The puzzle to explain the missing mass may well fail until physicists, whose explanations depend upon a "dead" universe, evolves to encompass the fact that the universe may well have made a "dead" to "live" transition, and therefore a "physics controlled" vs. "intelligence controlled" transition sometime a few billion, but perhaps as much as 6-8 billion years ago. This is documented by Lineweaver's group in dealing with the fact that most of the Earths in our Galaxy are *older* than our own. We are the latecomers. Until the physicists wake up to this fact everything they are spouting is suspect.
Until physicists and astronomers incorporate ideas such as Dyson Shells or Matrioshka Brains into their thinking (and seek to prove or disprove them) then all of the speculation about dark matter is just yada yada yada. The dark matter can easily be explained by Matrioshka Brains who have left their galaxies.
The universe has intelligence in it (we being the case in point). Unless theories about the evolution of the universe incorporate theories about the evolution of intelligence and civilizations they are clearly missing part of the equation.
The purpose of the HTTP protocol on the WWW is to DISPLAY pages composed of images and text. It never had to be any more complex than that (and wasn't until Javascript reared its ugly head).
Now, many web sites are directly or indirectly seeking to take control of your machine (google-analytics comes to mind) by downloading programs onto your computer and running them through your web browser.
Its *My computer*. Its *My memory*. Its *My CPU time*. Thou shalt not use it (or steal it) without my previous permission [1].
And that is why my primary Web browser is Firefox with NoScript enabled for all sites except a few, such as gmail, where javascript is actually required.
It is for these reasons that I view scripting languages attached to web pages as EVIL. Only when all scripting applications say "may I run on your machine (and this is what I will do)" will one have an acceptable paradigm.
1. I would love to see a class action suit by people running unused CPU cycle programs, e.g. Folding@Home, SETI@Home (which is useless), and the many other @Home derivatives against web sites, perhaps even Google, for downloading "programs" which will consume memory and CPU time *without* my permission.
I do not think the Apple strategy will fly. It is easy enough to purchase prepaid credit cards and to use those to purchase iPhones. They may add a level of indirection but I doubt they will be able to prevent it.
If technology is driving down the cost of hardware (circuit complexity increasing by 2x every 2 years -- classic Moore's Law according to Wikipedia). Meaning you can compress data at a lower cost, you can transmit more data at a lower cost. Then why should not communications costs be declining at that same rate? I could care less if I get video on demand. My voice comununications should be almost free. The challenge to AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, etc. is why our bills (adjusted for quantity of data delivered) should not be declining by at least 1/2 every 2 years.
Apple can sell a fancy phone, whose advanced features I do not have to use. Lower the costs of my minimal connectivity. That is all I (as someone 51 y.o) needs to have I mean *really* what the hell does an iPhone provide that an easily available terminal cannot provide. And if you do not have an easily available terminal -- where the hell are you living? (And as a brief aside I have had dinner with Steve Jobs -- though I respect him as an individual I wasn't that impressed.) I would cite Google as being much more likely to change the playing field than Apple at the current time. It could strongly be argued that Apple has sold out to AT&T. Fortunately the hackers will defeat their efforts to completely manipulate their technology -- which customers have purchased. My hardware. My right to program it for my purposes. Claim otherwise. You will lose.
If there are no current real world applications that are programmed for or depend on quantum computers, the proper response is "so what?"
I do not care about quantum computing. There are perhaps a bunch of nerds in the basement of buildings in Virginia that may. There may also be a few people in skyscrapers in Manhatten that may. But for hundreds of millions, perhaps pushing a billion of other computer users around the world this is meaningless noise.
To wit "As we were discussing, Gran Paradiso -- the latest version of Firefox -- is nearing release." They have not fixed the infamous "untitled window" problem, which is pretty clearly defined at this state. I believe that problem has been documented for over 3 years! I can also take Firefox down in a number of ways by simply ulimiting the amount of available memory.
Any individual who views "Gran Paradiso", as it currently exists as a "quality product" should be put up on stake in Yugoslavia, Romania, *wherever*, and I will be more than happy to fire bullets as they are slowly being impaled.
I made a similar observation at Oracle over 20 years ago, it worked pretty well then but now people may be more comfortable with being impaled now.. Or perhaps they are simply more comfortable with releasing crap.
Assertion. Release a new version of Firefox when you have all of the old bugs fixed. Otherwise you are playing off of the developer egos to release the next "new great thing" --- and they are so transparent to some of us who have been around for a while.
The governments of the world can regulate access to space all they want. And they can effectively get away with it so long as one is sending humans into space. But once one has nanorobots at ones disposal that control ends. In that era they are going to have a piss poor time regulating space colonization. Rocket science is rocket science and I don't have to be an Astronaut Farmer if I'm launching nanorobots. And then, once I've got a few dozen asteroids under my control, the U.S. government (or any other government for that matter), can take their "global" treaties and make wall paper out of them.
The Mars Rovers have been running for ~3 years. They pale in comparison to what robust molecular nanotechnology could do. And that doesn't require a Delta 2 launch vehicle or NASA or a multi-hundred million dollar budget (or the permission of various governments) to get into space. Space is *ours* (humanitity's),and not the province of various self-interested elected (or non-elected) assemblies.
I have twice brought the Linux kernel to its knees. To the extent that it was not even able to move the mouse cursor around on the screen. And I would argue that a "desktop" system that cannot move the mouse cursor around is not a "desktop" system.
And it is very easy to reproduce this. Create an 8 GB swap partition. Then execute a self-reinvoking shell script. Mind you I am *not* reccomeding one try this. This is a recipe for dragging ones machine into the depths of hell.
The fact that the designers of Linux have failed to perform sufficient "limits testing" (and performance under stress on the desktop) is a testimony to what they really need to do. It is simple, "Break Linux" and have it still perform.
He should have just undergone cryonic suspension, in which case when he was revived he could pick up where he left off (for better or worse)...
(And for those of you chuckling in the wings in disbelief (with respect to whether cryonic suspension and reanimation will work -- I am more than willing to go head to head with you on the mats on that count.)
The failure to consider and recommend cryonic suspension as an option (compared with being buried or incinerated) is killing far more people a year that George W. Bush is. One is only really "dead" when the molecular disassembly process is complete. Before that point of existence, you are simply less alive.
If this comment is accurate, it is an extremely poor reflection of the understanding of what serious people desire on the web. Indeed it could be deemed a Web 2.0 benchmark.
I am both a programmer and an academic and consider the web to be an information resource. I do not care about Web 2.0 at all. My primary interests are in BBS/blog/Wiki posts involving people who have or have solved problems and the static display of abstracts and papers of people who have devoted serious thought to problems. Static ads are not too disturbing (in my peripheral vision) and are even sometimes useful. I usually browse the web with Javascript entirely disabled except for trusted and useful sites. As a programmer I have no trust for what happens when you allow others to run programs on your machine (vs. controlled drawing on ones monitor which is what HTML does).
It is *my* computer and it should be doing what *I* desire. Not what some idiot marketing person in some corporate bureaucracy (or some virus writer in Eastern Europe) desires. Unfortunately all too many web sites are starting to take the perspective that
A proper benchmark (from my perspective) would be the load and display time for several hundred pages from a variety of websites. In this respect Firefox falls down severely (I cannot comment on Opera). I have seen Firefox take over 15 minutes of maxed out CPU time and nearly maxed network use to reload a complex failed session. This is a real world requirement if for various reasons one has to restart ones machine or ones browser due to real world "glitches" (or buggy software). (For example I've seen the Flash plug-in crash firefox which would require a session restart).
Javascript benchmarks are a small subset of what browsers should do. For me their primary purpose should be to efficiently download and display simple text and images.
Perhaps. While molecular dynamics simulations are inherently "quantum", I have yet to see a paper which proposes how to solve the equations using a quantum compute and Perhaps a chicken and egg situation. Perhaps after multi-Qubit computers are common one will see attempts at having them perform molecular dynamics simulations. Until then, the equations for molecular simulations are reasonably well defined (electrostatic interactions between nuclei surrounded by electron clouds in motion). A non-trivial computational problem but one which we can understand from a theoretical perspective and model reasonably accurately. It is somewhat similar to simulations involving the formation of solar systems but at a much different scale.
For those who actually understand real molecular nanotechnology, aka "Drexlerian" nanotechnology, you may understand that one of the real "breakthroughs" comes when you can computationally simulate the function of a 4 to 8 million atom molecular nanoassembler. Because if you can simulate one and prove that it does not violate any laws of physics then one of the classical oppositions to real molecular nanotechnology falls [1]. The argument transitions entirely from "it can't work" (common among people oriented towards "dissing" nanotech) to "you can't build one". And as DRM, the iPhone restrictions, etc. have all shown "can't" is very swampy territory to wade into.
Now, I know if I've got 8 million cores, such a simulation is probably feasible (and presumably bandwidth limited by hypertransport data transfer rates) so the question transitions to how many atoms can one core handle and that in turn transitions to how effective the instruction set is at performing the math required for molecular dynamics simulations. So, is SSE5 any better than this or should I be lobbying AMD for SSE6 which is explicitly targeted at molecular dynamics simulations? It is not the market for business computing but it is the market that potentially millions of "nanoengineers" will fall into.
It also goes without saying that the chip manufacturers and ubergamers and SecondLife participants all have a high interest in achieving this because pushing below ~32nm using current technology is going to get very dicey at which point Moore's Law is going to have to shift from bulk atom assembly (current lithography methods) to precision atom assembly (real molecular nanoassembly).
1. There is a third argument against the simulation of a molecular nanoassembler. The argument that an atom specific design for a 4-8 million atom nanoassembler does not currently exist. The best one can point to is a few thousand atom Fine Motion Controller (http://www.imm.org/research/parts/controller/) designed by Drexler and Merkle. However the Nanoengineer software (http://www.nanoengineer-1.com/content/) from Nanorex allows one to design elements of an actual nanoassembler. If even a mere one thousand/. readers were to add 1 atom a day to the design in a distributed open source NanoAtHome.org (http://www.nanoathome.org/) type project -- the design would be complete within 1-2 years (there is a significant amount of redundancy and therefore human intellect amplification in the atom placement in a nanoassembler). You can't simulate it without designing it first -- but if one can design 400 million transistor microprocessors then designing an 8 million atom nanoassembler shouldn't be that difficult.
The point would be that we have been engineering microorganisms with human designed and manufactured DNA, by your definition "artificial life", for decades, . Such exercises are done at hundreds of universities and companies on a regular basis. Once the sequences have been read (and over a thousand of them are now sitting in databases) the only real barrier to assembling a synthetic genome is cost. And this group hasn't even done that -- all they did was move a genome into a foreign house. And bacterial viruses have been doing that for billions of years.
No, no, no. You can of course start with "nature's building blocks" but you don't have to start there. Feynman and Drexler made that perfectly clear. There is "Plenty of Room at the Bottom". And taking a bunch of furniture out of one house and moving it into another house is not what I would classify as a brilliant achievement. Indeed, I suspect one would have to really work determining those cases where one cannot move the furniture from one house to another.
And it is not a given that the first wetware implementation of artificial life will require the cumbersome machinery that nature has left us with. The key point is that it is *NOT* "artificial" if you are using nature's building blocks. You did not sit down at a computer, you did not design the enzymes, you did not synthesize the DNA in the lab to produce those enzymes, you did not test them to verify how well they worked and so on and so forth.
You are operating from the perspective that conscious minds could not come up with a significantly better system than that which nature has handed to us using its trail and error processes. I would hate to think that is the case.
There is a line in "Chorus Line" where the individual says "I can do that". That is what one has here. I can emplace some DNA and have the existing machinery copy that DNA so as to produce more bacteria. The principles behind this have been known for decades.
I don't have a particular attachment to my current instantiation. A copy is a copy is a copy. And if it had really identical memories I don't see how he (I) would realize that he (I) was a copy. I do realize of course that there are people who don't happen to feel this way.
The problem with this news article is that most people hearing about it and commenting on it are clueless with respect to what it means and doesn't mean.
It means that someone walked into your house took all the old furniture out and replaced it with a whole bunch of different but similar furniture so that when you got home in the evening you could still sit down on the couch and watch TV.
So what everyone is going gaga over is the fact that the movers can take furniture out and replace it with different furniture. To be honest, I'm not that impressed. It has *nothing* to do with synthetic life, artificial life, etc. because they are *still* using the few hundred enzymes that nature had to evolve over billions of years. They didn't sit down and design a totally new basis for self-replicating systems that can survive in our "real" world and make a copy of itself. The hard drive in your computer is significantly more impressive. It has more parts and using a single command I can get it to copy itself. And *we* humans had to design every single circuit and craft every single part in it. Now *thats* something to be impressed with.
While the cellulose in the paper may be biodegradable I strongly suspect the carbon nanotubes are not! Carbon nanotubes do not naturally exist in nature and its doubtful that enzymes would have evolved to degrade them. One can probably only attack them from the end and even then its seems iffy (the nanotube has to fit precisely into an enzyme active site designed to attack it). It remains to be seen whether we will be able to develop enzymes that will effectively degrade (or synthesize) carbon nanotubes. If one could one would see a lot more use of them in applications such as batteries/capacitors.
It is also probable that carbon nanotubes may be incompatible with bacterial degradation because the nanotubes could puncture the cell wall of the bacteria presumably leading to ion gradient disruptions. There may be similarities between possible toxicity of asbestos fibers and nanotubes. It is unclear (to me) whether animal immune systems may respond differently to smooth carbon surfaces compared with rough magnesium/iron silicate surfaces.
Be that as it may, disposal of carbon nanotubes is easy using incineration though in practice it would probably be much more useful to develop methods for recycling them. Given the structure of nanotubes it is unlikely they would suffer much degradation over time (probably leading to long battery/capacitor lifetimes).
I don't remember. It may have filed it and I may have received a note that it didn't contain enough information. Bug reports without full symbol traceback information are pretty useless most of the time. I'm in the process of rebuilding all of the latest libraries with debugging but thats always a multi-day process unfortunately (and not one that I would guess the average user would undertake). If one gets a SEGV after running the browser a couple of days in the middle of a complex session its probably a memory corruption problem -- and likely only able to be debugged by a few core developers who understand everything thats in the heap. I don't use a lot of Epiphany plugins and generally ditched most of my Firefox plugins because they contributed to heap fragmentation/memory loss (even the Flash player from Adobe since that tended to fault). I'll be leaning towards the first browser that gets a robust bookmark system as neither Epiphany nor Firefox (2.0 *or* 3.0a7pre) are anything I'd consider to be worthy of the label "production".
Well, security holes and crashes are somewhat orthogonal to each other. In systems where instruction space is separate from and protected from data space and the kernel space is separate from the user space it isn't clear how bad security can get in practice. Browsers I suspect are more vulnerable if one has plugins that can gain access to the user data space (form entry strings, user files, etc.). Installation of any binary packages is problematic (the greatest risk in an open source world would be compromised mirrors IMO).
There is a lot of attention on (and tracking of) potential security holes (buffer overflows, etc.) and differences between such holes in IE vs. Firefox, rates of security patches in various closed source systems vs. open source systems (and then distribution through open source distributors) -- but from someone on the outside, such as myself, there seems to be a lot of handwaving and very little detail on how real problems are put into web sites or emails and infect "real" protected user systems (which Unix/Linux/BSD systems have always tended to be) and which Windows (e.g. Vista) is slowly becoming. I suspect the real security experts know how one might make such attempts (root kits, etc.) but no "real world" "real risk" statistics seem to be available even for people who are regular/. readers.
No self-respecting advanced technological civilization would bury significant amounts of useful matter at the center of a planet. They would instead construct objects filled with fiber optic cables to carry large amounts of data between all of the computational nodes. The compute nodes have to be on the surface because they have to radiate away the heat they generate but the central part of the Jupiter Brain (aka Borg sphere) should have a density low enough that gravitational compression doesn't distort the one-to-many point-to-point transmission over the fibers.
The difference between a Jupiter Brain and a Matrioshka Brain is that the center of a Jupiter Brain is not running off of a gravitationally bound and driven fusion reactor (aka "star"). Most of the energy used by the Jupiter Brain comes from the external solar energy it absorbs (though in theory it could house a number of "small" fusion reactors fueled by hydrogen or helium siphoned from the nearby star).
Side note to the Dyson "Sphere" advocates -- classical "spheres" are impossible (you've been watching too much Star Trek) -- Dyson never used the word "sphere" and made a point of clarifying this in his response to the letters following his original paper. A better term to avoid confusion is a "Dyson shell".
If the point of this item is to point out bugs in IE it isn't alone. I crashed a large Epiphany session with a segmentation violation a couple of days ago and its relatively easy to crash Firefox if you limit the amount of memory available using ulimit (Firefox doesn't catch "early" C++ memory allocation failures and handle them gracefully). Firefox also has the infamous "window unexpectedly destroyed" bug (#263160) for ~3 years (which will crash the browser if you attempt to close the untitled window).
I suspect all of the Mozilla based browsers will effectively die if one throws enough "heavyweight" pages at them (i.e. those which are activity heavy [because there isn't a Javascript/Active HTML/Animated GIF scheduler]) or run out of swap space (again because memory allocation failures are not handled gracefully).
IMO, developers place too much emphasis on feature enhancements rather than making the existing browsers run reliably (bugs shouldn't linger for 3 years), with a minimal machine footprint (Netscape 4.7x required significantly less memory than Firefox) and effective priority scheduling of the "top" window (user responsiveness).
It is an extreme stretch to label a "massive" object around an old star light years away a "planet". It could just as well be a Jupiter Brain. The only things which are known about exo-"planets" are their orbital periods and in various cases their mass (for wobble planets) or their radius (for transit planets). We *assume* that such objects are "natural" and therefore must be "planets" but the older the star the less likely it is that any initial planets would have remained in their "natural" state or that they are planets at all. I can accept planets growing in protostar nebulas but any other "massive object" orbiting other stars could be something else entirely. Say a Borg sphere sent to collect essential elements being blown out of a red giant [1].
Much more interesting if these spheres are running around the galaxy are the questions of where and when did they originate? And when will they arrive *here*? [2]
Too many astronomers steeped in the traditions of a natural (dead) universe and Occam's razor fall into the anthropocentric swamps based on assumptions that nothing we observe can possibly have been engineered.
1. Old stars have significantly higher fractions of heavier elements (say from carbon through iron) and it is not unreasonable for advanced technological civilizations to send mining expeditions to such stars to harvest these resources (because manufacturing them in solar system sized particle accelerators is likely to be very expensive from an energy standpoint). 2. Fortunately our solar system, due to the youth of the sun, is relatively low on the list of essential resource rich targets.
Unless humanity and its derivatives evolve to the point of self-extinction of some insurmountable galactic event wipes out the solar system (e.g. a rogue black hole swallows the entire system) the sun will *never* become a red giant.
People do *not* understand that once a civilization has become an "advanced technological civilization" (as we are), natural technology developments, esp. molecular nanotechnology, enable the dismantlement of the planets (think swarms of nanorobot miners) and the conversion of the solar system into a Matrioshka Brain. During that time period (centuries to a few million years) a materials shortage develops (one needs *all* those atoms when one starts storing zettabytes and yottabytes of data) and the closest available materials are all harvested -- including a significant fraction of the sun! Remove the material from the sun and it goes from being a G class star to an M class star with a significantly longer lifetime (hundreds of billions of years). The most probable situation in an engineered system is to extract and store much of the Sun's hydrogen and add it back to the star gradually producing a relatively constant fusion reactor power source for a several trillion years. During that time period we have presumably figured out how to navigate the solar system to enable close encounters with undeveloped star systems where we can pick up additional hydrogen resources extending the lifetime of our sun (and the surrounding Matrioshka Brain) until the energy resources of the galaxy are exhausted.
Once intelligent life arrives on the scene all natural evolutionary vectors (e.g. natural stellar and galactic evolution) are subject to modification. A far more interesting topic for conversation, IMO,is *why*, if 60-70% of the Earth's in our galaxy are significantly older than ours have they not made the KT-I to KT-II transition (converting their systems into Matrioshka Brains in the process)? Or have they? [1]. Note that this is somewhat different from the classical Fermi Question, "Where are they?", which is really derived from "Why aren't they here?" or "Why haven't we heard from them?" and is instead the more modern variant, "Why don't we see more stars disappearing?" Matrioshka Brains can navigate around the galaxy but they don't go solar system hopping on a whim.
1. "Dark matter" can be explained by the activities of advanced technological civilizations if one sets aside the arguments of theoretical physicists which depend in large part on assumptions of a "natural" universe. I've never observed a theoretical physicist sit down at a table and say, (a) here is a natural (dead) universe and (b) here is a universe developed to its full potential by intelligent civilizations and (c) there must be a phase transition from a dead universe to an engineered universe -- what do our observations tell us about its current state as we look back through its history? Cosmological discussions are inherently incomplete unless they incorporate how intelligence alters the nature of the universe.
The problem seems to be that "nice" doesn't seem to kick in until after some CPU time has accumulated -- out of the starting gates processes seem to get to monopolize the CPU (perhaps for seconds).
There is a recent paper from some researchers at IBM on how to develop programs to monopolize the CPU under Linux. I haven't read it yet but I suspect the way it would work is to setup a shared memory region with the program data and then continually re-exec the executable file with the shared data. Or perhaps continually fork and have the parent exit. So long as the run time of the process is below the time required for "nicing" to have an impact the program will hog the CPU to the detriment of programs which may have run a long time (e.g. mplayer, the X-server, etc.).
Of course this is somewhat speculation on my part based on personal observations (rather than digging through the code for hours). YMMV.
The first computer system I ever used was Version 6 running on a PDP 11/45 in a timesharing environment where they had to attempt to maintain performance for 30+ simultaneous users -- I think I have a good feel for what a system running at full (optimal) capacity should look like -- one sign is that the swap disk is busy 100% of the time. If your system is configured properly (I've got 2 swap partitions on separate drives) then in an ideal situation both of them should be busy when main memory is in short supply. (Ideally, a background process would be migrating swap pages from the most busy to the least busy swap partition -- but I doubt Linux is that sophisticated.)
This is *NOT* the behavior I observe under Linux (Gentoo releases 2.6.12 thru 2.6.20). For the most part vmstat is reporting relatively low si rates and even lower so rates (nothing near the capacity of the drives). I believe this is due to a tuning of the kernel to not overload the drives with swapping since this would function to the detriment of user I/O in a server type environment.
And *yes*, I'm aware that Firefox is a memory pig and its internal memory management should be rewritten so that long running instantiations do not accumulate large fragmented heaps that promote excessive paging in most situations when memory needs to be allocated or deallocated [1]. But *that* is a different problem from the fact that on a single user desktop system when memory is in short supply I would expect to see *much* higher rates of CPU use and disk I/O. I *know* what a busy system looks like. If one restarts a 500+ tab firefox session (with hundreds of megabytes of main memory available) the CPU & Network use both go to 100% (for up to 15 minutes) -- but as soon as you've reached 100% memory utilization (one or more firefox instances + openoffice + a few evinces and/or acroreads + dozens of gnome-terminals + apache + mysql + all of the standard linux service processes) user perceived performance goes down the tubes.
A new process scheduler may improve some of this (so maybe I won't have to set mplayer up as a root process running at nice --19 locked into memory) but I doubt it will have much impact on paging performance. I can't be certain because I haven't tried it yet.
1. I already added an extra gigabyte of memory to my desktop machine (now @ 1.5 GB) to get the same performance in Firefox 2.0.X that I was getting in Netscape 4.72 under Windows 2000 with 256MB of memory. Of course Netscape 4.72 was designed in an era when one didn't have many desktop machines with 1+ GB of main memory or a need to do anything other than simply *display* some text. [2]. 2. Some people think allowing unknown entities to run programs on their machine (Javascript, AJAX(?) and other "active" HTML variants, etc.) is a good idea. I think its yet another recipe for having millions more computers hijacked for nefarious purposes.
I hope you've got a plan laid out for how to explain to your son that he is going to have to clean up the mess that you (our?) generation created.
Last time I checked, eskimos and desert tribes were able to live in the temperature extremes you describe. What you are saying is that you want your lifestyle at your current comfort level at the expense of the planet (and many others on the planet). With respect to mother & sister visits -- thats what webcams are for. Compare the costs of a webcam (even with a computer) with multiple multi-hundred mile "field trips". The concept of having to visit family often is a "child of the car age" meme. The people who colonized the U.S. or struck out for the gold fields of California or Alaska probably expected never to see their families again. They had a substitute that worked fine. They wrote letters.
Without the discussion decaying into a long tit-for-tat, humanity as a whole is facing the problem of how do we (collectively) create a sustainable path forward. As one of the other URL's cited points out, at least in the U.S., switching to plug-in electrics doesn't do *that* much to make us "green" because most of the electricity is derived from non-green coal. Hydrogen is clean but it isn't currently "green". So long as you are taking reduced carbon out of the ground and translating it into oxidized carbon in the atmosphere one is not living in a sustainable fashion. To have a sustainable path forward requires a complete switch completely to solar which comes in a variety of forms, e.g. biodiesel, bioethanol, photovoltaic, solar-thermal, hydroelectric or wind [1].
The problem facing the U.S. and to a lesser extent many developed countries [2] is that they are unwilling to make the sacrifices and investment necessary over a couple of decades to fix this problem permanently [3]. If we were we would leave our children with a much better planet and they would be telling us, "Gee Mom & Dad, you did good."
1. Nuclear is perhaps sustainable but only if you are using (a) breeder reactors; (b) a thorium fuel cycle; or (c) fusion -- and none of those are currently on the table. 2. Though the argument can be made that Europe and especially Japan are able to maintain similar levels of living standards with significantly lower J/person/year energy requirements. 3. One only has to look at what the U.S. accomplished in WW II (or the Apollo Project) when it *had* to be done. A similar attitude shift could likely solve the problem in a similar time frame. Instead we seem to be playing around on the edges under the mistaken impression that hydrogen will solve all these problems when it doesn't do so at all.
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The puzzle to explain the missing mass may well fail until physicists, whose explanations depend upon a "dead" universe, evolves to encompass the fact that the universe may well have made a "dead" to "live" transition, and therefore a "physics controlled" vs. "intelligence controlled" transition sometime a few billion, but perhaps as much as 6-8 billion years ago. This is documented by Lineweaver's group in dealing with the fact that most of the Earths in our Galaxy are *older* than our own. We are the latecomers. Until the physicists wake up to this fact everything they are spouting is suspect.
Until physicists and astronomers incorporate ideas such as Dyson Shells or Matrioshka Brains into their thinking (and seek to prove or disprove them) then all of the speculation about dark matter is just yada yada yada. The dark matter can easily be explained by Matrioshka Brains who have left their galaxies.
The universe has intelligence in it (we being the case in point). Unless theories about the evolution of the universe incorporate theories about the evolution of intelligence and civilizations they are clearly missing part of the equation.
The purpose of the HTTP protocol on the WWW is to DISPLAY pages composed of images and text.
It never had to be any more complex than that (and wasn't until Javascript reared its ugly head).
Now, many web sites are directly or indirectly seeking to take control of your machine (google-analytics comes to mind) by downloading programs onto your computer and running them through your web browser.
Its *My computer*. Its *My memory*. Its *My CPU time*.
Thou shalt not use it (or steal it) without my previous permission [1].
And that is why my primary Web browser is Firefox with NoScript enabled for all sites except a few, such as gmail, where javascript is actually required.
It is for these reasons that I view scripting languages attached to web pages as EVIL. Only when all scripting applications say "may I run on your machine (and this is what I will do)" will one have an acceptable paradigm.
1. I would love to see a class action suit by people running unused CPU cycle programs, e.g. Folding@Home, SETI@Home (which is useless), and the many other @Home derivatives against web sites, perhaps even Google, for downloading "programs" which will consume memory and CPU time *without* my permission.
I do not think the Apple strategy will fly. It is easy enough to purchase prepaid credit cards and to use those to purchase iPhones. They may add a level of indirection but I doubt they will be able to prevent it.
If technology is driving down the cost of hardware (circuit complexity increasing by 2x every 2 years -- classic Moore's Law according to Wikipedia). Meaning you can compress data at a lower cost, you can transmit more data at a lower cost. Then why should not communications costs be declining at that same rate? I could care less if I get video on demand. My voice comununications should be almost free. The challenge to AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, etc. is why our bills (adjusted for quantity of data delivered) should not be declining by at least 1/2 every 2 years.
Apple can sell a fancy phone, whose advanced features I do not have to use. Lower the costs of my minimal connectivity. That is all I (as someone 51 y.o) needs to have I mean *really* what the hell does an iPhone provide that an easily available terminal cannot provide. And if you do not have an easily available terminal -- where the hell are you living? (And as a brief aside I have had dinner with Steve Jobs -- though I respect him as an individual I wasn't that impressed.) I would cite Google as being much more likely to change the playing field than Apple at the current time. It could strongly be argued that Apple has sold out to AT&T. Fortunately the hackers will defeat their efforts to completely manipulate their technology -- which customers have purchased. My hardware. My right to program it for my purposes. Claim otherwise. You will lose.
If there are no current real world applications that are programmed for or depend on quantum computers, the proper response is "so what?"
I do not care about quantum computing.
There are perhaps a bunch of nerds in the basement of buildings in Virginia that may.
There may also be a few people in skyscrapers in Manhatten that may.
But for hundreds of millions, perhaps pushing a billion of other computer users around the world this is meaningless noise.
To wit "As we were discussing, Gran Paradiso -- the latest version of Firefox -- is nearing release."
They have not fixed the infamous "untitled window" problem, which is pretty clearly defined at this state. I believe that problem has been documented for over 3 years! I can also take Firefox down in a number of ways by simply ulimiting the amount of available memory.
Any individual who views "Gran Paradiso", as it currently exists as a "quality product" should be put up on stake in Yugoslavia, Romania, *wherever*, and I will be more than happy to fire bullets as they are slowly being impaled.
I made a similar observation at Oracle over 20 years ago, it worked pretty well then but now people may be more comfortable with being impaled now.. Or perhaps they are simply more comfortable with releasing crap.
Assertion. Release a new version of Firefox when you have all of the old bugs fixed. Otherwise you are playing off of the developer egos to release the next "new great thing" --- and they are so transparent to some of us who have been around for a while.
The governments of the world can regulate access to space all they want. And they can effectively get away with it so long as one is sending humans into space. But once one has nanorobots at ones disposal that control ends. In that era they are going to have a piss poor time regulating space colonization. Rocket science is rocket science and I don't have to be an Astronaut Farmer if I'm launching nanorobots. And then, once I've got a few dozen asteroids under my control, the U.S. government (or any other government for that matter), can take their "global" treaties and make wall paper out of them.
The Mars Rovers have been running for ~3 years. They pale in comparison to what robust molecular nanotechnology could do. And that doesn't require a Delta 2 launch vehicle or NASA or a multi-hundred million dollar budget (or the permission of various governments) to get into space. Space is *ours* (humanitity's),and not the province of various self-interested elected (or non-elected) assemblies.
I have twice brought the Linux kernel to its knees. To the extent that it was not even able to move the mouse cursor around on the screen. And I would argue that a "desktop" system that cannot move the mouse cursor around is not a "desktop" system.
And it is very easy to reproduce this. Create an 8 GB swap partition. Then execute a self-reinvoking shell script. Mind you I am *not* reccomeding one try this. This is a recipe for dragging ones machine into the depths of hell.
The fact that the designers of Linux have failed to perform sufficient "limits testing" (and performance under stress on the desktop) is a testimony to what they really need to do. It is simple, "Break Linux" and have it still perform.
He should have just undergone cryonic suspension, in which case when he was revived he could pick up where he left off (for better or worse)...
(And for those of you chuckling in the wings in disbelief (with respect to whether cryonic suspension and reanimation will work -- I am more than willing to go head to head with you on the mats on that count.)
The failure to consider and recommend cryonic suspension as an option (compared with being buried or incinerated) is killing far more people a year that George W. Bush is. One is only really "dead" when the molecular disassembly process is complete. Before that point of existence, you are simply less alive.
If this comment is accurate, it is an extremely poor reflection of the understanding of what serious people desire on the web. Indeed it could be deemed a Web 2.0 benchmark.
I am both a programmer and an academic and consider the web to be an information resource. I do not care about Web 2.0 at all. My primary interests are in BBS/blog/Wiki posts involving people who have or have solved problems and the static display of abstracts and papers of people who have devoted serious thought to problems. Static ads are not too disturbing (in my peripheral vision) and are even sometimes useful. I usually browse the web with Javascript entirely disabled except for trusted and useful sites. As a programmer I have no trust for what happens when you allow others to run programs on your machine (vs. controlled drawing on ones monitor which is what HTML does).
It is *my* computer and it should be doing what *I* desire. Not what some idiot marketing person in some corporate bureaucracy (or some virus writer in Eastern Europe) desires. Unfortunately all too many web sites are starting to take the perspective that
A proper benchmark (from my perspective) would be the load and display time for several hundred pages from a variety of websites. In this respect Firefox falls down severely (I cannot comment on Opera). I have seen Firefox take over 15 minutes of maxed out CPU time and nearly maxed network use to reload a complex failed session. This is a real world requirement if for various reasons one has to restart ones machine or ones browser due to real world "glitches" (or buggy software). (For example I've seen the Flash plug-in crash firefox which would require a session restart).
Javascript benchmarks are a small subset of what browsers should do. For me their primary purpose should be to efficiently download and display simple text and images.
Perhaps. While molecular dynamics simulations are inherently "quantum", I have yet to see a paper which proposes how to solve the equations using a quantum compute and Perhaps a chicken and egg situation. Perhaps after multi-Qubit computers are common one will see attempts at having them perform molecular dynamics simulations. Until then, the equations for molecular simulations are reasonably well defined (electrostatic interactions between nuclei surrounded by electron clouds in motion). A non-trivial computational problem but one which we can understand from a theoretical perspective and model reasonably accurately. It is somewhat similar to simulations involving the formation of solar systems but at a much different scale.
For those who actually understand real molecular nanotechnology, aka "Drexlerian" nanotechnology, you may understand that one of the real "breakthroughs" comes when you can computationally simulate the function of a 4 to 8 million atom molecular nanoassembler. Because if you can simulate one and prove that it does not violate any laws of physics then one of the classical oppositions to real molecular nanotechnology falls [1]. The argument transitions entirely from "it can't work" (common among people oriented towards "dissing" nanotech) to "you can't build one" . And as DRM, the iPhone restrictions, etc. have all shown "can't" is very swampy territory to wade into.
Now, I know if I've got 8 million cores, such a simulation is probably feasible (and presumably bandwidth limited by hypertransport data transfer rates) so the question transitions to how many atoms can one core handle and that in turn transitions to how effective the instruction set is at performing the math required for molecular dynamics simulations. So, is SSE5 any better than this or should I be lobbying AMD for SSE6 which is explicitly targeted at molecular dynamics simulations? It is not the market for business computing but it is the market that potentially millions of "nanoengineers" will fall into.
It also goes without saying that the chip manufacturers and ubergamers and SecondLife participants all have a high interest in achieving this because pushing below ~32nm using current technology is going to get very dicey at which point Moore's Law is going to have to shift from bulk atom assembly (current lithography methods) to precision atom assembly (real molecular nanoassembly).
1. There is a third argument against the simulation of a molecular nanoassembler. The argument that an atom specific design for a 4-8 million atom nanoassembler does not currently exist. The best one can point to is a few thousand atom Fine Motion Controller (http://www.imm.org/research/parts/controller/) designed by Drexler and Merkle. However the Nanoengineer software (http://www.nanoengineer-1.com/content/) from Nanorex allows one to design elements of an actual nanoassembler. If even a mere one thousand /. readers were to add 1 atom a day to the design in a distributed open source NanoAtHome.org (http://www.nanoathome.org/) type project -- the design would be complete within 1-2 years (there is a significant amount of redundancy and therefore human intellect amplification in the atom placement in a nanoassembler). You can't simulate it without designing it first -- but if one can design 400 million transistor microprocessors then designing an 8 million atom nanoassembler shouldn't be that difficult.
The point would be that we have been engineering microorganisms with human designed and manufactured DNA, by your definition "artificial life", for decades, . Such exercises are done at hundreds of universities and companies on a regular basis. Once the sequences have been read (and over a thousand of them are now sitting in databases) the only real barrier to assembling a synthetic genome is cost. And this group hasn't even done that -- all they did was move a genome into a foreign house. And bacterial viruses have been doing that for billions of years.
No, no, no. You can of course start with "nature's building blocks" but you don't have to start there. Feynman and Drexler made that perfectly clear. There is "Plenty of Room at the Bottom". And taking a bunch of furniture out of one house and moving it into another house is not what I would classify as a brilliant achievement. Indeed, I suspect one would have to really work determining those cases where one cannot move the furniture from one house to another.
And it is not a given that the first wetware implementation of artificial life will require the cumbersome machinery that nature has left us with. The key point is that it is *NOT* "artificial" if you are using nature's building blocks. You did not sit down at a computer, you did not design the enzymes, you did not synthesize the DNA in the lab to produce those enzymes, you did not test them to verify how well they worked and so on and so forth.
You are operating from the perspective that conscious minds could not come up with a significantly better system than that which nature has handed to us using its trail and error processes. I would hate to think that is the case.
There is a line in "Chorus Line" where the individual says "I can do that". That is what one has here. I can emplace some DNA and have the existing machinery copy that DNA so as to produce more bacteria. The principles behind this have been known for decades.
I don't have a particular attachment to my current instantiation. A copy is a copy is a copy. And if it had really identical memories I don't see how he (I) would realize that he (I) was a copy. I do realize of course that there are people who don't happen to feel this way.
The problem with this news article is that most people hearing about it and commenting on it are clueless with respect to what it means and doesn't mean.
It means that someone walked into your house took all the old furniture out and replaced it with a whole bunch of different but similar furniture so that when you got home in the evening you could still sit down on the couch and watch TV.
So what everyone is going gaga over is the fact that the movers can take furniture out and replace it with different furniture. To be honest, I'm not that impressed. It has *nothing* to do with synthetic life, artificial life, etc. because they are *still* using the few hundred enzymes that nature had to evolve over billions of years. They didn't sit down and design a totally new basis for self-replicating systems that can survive in our "real" world and make a copy of itself. The hard drive in your computer is significantly more impressive. It has more parts and using a single command I can get it to copy itself. And *we* humans had to design every single circuit and craft every single part in it. Now *thats* something to be impressed with.
While the cellulose in the paper may be biodegradable I strongly suspect the carbon nanotubes are not! Carbon nanotubes do not naturally exist in nature and its doubtful that enzymes would have evolved to degrade them. One can probably only attack them from the end and even then its seems iffy (the nanotube has to fit precisely into an enzyme active site designed to attack it). It remains to be seen whether we will be able to develop enzymes that will effectively degrade (or synthesize) carbon nanotubes. If one could one would see a lot more use of them in applications such as batteries/capacitors.
It is also probable that carbon nanotubes may be incompatible with bacterial degradation because the nanotubes could puncture the cell wall of the bacteria presumably leading to ion gradient disruptions. There may be similarities between possible toxicity of asbestos fibers and nanotubes. It is unclear (to me) whether animal immune systems may respond differently to smooth carbon surfaces compared with rough magnesium/iron silicate surfaces.
Be that as it may, disposal of carbon nanotubes is easy using incineration though in practice it would probably be much more useful to develop methods for recycling them. Given the structure of nanotubes it is unlikely they would suffer much degradation over time (probably leading to long battery/capacitor lifetimes).
I don't remember. It may have filed it and I may have received a note that it didn't contain enough information. Bug reports without full symbol traceback information are pretty useless most of the time. I'm in the process of rebuilding all of the latest libraries with debugging but thats always a multi-day process unfortunately (and not one that I would guess the average user would undertake). If one gets a SEGV after running the browser a couple of days in the middle of a complex session its probably a memory corruption problem -- and likely only able to be debugged by a few core developers who understand everything thats in the heap. I don't use a lot of Epiphany plugins and generally ditched most of my Firefox plugins because they contributed to heap fragmentation/memory loss (even the Flash player from Adobe since that tended to fault). I'll be leaning towards the first browser that gets a robust bookmark system as neither Epiphany nor Firefox (2.0 *or* 3.0a7pre) are anything I'd consider to be worthy of the label "production".
Well, security holes and crashes are somewhat orthogonal to each other. In systems where instruction space is separate from and protected from data space and the kernel space is separate from the user space it isn't clear how bad security can get in practice. Browsers I suspect are more vulnerable if one has plugins that can gain access to the user data space (form entry strings, user files, etc.). Installation of any binary packages is problematic (the greatest risk in an open source world would be compromised mirrors IMO).
/. readers.
There is a lot of attention on (and tracking of) potential security holes (buffer overflows, etc.) and differences between such holes in IE vs. Firefox, rates of security patches in various closed source systems vs. open source systems (and then distribution through open source distributors) -- but from someone on the outside, such as myself, there seems to be a lot of handwaving and very little detail on how real problems are put into web sites or emails and infect "real" protected user systems (which Unix/Linux/BSD systems have always tended to be) and which Windows (e.g. Vista) is slowly becoming. I suspect the real security experts know how one might make such attempts (root kits, etc.) but no "real world" "real risk" statistics seem to be available even for people who are regular
No self-respecting advanced technological civilization would bury significant amounts of useful matter at the center of a planet. They would instead construct objects filled with fiber optic cables to carry large amounts of data between all of the computational nodes. The compute nodes have to be on the surface because they have to radiate away the heat they generate but the central part of the Jupiter Brain (aka Borg sphere) should have a density low enough that gravitational compression doesn't distort the one-to-many point-to-point transmission over the fibers.
The difference between a Jupiter Brain and a Matrioshka Brain is that the center of a Jupiter Brain is not running off of a gravitationally bound and driven fusion reactor (aka "star"). Most of the energy used by the Jupiter Brain comes from the external solar energy it absorbs (though in theory it could house a number of "small" fusion reactors fueled by hydrogen or helium siphoned from the nearby star).
Side note to the Dyson "Sphere" advocates -- classical "spheres" are impossible (you've been watching too much Star Trek) -- Dyson never used the word "sphere" and made a point of clarifying this in his response to the letters following his original paper. A better term to avoid confusion is a "Dyson shell".
If the point of this item is to point out bugs in IE it isn't alone. I crashed a large Epiphany session with a segmentation violation a couple of days ago and its relatively easy to crash Firefox if you limit the amount of memory available using ulimit (Firefox doesn't catch "early" C++ memory allocation failures and handle them gracefully). Firefox also has the infamous "window unexpectedly destroyed" bug (#263160) for ~3 years (which will crash the browser if you attempt to close the untitled window).
I suspect all of the Mozilla based browsers will effectively die if one throws enough "heavyweight" pages at them (i.e. those which are activity heavy [because there isn't a Javascript/Active HTML/Animated GIF scheduler]) or run out of swap space (again because memory allocation failures are not handled gracefully).
IMO, developers place too much emphasis on feature enhancements rather than making the existing browsers run reliably (bugs shouldn't linger for 3 years), with a minimal machine footprint (Netscape 4.7x required significantly less memory than Firefox) and effective priority scheduling of the "top" window (user responsiveness).
It is an extreme stretch to label a "massive" object around an old star light years away a "planet". It could just as well be a Jupiter Brain. The only things which are known about exo-"planets" are their orbital periods and in various cases their mass (for wobble planets) or their radius (for transit planets). We *assume* that such objects are "natural" and therefore must be "planets" but the older the star the less likely it is that any initial planets would have remained in their "natural" state or that they are planets at all. I can accept planets growing in protostar nebulas but any other "massive object" orbiting other stars could be something else entirely. Say a Borg sphere sent to collect essential elements being blown out of a red giant [1].
Much more interesting if these spheres are running around the galaxy are the questions of where and when did they originate? And when will they arrive *here*? [2]
Too many astronomers steeped in the traditions of a natural (dead) universe and Occam's razor fall into the anthropocentric swamps based on assumptions that nothing we observe can possibly have been engineered.
1. Old stars have significantly higher fractions of heavier elements (say from carbon through iron) and it is not unreasonable for advanced technological civilizations to send mining expeditions to such stars to harvest these resources (because manufacturing them in solar system sized particle accelerators is likely to be very expensive from an energy standpoint).
2. Fortunately our solar system, due to the youth of the sun, is relatively low on the list of essential resource rich targets.
Unless humanity and its derivatives evolve to the point of self-extinction of some insurmountable galactic event wipes out the solar system (e.g. a rogue black hole swallows the entire system) the sun will *never* become a red giant.
People do *not* understand that once a civilization has become an "advanced technological civilization" (as we are), natural technology developments, esp. molecular nanotechnology, enable the dismantlement of the planets (think swarms of nanorobot miners) and the conversion of the solar system into a Matrioshka Brain. During that time period (centuries to a few million years) a materials shortage develops (one needs *all* those atoms when one starts storing zettabytes and yottabytes of data) and the closest available materials are all harvested -- including a significant fraction of the sun! Remove the material from the sun and it goes from being a G class star to an M class star with a significantly longer lifetime (hundreds of billions of years). The most probable situation in an engineered system is to extract and store much of the Sun's hydrogen and add it back to the star gradually producing a relatively constant fusion reactor power source for a several trillion years. During that time period we have presumably figured out how to navigate the solar system to enable close encounters with undeveloped star systems where we can pick up additional hydrogen resources extending the lifetime of our sun (and the surrounding Matrioshka Brain) until the energy resources of the galaxy are exhausted.
Once intelligent life arrives on the scene all natural evolutionary vectors (e.g. natural stellar and galactic evolution) are subject to modification. A far more interesting topic for conversation, IMO,is *why*, if 60-70% of the Earth's in our galaxy are significantly older than ours have they not made the KT-I to KT-II transition (converting their systems into Matrioshka Brains in the process)? Or have they? [1]. Note that this is somewhat different from the classical Fermi Question, "Where are they?", which is really derived from "Why aren't they here?" or "Why haven't we heard from them?" and is instead the more modern variant, "Why don't we see more stars disappearing?" Matrioshka Brains can navigate around the galaxy but they don't go solar system hopping on a whim.
1. "Dark matter" can be explained by the activities of advanced technological civilizations if one sets aside the arguments of theoretical physicists which depend in large part on assumptions of a "natural" universe. I've never observed a theoretical physicist sit down at a table and say, (a) here is a natural (dead) universe and (b) here is a universe developed to its full potential by intelligent civilizations and (c) there must be a phase transition from a dead universe to an engineered universe -- what do our observations tell us about its current state as we look back through its history? Cosmological discussions are inherently incomplete unless they incorporate how intelligence alters the nature of the universe.
The problem seems to be that "nice" doesn't seem to kick in until after some CPU time has accumulated -- out of the starting gates processes seem to get to monopolize the CPU (perhaps for seconds).
There is a recent paper from some researchers at IBM on how to develop programs to monopolize the CPU under Linux. I haven't read it yet but I suspect the way it would work is to setup a shared memory region with the program data and then continually re-exec the executable file with the shared data. Or perhaps continually fork and have the parent exit. So long as the run time of the process is below the time required for "nicing" to have an impact the program will hog the CPU to the detriment of programs which may have run a long time (e.g. mplayer, the X-server, etc.).
Of course this is somewhat speculation on my part based on personal observations (rather than digging through the code for hours). YMMV.
The first computer system I ever used was Version 6 running on a PDP 11/45 in a timesharing environment where they had to attempt to maintain performance for 30+ simultaneous users -- I think I have a good feel for what a system running at full (optimal) capacity should look like -- one sign is that the swap disk is busy 100% of the time. If your system is configured properly (I've got 2 swap partitions on separate drives) then in an ideal situation both of them should be busy when main memory is in short supply. (Ideally, a background process would be migrating swap pages from the most busy to the least busy swap partition -- but I doubt Linux is that sophisticated.)
This is *NOT* the behavior I observe under Linux (Gentoo releases 2.6.12 thru 2.6.20). For the most part vmstat is reporting relatively low si rates and even lower so rates (nothing near the capacity of the drives). I believe this is due to a tuning of the kernel to not overload the drives with swapping since this would function to the detriment of user I/O in a server type environment.
And *yes*, I'm aware that Firefox is a memory pig and its internal memory management should be rewritten so that long running instantiations do not accumulate large fragmented heaps that promote excessive paging in most situations when memory needs to be allocated or deallocated [1]. But *that* is a different problem from the fact that on a single user desktop system when memory is in short supply I would expect to see *much* higher rates of CPU use and disk I/O. I *know* what a busy system looks like. If one restarts a 500+ tab firefox session (with hundreds of megabytes of main memory available) the CPU & Network use both go to 100% (for up to 15 minutes) -- but as soon as you've reached 100% memory utilization (one or more firefox instances + openoffice + a few evinces and/or acroreads + dozens of gnome-terminals + apache + mysql + all of the standard linux service processes) user perceived performance goes down the tubes.
A new process scheduler may improve some of this (so maybe I won't have to set mplayer up as a root process running at nice --19 locked into memory) but I doubt it will have much impact on paging performance. I can't be certain because I haven't tried it yet.
1. I already added an extra gigabyte of memory to my desktop machine (now @ 1.5 GB) to get the same performance in Firefox 2.0.X that I was getting in Netscape 4.72 under Windows 2000 with 256MB of memory. Of course Netscape 4.72 was designed in an era when one didn't have many desktop machines with 1+ GB of main memory or a need to do anything other than simply *display* some text. [2].
2. Some people think allowing unknown entities to run programs on their machine (Javascript, AJAX(?) and other "active" HTML variants, etc.) is a good idea. I think its yet another recipe for having millions more computers hijacked for nefarious purposes.
I hope you've got a plan laid out for how to explain to your son that he is going to have to clean up the mess that you (our?) generation created.
Last time I checked, eskimos and desert tribes were able to live in the temperature extremes you describe. What you are saying is that you want your lifestyle at your current comfort level at the expense of the planet (and many others on the planet). With respect to mother & sister visits -- thats what webcams are for. Compare the costs of a webcam (even with a computer) with multiple multi-hundred mile "field trips". The concept of having to visit family often is a "child of the car age" meme. The people who colonized the U.S. or struck out for the gold fields of California or Alaska probably expected never to see their families again. They had a substitute that worked fine. They wrote letters.
Without the discussion decaying into a long tit-for-tat, humanity as a whole is facing the problem of how do we (collectively) create a sustainable path forward. As one of the other URL's cited points out, at least in the U.S., switching to plug-in electrics doesn't do *that* much to make us "green" because most of the electricity is derived from non-green coal. Hydrogen is clean but it isn't currently "green". So long as you are taking reduced carbon out of the ground and translating it into oxidized carbon in the atmosphere one is not living in a sustainable fashion. To have a sustainable path forward requires a complete switch completely to solar which comes in a variety of forms, e.g. biodiesel, bioethanol, photovoltaic, solar-thermal, hydroelectric or wind [1].
The problem facing the U.S. and to a lesser extent many developed countries [2] is that they are unwilling to make the sacrifices and investment necessary over a couple of decades to fix this problem permanently [3]. If we were we would leave our children with a much better planet and they would be telling us, "Gee Mom & Dad, you did good."
1. Nuclear is perhaps sustainable but only if you are using (a) breeder reactors; (b) a thorium fuel cycle; or (c) fusion -- and none of those are currently on the table.
2. Though the argument can be made that Europe and especially Japan are able to maintain similar levels of living standards with significantly lower J/person/year energy requirements.
3. One only has to look at what the U.S. accomplished in WW II (or the Apollo Project) when it *had* to be done. A similar attitude shift could likely solve the problem in a similar time frame. Instead we seem to be playing around on the edges under the mistaken impression that hydrogen will solve all these problems when it doesn't do so at all.