Wait ten years. It takes that sort of time for gee-whizz new tech to become commonplace enough that people with skills in other fields (such as medical implants) can build the components into unrelated gadgets.
Though all you need is the control system and bluetooth in your brain. If the brain can touch an imaginary screen like fingers touch a real one, the rest of the phone can be in your pocket (easier to charge, upgrade etc).
I would doubt that this means a million full-time workers. My guess is that most of that million is people paid a small fee and a commission for looking out when they go to the markets in then normal course of their lives and whistleblowing when they see counterfeits. Obviously, there will be some full time organisers, and some full-time enforcers. But that figure of a million strikes me as a PR figure to tell the world that the government is taking conterfeiting seriously.
Because that's what's currently thoroughly lacking in China: they copy, but do not improve anything of it or create their own designs based on imported designs, which is what gave the Japanese their early edge and what helped propel that country to the top of the world's economies.
And Chinese companies, having copied successfully, are now starting to innovate - exactly as the Japanese did. Japan went though an early stage when "Made in Japan" meant shoddy look-alikes. From which, over thirty years, they transitions to where the same phrase meant quality advanced products. China is already embarked down that road - it won't be thirty years before they have a similar reputation. While there is still a lot of cheap tat coming out of China, companies like Huawei are producing kit that is seriously outperforming their Western competitors.
Software solutions are almost certainly cheaper than discrete logic, which is in part why they are using them. The silicon cost of, say, an 8051 is essentially zero. It is much cheaper to buy a general purpose 8051 bases microcontroller, produced in tens of millions, and customise it with software, than to create a specialized circuit. Especially if you are a small-scale producer like Jaguar - but even mass producers like Toyota do so for their mass-market cars.
But the second part of your post is germane. Who checks the QA on the software in these safety-critical systems? In avionics, the certification authorities require certain standards of software QA before they will license the aircraft to carry them. There is no such certification authority, so far as I know, for road vehicles. And there would be some reasonable opposition to imposing it: do you want to make car tuning something that can only be done by aerospace qualified companies?
But the whole point of the transportation is to move bees to the different orchard areas at the times that they are in flower. The routine trading involved with fixed bee colonies would be tiny. What they are doing is moving bees from California's early flowering orchards to Oregon's later ones and then Washington's even later one, then perhaps over to Florida for a bit of subtropical winter pollination. Limiting to one state would remove the reason for moving them, and require major changes to farming practice (which, maybe, are needed).
The goal is that the technology will help reduce congestion, fuel waste, and accidents."
A much bigger goal for me is that it will increase mobility for the elderly and disabled. I saw my parents lives become dramatically circumscribed when they lost the ability to drive. I am within long view of the same thing myself, and I hope that these cars will be available before I get there.
And, to answer some other points, it doesn't have to be as good as the best driver, it only has to be as good as the average driver. In fact, if these cars existed, we could be more draconian about banning the very worst drivers. How would road safety change if we replaced the worst 10% of drivers with a automated car equal to the (raised) average?
And how many accidents are caused by drink, tiredness, texting/phoning etc? I am not saying they would all disappear, but if you could hand over to an automated system while you sent a text, the roads would be much safer. (I know you are an idiot if you test while driving, but empirically idiots exist).
In fact, the system could observe the driver and offer/demand to take over if the driver was below standard. (And call the police or refuse to run if way below standard?).
You are assuming that all babies are unwanted accidents. In fact, the overwhelming majority of adults seem to want to have children.
True in most of the developed world - where the birth rate has fallen below the replacement level. Not so true in poorer parts of the world, where men regard it as humiliating to use condoms and a woman's role to bear as many children as she can. And birth rates are highest in places, such as the Congo, where life is chanciest. If you may die tomorrow, reproduce today. And if your children have a high probability of dying, have lots of them. The most effective contraception is female education and empowerment.
No, that is not true. Of course, if there is a slow device, it may tie up the bus while it is being used. But when it gets off the bus, faster devices can work at their native speed. In fact, USB 2 and USB 3 devices can, to q certain extent, be operating simultaneously because USB3 is actually a separate set of wires.
Don't worry - I know that. I work on firmware inside USB peripherals. But the same fraction of a second of DC remaining after the AC goes should allow all outstanding transactions to be completed on well-behaved peripherals.
Cache is just SRAM - but extremely fast SRAM either integrated on the CPU chip or on special cache chips very close to it. Memristors are currently being proposed to replace Flash - 10,000 time slower than cache, for write at least - and DDR - gettong towards 100 times slower than cache. It is a jump to assume that memristors will quickly reach the speeds of cache SRAM. It is also an assumption that you can merge the fabrication technologies for memristors with the bleeding-edge fabrication technologies used for CPUs.
I am not saying that neither can occur, but I suggest that it is extrapolating a long way from the current position described in TFA to where we can get non-volatile cache,
This assumes that disks will not manage to keep ahead in price/performance of these memristors. People have predicted the death of hard disks many times over teh past two decades to my knowledge, and always been proved wrong. Memristors may well wipe out current flash, but they are chasing a moving target with disks.
Of course, low end systems will no longer need the vast space offered by disks. We are already seeing that with tablets. The average hope PC may go diskless. But the ever increasing assumption that "storage is cheap" will mean that people will always want large storage systems for some uses.
True, but a CPU ought to be able to store all that it needs to of its state in a small fraction of a second. Most PSUs will hold power for this long, so that if they can give an "power failed" interrupt half a second before dropping the main voltage, it should be OK. You will have to flush dirty cache lines to main memory, but not dirty disk sectors to disk. Similarly, the disk should be able to complete transfers actually in progress in that same fraction of a second.
The problem will be, as you say, other hardware elements. However, many such elements are now being USB connected, and USB is explicitly supposed to be tolerant to hot plug/unplug - which is what a power fail should resemble. The main non-USB connected device is the monitor (and secondary monitors can be USB connected). Fix that, and you will have a chance of PCs which stop in mid stride on power failure and pick up when it returns.
No - it accumulates continually, provided it is high enough to avoid atmospheric drag. OK, the velocity difference between LEO and escape velocity is still of the order of 20,000 mph, so it would take 1,000 months to escape from Earth's gravity well. But what is eighty odd years on the cosmic scale?
Thing travelling at the speed of light produce infinities in predicted measurable quantities. Things travelling faster than light produce i (sqrt(-1)) in predicted measurable quantities. Most physicists say that anything that produces i in a measurable result, as opposed to some intermediate value which eventually gets squared, is probably not a reflection of the real world.
IANAL, of course, but I don't see this standing up in court. You cannot sign away basic human rights, and recourse to the courts would, I think, be ruled (especially by lawyers) as such a right. Especially if it were entered into by the usual semi-formal means of opening the packaging or clicking "I agree" rather than the more formal signing and dating of a document,. It might have some impact in assigning costs if you bypasses their conflict resolution process, and it were later shown that the process could have solved your problem. Assign from that, I see it as meaningless other than as a generator of FUD.
On the contrary - the record shows that when two groups of humans meet, mating tends to start within weeks or even days. This is regardless of loudly expressed disapproval from "authorities". There were many and widely bruited condemnations of the tendency of young white men to mate with their black slaves - but it didn't stop them. And recent evidence is that early Europeans interbred with Neandethals, from which they had been separated for hundreds rather than tens of thousands of years. After all, if men will mate with goats, dogs and horses - as some do - they will surely mate with a slightly different humanoid.
Its odd how many people want a tablet to be a real computer because it has a CPU in it. A tablet is not, and should not be, a PC. Just as your phone has a CPU more powerful than the PC you were using about eight years ago, but is not a PC, neither is a tablet. A motorbike doesn't have a roof, side windows, wipers, and air conditioning even though some people build cars using the same engine. The same applies here: if you want a PC, get a PC, don't encumber a light weight specialist device with features designed for a general-purpose device. Tablet != Computer.
Why does even one airport have to be serviced by a single company? Each terminal could be handled separately. One lane complex obviously needs a unified contro, but above that there is no need for co-operation, And the airlines would get feedback from customers and change pretty fast. Unlike many services, this is something that could be on pretty short term contracts: say two year contracts extended annually. So each year, you tell the contractor they have one year to fix it, or you will start looking for a new contractor for the year after that. Only small airports would have to give even a temporary monopoly.
Which is why I explicitly made allowance for automated trading up to 10 times faster than underlying transactions. Any increase in liquidity past this point is unnecessary: you are spending money to generate liquidity which cannot be used.
My point is that the only real entries and exits from the market are those mediated by humans, with a timescale of a minute or so. Everything else is just churning round the financial system, as zero net gain. And, while I accept that automated mechanisms must be a bit faster than humans, nothing in real, i.e. h7uman, terms is gained by trading faster than a few seconds. You may, of course, pump money from one market to another - but doing this hyperfast delivers no more value than doing it fast.
No, it would still be very small - the cost per trade of this new link is presumably pretty small, just that there are many trades, Perhaps micro-tax would be better: I would have thought it would come in at a few parts per million,
Sadly, the high speed trading for which this is designed is a zero sum game - the extra dollars made by the hedge funds are shaved off someone else.
Banking has a very valid job to do: transferring money from savers to borrowers, aggregating small savings into large investments, and ironing out risk by spreading it over many loans. But these are, fundamentally, decisions made by humans, and such decisions will be made on timescales of, at the fastest, a minute or so. In order to ensure liquidity, and to even out large lumps in the trading,it is useful to have automated system which work on a timescale which is, say, ten times faster. Such banking and trading adds value. and it the reason we need banks. But any trading faster than that is purely profiting from irregularities in the system, and adds no value to the world. So any value extracted by the traders, or used to build links for such traders (as described in the article) is money wasted: a net loss to humanity.
I would like to put a drag on such trading: one which would dissuade high speed trades while not harming legitimate trades, including legitimate spreading of large risks. A nano-tax might do it - and the premium traders will pay to use this cable suggests the magnitude of such a nano-tax.
I find it curious that because someone is right about some things, people assume he was right about everything, while others say that because he was wrong about some things, he was wrong about everything.
Of course Marx had some real insights. He would not have had any following at all if he had not. But, as is often the case, seen what is wrong with the current system does not meaning knowing how to fix it. His insights into the problems of 19th century capitalism were true. But his plan for fixing them simply doesn't work. True communism, as Marx planned it, simply cannot work in a world in which people are even a little selfish. Soviet Communism was not Marxist communism - it merely claimed to be; it was corrupted by normal human self interest to the point where its claims to Marxism were completely token.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait ten years. It takes that sort of time for gee-whizz new tech to become commonplace enough that people with skills in other fields (such as medical implants) can build the components into unrelated gadgets.
Though all you need is the control system and bluetooth in your brain. If the brain can touch an imaginary screen like fingers touch a real one, the rest of the phone can be in your pocket (easier to charge, upgrade etc).
I would doubt that this means a million full-time workers. My guess is that most of that million is people paid a small fee and a commission for looking out when they go to the markets in then normal course of their lives and whistleblowing when they see counterfeits. Obviously, there will be some full time organisers, and some full-time enforcers. But that figure of a million strikes me as a PR figure to tell the world that the government is taking conterfeiting seriously.
Because that's what's currently thoroughly lacking in China: they copy, but do not improve anything of it or create their own designs based on imported designs, which is what gave the Japanese their early edge and what helped propel that country to the top of the world's economies.
And Chinese companies, having copied successfully, are now starting to innovate - exactly as the Japanese did. Japan went though an early stage when "Made in Japan" meant shoddy look-alikes. From which, over thirty years, they transitions to where the same phrase meant quality advanced products. China is already embarked down that road - it won't be thirty years before they have a similar reputation. While there is still a lot of cheap tat coming out of China, companies like Huawei are producing kit that is seriously outperforming their Western competitors.
Software solutions are almost certainly cheaper than discrete logic, which is in part why they are using them. The silicon cost of, say, an 8051 is essentially zero. It is much cheaper to buy a general purpose 8051 bases microcontroller, produced in tens of millions, and customise it with software, than to create a specialized circuit. Especially if you are a small-scale producer like Jaguar - but even mass producers like Toyota do so for their mass-market cars.
But the second part of your post is germane. Who checks the QA on the software in these safety-critical systems? In avionics, the certification authorities require certain standards of software QA before they will license the aircraft to carry them. There is no such certification authority, so far as I know, for road vehicles. And there would be some reasonable opposition to imposing it: do you want to make car tuning something that can only be done by aerospace qualified companies?
But the whole point of the transportation is to move bees to the different orchard areas at the times that they are in flower. The routine trading involved with fixed bee colonies would be tiny. What they are doing is moving bees from California's early flowering orchards to Oregon's later ones and then Washington's even later one, then perhaps over to Florida for a bit of subtropical winter pollination. Limiting to one state would remove the reason for moving them, and require major changes to farming practice (which, maybe, are needed).
The goal is that the technology will help reduce congestion, fuel waste, and accidents."
A much bigger goal for me is that it will increase mobility for the elderly and disabled. I saw my parents lives become dramatically circumscribed when they lost the ability to drive. I am within long view of the same thing myself, and I hope that these cars will be available before I get there.
And, to answer some other points, it doesn't have to be as good as the best driver, it only has to be as good as the average driver. In fact, if these cars existed, we could be more draconian about banning the very worst drivers. How would road safety change if we replaced the worst 10% of drivers with a automated car equal to the (raised) average?
And how many accidents are caused by drink, tiredness, texting/phoning etc? I am not saying they would all disappear, but if you could hand over to an automated system while you sent a text, the roads would be much safer. (I know you are an idiot if you test while driving, but empirically idiots exist).
In fact, the system could observe the driver and offer/demand to take over if the driver was below standard. (And call the police or refuse to run if way below standard?).
You are assuming that all babies are unwanted accidents. In fact, the overwhelming majority of adults seem to want to have children.
True in most of the developed world - where the birth rate has fallen below the replacement level. Not so true in poorer parts of the world, where men regard it as humiliating to use condoms and a woman's role to bear as many children as she can. And birth rates are highest in places, such as the Congo, where life is chanciest. If you may die tomorrow, reproduce today. And if your children have a high probability of dying, have lots of them. The most effective contraception is female education and empowerment.
No, that is not true. Of course, if there is a slow device, it may tie up the bus while it is being used. But when it gets off the bus, faster devices can work at their native speed. In fact, USB 2 and USB 3 devices can, to q certain extent, be operating simultaneously because USB3 is actually a separate set of wires.
Don't worry - I know that. I work on firmware inside USB peripherals. But the same fraction of a second of DC remaining after the AC goes should allow all outstanding transactions to be completed on well-behaved peripherals.
Cache is just SRAM - but extremely fast SRAM either integrated on the CPU chip or on special cache chips very close to it. Memristors are currently being proposed to replace Flash - 10,000 time slower than cache, for write at least - and DDR - gettong towards 100 times slower than cache. It is a jump to assume that memristors will quickly reach the speeds of cache SRAM. It is also an assumption that you can merge the fabrication technologies for memristors with the bleeding-edge fabrication technologies used for CPUs.
I am not saying that neither can occur, but I suggest that it is extrapolating a long way from the current position described in TFA to where we can get non-volatile cache,
This assumes that disks will not manage to keep ahead in price/performance of these memristors. People have predicted the death of hard disks many times over teh past two decades to my knowledge, and always been proved wrong. Memristors may well wipe out current flash, but they are chasing a moving target with disks.
Of course, low end systems will no longer need the vast space offered by disks. We are already seeing that with tablets. The average hope PC may go diskless. But the ever increasing assumption that "storage is cheap" will mean that people will always want large storage systems for some uses.
True, but a CPU ought to be able to store all that it needs to of its state in a small fraction of a second. Most PSUs will hold power for this long, so that if they can give an "power failed" interrupt half a second before dropping the main voltage, it should be OK. You will have to flush dirty cache lines to main memory, but not dirty disk sectors to disk. Similarly, the disk should be able to complete transfers actually in progress in that same fraction of a second.
The problem will be, as you say, other hardware elements. However, many such elements are now being USB connected, and USB is explicitly supposed to be tolerant to hot plug/unplug - which is what a power fail should resemble. The main non-USB connected device is the monitor (and secondary monitors can be USB connected). Fix that, and you will have a chance of PCs which stop in mid stride on power failure and pick up when it returns.
Unless it is expressed in football pitches, or maybe micro-Belgiums, how can I possibly understand it?
No - it accumulates continually, provided it is high enough to avoid atmospheric drag. OK, the velocity difference between LEO and escape velocity is still of the order of 20,000 mph, so it would take 1,000 months to escape from Earth's gravity well. But what is eighty odd years on the cosmic scale?
Thing travelling at the speed of light produce infinities in predicted measurable quantities. Things travelling faster than light produce i (sqrt(-1)) in predicted measurable quantities. Most physicists say that anything that produces i in a measurable result, as opposed to some intermediate value which eventually gets squared, is probably not a reflection of the real world.
IANAL, of course, but I don't see this standing up in court. You cannot sign away basic human rights, and recourse to the courts would, I think, be ruled (especially by lawyers) as such a right. Especially if it were entered into by the usual semi-formal means of opening the packaging or clicking "I agree" rather than the more formal signing and dating of a document,. It might have some impact in assigning costs if you bypasses their conflict resolution process, and it were later shown that the process could have solved your problem. Assign from that, I see it as meaningless other than as a generator of FUD.
On the contrary - the record shows that when two groups of humans meet, mating tends to start within weeks or even days. This is regardless of loudly expressed disapproval from "authorities". There were many and widely bruited condemnations of the tendency of young white men to mate with their black slaves - but it didn't stop them. And recent evidence is that early Europeans interbred with Neandethals, from which they had been separated for hundreds rather than tens of thousands of years. After all, if men will mate with goats, dogs and horses - as some do - they will surely mate with a slightly different humanoid.
Its odd how many people want a tablet to be a real computer because it has a CPU in it. A tablet is not, and should not be, a PC. Just as your phone has a CPU more powerful than the PC you were using about eight years ago, but is not a PC, neither is a tablet. A motorbike doesn't have a roof, side windows, wipers, and air conditioning even though some people build cars using the same engine. The same applies here: if you want a PC, get a PC, don't encumber a light weight specialist device with features designed for a general-purpose device. Tablet != Computer.
Why does even one airport have to be serviced by a single company? Each terminal could be handled separately. One lane complex obviously needs a unified contro, but above that there is no need for co-operation, And the airlines would get feedback from customers and change pretty fast. Unlike many services, this is something that could be on pretty short term contracts: say two year contracts extended annually. So each year, you tell the contractor they have one year to fix it, or you will start looking for a new contractor for the year after that. Only small airports would have to give even a temporary monopoly.
See the happy moron,
He doesn't give a damn.
I wish I were a moron.
My God! Perhaps I am.
Which is why I explicitly made allowance for automated trading up to 10 times faster than underlying transactions. Any increase in liquidity past this point is unnecessary: you are spending money to generate liquidity which cannot be used.
My point is that the only real entries and exits from the market are those mediated by humans, with a timescale of a minute or so. Everything else is just churning round the financial system, as zero net gain. And, while I accept that automated mechanisms must be a bit faster than humans, nothing in real, i.e. h7uman, terms is gained by trading faster than a few seconds. You may, of course, pump money from one market to another - but doing this hyperfast delivers no more value than doing it fast.
No, it would still be very small - the cost per trade of this new link is presumably pretty small, just that there are many trades, Perhaps micro-tax would be better: I would have thought it would come in at a few parts per million,
Sadly, the high speed trading for which this is designed is a zero sum game - the extra dollars made by the hedge funds are shaved off someone else.
Banking has a very valid job to do: transferring money from savers to borrowers, aggregating small savings into large investments, and ironing out risk by spreading it over many loans. But these are, fundamentally, decisions made by humans, and such decisions will be made on timescales of, at the fastest, a minute or so. In order to ensure liquidity, and to even out large lumps in the trading,it is useful to have automated system which work on a timescale which is, say, ten times faster. Such banking and trading adds value. and it the reason we need banks. But any trading faster than that is purely profiting from irregularities in the system, and adds no value to the world. So any value extracted by the traders, or used to build links for such traders (as described in the article) is money wasted: a net loss to humanity.
I would like to put a drag on such trading: one which would dissuade high speed trades while not harming legitimate trades, including legitimate spreading of large risks. A nano-tax might do it - and the premium traders will pay to use this cable suggests the magnitude of such a nano-tax.
I find it curious that because someone is right about some things, people assume he was right about everything, while others say that because he was wrong about some things, he was wrong about everything.
Of course Marx had some real insights. He would not have had any following at all if he had not. But, as is often the case, seen what is wrong with the current system does not meaning knowing how to fix it. His insights into the problems of 19th century capitalism were true. But his plan for fixing them simply doesn't work. True communism, as Marx planned it, simply cannot work in a world in which people are even a little selfish. Soviet Communism was not Marxist communism - it merely claimed to be; it was corrupted by normal human self interest to the point where its claims to Marxism were completely token.