need to launch rocket fuel."A big net" is not going to work. You can't build a net to catch something that's going at multiple km/s relative to you. Perhaps you could build some sort of "reverse railgun" to catch the projectiles, but I can't imagine that such a thing would be agile enough to catch the likely poorly-aimed projectiles, and if you missed slightly you'd destroy the catcher. The only real way to do it is to have a spacecraft match orbit and dock. And I don't see any particular reason to have people in the spacecraft; a robotic or remote-controlled tug would work fine. Better, probably.Putting the railgun on a mountain is a start, but it won't eliminate the atmosphere problem. Almost half of the atmosphere will still be above the railgun.
It's a cool idea, though. Probably more realistic than a space elevator.