Well, you won't be sending OpenGL/DirectX commands over the network: Modern PC games need more bandwidth to the graphics card than an 8xAGP interface can provide. This is the principle reason for the next generation of graphics cards to go to PCI-Express. The bandwidth of 8xAGP is 18Gbps...six times more than raw video at 76Hz 1600x1200x24bits!
So - sending OpenGL commands from a central server would only make matters worse - sending the raw video would be cheaper.
One option that *would* work would be to send descriptions of objects to be drawn once at the start of a 'level' - and then update just the positions of those objects each frame.
However, that's pretty much what a present-day game server does...and you most definitely need a full-scale PC to render the results...a 'thin client' that could do that would be just as 'fat' as a full scale PC.
The idea that games are exempt from the discussion because you can play them on a game console is just fudging the issue.
Games consoles are growing the ability to access the Internet, play movies and do a bunch of things that PC's currently do.
If you're arguing that the PC is going to be replaced by game consoles - then that's a different argument entirely. In the end, games consoles (or set-top boxes) *are* PC's...but with closed architectures and no standards. That *could* happen - but it's not what the guy from Sun is telling us.
By the time game consoles overtook PC's in the home, they'd have all the features of PC's. You'd have to be able to photoshop your digital camera snaps, do word processing, send email and browse the web on these devices. That's evidently what the console manufacturers are thinking about - but there's a big snag.
Game consoles are sold at a loss - other than the Nintendo Game-Cube - they all cost more to manufacture than they are sold for. This means that they HAVE to sell games in order to cover their costs. If people bought these machines as PC replacements and only used them to access the net, their prices would have to double.
But even if that did happen - I don't see Sun making super-cheap end-user web appliances - and any kind of big centralised server is just as likely to be made by Dell or IBM as it is Sun. Those other companies are flexible enough to survive and prosper over any hypothetical cross-over period.
The one kind of company that WOULD prosper if the PC were somehow to become obsolete would be network providers. The need for insanely broadband networks would leap if this ever happened.
But I don't think it's going to happen...at least not in developed countries. You have a hard time getting people to take public transport rather than driving their own cars...this is problematic for the exact same reasons.
However, in China, India...yeah...super-cheap Internet appliances could work.
But even so - it's hard to see where the savings are. If you are going to write serious documents, you still need a large, bright screen - a network interface, a printer and a full-sized keyboard and enough local intelligence to run those devices. By the time you've done all that, the extra cost for RAM and CPU to turn it into a PC capable of running Linux/OpenOffice/Mozilla is rather tiny.
Cutting out the hard disk and CD drive is certainly a do-able thing though.
The point is that I *do* play at those rates and resolutions and any effort to replace *my* PC because it's "obsolete" had better do no worse.
So it's certainly possible to replace *SOME* PC's with network appliances - my mother only uses hers for email and web browsing - but that's not what the nice man from Sun is saying. He's saying that PC's are obsolete...and they aren't.
"1. What is Verizon FiOS Internet Service?
Verizon FiOS Internet Service is a broadband service designed
to provide Internet access with maximum connection speeds of up
to 30 Mbps downstream and 5 Mbps upstream"...that's not really 3.5Gbps is it? (and of course it uses that good old standby of snake oil salesmen everywhere "...up to..." - meaning that you might actually get a tenth of that some of the time).
If your game ran on a computer on the other end of that link, the best full colour 76Hz resolution would be about 128x128 pixels without compression - or maybe 300x200 with compression.
Not terribly impressive for playing Doom3 eh? You could probably play Tetris over that quality of link...if you could stand the latency.
The issue is always one of compute versus bandwidth.
The advantages of centralising compute is obvious - most PC's are idle for 99% of the time - so if we put the compute resources somewhere we can all share them then we can have 100x performance when we need it.
However, the PC can only be replaced with some kind of Web appliance and a honking great central server is only possible when there is sufficient bandwidth and low enough latency for ALL applications. If there is even one necessary application which needs more bandwidth than a typical network connection can provide - then you're screwed and you need a full blown computer at every location.
If you are talking about an office setup where people are doing word processing, spreadsheets and other predominantly text-based work - then maybe Mr Schwartz is right - but think about this - a Web-appliance capable of rendering nice interfaces isn't going to be a whole lot cheaper than a regular PC.
For a home setup, things are even worse.
When we play games - we need (at a minimum) 76Hz video at 1600x1200 full colour resolution...plus a couple of 44kHz audio channels...sustained - no dropouts and minimal latency.
That's 76 x 1600x1200 x 24 bits/second of graphics...3.5Gbits/sec. Realtime compression tricks might cut that in half - but even a dedicated 1GHz link to eachuser is insufficient.
A T1 line to every user (1.544Mbits/sec) wouldn't come close. Right now, you'd need a high quality synchronous optical network into every home.
It's possible - but compared to the cost of buying a $200 PC with a $100 graphics card, it's a non-starter.
Hard drives are the only things big enough to archive my 'stuff' - so everytime I upgrade my system, I copy all of my files onto the new drive (which is probably 5x larger than the last one - so I have plenty of space and no need to delete things).
So - I still have files that were on a TRS-80 cassette tape - then on an 8" floppy - that I copied onto 5" and then onto 3" and then onto a 200Mb hard drive - then 1Gb, 10Gb, 200Gb, 400Gb hard drives. The idea of keeping stuff on a large pile of CD-ROMs or even DVD-ROMs is ludicrous. The only way to archive my stuff is by putting it onto another hard drive.
With the rise of networked storage, the physical media becomes less relevent at time goes on. I can get files back from 'The Wayback Machine' in the state they were in YEARS ago - provided they were on my Web site.
Why wouldn't those Internet archives continue to be maintained in purpetuity?
The backward reach of Internet storage increases daily with people like Google scanning ancient paper media in order that they can be searched and perhaps one day viewed fully online. Blogs, Gmail archives, Forum systems mean that even our personal communications are saved for our descendants. The only personal mail my late Father left was a couple of letters to my mother before they were married that she kept as memento's. My grandkids should be able to find and read this very post 100 years from now.
How can anyone say that the trend is for data destruction? We're hoarding ancient (and mostly useless) data by the petabyte.
Walmart are reputed to have computer records of every credit card sale they ever made...archeologists will find those most interesting. Imagine if we knew the exact and detailed buying habit of every citizen of ancient Greece? Find Aristotles favorite brand of soap powder?
The larger problem (and it's potentially VERY serious) is the rise of closed file formats, encryption and DRM. There is a real possibility of designing systems that our ancestors may yet be unable to crack. When Moores' Law hits the endstops, our encryption may be truly impossible to break - even theoretically.
THAT is the thing that'll frustrate the efforts of future data-archeologists.
Is there a point where our privacy needs extend past our own lives? How about a thousand years from now?
I'm betting that if you scattered half a dozen 10 cent bicycle retro-reflectors around the area, you could have it dazzling more independent sources than it could cope with.
This is *such* a good idea - but I guarantee it'll get screwed up by the big corporates:
IN UTOPIA:
In an ideal world, there would be an industry-wide standard for the little container of fuel - there would be 50 manufacturers of them world-wide and they would be easy to find, interchangeable and CHEAP (just like AA batteries). Their life is much longer than batteries and they pollute much less.
HOORAY!
IN THE REAL WORLD:
In the real world, they will be like ink cartridges. Locked up to the wazoo with encrypted interfaces - unrefillable - unique not only to one manufacturer - but perhaps even to one model in their range. They'd be impossible to find in any store anywhere in the world - and they would cost an absolute fortune. Since there is no way to replace them with regular batteries, you're completely screwed.
GACK! Give me back my battery-operated devices!
Which do you think we'll end up with?
The pressure to sell portable consumer items like MP3 players, PDA's, etc for bottom dollar will cause manufacturers to give away the players for much less than they cost - then do the 'bait and switch' trick and charge 100x more for an ethanol cartridge than they actually cost to make.
Consumers don't like that in printers - let's not let that happen for MP3 players, etc.
There are far too many comments here from people who don't understand what the article is saying.
1) It is *NOT* a hydrogen powered car technology. 2) It is *NOT* a water injection system. 3) It is *NOT* claimed that the energy from burning the hydrogen is what makes the savings.
Any of those claims would be trivial to destroy.
The actual claim is that injecting tiny amounts of hydrogen (generated from electrolysing water) into the engine makes the gasoline burn more completely.
Since it is *NOT* true that only 35% of the gasoline is burned, that can't be what he's really claiming - unless he's a complete nut-job. Only really inefficient gas engines - such as found on weed-eaters and snow blowers - burn so little of their fuel.
The gasoline engine *DOES* leave some unburned residues - carbon monoxide for example could theoretically be combusted down to carbon dioxide to extract more energy and produce less pollution - but that's a *TINY* fraction of the problem. Nothing like the 10% to 35% that's claimed here.
However, there are enough large holes in what's claimed to wrap the bogosity meter around the end-stop.
Car runs on water...yeah...how many times have we heard that before.
Let the shredding of ridiculous claims commence!
1) 80 million miles of testing.
That's 500 man-years of driving at 55mph for 8 hours a day. The article says he employs 15 people and he's been in the business for 11 years. If we believe this claim at all, we know he hasn't been doing the testing in a scientifically controlled manner. At best, we have to assume his customers are doing it. But if the savings are only around 10%, how do you distinguish variations in driving style from actual fuel savings. There are plenty of ways to get a 10% fuel saving from a typical car by limiting it's accelleration ability for example. If he glued a half inch wooden block underneath the gas pedal he could probably get a 10% saving from most people's driving habits.
2) Montreal Gazette drove the test car on cruise at 63mph and saw a 10% fuel saving.
Well, that's really unsuprising. A carefully set up vehicle with properly inflated tyres and driven at the optimal speed on a single highway run can easily out-do the manufacturers milage rating because the test conditions for highway milage ratings from the EPA (or the Canadian equivelent) are less optimal than that.
3) "The tailpipe was not hot" "...proves that hot polluting emissions are not coming out of the tailpipe"
Hmmm - everything that goes into the engine (air, fuel) has to come out again - and it has to come out of the tailpipe. Even if what comes out is non-polluting, it *does* have to come out again. Removing the pollutants from the exhaust would make little if any difference to the temperature of the exhaust gasses. This proves *NOTHING*.
4) He's selling this unit himself.
This is a HUGE give-away. If this thing was real and had worked solidly over millions of hours of testing - the car manufacturers would be all over this development. He could walk into Ford or GM and pick up a cheque for a billion dollars tomorrow if this worked.
5) The amount of hydrogen his system could produce must be microscopic.
The amount of water that's in that little box lasts 80 hours. He talks about his company doing development work to shink the weight of the box down from 20lbs. If the box was mostly one huge water tank then you'd have to deduce that the only way to shink it noticably would be to reduce the size of it would be to shrink the amount of water it holds - but doing that wouldn't require significant development effort. It would be a trivial matter of telling people to refill it more often. So we have to assume that most of the 20lb box ISN'T water. Let's be generous and guess that half of it is a 1 gallon (10lb) water tank.
So just how much water is consumed over 80 hours of driving? 80 hours of driving would consume - what - 200 gallons of gasoline? So one gallon of water - when electrolized in to hydrogen - drastically improves the fuel efficiency of 200 gallons of gasoline?! Mmmm'K.
6) How come the hydrogen fuel cell developers aren't making a killing by injecting hydrogen into conventional gasoline engines? The amount of hydrogen in even a modest fuel cell would provide that tiny amount of hydrogen to the engine and last for maybe a year! Much more practical than this gizmo I think.
Electrolysis driven by a car battery...sheesh!
7) There are a LOT of unverifiable 'facts' in this paper.
Google this 'Gene Stowe' guy - who'se plastic version exploded with enough force to fling plastic disks 200 to 300 feet into the air...which we're told were then sighted as UFO's. No sign of him anywhere.
Oh - come *ON* - if you throw a plastic disk 200 to 300 feet into the air, it comes back down about 20 seconds later. How the heck could anyone ever imagine they'd seen a UFO? Furthermore, if they had a 'lot' of UFO sightings, that means that these things exploded an awful lot. How come the guy continued testing them after they exploded? Why isn't this story all over the Internet?
I agree that you can argue (quite successfully in your case) against my gut feel for the magnitude of the numbers - but you have to agree that there is enough variability in there that we cannot possibly rule out exogenesis because it's "obviously" less likely than endogenesis as the parent to my post suggested. It's perfectly possible for exogenesis to be overwhelmingly more probable.
OK - so 125 Giga-galaxies times 100 Giga-stars per galaxy times...what...2 planets per star on the average?
That's maybe 25,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets....any you're claming the problem is that 60% of those are uninhabitable because or binary stars? Oh dear...only 12,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 left.
Your argument has merit - but you are assuming that all planets that might be postulated as the ultimate origin of life are earth-like.
You might argue (although I personally would not) that the probability of life spontaneously arising on a world with the precise parameters of early earth is Pe - but the probability of it arising on a planet with different parameters of atmosphere, composition, temperature, gravity, radiation - is larger than Pe. Call this probability Px (probability of life forming on planet X). But there are lots of planet types out there if we don't know what the perfect conditions for forming life is (and I don't think we do) then Px might be as large as N times Pe where N is the number of planets in the universe. But certainly Px is larger than Pe just because of the range of possible alternative conditions.
Further more, these probabilities might be: "The probability of life forming in any given year" - so the probability of life forming at any time in the past would that annual probability times the available amount of time over which life might have been able to form. Well, if you require endogenesis, then you have only Te==the age of the earth - where exogenesis allows Tx==the age of the universe minus the travel time. I think it's clear that Tx > Te
So whilst the probability of life travelling between worlds might be some low probability (call it Z), then it might still be that Z.Px.Tx > Pe.Te - which would make exogenesis (panspermia) more probable than endogenesis.
Since Tx is MUCH greater than Te, and N is such a large number (so Px is much larger than Pe), we can allow Z (the risks due to travelling between worlds) to be tiny and still believe that exogensis is more probable then endogenesis.
I didn't say that we necessarily need panspermia to explain the origins of life, or that the theory is testable.
If we find a perfectly good explanation for the origins of life on Earth - then that is still not proof that life actually did start here.
That means that Panspermia is unfalsifyable - which is a bad thing for a scientific theory. All you can do is to presume that it's false until someone proves otherwise.
But the previous post questioned why Panspermia could possibly be of any help in explaining the origin problem. I merely pointed out the theoretical possibility that Panspermia might some day be an important explanation of how this happened.
If you somehow managed to utterly PROVE that life could not possibly have originated on early Earth, science would be in deep trouble without something like the Panspermia theory which allows one to hypothesise other sets of conditions and longer timescales.
Suppose we found evidence that life could not have formed without some particular chemical compound that cannot ever have existed at earthly temperatures and pressures? Then you'd be forced to admit that life started elsewhere. In a sense, you could prove panspermia by showing that life could not have come from early earth. Given that there is demonstrably life here now, you'd have proven that it had to have come from elsewhere.
A true test of Panspermia would require us to find another planet - perhaps one very similar to Earth and to demonstrate that life here and life there shared striking similarities that could not have arisen by chance. For example, if both life forms had similar long stretches of 'junk' DNA. You'd be unable to show that the 'life originated on earth' theory was true anymore because by symmetry, it might have arisen on planet-X and travelled here instead of the other way around.
So Panspermia might be proved, conclusively. If we found evidence of life on (say) Mars and could demonstrate that this life bore striking resemblances to Earthly life. You'd then be forced to admit that the overwhelmingly most likely explanation was that life could travel from one planet to another. You'd still be left with the question of whether it originated on Earth, on Mars or in some yet other place...but the idea that life could be formed in one place and travel to another would be demonstrably true.
My apologies - you are absolutely right of course. With no pre-existing life to infect, a virus couldn't reproduce. So strike that word.
Re:The Slurpee is Great But...
on
The Slurpee at 40
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
> I preferred the Icee which was a Slurpee knock-off
Icee is *not* a knockoff - it's the Slurpee that is the copy.
According to Wikipedia, 7-11 bought the idea for the Slurpee *from* Icee in 1967.
(Hmmm - that makes it only 38 years old...where did they get '40th birthday' from? Wiki says that the idea was invented in the 1950's - so it's not the anniversary of it's invention?).
Hardly one sentence of the story bears up under any kind of scientific scrutiny.
Whilst you can get a spark from voltages as low as 500 to 1000 volts if the conditions are right, the amount of current that flows is microscopic.
Once the guy's jacket had discharged once, he'd have to build up charge again over a long period.
Sparks from static sources are too brief to heat things up to that degree...and if you tried to measure them with a conventional meter, the meter itself would discharge the source even faster than a spark would. There wouldn't be time to get a reading because the current would only flow for a microsecond or so.
In the words of the masters: This myth is *busted*.
> Why would it be easier to believe that life began elsewhere > than to assume that life started here on Earth?
Two reasons:
1) We have some idea of the early conditions on Earth - but maybe
we have a hard time believing that those were conducive to
forming life from scratch. If life started elsewhere then there
is almost no limit to the range of concievable temperatures, pressures,
gravity, radiation and chemical environments in which it might
ultimately have formed.
2) Time: Is the Earth old enough for that very early phase of going
from completely non-biological materials to DNA, cell walls, etc?
If not - then panspermia explains that by saying that life was
around in some other place LONG before the Earth was formed.
So panspermia allows for a scientific explanation of life's formation that is perhaps more plausible than formation on early Earth.
Sure, this is an interesting paper with important ramifications - but I don't see how it has any bearing on the theory of panspermia.
Surely it only takes one tiny droplet of life-carrying comet water to make it into earth's early oceans without being boiled into sterility. If conditions were right, that initial small pocket of bacteria or virii could multiply to cover the planet in a matter of years.
You can't tell me that over millions of years and millions of impacts, not one would come down at a sufficiently low speed or favorable grazing angle to gently melt comet ice into an existing ocean.
Given what we've observed of Mars meteorites ending up on Earth, it's perfectly possible for life from one part of the universe to spread from planet to planet - and even solar system to solar system.
If you buy into the idea that there was life elsewhere in the universe long before life has been found to have existed on Earth - then panspermia is very possible.
My problem with that theory is that it doesn't answer any questions about how life formed in the first place. There still has to be an origin world - and explaining how life appeared there is just as hard as explaining how it might have formed here in the absence of panspermia.
Hmmm - I'd better email myself the GIF spec - maybe along with some source code to read it with - and a C compiler to compile the source with. Ah WTF - I'll just email myself the Linux sources....but seriously...there won't be any problem with reading GIF if anyone actually wants to - the file format is documented all over the place and in 100 years, if there are still GIF files on some kind of readable media - then the odds are very good that those documents will be easy to find. Programming a GIF reader (or a reader for almost any documented file format) is easy - presuming you are sufficiently motivated. A historian who is interested in 100 year old documents shouldn't have any problems getting them converted to whatever format is needed.
The HUGE concern is the undocumented, encrypted or (worse) DRM'ed files. Reading those in 100 years may be exceedingly difficult.
We can read documents written in heiroglyphs around 2000 years ago. The only problem is with languages for which no translations *ever* existed.
Survival and longevity of antique media are a much bigger problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you won't be sending OpenGL/DirectX commands over the network: Modern PC games need more bandwidth to the graphics card than an 8xAGP interface can provide. This is the principle reason for the next generation of graphics cards to go to PCI-Express. The bandwidth of 8xAGP is 18Gbps...six times more than raw video at 76Hz 1600x1200x24bits!
So - sending OpenGL commands from a central server would only make matters worse - sending the raw video would be cheaper.
One option that *would* work would be to send descriptions of objects to be drawn once at the start of a 'level' - and then update just the positions of those objects each frame.
However, that's pretty much what a present-day game server does...and you most definitely need a full-scale PC to render the results...a 'thin client' that could do that would be just as 'fat' as a full scale PC.
Hmmm - you don't live in the Dallas/Ft.Worth area do you?
The nearest public transport is 20 miles from where I live...and 20 miles from where I work too.
The idea that games are exempt from the discussion because you can play them on a game console is just fudging the issue.
Games consoles are growing the ability to access the Internet, play movies and do a bunch of things that PC's currently do.
If you're arguing that the PC is going to be replaced by game consoles - then that's a different argument entirely. In the end, games consoles (or set-top boxes) *are* PC's...but with closed architectures and no standards. That *could* happen - but it's not what the guy from Sun is telling us.
By the time game consoles overtook PC's in the home, they'd have all the features of PC's. You'd have to be able to photoshop your digital camera snaps, do word processing, send email and browse the web on these devices. That's evidently what the console manufacturers are thinking about - but there's a big snag.
Game consoles are sold at a loss - other than the Nintendo Game-Cube - they all cost more to manufacture than they are sold for. This means that they HAVE to sell games in order to cover their costs. If people bought these machines as PC replacements and only used them to access the net, their prices would have to double.
Now a conventional PC starts to look good again.
Yes - of course that's the case.
But even if that did happen - I don't see Sun making super-cheap end-user web appliances - and any kind of big centralised server is just as likely to be made by Dell or IBM as it is Sun. Those other companies are flexible enough to survive and prosper over any hypothetical cross-over period.
The one kind of company that WOULD prosper if the PC were somehow to become obsolete would be network providers. The need for insanely broadband networks would leap if this ever happened.
But I don't think it's going to happen...at least not in developed countries. You have a hard time getting people to take public transport rather than driving their own cars...this is problematic for the exact same reasons.
However, in China, India...yeah...super-cheap Internet appliances could work.
But even so - it's hard to see where the savings are. If you are going to write serious documents, you still need a large, bright screen - a network interface, a printer and a full-sized keyboard and enough local intelligence to run those devices. By the time you've done all that, the extra cost for RAM and CPU to turn it into a PC capable of running Linux/OpenOffice/Mozilla is rather tiny.
Cutting out the hard disk and CD drive is certainly a do-able thing though.
That's not the point.
The point is that I *do* play at those rates and resolutions and any effort to replace *my* PC because it's "obsolete" had better do no worse.
So it's certainly possible to replace *SOME* PC's with network appliances - my mother only uses hers for email and web browsing - but that's not what the nice man from Sun is saying. He's saying that PC's are obsolete...and they aren't.
"1. What is Verizon FiOS Internet Service?
Verizon FiOS Internet Service is a broadband service designed
to provide Internet access with maximum connection speeds of up
to 30 Mbps downstream and 5 Mbps upstream"
If your game ran on a computer on the other end of that link, the
best full colour 76Hz resolution would be about 128x128 pixels without compression - or maybe 300x200 with compression.
Not terribly impressive for playing Doom3 eh? You could probably play Tetris over that quality of link...if you could stand the latency.
The issue is always one of compute versus bandwidth.
The advantages of centralising compute is obvious - most PC's are idle for 99% of the time - so if we put the compute resources somewhere we can all share them then we can have 100x performance when we need it.
However, the PC can only be replaced with some kind of Web appliance and a honking great central server is only possible when there is sufficient bandwidth and low enough latency for ALL applications. If there is even one necessary application which needs more bandwidth than a typical network connection can provide - then you're screwed and you need a full blown computer at every location.
If you are talking about an office setup where people are doing word processing, spreadsheets and other predominantly text-based work - then maybe Mr Schwartz is right - but think about this - a Web-appliance capable of rendering nice interfaces isn't going to be a whole lot cheaper than a regular PC.
For a home setup, things are even worse.
When we play games - we need (at a minimum) 76Hz video at 1600x1200 full colour resolution...plus a couple of 44kHz audio channels...sustained - no dropouts and minimal latency.
That's 76 x 1600x1200 x 24 bits/second of graphics...3.5Gbits/sec. Realtime compression tricks might cut that in half - but even a dedicated 1GHz link to eachuser is insufficient.
A T1 line to every user (1.544Mbits/sec) wouldn't come close. Right now, you'd need a high quality synchronous optical network into every home.
It's possible - but compared to the cost of buying a $200 PC with a $100 graphics card, it's a non-starter.
Oops! Thanks for the correction.
I don't archive stuff on CD-ROM.
Hard drives are the only things big enough to archive my 'stuff' - so everytime I upgrade my system, I copy all of my files onto the new drive (which is probably 5x larger than the last one - so I have plenty of space and no need to delete things).
So - I still have files that were on a TRS-80 cassette tape - then on an 8" floppy - that I copied onto 5" and then onto 3" and then onto a 200Mb hard drive - then 1Gb, 10Gb, 200Gb, 400Gb hard drives. The idea of keeping stuff on a large pile of CD-ROMs or even DVD-ROMs is ludicrous. The only way to archive my stuff is by putting it onto another hard drive.
With the rise of networked storage, the physical media becomes less relevent at time goes on. I can get files back from 'The Wayback Machine' in the state they were in YEARS ago - provided they were on my Web site.
Why wouldn't those Internet archives continue to be maintained in purpetuity?
The backward reach of Internet storage increases daily with people like Google scanning ancient paper media in order that they can be searched and perhaps one day viewed fully online. Blogs, Gmail archives, Forum systems mean that even our personal communications are saved for our descendants. The only personal mail my late Father left was a couple of letters to my mother before they were married that she kept as memento's. My grandkids should be able to find and read this very post 100 years from now.
How can anyone say that the trend is for data destruction? We're hoarding ancient (and mostly useless) data by the petabyte.
Walmart are reputed to have computer records of every credit card sale they ever made...archeologists will find those most interesting. Imagine if we knew the exact and detailed buying habit of every citizen of ancient Greece? Find Aristotles favorite brand of soap powder?
The larger problem (and it's potentially VERY serious) is the rise of closed file formats, encryption and DRM. There is a real possibility of designing systems that our ancestors may yet be unable to crack. When Moores' Law hits the endstops, our encryption may be truly impossible to break - even theoretically.
THAT is the thing that'll frustrate the efforts of future data-archeologists.
Is there a point where our privacy needs extend past our own lives? How about a thousand years from now?
I'm betting that if you scattered half a dozen 10 cent bicycle retro-reflectors around the area, you could have it dazzling more independent sources than it could cope with.
This is *such* a good idea - but I guarantee it'll get screwed up by the big corporates:
IN UTOPIA:
In an ideal world, there would be an industry-wide standard for the little container of fuel - there would be 50 manufacturers of them world-wide and they would be easy to find, interchangeable and CHEAP (just like AA batteries).
Their life is much longer than batteries and they pollute much less.
HOORAY!
IN THE REAL WORLD:
In the real world, they will be like ink cartridges. Locked up to the wazoo with encrypted interfaces - unrefillable - unique not only to one manufacturer - but perhaps even to one model in their range. They'd be impossible to find in any store anywhere in the world - and they would cost an absolute fortune. Since there is no way to replace them with regular batteries, you're completely screwed.
GACK! Give me back my battery-operated devices!
Which do you think we'll end up with?
The pressure to sell portable consumer items like MP3 players, PDA's, etc for bottom dollar will cause manufacturers to give away the players for much less than they cost - then do the 'bait and switch' trick and charge 100x more for an ethanol cartridge than they actually cost to make.
Consumers don't like that in printers - let's not let that happen for MP3 players, etc.
RTFA please.
There are far too many comments here from people who don't understand what the article is saying.
1) It is *NOT* a hydrogen powered car technology.
2) It is *NOT* a water injection system.
3) It is *NOT* claimed that the energy from burning the hydrogen is what makes the savings.
Any of those claims would be trivial to destroy.
The actual claim is that injecting tiny amounts of hydrogen (generated from electrolysing water) into the engine makes the gasoline burn more completely.
Since it is *NOT* true that only 35% of the gasoline is burned, that can't be what he's really claiming - unless he's a complete nut-job. Only really inefficient gas engines - such as found on weed-eaters and snow blowers - burn so little of their fuel.
The gasoline engine *DOES* leave some unburned residues - carbon monoxide for example could theoretically be combusted down to carbon dioxide to extract more energy and produce less pollution - but that's a *TINY* fraction of the problem. Nothing like the 10% to 35% that's claimed here.
However, there are enough large holes in what's claimed to wrap the bogosity meter around the end-stop.
TFA mentioned a rival company Hy-Drive.
http://www.hy-drive.com/
They are making pretty much the exact same claims - although a lot less stridently and with no exact claims of fuel savings.
They'll sell you one right now:
http://www.hy-drive.com/main/Default.asp?Page=20
This one needs filling up with water every 5,000km - and since it fits into a 14"x14"x20" box - you know there's not a lot of water inside.
Car runs on water...yeah...how many times have we heard that before.
Let the shredding of ridiculous claims commence!
1) 80 million miles of testing.
That's 500 man-years of driving at 55mph for 8 hours a day. The article says he employs 15 people and he's been in the business for 11 years. If we believe this claim at all, we know he hasn't been doing the testing in a scientifically controlled manner. At best, we have to assume his customers are doing it. But if the savings are only around 10%, how do you distinguish variations in driving style from actual fuel savings. There are plenty of ways to get a 10% fuel saving from a typical car by limiting it's accelleration ability for example. If he glued a half inch wooden block underneath the gas pedal he could probably get a 10% saving from most people's driving habits.
2) Montreal Gazette drove the test car on cruise at 63mph and saw a 10% fuel saving.
Well, that's really unsuprising. A carefully set up vehicle with properly inflated tyres and driven at the optimal speed on a single highway run can easily out-do the manufacturers milage rating because the test conditions for highway milage ratings from the EPA (or the Canadian equivelent) are less optimal than that.
3) "The tailpipe was not hot" "...proves that hot polluting emissions are not coming out of the tailpipe"
Hmmm - everything that goes into the engine (air, fuel) has to come out again - and it has to come out of the tailpipe. Even if what comes out is non-polluting, it *does* have to come out again. Removing the pollutants from the exhaust would make little if any difference to the temperature of the exhaust gasses. This proves *NOTHING*.
4) He's selling this unit himself.
This is a HUGE give-away. If this thing was real and had worked solidly over millions of hours of testing - the car manufacturers would be all over this development. He could walk into Ford or GM and pick up a cheque for a billion dollars tomorrow if this worked.
5) The amount of hydrogen his system could produce must be microscopic.
The amount of water that's in that little box lasts 80 hours. He talks about his company doing development work to shink the weight of the box down from 20lbs. If the box was mostly one huge water tank then you'd have to deduce that the only way to shink it noticably would be to reduce the size of it would be to shrink the amount of water it holds - but doing that wouldn't require significant development effort. It would be a trivial matter of telling people to refill it more often. So we have to assume that most of the 20lb box ISN'T water. Let's be generous and guess that half of it is a 1 gallon (10lb) water tank.
So just how much water is consumed over 80 hours of driving? 80 hours of driving would consume - what - 200 gallons of gasoline? So one gallon of water - when electrolized in to hydrogen - drastically improves the fuel efficiency of 200 gallons of gasoline?! Mmmm'K.
6) How come the hydrogen fuel cell developers aren't making a killing by injecting hydrogen into conventional gasoline engines? The amount of hydrogen in even a modest fuel cell would provide that tiny amount of hydrogen to the engine and last for maybe a year! Much more practical than this gizmo I think.
Electrolysis driven by a car battery...sheesh!
7) There are a LOT of unverifiable 'facts' in this paper.
Google this 'Gene Stowe' guy - who'se plastic version exploded with enough force to fling plastic disks 200 to 300 feet into the air...which we're told were then sighted as UFO's. No sign of him anywhere.
Oh - come *ON* - if you throw a plastic disk 200 to 300 feet into the air, it comes back down about 20 seconds later. How the heck could anyone ever imagine they'd seen a UFO? Furthermore, if they had a 'lot' of UFO sightings, that means that these things exploded an awful lot. How come the guy continued testing them after they exploded? Why isn't this story all over the Internet?
Bogus.
I agree that you can argue (quite successfully in your case) against my gut feel for the magnitude of the numbers - but you have to agree that there is enough variability in there that we cannot possibly rule out exogenesis because it's "obviously" less likely than endogenesis as the parent to my post suggested. It's perfectly possible for exogenesis to be overwhelmingly more probable.
OK - so 125 Giga-galaxies times 100 Giga-stars per galaxy times...what...2 planets per star on the average?
...any you're claming the problem is that 60% of those are uninhabitable because or binary stars? Oh dear...only 12,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 left.
That's maybe 25,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets.
Your argument has merit - but you are assuming that all planets that might be postulated as the ultimate origin of life are earth-like.
You might argue (although I personally would not) that the probability of life spontaneously arising on a world with the precise parameters of early earth is Pe - but the probability of it arising on a planet with different parameters of atmosphere, composition, temperature, gravity, radiation - is larger than Pe. Call this probability Px (probability of life forming on planet X). But there are lots of planet types out there if we don't know what the perfect conditions for forming life is (and I don't think we do) then Px might be as large as N times Pe where N is the number of planets in the universe. But certainly Px is larger than Pe just because of the range of possible alternative conditions.
Further more, these probabilities might be: "The probability of life forming in any given year" - so the probability of life forming at any time in the past would that annual probability times the available amount of time over which life might have been able to form. Well, if you require endogenesis, then you have only Te==the age of the earth - where exogenesis allows Tx==the age of the universe minus the travel time. I think it's clear that Tx > Te
So whilst the probability of life travelling between worlds might be some low probability (call it Z), then it might still be that Z.Px.Tx > Pe.Te - which would make exogenesis (panspermia) more probable than endogenesis.
Since Tx is MUCH greater than Te, and N is such a large number (so Px is much larger than Pe), we can allow Z (the risks due to travelling between worlds) to be tiny and still believe that exogensis is more probable then endogenesis.
I didn't say that we necessarily need panspermia to explain the origins of life, or that the theory is testable.
If we find a perfectly good explanation for the origins of life on Earth - then that is still not proof that life actually did start here.
That means that Panspermia is unfalsifyable - which is a bad thing for a scientific theory. All you can do is to presume that it's false until someone proves otherwise.
But the previous post questioned why Panspermia could possibly be of any help in explaining the origin problem. I merely pointed out the theoretical possibility that Panspermia might some day be an important explanation of how this happened.
If you somehow managed to utterly PROVE that life could not possibly have originated on early Earth, science would be in deep trouble without something like the Panspermia theory which allows one to hypothesise other sets of conditions and longer timescales.
Suppose we found evidence that life could not have formed without some particular chemical compound that cannot ever have existed at earthly temperatures and pressures? Then you'd be forced to admit that life started elsewhere. In a sense, you could prove panspermia by showing that life could not have come from early earth. Given that there is demonstrably life here now, you'd have proven that it had to have come from elsewhere.
A true test of Panspermia would require us to find another planet - perhaps one very similar to Earth and to demonstrate that life here and life there shared striking similarities that could not have arisen by chance. For example, if both life forms had similar long stretches of 'junk' DNA. You'd be unable to show that the 'life originated on earth' theory was true anymore because by symmetry, it might have arisen on planet-X and travelled here instead of the other way around.
So Panspermia might be proved, conclusively. If we found evidence of life on (say) Mars and could demonstrate that this life bore striking resemblances to Earthly life. You'd then be forced to admit that the overwhelmingly most likely explanation was that life could travel from one planet to another. You'd still be left with the question of whether it originated on Earth, on Mars or in some yet other place...but the idea that life could be formed in one place and travel to another would be demonstrably true.
My apologies - you are absolutely right of course. With no pre-existing life to infect, a virus couldn't reproduce. So strike that word.
> I preferred the Icee which was a Slurpee knock-off
Icee is *not* a knockoff - it's the Slurpee that is the copy.
According to Wikipedia, 7-11 bought the idea for the Slurpee *from* Icee in 1967.
(Hmmm - that makes it only 38 years old...where did they get '40th birthday' from? Wiki says that the idea was invented in the 1950's - so it's not the anniversary of it's invention?).
Yeah this is bo-o-gus.
Hardly one sentence of the story bears up under any kind of scientific scrutiny.
Whilst you can get a spark from voltages as low as 500 to 1000 volts if the conditions are right, the amount of current that flows is microscopic.
Once the guy's jacket had discharged once, he'd have to build up charge again over a long period.
Sparks from static sources are too brief to heat things up to that degree...and if you tried to measure them with a conventional meter, the meter itself would discharge the source even faster than a spark would. There wouldn't be time to get a reading because the current would only flow for a microsecond or so.
In the words of the masters: This myth is *busted*.
> 80 percent of all studies are wrong...
Which means that there is only a 20% chance that the study that shows that "80% of studies are wrong" is right.
Which means that we have no idea what the probability of error is without doing a lot more studies on the subject.
My head hurts.
> Why would it be easier to believe that life began elsewhere
> than to assume that life started here on Earth?
Two reasons:
1) We have some idea of the early conditions on Earth - but maybe
we have a hard time believing that those were conducive to
forming life from scratch. If life started elsewhere then there
is almost no limit to the range of concievable temperatures, pressures,
gravity, radiation and chemical environments in which it might
ultimately have formed.
2) Time: Is the Earth old enough for that very early phase of going
from completely non-biological materials to DNA, cell walls, etc?
If not - then panspermia explains that by saying that life was
around in some other place LONG before the Earth was formed.
So panspermia allows for a scientific explanation of life's formation
that is perhaps more plausible than formation on early Earth.
Sure, this is an interesting paper with important ramifications - but I don't see how it has any bearing on the theory of panspermia.
Surely it only takes one tiny droplet of life-carrying comet water to make it into earth's early oceans without being boiled into sterility. If conditions were right, that initial small pocket of bacteria or virii could multiply to cover the planet in a matter of years.
You can't tell me that over millions of years and millions of impacts, not one would come down at a sufficiently low speed or favorable grazing angle to gently melt comet ice into an existing ocean.
Given what we've observed of Mars meteorites ending up on Earth, it's perfectly possible for life from one part of the universe to spread from planet to planet - and even solar system to solar system.
If you buy into the idea that there was life elsewhere in the universe long before life has been found to have existed on Earth - then panspermia is very possible.
My problem with that theory is that it doesn't answer any questions about how life formed in the first place. There still has to be an origin world - and explaining how life appeared there is just as hard as explaining how it might have formed here in the absence of panspermia.
Hmmm - I'd better email myself the GIF spec - maybe along with some source code to read it with - and a C compiler to compile the source with. Ah WTF - I'll just email myself the Linux sources. ...but seriously...there won't be any problem with reading GIF if anyone actually wants to - the file format is documented all over the place and in 100 years, if there are still GIF files on some kind of readable media - then the odds are very good that those documents will be easy to find. Programming a GIF reader (or a reader for almost any documented file format) is easy - presuming you are sufficiently motivated. A historian who is interested in 100 year old documents shouldn't have any problems getting them converted to whatever format is needed.
The HUGE concern is the undocumented, encrypted or (worse) DRM'ed files. Reading those in 100 years may be exceedingly difficult.
We can read documents written in heiroglyphs around 2000 years ago. The only problem is with languages for which no translations *ever* existed.
Survival and longevity of antique media are a much bigger problem.