Hmm. The comment about hallowed ground was just an example. But you are right, it would go the way of the Egyptian pyramids; the atomic loot would quickly be scattered across the landscape.
I think that what the original proposal was about had more to do with keeping an elite priesthood "in on the game" such that they could manage the message and thus the masses. In that way it is more like organized religion that hokey superstition. But now it comes to it, we've only got one relgion that is older than 5,000 years so we've little experience even with long-lived oral traditions. Not on the scale required, at least.
So the seed of the solution lay in the problem itself? Moore's Law, taken to its logical end? Pile the nuclear/chemical/biological/industrial wastes high enough and wide enough and the resulting environmental and genetic destruction and loss of life will be so horrendous that only mindless arthropods will venture near. That's really nice.
Maybe we don't need an atomic priesthood or digital Domesday Book, so much as we need some kind of way to transmit to the future generations of people the notion that we really did not give a flying fsck about them, and we knew it at the time. Tough love for the ages.
When seeing the comment about how computers are becoming tombs for information, I was immediately reminded of the "atomic priesthood" (discussed here and elsewhere) that has sometimes been offered as one way to keep track of another kind of decaying technology, old nuclear fuel dumps and reactor sites. Those can remain deadly for eons, certainly beyond the survival even of the English language (or any other current language). How do you warn people 10,000 years from now that a small hill in an unnamed valley is actually highly radioactive? What is the equivalent of "don't dig here" in the language of 10,000 years hence? One answer seems to be that only commands from G*d are translated with any tenacity (let alone accuracy) such that future generations will know not to dig on ground hallowed by some presumed religious event in the dim past (um...that would be next year for us). If you can overcome the rank cynicism, the implications in all this for the future are troubling to say the least.
What is under the hood of most things is actually not very important, and in general this issue does not occupy the thoughts of busy people over much. Further, not caring about things that do not matter makes one neither a zealot nor ignorant, and should actually be a measure of maturity.
In a few more years the computer technology industry will become a consumer electronics industry. People will not care how the applicance works, so long as it fetchs email, browses the web, and archives Buffy episodes. It will make no more sense then to ask what is under the hood of (what is now called) a personal computer than it does to ask what kind of compressor is running in your refrigerator. Unless you are the equivalent of a refrigerator repair person. But repair people do not run the world, do not determine the future of technology, and do not have any special place in the pantheon of labor. They are like crows, waiting for something to fail so they can profit. They contribute little to the advancement of technology. This is the future fate of tech-glorifying nerds who today think someone is stupid if they don't buy a PC over a Mac based on specifications of the component parts.
A better use of your time would be to find a solution to spam, or invent a fail-safe operating system for information applicances, or devise sensible ways to limit child access to porn, or some other interesting challenge that, indeed, makes no big deal of what is under the hood. If you are not up to the task then you can either go back to school or leave the rest of us alone while we focus our adult attention on things that matter.
I work with a company with operations in both the US and India. My observation is that Indians seem to love M$, certainly as a company and also the software. If they love the company it is probably because it represents for them the peak of the capitalist experience. If they love the software then it is probably because knowing it well is a foot into the door of other companies who are M$ shops for the most part, where many would like to work. And also because there is a lot of development outsourcing to India, and that often means creating and maintaining apps that run on Windows.
It is tempting, but hazardous, to compare the Indian experience with that of other developing countries. India probably has a closer relationship with North American (read...US) companies than does for example Peru, mostly because of outsourcing agreements. So the real and imagined needs of the two nations might well be different. In general I would predict that the success of OSS might be more likely in a nation like Peru, going it alone, and less so in a nation like India which for better or worse is hitching its star to North American companies.
I am the only OSS advocate in my company, but I am also the main programmer and web sysadmin. I am a US citizen living in Silicon Valley, I have never been to India. The company's Indian VP of technology (who hired me but has since left the company) liked OSS and allowed me do as I liked with it, so I installed Linux/Apache/PHP on the public site and developed for that, just as many other US companies and operations have done, and for the usual reasons (cost, stability, license issues, etc etc). The team in India frankly thinks I am a dinosaur and a malcontent, wasting company time using OSS when I should be going with "the winning team" as they like to put it. At least they cannot accuse me of wasting company funds. This is strictly a philosophical issue, as the servers and applications I have installed and maintain have never failed, while many M$ servers and applications have died or been attacked by malware.
If my personal experience is any guide at all, OSS will fail in India because it is not seen as the gateway to quick success and assurances of wealth. The angle for education would be that schools need to turn out programmers and sysadmins who live/breath M$ products and services as this will get them more jobs with outsourcers and options to work with companies in the US. For all I know, they are absolutely correct.
I leave it as an exercise for others to comment on what might amount to corporate neo-Imperialism. Still, it is hard to be critical of what Indians are trying to do, or how they are going about it. They are in some ways simply playing the hand that was dealt them.
It is all too easy to deride the doubters. I think that misses the point. What they are doubting is not so much the why and wherefore of the moon landing. What they are doubting is the credibility of the US government as well as that of scientists (and teachers) in government employ. Note that the $15K is being spent to create teaching materials, at least in part. Now what does that tell you? It tells me that there is a lot of doubt, all the way down.
People will beleive all kinds of crap. But mostly they are eager to beleive that which supports their prior opinion, not that which challenges it. Right now, after the Florida elections and Enron and the like, after years of Nixon and Ray Gun and Bush I and Bush II and Bubba, after all that, the opinion is that the government and it's sycophants are greedy, stupid and shallow. That there are only lies, damned lies and press releases. That the lie is King and it was the lie that went to the moon, not men. I don't buy that myself, but *someone* is buying it.
Maybe it's just been a long time since anything stupendously groovy happened at the hand of humans. A lot of crappy things have happened since Apollo 11, that's for sure. Where are the new heros, men and women, who will make people believe in themselves and us all again?
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. With the GPS data handy (and plotting a best-fit to the chopper path to get the viewing angle) it should be easy to calculate the paralax and foreshortening from frame-to-frame, and there is quite a bit you'll notice; coastal features like cliff faces look different from different frames. Still, the morphing that would be required might not be too bad. And if one were to save the intermediate sequences...why...you could sail along the coast in real-time, following the chopper path as it must have been at the time.
I wonder if some render farm could crunch on this pro bono? Of course, you'd need a couple terabytes more storage...
I notice that the/. crowd has already taken up the call for wall-sized monitors. I hasten to direct anyone with such notions to the Ray Bradbury classic "Fahrenheit 451". It is a disturbing work on many levels, and you can Google a lot of analytical treatments of the themes in the book.
Particular to the current thread, in the book there are wall-sized display devices used in the predictable fashion; not to view above the sky full of live stars or weather a la Hogwarts in Harry Potter (which sounds delightful) but to take a small room and create a large, totally synthetic environment with an extended synthespian family, all via subscription service. And there you sit all day, listening to their dramatic, interesting lives while your own dull, wasted existance drains away. So if you like, views into a crafted world with fake people, custom made for unneeded people. Homeowners in the book measure themselves successful based on how many walls they own; four walls is just enough.
Entertainment is emmersive enough. Do we really want to be flood with non-reality? Or Unreal Tourny, for that matter? The stars overhead sound good, and so does an "invisible wall" that projects an outside view of your backyard, or anywhere else in the world for that matter (the crater of an active volacanoe sounds nice!) But that's NOT where this is headed, you know. People historically ignore nature and real people and embrace entertainment instead.
If chip building were a competitive sport then there would be restrictions on die size, cache-level-on-die, number of transistors, pipeline depth, silicon formulations, number of logic units, etc etc, to keep it "interesting" and truly all about fabrication skill and not about architectures. Just as sport racing is supposedly about driver skill. Regarding technology, people on the street really do think it is just about production skills, who has the best fab process such that they can squeeze another 500 MHz out of their generic idea of what a CPU is. That's why the analogy to F1 racing is a bad one. The better analogy is the one I gave; production cars, where there really are differences, and people who know that open the hood and read the engine specs, then test drive the thing under conditions that reflect their anticipated need. Sure, the Dodge Viper is not as much a "production car" in terms of factory output as, say, the Honda Civic. But that could turn around overnight if consumer appetite/need changed to desire big displacement/low rev architectures over small displacement/high rev ones. If technology consumers likewise started looking at on-the-chip logic and less at on-the-box GHz ratings you might see buying patterns alter radically, and very quickly. It's all marketing, baby, which I suppose means its all sex. Watch Intel start whoring their pipeline width and on-chip cache when some sexy VJ on MTV says things like that turn her on (yeah, we wish.)
BTW, I just dropped a modern, high-output 2.2L in my 1971 OpelGT, an upgrade from the ancient formulation 1.9L but at the same revs, so you know what turns *my* crank! Now to get those revs up...I wonder how much a set of forged pistons and a roller cam would set me back? But of course you would say, double the number of pistons, chump. And you would be absolutely right.
MHz and GHz are fine, but that's just RPMs. As anyone who has driven a bored out V8 or massive V10 will tell you, there is no replacement for displacement. You can rev a crappy 2L engine to 7,000rpm and make your itty bitty wheels spin and make a nice smell. But if you want to throw asphalt into the air and stike terror into living things you put the pedal to 8 or 10L of fire-breathing cast iron.
The Power line from IBM has that kind of displacement. You don't need GHz, or at least not as many, to get a lot of torque out the back end. And of course once you get torque, you can work on the revs. As we've all seen, higher revs happen with improvements to production technique, and are a given. But more torque (ie, more and better logic on the die) takes a strategic investment, and some amount of risk. But I'll take a bigbore Dodge Viper over this years higher-revving econo Tondabishi any day.
Explanation: I doubt the mule is "fertile". In a random mutation the extra chromosome was dropped in one egg (it has to be the egg of course or else this is no miracle birth), such that the female mule could pass an egg which would look vaguely as if it came from a donkey. Then it doesn't matter if the mule is mounted by a horse or a donkey; either works, thought the latter produces yet another mule (albeit with some really whacked genetics.)
What doesn't work, most of the time, is a chromosomal deletion. Those are generally fatal, most of the time even before a fetus develops. So what is rare is not fertilization or even implantation, but birth. Still, I would expect that the foal would be tweeked in some way, not likely at all to thrive.
If horse breeders kill "fertile" mules (those that give a birth) it probably is not because they will be run out of business if mules become a new species (rather they should be thrilled; can you imagine how hard it is to get horses to mate with donkeys?!?) They are killing these animals because of fear that the birth is the result of sorcery, and that their business will suffer or they themselves might be accused of witchcraft. Two-headed sheep? Hens that crow? Mules giving birth? Toss a rope over a tree limb and go looking for a witch. (You can take the word of a practicing warlock.)
This has been said above, but it deserves another voice. My 1971 Opel GT was engineered by some smart German fellow or several at at drafting table, probably with a sliderule. It runs great (still) but is not fancy, and it does not have any parts that cannot be fixed with hand tools. A modern roadster, any of them, was designed mostly on a CAD system and largely fabricated and assembled the same way. It has more computers than the US space shuttle. Now, the roadster of 2015 will contain a lot of AI and will be designed and coded by machines, because the complexity of the task will be beyond human comprehension. In fact, the car will code itself on-the-fly using integrated sensors and neural networks.
There are humans at all stages, but the engineering they are doing suits the work of the moment. From designing bolts to designing electronic components to designing...what would you call it? Expectations? Models? Moral values? I don't know what you call it in 2015 when the cars design, build and program themselves. But I bet you in 2015 BMW will still be "The Ultimate Driving Machine" and high performance cars will still be marvels of...engineering.
In the Middle Ages when you made a contract with someone it was written twice on the same parchment, at the top and at the bottom. Then the parchment was torn in half unevenly between the two versions of the contract and each party took one of the halves. In the future should the terms of the contract come into question they could verify that the contract each held was in fact the original by realigning them along the tear; the originals would of course match exactly and the veracity of the copy contained therein could be verified.
The jagged edge of the contracts looked like teeth, Latin dent IIRC, and whoever held such a contract was said to be indentured
Didn't require lasers, of course, but did require that the two parts be physically present and visually verified, so it is remarkably similar in principle. The fibers and surface imperfections of the parchment (thin leather) would have taken the place of the glass beads in this case.
Umm...let's see now. You can plug in a hard drive, ethernet hub, camera, scanner, mouse and keyboard into your USB port. Firewire can handle all that and more, and at higher speeds. And your concern was...what? That your PeeCee might start to look like a Mac in the back? As Steve Martin put it: Well excuuuuuse me.
However, movement of individuals (immigration and emigration) serves to mix things up again very quickly. Especially during a crisis when refugees flee from a stricken area, sometimes vast distances, and then slowly filter back bringing new lives and families with them. So I'm afraid there is no silver lining here, unless those refugees learned something about safe sex.
In the same way that chimps have a cluster of genes, like a chromosomal scar from that earlier fight to survive, humans carry around memes in their heads and in their conversations. They are clustered experiences, mental and societal scars seared into history and practice and passed on by learning. The survivors in Botswana won't carry any lasting immunity, except perhaps something that lodged between their ears.
That's what Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould called it. Basically, evolution by totally getting your ass kicked. No, it doesn't really apply to humans, we're outside the flow of evolution for all practical purposes. We evolve via understanding, not genetics.
How would Apple benefit? Networking Macs in a Windows environment is currently a pain, and only gets easier if you buy a utility. This certainly creates a barrier for Apple to get a toe in the door of M$-only shops. If M$ ever adopts this technology then Macs and Windows boxes will have an easier time relating, and a few Macs will break into some really hard turf. M$ is not chasing Apple, but they are chasing Linux starting in the server closet. M$ is unlikely to adopt Rendezvous technology until it shows up in Linux and other server systems, then M$ will be all over it so as not to get locked out of the server closet. Linux is open sourced, so this critical networking issue for Apple must be an open source solution as well. Linux gets Rendezvous, Windows chases Linux, the corporate network gets Rendezvoused as a whole, and Apple hops on the LAN with everyone else. QED.;-)
Oh now I see. Since some people don't have modern computers (OSS-based or otherwise) the Gov can't use computers at all in conducting the business of the public. I mean, at some point that's the lowest you can limbo in the service of egalitarianism.
Look, there is always paper and the USPS. Libraries have computers for free use, and generally keep them within a few years of "current". Same with public schools. In a few years hence anyone with a cell phone will probably have access to a microbrowser.
Universal access to technology is an interesting topic, but not a realistic goal when defined narrowly as dekstop PCs. Freedom of information is not only interesting but frankly vital.
Regarding the "earth" writ large, it means nothing (unless She gets fed up with us as a result.) Regarding the human population, I should say that the overall population is more influenced upward by past improvements in agriculture and hygiene going back thousands of years than it ever will be by something like this, or any kind of organ transplant/replacement. Same goes for bionic organs. Also, population growth over a given period of time depends more on parameters of birth and death rates across the population than on late-life developments that serve only to extend individual life (especially if it is extended for older non-reproductives.) As such, the growth we see today was influenced by factors and events several generations back that served mostly to reduce infant mortality. If, as some say, the Big Crunch and eventual Collapse will happen in the next 100 years then whatever allowed our numbers to explode up to then has taken place mostly in the last century (1900's, for those still getting adjusted.) Adding into the mix a few survivals due to exotic organ transplants just makes the rubble bounce a little higher (to mix metaphors a bit.)
Just for the record, I don't think anything of the sort will happen. Relax and enjoy your pork heart.
I started in tech ages ago when I started college, using a timeshare system to write analytical hacks in BASIC for undergraduate courses I was taking. I got good, and became the Biology dept tech guru at about age 20. Technolgy has dogged me ever since, and I have been a tech leader (of sorts) at University in academia, for University field research (ugh), in public education (urf), at an education non-profit think tank (bleh), and now a startup (er..several actually). I am now 43 yo. Frankly, I found the middle part of that journey the most tedious. Pure academia was, well, pure. The politics were minimal, the work was open-ended and interesting, but the pay was total crap. But everyone loved me! Research work may end up perverting you as it is rather corrupt now. Nonprofits can be groovy, think tanks however combine the very worst of University and private sector. Never again! And so, at this late stage, I like startups. Startups are, well, starting up. Politics are minimal, the work is open-ended and interesting, and yet the pay is pretty good. It is the hours and the stress that are crap! Does everyone love me still? A few people fear me, some turn to me for leadership. Either way it's love of a sort. Would I go back to academia? Someday I will, but not for the money. I will teach and terrorize the students "Paper Chase"-style. It's really the work of the moment for old nerds like me.
People are going to say that this is such a bad thing. But really, it's just an extended interpretation of what was always in the license. Software companies have been telling us for decades that we don't own the software we buy, and we've let them. And it doesn't matter that to now they haven't done much with that stipulation (except make it hard/impossible to sell a used computer with software) but they could have at any time. So now, Microsoft is
Back In The Olden Days, why, we just wrote our own software! Companies sold hardware and a compiler. That has slowly changed, and now we are staring down the barrel of the 'software subscription' gun. Meaning, you will have as much control over the nature and quality of your software (and hence your entire computing experience) as you have over the programming on broadcast TV. Which is, none at all. The masses are thrilled with that (they still watch TV, too) and M$ and all the others are selling to the masses and probably not a single reader of this post. So yeah it sucks when M$ takes control, as if they never had control, but if you have a problem with that you can join with a bunch of software rebels and create your own software, and license it the way you like. Yeah sure I'm not the first to come up with that idea, but before we lament what the software companies do because we let them, we can just go around them.
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Hmm. The comment about hallowed ground was just an example. But you are right, it would go the way of the Egyptian pyramids; the atomic loot would quickly be scattered across the landscape.
I think that what the original proposal was about had more to do with keeping an elite priesthood "in on the game" such that they could manage the message and thus the masses. In that way it is more like organized religion that hokey superstition. But now it comes to it, we've only got one relgion that is older than 5,000 years so we've little experience even with long-lived oral traditions. Not on the scale required, at least.
So the seed of the solution lay in the problem itself? Moore's Law, taken to its logical end? Pile the nuclear/chemical/biological/industrial wastes high enough and wide enough and the resulting environmental and genetic destruction and loss of life will be so horrendous that only mindless arthropods will venture near. That's really nice.
Maybe we don't need an atomic priesthood or digital Domesday Book, so much as we need some kind of way to transmit to the future generations of people the notion that we really did not give a flying fsck about them, and we knew it at the time. Tough love for the ages.
When seeing the comment about how computers are becoming tombs for information, I was immediately reminded of the "atomic priesthood" (discussed here and elsewhere) that has sometimes been offered as one way to keep track of another kind of decaying technology, old nuclear fuel dumps and reactor sites. Those can remain deadly for eons, certainly beyond the survival even of the English language (or any other current language). How do you warn people 10,000 years from now that a small hill in an unnamed valley is actually highly radioactive? What is the equivalent of "don't dig here" in the language of 10,000 years hence? One answer seems to be that only commands from G*d are translated with any tenacity (let alone accuracy) such that future generations will know not to dig on ground hallowed by some presumed religious event in the dim past (um...that would be next year for us). If you can overcome the rank cynicism, the implications in all this for the future are troubling to say the least.
What is under the hood of most things is actually not very important, and in general this issue does not occupy the thoughts of busy people over much. Further, not caring about things that do not matter makes one neither a zealot nor ignorant, and should actually be a measure of maturity.
In a few more years the computer technology industry will become a consumer electronics industry. People will not care how the applicance works, so long as it fetchs email, browses the web, and archives Buffy episodes. It will make no more sense then to ask what is under the hood of (what is now called) a personal computer than it does to ask what kind of compressor is running in your refrigerator. Unless you are the equivalent of a refrigerator repair person. But repair people do not run the world, do not determine the future of technology, and do not have any special place in the pantheon of labor. They are like crows, waiting for something to fail so they can profit. They contribute little to the advancement of technology. This is the future fate of tech-glorifying nerds who today think someone is stupid if they don't buy a PC over a Mac based on specifications of the component parts.
A better use of your time would be to find a solution to spam, or invent a fail-safe operating system for information applicances, or devise sensible ways to limit child access to porn, or some other interesting challenge that, indeed, makes no big deal of what is under the hood. If you are not up to the task then you can either go back to school or leave the rest of us alone while we focus our adult attention on things that matter.
I work with a company with operations in both the US and India. My observation is that Indians seem to love M$, certainly as a company and also the software. If they love the company it is probably because it represents for them the peak of the capitalist experience. If they love the software then it is probably because knowing it well is a foot into the door of other companies who are M$ shops for the most part, where many would like to work. And also because there is a lot of development outsourcing to India, and that often means creating and maintaining apps that run on Windows.
It is tempting, but hazardous, to compare the Indian experience with that of other developing countries. India probably has a closer relationship with North American (read...US) companies than does for example Peru, mostly because of outsourcing agreements. So the real and imagined needs of the two nations might well be different. In general I would predict that the success of OSS might be more likely in a nation like Peru, going it alone, and less so in a nation like India which for better or worse is hitching its star to North American companies.
I am the only OSS advocate in my company, but I am also the main programmer and web sysadmin. I am a US citizen living in Silicon Valley, I have never been to India. The company's Indian VP of technology (who hired me but has since left the company) liked OSS and allowed me do as I liked with it, so I installed Linux/Apache/PHP on the public site and developed for that, just as many other US companies and operations have done, and for the usual reasons (cost, stability, license issues, etc etc). The team in India frankly thinks I am a dinosaur and a malcontent, wasting company time using OSS when I should be going with "the winning team" as they like to put it. At least they cannot accuse me of wasting company funds. This is strictly a philosophical issue, as the servers and applications I have installed and maintain have never failed, while many M$ servers and applications have died or been attacked by malware.
If my personal experience is any guide at all, OSS will fail in India because it is not seen as the gateway to quick success and assurances of wealth. The angle for education would be that schools need to turn out programmers and sysadmins who live/breath M$ products and services as this will get them more jobs with outsourcers and options to work with companies in the US. For all I know, they are absolutely correct.
I leave it as an exercise for others to comment on what might amount to corporate neo-Imperialism. Still, it is hard to be critical of what Indians are trying to do, or how they are going about it. They are in some ways simply playing the hand that was dealt them.
It is all too easy to deride the doubters. I think that misses the point. What they are doubting is not so much the why and wherefore of the moon landing. What they are doubting is the credibility of the US government as well as that of scientists (and teachers) in government employ. Note that the $15K is being spent to create teaching materials, at least in part. Now what does that tell you? It tells me that there is a lot of doubt, all the way down.
People will beleive all kinds of crap. But mostly they are eager to beleive that which supports their prior opinion, not that which challenges it. Right now, after the Florida elections and Enron and the like, after years of Nixon and Ray Gun and Bush I and Bush II and Bubba, after all that, the opinion is that the government and it's sycophants are greedy, stupid and shallow. That there are only lies, damned lies and press releases. That the lie is King and it was the lie that went to the moon, not men. I don't buy that myself, but *someone* is buying it.
Maybe it's just been a long time since anything stupendously groovy happened at the hand of humans. A lot of crappy things have happened since Apollo 11, that's for sure. Where are the new heros, men and women, who will make people believe in themselves and us all again?
Or, if not Microsoft, some company who can spark the long-overdue tablet-computing revolution.
'Nuff said 'bout that.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. With the GPS data handy (and plotting a best-fit to the chopper path to get the viewing angle) it should be easy to calculate the paralax and foreshortening from frame-to-frame, and there is quite a bit you'll notice; coastal features like cliff faces look different from different frames. Still, the morphing that would be required might not be too bad. And if one were to save the intermediate sequences...why...you could sail along the coast in real-time, following the chopper path as it must have been at the time.
I wonder if some render farm could crunch on this pro bono? Of course, you'd need a couple terabytes more storage...
That must have some value in general as a geophysical survey. 500 foot resolution would be expen$ive to get if you were to pay for it on contract!
I notice that the /. crowd has already taken up the call for wall-sized monitors. I hasten to direct anyone with such notions to the Ray Bradbury classic "Fahrenheit 451". It is a disturbing work on many levels, and you can Google a lot of analytical treatments of the themes in the book.
Particular to the current thread, in the book there are wall-sized display devices used in the predictable fashion; not to view above the sky full of live stars or weather a la Hogwarts in Harry Potter (which sounds delightful) but to take a small room and create a large, totally synthetic environment with an extended synthespian family, all via subscription service. And there you sit all day, listening to their dramatic, interesting lives while your own dull, wasted existance drains away. So if you like, views into a crafted world with fake people, custom made for unneeded people. Homeowners in the book measure themselves successful based on how many walls they own; four walls is just enough.
Entertainment is emmersive enough. Do we really want to be flood with non-reality? Or Unreal Tourny, for that matter? The stars overhead sound good, and so does an "invisible wall" that projects an outside view of your backyard, or anywhere else in the world for that matter (the crater of an active volacanoe sounds nice!) But that's NOT where this is headed, you know. People historically ignore nature and real people and embrace entertainment instead.
If chip building were a competitive sport then there would be restrictions on die size, cache-level-on-die, number of transistors, pipeline depth, silicon formulations, number of logic units, etc etc, to keep it "interesting" and truly all about fabrication skill and not about architectures. Just as sport racing is supposedly about driver skill. Regarding technology, people on the street really do think it is just about production skills, who has the best fab process such that they can squeeze another 500 MHz out of their generic idea of what a CPU is. That's why the analogy to F1 racing is a bad one. The better analogy is the one I gave; production cars, where there really are differences, and people who know that open the hood and read the engine specs, then test drive the thing under conditions that reflect their anticipated need. Sure, the Dodge Viper is not as much a "production car" in terms of factory output as, say, the Honda Civic. But that could turn around overnight if consumer appetite/need changed to desire big displacement/low rev architectures over small displacement/high rev ones. If technology consumers likewise started looking at on-the-chip logic and less at on-the-box GHz ratings you might see buying patterns alter radically, and very quickly. It's all marketing, baby, which I suppose means its all sex. Watch Intel start whoring their pipeline width and on-chip cache when some sexy VJ on MTV says things like that turn her on (yeah, we wish.)
BTW, I just dropped a modern, high-output 2.2L in my 1971 OpelGT, an upgrade from the ancient formulation 1.9L but at the same revs, so you know what turns *my* crank! Now to get those revs up...I wonder how much a set of forged pistons and a roller cam would set me back? But of course you would say, double the number of pistons, chump. And you would be absolutely right.
MHz and GHz are fine, but that's just RPMs. As anyone who has driven a bored out V8 or massive V10 will tell you, there is no replacement for displacement. You can rev a crappy 2L engine to 7,000rpm and make your itty bitty wheels spin and make a nice smell. But if you want to throw asphalt into the air and stike terror into living things you put the pedal to 8 or 10L of fire-breathing cast iron.
The Power line from IBM has that kind of displacement. You don't need GHz, or at least not as many, to get a lot of torque out the back end. And of course once you get torque, you can work on the revs. As we've all seen, higher revs happen with improvements to production technique, and are a given. But more torque (ie, more and better logic on the die) takes a strategic investment, and some amount of risk. But I'll take a bigbore Dodge Viper over this years higher-revving econo Tondabishi any day.
Explanation: I doubt the mule is "fertile". In a random mutation the extra chromosome was dropped in one egg (it has to be the egg of course or else this is no miracle birth), such that the female mule could pass an egg which would look vaguely as if it came from a donkey. Then it doesn't matter if the mule is mounted by a horse or a donkey; either works, thought the latter produces yet another mule (albeit with some really whacked genetics.)
What doesn't work, most of the time, is a chromosomal deletion. Those are generally fatal, most of the time even before a fetus develops. So what is rare is not fertilization or even implantation, but birth. Still, I would expect that the foal would be tweeked in some way, not likely at all to thrive.
If horse breeders kill "fertile" mules (those that give a birth) it probably is not because they will be run out of business if mules become a new species (rather they should be thrilled; can you imagine how hard it is to get horses to mate with donkeys?!?) They are killing these animals because of fear that the birth is the result of sorcery, and that their business will suffer or they themselves might be accused of witchcraft. Two-headed sheep? Hens that crow? Mules giving birth? Toss a rope over a tree limb and go looking for a witch. (You can take the word of a practicing warlock.)
This has been said above, but it deserves another voice. My 1971 Opel GT was engineered by some smart German fellow or several at at drafting table, probably with a sliderule. It runs great (still) but is not fancy, and it does not have any parts that cannot be fixed with hand tools. A modern roadster, any of them, was designed mostly on a CAD system and largely fabricated and assembled the same way. It has more computers than the US space shuttle. Now, the roadster of 2015 will contain a lot of AI and will be designed and coded by machines, because the complexity of the task will be beyond human comprehension. In fact, the car will code itself on-the-fly using integrated sensors and neural networks.
There are humans at all stages, but the engineering they are doing suits the work of the moment. From designing bolts to designing electronic components to designing...what would you call it? Expectations? Models? Moral values? I don't know what you call it in 2015 when the cars design, build and program themselves. But I bet you in 2015 BMW will still be "The Ultimate Driving Machine" and high performance cars will still be marvels of...engineering.
In the Middle Ages when you made a contract with someone it was written twice on the same parchment, at the top and at the bottom. Then the parchment was torn in half unevenly between the two versions of the contract and each party took one of the halves. In the future should the terms of the contract come into question they could verify that the contract each held was in fact the original by realigning them along the tear; the originals would of course match exactly and the veracity of the copy contained therein could be verified.
;-)
The jagged edge of the contracts looked like teeth, Latin dent IIRC, and whoever held such a contract was said to be indentured
Didn't require lasers, of course, but did require that the two parts be physically present and visually verified, so it is remarkably similar in principle. The fibers and surface imperfections of the parchment (thin leather) would have taken the place of the glass beads in this case.
So, does the MIT patent fail due to prior art?
Oh, that would be the Vogon advanced surveying team, laying out a new interspace by-pass. Everyone don't forget your towel!
Umm...let's see now. You can plug in a hard drive, ethernet hub, camera, scanner, mouse and keyboard into your USB port. Firewire can handle all that and more, and at higher speeds. And your concern was...what? That your PeeCee might start to look like a Mac in the back? As Steve Martin put it: Well excuuuuuse me.
On the face of it, you are correct.
However, movement of individuals (immigration and emigration) serves to mix things up again very quickly. Especially during a crisis when refugees flee from a stricken area, sometimes vast distances, and then slowly filter back bringing new lives and families with them. So I'm afraid there is no silver lining here, unless those refugees learned something about safe sex.
In the same way that chimps have a cluster of genes, like a chromosomal scar from that earlier fight to survive, humans carry around memes in their heads and in their conversations. They are clustered experiences, mental and societal scars seared into history and practice and passed on by learning. The survivors in Botswana won't carry any lasting immunity, except perhaps something that lodged between their ears.
That's what Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould called it. Basically, evolution by totally getting your ass kicked. No, it doesn't really apply to humans, we're outside the flow of evolution for all practical purposes. We evolve via understanding, not genetics.
How would Apple benefit? Networking Macs in a Windows environment is currently a pain, and only gets easier if you buy a utility. This certainly creates a barrier for Apple to get a toe in the door of M$-only shops. If M$ ever adopts this technology then Macs and Windows boxes will have an easier time relating, and a few Macs will break into some really hard turf. M$ is not chasing Apple, but they are chasing Linux starting in the server closet. M$ is unlikely to adopt Rendezvous technology until it shows up in Linux and other server systems, then M$ will be all over it so as not to get locked out of the server closet. Linux is open sourced, so this critical networking issue for Apple must be an open source solution as well. Linux gets Rendezvous, Windows chases Linux, the corporate network gets Rendezvoused as a whole, and Apple hops on the LAN with everyone else. QED. ;-)
Oh now I see. Since some people don't have modern computers (OSS-based or otherwise) the Gov can't use computers at all in conducting the business of the public. I mean, at some point that's the lowest you can limbo in the service of egalitarianism.
Look, there is always paper and the USPS. Libraries have computers for free use, and generally keep them within a few years of "current". Same with public schools. In a few years hence anyone with a cell phone will probably have access to a microbrowser.
Universal access to technology is an interesting topic, but not a realistic goal when defined narrowly as dekstop PCs. Freedom of information is not only interesting but frankly vital.
Regarding the "earth" writ large, it means nothing (unless She gets fed up with us as a result.) Regarding the human population, I should say that the overall population is more influenced upward by past improvements in agriculture and hygiene going back thousands of years than it ever will be by something like this, or any kind of organ transplant/replacement. Same goes for bionic organs. Also, population growth over a given period of time depends more on parameters of birth and death rates across the population than on late-life developments that serve only to extend individual life (especially if it is extended for older non-reproductives.) As such, the growth we see today was influenced by factors and events several generations back that served mostly to reduce infant mortality. If, as some say, the Big Crunch and eventual Collapse will happen in the next 100 years then whatever allowed our numbers to explode up to then has taken place mostly in the last century (1900's, for those still getting adjusted.) Adding into the mix a few survivals due to exotic organ transplants just makes the rubble bounce a little higher (to mix metaphors a bit.)
Just for the record, I don't think anything of the sort will happen. Relax and enjoy your pork heart.
I started in tech ages ago when I started college, using a timeshare system to write analytical hacks in BASIC for undergraduate courses I was taking. I got good, and became the Biology dept tech guru at about age 20. Technolgy has dogged me ever since, and I have been a tech leader (of sorts) at University in academia, for University field research (ugh), in public education (urf), at an education non-profit think tank (bleh), and now a startup (er..several actually). I am now 43 yo. Frankly, I found the middle part of that journey the most tedious. Pure academia was, well, pure. The politics were minimal, the work was open-ended and interesting, but the pay was total crap. But everyone loved me! Research work may end up perverting you as it is rather corrupt now. Nonprofits can be groovy, think tanks however combine the very worst of University and private sector. Never again! And so, at this late stage, I like startups. Startups are, well, starting up. Politics are minimal, the work is open-ended and interesting, and yet the pay is pretty good. It is the hours and the stress that are crap! Does everyone love me still? A few people fear me, some turn to me for leadership. Either way it's love of a sort. Would I go back to academia? Someday I will, but not for the money. I will teach and terrorize the students "Paper Chase"-style. It's really the work of the moment for old nerds like me.
I'd get printouts in my mail slot, and pay $.35 for them. Groovy.
People are going to say that this is such a bad thing. But really, it's just an extended interpretation of what was always in the license. Software companies have been telling us for decades that we don't own the software we buy, and we've let them. And it doesn't matter that to now they haven't done much with that stipulation (except make it hard/impossible to sell a used computer with software) but they could have at any time. So now, Microsoft is
Back In The Olden Days, why, we just wrote our own software! Companies sold hardware and a compiler. That has slowly changed, and now we are staring down the barrel of the 'software subscription' gun. Meaning, you will have as much control over the nature and quality of your software (and hence your entire computing experience) as you have over the programming on broadcast TV. Which is, none at all. The masses are thrilled with that (they still watch TV, too) and M$ and all the others are selling to the masses and probably not a single reader of this post. So yeah it sucks when M$ takes control, as if they never had control, but if you have a problem with that you can join with a bunch of software rebels and create your own software, and license it the way you like. Yeah sure I'm not the first to come up with that idea, but before we lament what the software companies do because we let them, we can just go around them.
After all, we do still own the hardware. For now.