if they already exist and make heaps of more sense than the space solar power station why aren't we already building our infrastructure around them?
Because it's currently cheaper to scoop dirt out of the ground and burn it. It's cheaper because the external costs of fossil fuels are not incorporated into the consumer price as they should be.
BTW, it's also cheaper (by a far bigger margin) to burn dirt than to launch hundreds of square miles of satellites. If it weren't, then why aren't we doing that already, hmmm?
Your logic is impeccable. There are some new ideas that worked, therefore every new idea must work. Especially the most costly, fragile and unwieldy ones we can dream up when straightforward alternatives already exist.
No, if we listen to people like you with your unrealistic space solar power pipe dreams, then we'll never have the resources to implement practical earth-based solar power.
*You* are the one who will be personally responsible for all the poor starving babies and puppies.
Yeah, and a trip to the west coast after the Lewis and Clark expedition would only have been for historical reasons and maybe bring back a few more notes.
If Lewis and Clark had come back reporting that there was nothing on the west coast but dust, no economically extractable minerals, and that had zero atmosphere and only trace amounts of water, and that another trip would cost multiple billions of 2008 dollars, and a colony would cost hundreds of billions, then there would indeed have been no reason to go back.
Why can't they make a single led the size of a lightbulb instead of 100 small led's.
Is it possible to make a single, huge led?
I don't know. Maybe it's the same reason that they can't make a tungsten filament the size of a whole light bulb. Instead, they keep selling us a tiny wire the size of a pubic hair surrounded by a huge void filled with argon gas. This has been going on for well over a century, and they never seem to fix it.
Have computers or JIT compilers gotten fast enough that people actually do ray tracing in Java?
I can believe it could be. Java can be just as fast as C as long as you write code the way you'd write it in C. That means statically allocating your data in arrays and avoiding creating new objects (which results in allocation, constructor and GC overhead, as well as cache thrashing).
The problem most people have with Java performance is that most problems become very unwieldy if written in a C-like fashion, and everything in the Java language and culture encourages new object creation rather than reuse of mutable static objects. By the same token, the Java-like way is much easier to code and less prone to bugs than the C-like way. In a lot of applications, especially the ones where Java is heavily used, that's more important than performance.
The special case of raytracing is heavy on arrays and number crunching, and doesn't require much "business" type stuff like string processing or object abstractions, so coding in the C-like fashion is certainly feasible.
it's more acceptable than apt-get because everyone knows the internet is available as a resource, and google has a great user interface
Yes, everyone should be encouraged to download and run unsigned binary files from random 3rd party OEM websites. (Or links that come up in Google which purport to be such sites.)
Does somebody want to break it to the guy that Iran and other states will pursue weapons programs no matter what sort of powerplants we build in the US?
However, if we get rid of all nuclear power worldwide as we should, then there would be no legitimate reason for the US or any other country to be fooling around with nuclear enrichment facilities of any kind. Without the ability to hide under the facade of "peaceful power research", bombing such weapons programs into oblivion before they yield weapons would no longer be the political impossibility that it currently is. Detecting such programs via isotope sniffing would also be greatly simplified.
The Shuttle (and it's attendant support programs and staff) work pretty well.
No, they do not. They were originally supposed to be run like airliners, with a cost much lower than expendable rockets. They utterly and completely failed at that goal. Instead, it is by far the most expensive and unreliable (in terms of multi-year gaps in operational capability) launch system ever deployed, with cost ending up orders of magnitude greater than promised. The shuttle should have been canned in the late 70s as soon as they figured out that they had completely blown their original goals. (Yeah, the Air Force messed up their plans, blah blah. So what; they should have had the balls to dump project and start over.)
I don't care that much about the thing blowing up a couple of times; that happens with rockets. (Although any engineer who's not an incompetent idiot designs redundancy and/or escape systems to minimize loss of life in those incidents.) The real tragedy here is how much of the taxpayers' money has been wasted on this lobbyist-driven boondoggle over the decades, and what we could have achieved in space, had we spent that money wisely.
Ares and Orion are the correct solutions to a NASA that has been traveling down the wrong technological path for nearly 30 years.
NASA has indeed been on the wrong path for 30 years. But trying to recycle the very same hardware that put them on that path is not the correct solution.
The space shuttle has been the most expensive and epic failure in the history of aerospace technology. Not one single rivet from that program should ever be used again.
We all know that if there were a nuclear catastrophe of this magnitude, then the whole planet would be hurled through space at such speed that each week we would encounter a new alien race, group of outcasts, or supernatural being. Seeing as the earth is still in its stable orbit around the sun, we can conclude that this must not have happened.
The government can't even manage to keep a simple web service online, and people still believe that it would be wise to let them control health care.
Get real. On several occasions, I've had to manually intervene to fix idiotic billing f*ckups between my PRIVATE insurer and a PRIVATE hospital, who had entered into mutual contracts to be in the same "network". For some reason, they couldn't get their own computers to talk to each other and I had to fix their bugs by going deciphering cryptic paper printouts myself and wasting hours calling customer service. This kind of stupid private healthcare IT problem happens routinely to millions of people every year. Therefore, using your reasoning I conclude that due to a clear history of incompetence, it is unwise to let private parties handle health care, and such practice should be banned.
By law, camera phones must make the click noise when operated within some countries to help fight voyeurism.
That's a great idea. However, we need a law for video cameras, too.
I propose that by law, each video camera must be equipped with a prominent hand crank, and shall only record while the crank is being turned. Furthermore, as added protection, people with video cameras must wear a beret and carry a conical megaphone at all times while operating said device.
I'm not a warmonger or anything like that, but if the system has a 1 in 10 chance of stopping a nuclear missile or other rogue missile launched at a U.S. city (say mine), i'd rather have that chance than zero chance if we don't have the system.
And if deploying such a system destabilizes the strategic balance so that a nuclear war is significantly more likely to start in the first place, your odds calculation fails.
So it had a tiny 4 kilobyte, manually allocated cache (aka vector registers). But yes, they still had to be juggled by streaming vectors to and from memory. That approach still requires more memory bandwidth than current cache architectures, and it wouldn't solve the memory issues any more effectively than today's common designs, which just happen to stream cache blocks instead of vectors.
Why charge for IPs when all you need is to switch to a different numbering, solving the problem properly?
Because the members of the oligopoly that run the Intenet industry know that charging for a scarce resource is a great revenue generator. They're not going to go through a bunch of effort just to give up that income opportunity.
The scheme would not be targeted at people like you. It's targeted at institutions like MIT, Ford and Halliburton. If they each had to start coughing up $24 million per year to hold onto their sparsely used/8 IP blocks, they'd be clamoring to unload them.
Sounds like its time for supercomputers to go their own way again. I'd love to see some new technologies.
While supercomputers might have to come up with unique architectures again, vector processing isn't it. The issue here is the total bandwidth to a single shared view of a large amount of memory. Off-the-shelf PC cores with their SIMD units are already too fast for the available memory bandwidth; swapping those cores out for vector units won't do anything to solve the problem. (Especially if you were go back to the original Cray approach of streaming vectors from main memory with no caches, which would just compound the problem.)
What's really needed is big advances in memory architecture.
If a non-planet killing asteroid is targeting a nation which has not contributed to the fund/program, should we defend it?
That's much less likely than the asteroid hitting an ocean. After a glance at the globe, it looks to me like most of the world's ocean area has straight shot to at least some portion of the US coastline. So if the goal is to avoid those 1000-foot high tsunamis, the US probably has more interest in ensuring that the program gets implemented than to worry about who's not paying.
provide your name & address and in 30 days the dealer mails you a cheque.
I'd go even further than that. Have the scrap dealers issue mail-in rebates instead. That way people would have to spend half an hour assembling forms and ID numbers to submit. Then they'd have to wait 8-10 weeks to get a "check" printed with a fuzzy carbon transfer on a piece of postcard. It would come from some 3rd-party fulfillment house in Arizona, and there's a 60% chance that it will never arrive. No junkie in the world would put up with that hassle.
Perhaps this results in the use of more brain "power" to use a cell than talk to a person?
I think that's certainly true, in large part because you only get a couple of kHz bandwidth, little dynamic range and less than full-duplex operation from a phone. Wireless connections are often so crappy that I have to use my full concentration to decipher what the other person is saying even when I'm sitting in a quiet room doing nothing.
Much of the brain's I/O processing power that should be used to pilot the car is instead taken up in an effort to decipher the original meaning out of a noisy narrowband audio signal.
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if they already exist and make heaps of more sense than the space solar power station why aren't we already building our infrastructure around them?
Because it's currently cheaper to scoop dirt out of the ground and burn it. It's cheaper because the external costs of fossil fuels are not incorporated into the consumer price as they should be.
BTW, it's also cheaper (by a far bigger margin) to burn dirt than to launch hundreds of square miles of satellites. If it weren't, then why aren't we doing that already, hmmm?
Your logic is impeccable. There are some new ideas that worked, therefore every new idea must work. Especially the most costly, fragile and unwieldy ones we can dream up when straightforward alternatives already exist.
No, if we listen to people like you with your unrealistic space solar power pipe dreams, then we'll never have the resources to implement practical earth-based solar power.
*You* are the one who will be personally responsible for all the poor starving babies and puppies.
The labels don't mind paying MTV to play their videos
It looks like the labels are doubly incompetent: MTV takes their money, but then it doesn't bother to play any music videos at all.
Yeah, and a trip to the west coast after the Lewis and Clark expedition would only have been for historical reasons and maybe bring back a few more notes.
If Lewis and Clark had come back reporting that there was nothing on the west coast but dust, no economically extractable minerals, and that had zero atmosphere and only trace amounts of water, and that another trip would cost multiple billions of 2008 dollars, and a colony would cost hundreds of billions, then there would indeed have been no reason to go back.
Why can't they make a single led the size of a lightbulb instead of 100 small led's.
Is it possible to make a single, huge led?
I don't know. Maybe it's the same reason that they can't make a tungsten filament the size of a whole light bulb. Instead, they keep selling us a tiny wire the size of a pubic hair surrounded by a huge void filled with argon gas. This has been going on for well over a century, and they never seem to fix it.
Have computers or JIT compilers gotten fast enough that people actually do ray tracing in Java?
I can believe it could be. Java can be just as fast as C as long as you write code the way you'd write it in C. That means statically allocating your data in arrays and avoiding creating new objects (which results in allocation, constructor and GC overhead, as well as cache thrashing).
The problem most people have with Java performance is that most problems become very unwieldy if written in a C-like fashion, and everything in the Java language and culture encourages new object creation rather than reuse of mutable static objects. By the same token, the Java-like way is much easier to code and less prone to bugs than the C-like way. In a lot of applications, especially the ones where Java is heavily used, that's more important than performance.
The special case of raytracing is heavy on arrays and number crunching, and doesn't require much "business" type stuff like string processing or object abstractions, so coding in the C-like fashion is certainly feasible.
"The Earth's magnetic field has been found to have two large holes that are making Earth's surface vulnerable to solar winds"
I am wondering what is between the two large holes?
A region of the earth known as the magnetic perineum.
it's more acceptable than apt-get because everyone knows the internet is available as a resource, and google has a great user interface
Yes, everyone should be encouraged to download and run unsigned binary files from random 3rd party OEM websites. (Or links that come up in Google which purport to be such sites.)
Does somebody want to break it to the guy that Iran and other states will pursue weapons programs no matter what sort of powerplants we build in the US?
However, if we get rid of all nuclear power worldwide as we should, then there would be no legitimate reason for the US or any other country to be fooling around with nuclear enrichment facilities of any kind. Without the ability to hide under the facade of "peaceful power research", bombing such weapons programs into oblivion before they yield weapons would no longer be the political impossibility that it currently is. Detecting such programs via isotope sniffing would also be greatly simplified.
The Shuttle (and it's attendant support programs and staff) work pretty well.
No, they do not. They were originally supposed to be run like airliners, with a cost much lower than expendable rockets. They utterly and completely failed at that goal. Instead, it is by far the most expensive and unreliable (in terms of multi-year gaps in operational capability) launch system ever deployed, with cost ending up orders of magnitude greater than promised. The shuttle should have been canned in the late 70s as soon as they figured out that they had completely blown their original goals. (Yeah, the Air Force messed up their plans, blah blah. So what; they should have had the balls to dump project and start over.)
I don't care that much about the thing blowing up a couple of times; that happens with rockets. (Although any engineer who's not an incompetent idiot designs redundancy and/or escape systems to minimize loss of life in those incidents.) The real tragedy here is how much of the taxpayers' money has been wasted on this lobbyist-driven boondoggle over the decades, and what we could have achieved in space, had we spent that money wisely.
Ares and Orion are the correct solutions to a NASA that has been traveling down the wrong technological path for nearly 30 years.
NASA has indeed been on the wrong path for 30 years. But trying to recycle the very same hardware that put them on that path is not the correct solution.
The space shuttle has been the most expensive and epic failure in the history of aerospace technology. Not one single rivet from that program should ever be used again.
Whoosh.
We all know that if there were a nuclear catastrophe of this magnitude, then the whole planet would be hurled through space at such speed that each week we would encounter a new alien race, group of outcasts, or supernatural being. Seeing as the earth is still in its stable orbit around the sun, we can conclude that this must not have happened.
The government can't even manage to keep a simple web service online, and people still believe that it would be wise to let them control health care.
Get real. On several occasions, I've had to manually intervene to fix idiotic billing f*ckups between my PRIVATE insurer and a PRIVATE hospital, who had entered into mutual contracts to be in the same "network". For some reason, they couldn't get their own computers to talk to each other and I had to fix their bugs by going deciphering cryptic paper printouts myself and wasting hours calling customer service. This kind of stupid private healthcare IT problem happens routinely to millions of people every year. Therefore, using your reasoning I conclude that due to a clear history of incompetence, it is unwise to let private parties handle health care, and such practice should be banned.
By law, camera phones must make the click noise when operated within some countries to help fight voyeurism.
That's a great idea. However, we need a law for video cameras, too.
I propose that by law, each video camera must be equipped with a prominent hand crank, and shall only record while the crank is being turned. Furthermore, as added protection, people with video cameras must wear a beret and carry a conical megaphone at all times while operating said device.
I'm not a warmonger or anything like that, but if the system has a 1 in 10 chance of stopping a nuclear missile or other rogue missile launched at a U.S. city (say mine), i'd rather have that chance than zero chance if we don't have the system.
And if deploying such a system destabilizes the strategic balance so that a nuclear war is significantly more likely to start in the first place, your odds calculation fails.
So it had a tiny 4 kilobyte, manually allocated cache (aka vector registers). But yes, they still had to be juggled by streaming vectors to and from memory. That approach still requires more memory bandwidth than current cache architectures, and it wouldn't solve the memory issues any more effectively than today's common designs, which just happen to stream cache blocks instead of vectors.
Why charge for IPs when all you need is to switch to a different numbering, solving the problem properly?
Because the members of the oligopoly that run the Intenet industry know that charging for a scarce resource is a great revenue generator. They're not going to go through a bunch of effort just to give up that income opportunity.
The scheme would not be targeted at people like you. It's targeted at institutions like MIT, Ford and Halliburton. If they each had to start coughing up $24 million per year to hold onto their sparsely used /8 IP blocks, they'd be clamoring to unload them.
Sounds like its time for supercomputers to go their own way again. I'd love to see some new technologies.
While supercomputers might have to come up with unique architectures again, vector processing isn't it. The issue here is the total bandwidth to a single shared view of a large amount of memory. Off-the-shelf PC cores with their SIMD units are already too fast for the available memory bandwidth; swapping those cores out for vector units won't do anything to solve the problem. (Especially if you were go back to the original Cray approach of streaming vectors from main memory with no caches, which would just compound the problem.)
What's really needed is big advances in memory architecture.
If a non-planet killing asteroid is targeting a nation which has not contributed to the fund/program, should we defend it?
That's much less likely than the asteroid hitting an ocean. After a glance at the globe, it looks to me like most of the world's ocean area has straight shot to at least some portion of the US coastline. So if the goal is to avoid those 1000-foot high tsunamis, the US probably has more interest in ensuring that the program gets implemented than to worry about who's not paying.
provide your name & address and in 30 days the dealer mails you a cheque.
I'd go even further than that. Have the scrap dealers issue mail-in rebates instead. That way people would have to spend half an hour assembling forms and ID numbers to submit. Then they'd have to wait 8-10 weeks to get a "check" printed with a fuzzy carbon transfer on a piece of postcard. It would come from some 3rd-party fulfillment house in Arizona, and there's a 60% chance that it will never arrive. No junkie in the world would put up with that hassle.
Perhaps this results in the use of more brain "power" to use a cell than talk to a person?
I think that's certainly true, in large part because you only get a couple of kHz bandwidth, little dynamic range and less than full-duplex operation from a phone. Wireless connections are often so crappy that I have to use my full concentration to decipher what the other person is saying even when I'm sitting in a quiet room doing nothing.
Much of the brain's I/O processing power that should be used to pilot the car is instead taken up in an effort to decipher the original meaning out of a noisy narrowband audio signal.
Oh... <Emily-Litella> Never mind. </Emily-Litella>