Even if the writer's conclusion is true, it is not so obvious as to justify stating it without argument.
All physical computers are a finite implementation of a register machine. All programs for a register machine are equivalent to programs for all other known kinds of computers (Turing Machines, single stack machines, functional systems, even Quantum Mechanical devices), so changing the architecture is not going to change the argument. All programs for register machines can ultimately be described as a binary string. All binary strings can be interpreted as a base 2 representation of an integer. Therefore all programs that may ever be produced for any computer can be an integer value and so there exists a one to one mapping of all programs to the integers which are denumerable, therefore all programs are denumerable.
You can get more rigorous with this argument, such as by proving equivalence of function systems, Turing machines, proving that all programs have a binary representation etc. but that's the basic outline of a proof and it's not surprising. It may not be immediately obvious to those who don't study logic, computer science (or rather the philosophical basis of computation) or mathematics, but it's really an undergraduate level problem in those disciplines. So no, it's not really necessary to justify that statement, it's sufficient to state the theorem
"all computer programs may be mapped to integers and hence are denumerable" which has a well understood and uncontroversial proof, and get on to interesting problems.
I specifically said muscle cars of a generation ago (about a decade in car technology terms) for a reason. Corvettes have significantly improved in terms of fuel efficiency and horsepower over the years. The C6 engine is an engineering marvel, producing 400HP with good fuel efficiency. The BMW M3 powerplant is more comparable in power to the base engine in the C4 'vettes, which is why I specified older muscle cars. I know the 'vette isn't typically considered a muscle car, but its engine is more similar to a muscle car engine: a large displacement, pushrod V8 than other sports cars.
Anyway, gearing works against the M3. The city mileage is based on running the car at a constant 20mph, the highway at 48mph. Thanks to gearing the M3 has to turn anywhere from 1.2 to 1.5 times the rate of the vette to maintain the same speed. Factoring in the M3's higher compression ratio and the M3's advantage due to smaller capacity almost vanishes. By my back of the envelope calculations you'd still expect a small efficiency advantage for the M3 engine, but much less than the advantage it enjoys due to displacement, but I'm sure we can make that disappear if we took intake and exhaust inefficiencies into account. An M3 with lower gear ratios would regain fuel efficiency at the cost of no longer being a high performance car.
You're right, I was sloppy with my terms. The compression ratio is defined as the ratio of the maximum to minimum area of the cylinder. I just meant that once the turbo spools up the air is compressed before reaching the cylinder leading to a higher effective compression ratio than a naturally aspirated engine of the same geometry would have. More air requires more fuel, so turbocharging trades fuel efficiency for volumetric efficiency. In general a turbocharged engine acts like an engine of larger displacement, and suffers similar fuel efficiency penalties. Coupled with the huge displacement of the Veyron engine it's obvious that fuel economy is going to suffer. Not that it's really a concern for this type of automobile, although Porsche is making an effort to produce high performance engines that don't have poor efficiency at lower power, like the GT3.
OK, it sounds like this technology is starting to make it to mass market. Let's see if it lasts. As I said before, there have been attempts to do this before and they have been less than successful. The fact that GM only deactivates cylinders in limp home mode may indicate that they can't do it on a regular basis for fuel economy. Also since Saab is a division of GM and pursuing a different method of varying displacement that could be a sign that deactivating cylinders is not an optimal solution. Maybe Daimler-Chrysler has solved that problem, or maybe it's the second coming of active suspension; another neat technology that failed to catch on in the market place, time will tell.
Bzzt. You're _mostly_ right, but you've got a few critical things wrong.
Fair enough, let's try it point by point because I'm feeling peevish.
Mileage is partially caused by the efficiency of the motor, and partly by the efficiency of the package it's wrapped in.
I believe I mentioned aerodynamic efficiency. Mechanical efficiency, like properly inflated tires, low rolling resistance tires (which is generally synonymous with low traction) and other effects also come into play. However I believe the message I was replying to was focused on the relationship of engine horsepower to mileage so I wanted to ignore packaging issues. Furthermore the original point was that horsepower cannot be used to infer mileage, but high horsepower does imply large engine displacement, holding the redline and compression ratio constant and allowing for similar engine material and component technology. Engine displacement is a large component of fuel efficiency and the Veyron's engine is huge in terms of displacement. There is simply no way (including caveats about red lines, compression etc.) to make an 8 liter engine as fuel efficient as a 3.5 liter engine.
My _98_ Corvette, while it has much less drag than the 89
I'd be surprised if that's really true, but I don't have anything at hand to answer that definitively. Suffice it to say though, Corvette's have generally gotten larger with each generation and whatever wind tunnel work has been done on the C5 may be offset by its increase frontal area with respect to the C4.
Several manufaturers are releasing a displacement on command feature. making the V8 a V4 by shutting down four cylinders and removing the oil that keeps the lifters filled (and hence, lifting valves.) GM, Porsche and IIRC BMW have motors announced.
Two nits to pick here: first of all what you are talking about is a variable number of active cylinders, a variable displacement engine actually changes the engine displacement without changing the number of active cylinders. Secondly, the idea of varying the number of active cylinders for efficiency is almost as old as the piston engine itself. No one has made one work reliably yet, so I'll consider it vaporware for now. For an idea as to how difficult this is to implement in practice, consider that we've got fully elctronically automated engines, hybrid powertrains and even Miller and Wankel designs all developed in the last 4 decades with no commercially produced variable active cylinder engines for automobiles yet.
The next really REALLY cool tech you'll see is a camless motor. Lotus has done a LOT of research on solenoid actuated valves.
While I appreciate the work of the wizards at Lotus as much as the next guy, this is more blue sky technology for the Popular Science "Aurora exists" crowd. Camless engines may become a regular production item someday, but at this point someday is no less than a decade or two away, just after they put the finishing touches on their fusion reactor. On the other hand, the existence of all these technologies makes GM's claim of producing a competitive fuel cell car by 2010 pretty silly. If you were working on technology that won't be productized for 10 or 20 years would you still do it if you knew it would be obsolete?
You can tune the motor to optimum fuel efficiency, max low end torque or max upper end hp.
Horsepower is torque times angular velocity, times a proportionality factor to take care of units. Thus max upper end HP is the same as max upper end torque. In general, current cam designs necessitate a trade off in the torque curve, although that is less the case with new engines, but that's a pecularity of the engineering not a fundamental difference between power and torque.
I don't even know why I wased my time writing this, like I said, just peevish I guess.
Big powerfull engines only give you the potential to waste full, they do not cause the full usage.
Correct.
If you had 2 identical cars, but one has twice the HP they will both get the same mileage,
Incorrect. Fuel consumption is based on a few variables, horsepower is not one of them. It is possible that two engines with widely different horespower ratings will have the same mileage performance but that's a matter of coincidence not science. As an example consider the highly efficient 100HP/liter powerplants in the S2000, 911 and M3 compared to the 5.7 liter (and that's a key number) powerplants of American muscle cars of a generation ago (Mustang, Camaro, Corvette etc.).
In general, mileage is a combination of compression ratio, engine size, gearing, torque curve, aerodynamic and mechanical (especially tire) efficiency, valve train mechanics and a host of other factors. Horsepower is simply not one of them.
but people being people many would get worse mileage with the more HP version since they would use it more and accel. faster.
Again, generally true
But for a driver who knows what they are doing they would get the same either way.
Again no, the largest factor in mileage these days is engine capacity. To run an engine you need to maintain stoichiometric balance of the fuel to air ratio, typically between 12 and 14 parts fuel to air by mass. The larger the engine capacity the worse the fuel efficiency at equivalent rpm and compreson ratios. Some manufacturers experimented with shutting down fuel flow to cylinders at cruise in order to make the engine effectively smaller. Emission problems due to accumulation of oil in deactivated cylinders, poor engine life due to thermal stress and pumping losses made that a failed technology. The next big thing in fuel efficiency for conventional piston engines is the variable timing and lift technology now available in BMW's 4.5liter V8 and soon to come form other manufacturers. Fully variable timing and lift allow optimization of pumping losses across the rev range, as well as improved combustion efficiency for higher torque at equivalent RPM, at the price of potentially larger valve train mechanical losses. Total power may also be limited by a lower RPM limit compared to other engines in the same class, although Formula 1 powerplants, which use a different but related valve control system, can apporach 20,000 rpm.
Still to say this thing sucks fuel based on peak power is not correct.
True, but the turbocharged (= high compression ratio at high rpm) 8! liter capacity of the engine doesn't help.
I haven't got the exact figures, but I reckon 99% of all code written out there must be written in Imperative (sometimes pseudo OO) languages. There must be SOME reason functional languages are not so popular.
This was also true of procedural languages versus assembly prior to the mid '70's, true of COBOL versus other languages prior to the early '80's, true of C versus OO languages prior to the mid '90's...
It's not just for mutual funds that the past is a poor predictor of the future.
Functional language are only good in theory. Sure, you can easily write programs in them, but they abstract over how the program is executed. And the programs are going to be executed in an imperative manner; machine code is imperative, remember?
Although the register machine at the heart of most people's computer operates explicitly on state it does not mean it maps naturally to an imperative style of programming. For starters, the CPU is generally tightly constrained with respect to data types and the number of state values of which it can keep track, versus typical imperative (especially in imperative OO languages) code which assume infinite memory resources and types of arbitrary complexity. Secondly, for FPGA type computing, functional style programming is often a better fit.
Thus, there's a MASSIVE performance loss when a functional programming language is executed on any of the existing processors. Because the compilers can't think and optimise the code to best fit the imperative model. Where as the human being s can. That's why we should stick to imperative programming languages.
As is oft pointed out, there's a performance penalty to any newer/less widely deployed technology when adapted to older hardware. Over time that disappears (reiterate past as a poor predictor comment here). Would you hire a programmer who'd spend 99% of their time writing and optimising machine code, or a programmer who intelligently evaluates the available computing/development platforms (probably ending up with C++ or Java) and writing a relatively modern OO style program to run your new mission critical $7 billion production center? Note that the more details the programmer is responsible of keeping track of (down to making sure they remember the binary representations of the 2-300 instructions a modern processor can execute) the more likely they are to introduce bugs/errors.
The day someone actually invents a function processor, we could start promoting these fringe langauges. Till then, let's keep Haskell as part of CS811
Thank you for listening. That's the end of my rant.
So then you prefer the Liberal myth that one can only achieve success by suckling at the taxpayer teat?
No, I prefer the myth that I am the chosen one; specially favored among all creation.
An irrelevant and unrealistic example. That implies that the investors have no other investments besides the risky one to choose from.
For all the posters who take analogies too literally, a little research would probably have clued you in that I was referring to recent results in economics and finance which indicate that individual ability is not the only driving factor in wealth distributions, more info here. I am not arguing against personal responsibility or merit, merely pointing out that there are financial forces as inevitable as the curvature of spacetime which shape the course of events as well. The upshot is, whether everyone is equally able or not, as long as there is a chance of failure in investment activities, wealth will not be evenly distributed. In fact, as time passes, inequalities will increase, this has nothing to do with taxation, victimization or the availability of a good insurance policy. There are quite a few corollaries to consider as well, but I'll let you return to your ad hominem straw man attacks now.
The Libertarian myth that people will arrive at their appropriate station in life due to their own merits always amuses me. It becomes positively hilarious when you actually talk to them and realize they live in Lake Wobegon: where all the children are above average.
Regardless of ability, poverty will result simply as a result of random chance. As long as there is an independent probability of a negative result there will be winners and losers, regardless of ability. In a large enough population there will be people who lose most of the time, through no fault of their own. They will be relatively poor then, but it has nothing to do with their personal ability.
As a quick example, two investors mine some resource that's only available near fault lines. An earthquake comes, one investor's mine collapses and they are destitute. With the market all to themselves now the other is even wealthier than they would have been if the earthquake hadn't hit. They of course will write, or more precisely have someone ghost write, an autobiography lauding them as a business genius.
Internet cafes are not uncommon in the major population centers of Uganda: Kampala, Mbabara, Masaka, Kabale etc. Should any Slashdot readers find themselves in Kampala they are invited to visit my brother's Internet Cafe, Jupiter Communications in Kisimente. There are a couple of bars nearby where European and American expatriates like to hang out also.
That said, your friend probably attends university some distance from any major city. IT infrastructure in the nonurban areas of Uganda is lacking in all senses, it is likely that the school machines at his university are 10 year old 486 or even 386 devices with 5.25" floppies that were donated by some well meaning alumnus now based overseas. The problem with simply donating more machines, or even gifting the school with an entire network is that it is unlikely they have any personnel who can support it. To be fair then, rather than simply gifting a Ugandan school with this technology one should either arrange for the network to be remotely administered or provide funds for a system administrator, which will probably include funds for housing, food and transportation as well as a salary.
Furthermore, Uganda has a government mandated telecommunications duopoly, making service prices for high speed internet outrageous where phone lines are available. Satellite connections are severely limited by law, the telecoms duopoly also being in operation there. I don't think cellular data services are available although a clever hacker may be able to piggy back dial up service over a few cellular lines. Given the phone line quality it may actually be the preferred approach. Uganda also has high tariffs on importation of electronics, cell phones moreso than computers but high end computers, especially laptops are likely to be difficult to clear through customs cheaply. I'm not sure if making such a shipment as a charity case would help. Actually, it would probably help local education and industry to set up a shop to assemble computers from parts. This would help in establishing a base to train local talent in machine maintanance. The school could offer a course in these services to help defray costs in the same way some vocational high schools sell the services of their students.
As for those who are worried about availability of electricity (definitely a problem but improving in Uganda), clean water, food (actually that's one area that Uganda does not head help in), school books, pencils, etc. rather than dumping computers in a society without the infrastructure to support them, I say give people a chance. The more options they have the more likely they are to find a solution to their own problems. A Uganda in which the vast store of information that is the internet is widely available, is a Uganda which stands a better chance of breeding local enterpreneurs who will organize to provide running water to villages, run power lines, and have up to date educational materials. I am not a raging libertarian or free market zealot, but it has been the case that countries who have followed a development plan dictated by aid delivered from outside agencies (mostly in Africa and Central America) have lagged behind countries that have sought to create and protect local industry (mostly in Asia). I don't want this to degenerate into a rant about H1Bs, Indian immigration policies, or the valuation of Chinese currency, so suffice it to say, giving a Ugandan school a functioning, maintanable internet connection is not going to unemploy some worthy US based programmer or system administrator.
Hmm, I seem to have earned a higher moderation than necessary for some poorly recalled Biblical history. So I turned to the ever faithful Google, and lo the first five links are crackpots.
After swimming through that stuff you get to the encyclopedic summary of the Sunday school lessons I never paid attention to. So my first error, Jacob had 11 sons, of which he adopted the two grandsons of one, Joseph, leading to 13 tribes. But then why do people refer to 12 tribes of Israel? Because the 13th tribe descended from the 3rd son, Levi, is a special case. The Levites, were the priest class and had no land in Israel although they controlled the temple. Incidentally, the high priests were known as Kohanim, from which we get the last name Cohen. There is evidence that we can trace the dispersal of the Kohanim Levites down through the ages via genetics. One of the odder places this line turns up is among the Lemba tribe of South Africa.
OK, so that settles the issue of the number and origins of the tribes of Israel. So now I'll apologize to any Mormons whose beliefs I have mischaracterised. I understood that Mormons believed a group of Jews had arrived in North America, I was mistaken in that I supposed Mormons believed in an otherwise unknown tribe of Israel. If you really want to amuse yourself, follow the crackpot Google links into some head spinning discussions about the Biblical role the modern United States is supposed to play.
The 10 Tribes were not "lost" in the sense of being missing. The short story is that the Hebrews organized themselves into 12 tribes, presumably founded by the sons of the patriarch Jacob who had 11 sons but the tribes descended from Joseph traced their roots to his two sons. Each of these tribes occupied a different area of
When the Babylonians returned the tribes to Israel and Jerusalem, which was located in the lands of the tribe of Judah, was reconstructed, some of the other tribes began traditions that were an amalgamation of ancient Hebrew and Babylonian culture. The tribe of Benjamin sided with Judah in returning to a more strictly Jewish lifestyle. So that's how the other 10 tribes were "lost", a more accurate description would be they, left the faith, or were, lost to God, depending on whose point of view you wich to honor.
At any rate, we know exactly where those 10 tribes went. The lands they occupied became known as Samaria or the home of the Samaritans, hence the story of the good Samaritan.
The idea of a 13th tribe is peculiar to the Mormons though, although I think other Judeo-Christian sects claim to be yet another unknown tribe of Hebrews. I believe according to Mormons the 13th tribe were the ancestors of Native Americans.
Incidentally the Biblical use of the word tribe is more closely related to the modern idea of a clan: a people group related by blood. A tribe is a people group related by language and custom, usually made up of multiple clans. The clan system helps prevent inbreeding since your close relatives are easily identified.
I'm in the process of upgrading a B&W G3 to Radeon 7000 graphics and a 466MHz G4. For prices you can't beat EBay, the Radeons only show up rarely but I got one for $89 versus about $120 retail. DayStarTech sells CPU upgrades. You can get better prices on Daystar's equipment on EBay than at their website, I got a G4 466 for $145 versus $189 retail.
The apocryphal nuclear suitcase bomb notwithstanding, it is very difficult to make nuclear weapons small enough for tactical use. To save you from greater chance of carpal tunnel syndrome, I am aware of nuclear artillery shells, but they only fit the largest of howitzers. On the other hand, weapons based on this technology could conceivably be deployed at the squad level in a manner similar to an RPG or bazooka. It makes it much harder to control its use when deployed in such fashion. With standing armies of hundreds of thousands of soldiers the fallout from such a weapon used in combat would probably litter the countryside in a manner similar to land mines in such now forgotten conflicts (by most in the Western world) as the Namibian war for independence from South Africa.
To join in with the amoral, technophilic point of view preferred in this forum. From a technical point of view the problem with fallout seems to be related to the rate at which the halfnium explodes compared to the rate at which its volume is exposed to an x-ray source. Thus it seems that forming the halfnium in a thin shell around, and surrounded by, an x-ray source should mitigate fallout. However, I can't think to too many switchable x-ray sources other than a fission reaction which off course will cause its own problems...
Somewhat, and no I wouldn't consider most of it worthwhile but as far as practical guidance goes Cicero and Seneca are far more worthwhile than Plato.
This being Slashdot I was writing in a very imprecise manner, hence equating the achievements of all civilizations in all the areas mentioned. Of course some civilations were better than others in the areas of building, philosophy, art etc.
Because you know, it's not how many people died, it's the weapons used!
No, it's whether the collateral damage makes the battlefield useless afterwards. Little chunks of gamma emitters with a 31 year half life lying all over the place means whoever is left around has to deal with the consequences of a fight they may have had no part in, or may not even remember what the conflict was all about to begin with.
It seems that it will be the case that the ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Chinese etc. left beautiful ruins and philosophy, and Anglo-American civilization will leave little poison pills for future archeologists to uncover.
Please perform the following thought experiment. If you insist on perceiving interactions as "particles ramming into each other" consider the electromagnetic interaction. In the case of two electrons (a and b), a emits a photon, which "rams" into b and b moves "away" from a. OK, now make b a positron, a emits a photon, which "rams" into b and b moves "towards" a. Perhaps the idea of particles "ramming" into each other needs to be reconsidered.
BTW, every "% of humanity" statistic has to consider that most humans are Chinese.
If you want to be even remotely close to statistically significant you have to include citizens of India as well most of whom are very different from those of Chinese descent. . In fact most people will probably be an Indian citizen within the next 20 years. However citizens of India are a more heterogeneous population than that of China. Then again, Chinese of the diaspora (eg. in Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philipines, Vancouver etc.) are also a large population but can be very different than mainland Chinese. So I guess in the end every % of humanity statistic that measures some culturally derived phenomenon has to be considered BS.
I haven't read the book, I'll look into it though.
The comment that started off this thread implied that evolutionary success is largely determined by the ability of an organism to destroy (I believe the exact term was "kick ass") other organisms. I merely wished to point out that by and large evolutionary responses are far more subtle. Who knows what the proverbial microbe did, it may have crawled under a rock containing some tasty goop while an asteroid wiped out all its foes and simply come out standing. At any rate there are a myriad of organizational principles at the macroscopic level: from humans in cities (intraspecies) to cattle egrets and water buffalo (interspecies) but they don't necessarily extend to the microscopic. At this point things could vere into the realm of the influence of our gene's "need" to replicate is reflected in our concious decisions (I personally think it's minimal) but that's getting too far afield.
As for humanity being above evolutionary pressures I claim no such thing. What I think is unique about humanity is we have reached the point where we can decide that we don't want anymore smallpox or SARS viruses or even mosquitoes to exist. So in effect we've become the proverbial 10km asteroid from beyond as far as many species are concerned, except we have an attitude. In a sense humanity has turned many predator prey relationships completely around. Furthermore we can reduce the populations of other organisms at a rate so much larger than their reproductive capacity that evolution has no chance to act to compensate. All in all a pretty unusual state of affairs that has only been true for the last 5,000 or so years out of the 3.5 billion year history of life on earth.
My point is that competition in the biological world is usually a race to differentiate in a manner that alleviates conflict rather than to destroy another species completely. Until the 20th century when smallpox was eradicated, the malaria parasite removed from much of the world and polio nearly eradicated the response of organisms to parasitic organisms was to develop traits; like the sickle cell gene in the case of malaria, which alleviate the problem without destroying the parasite. The sickle cell gene makes one less vulnerable to malaria but it does not destroy the parasite.
Granted, humanity's ability to modify its behavior and environment, through public health campaigns in the case of smallpox or DDT in the case of malaria is a new and historically unprecendented phenomenon which changes the rules of biology. However it also a very recent phenomenon and has not been in effect during the evolutionary processes that led to humanity.
I didn't say that evolution "chooses" cooperation over competition. Merely that in the case of evolution flight (through changes in genotype that often lead to phenotypic changes) is more often chosen than fight (physically destroying another species) to badly mix metaphors. It's not an either or proposition either, but by and large direct interspecies competition is far rarer than the Discovery Channel and Ted Nugent would have you believe.
Even in the case of economics, flight through identification of underserved markets and first mover advantage is generally preferable to fight. One example is the response of European automobile manufacturers to the Japanese in the American market (the Europeans developed strong "brand" identities and sold cars at upmarket prices to those for whom a car is as much a lifestyle choice as a necessity) while GM, Ford et al. attempted to build their own small automobiles in direct competition with Toyota and Honda. The corporate history of Sun and Apple in response to Microsoft's expanding product lines: Apple essentially becoming the BMW of PC makers and Sun taking Microsoft head on is similar.
Don't get me wrong, I like to deliver a good butt kicking as much as the next craven, sadistic narcissist. However, I don't need to justify my actions by claiming "that's how the world works".
While the idea of evolution as an endless ass kicking contest holds sway with the Ted Nugent crowd it is neither rational nor an accurate protrayal of evolutionary processes. In the Darwinian sense competition is really a struggle of an organism against its changing environment. As the environment changes the organisms best capable of dealing with the changes survive. This is counterbalanced by the increased rate of reproduction that organisms closely attuned to a very specific set of environmental conditions can achieve. Hence, smaller mammals with lower caloric requirements, warm blood, large broods, short generations and omnivourous diets are better able to survive a cataclysmic event like the nuclear winter like event that ended the reign of the dinosaurs. Furthermore direct competition between species is rarely observed. For example, a lion will rarely go out of its way to attack a leopard unless the lion is near starvation and the leopard has recently made a kill. If the lion is such a poor hunter that it needs to steal food to survive it will probably not be able to reproduce as it will starve to death when the leopard leaves its territory and no other creature will provide food for it to scavenge.
The primary force driving evolution then is the external environment. Direct competition generally occurs only within members of the same species but rarely leads to speciation. Also, direct competition usually is related to sexual (as opposed to asexual) mating and not all organisms that reproduce sexually compete directly. For example male songbirds "compete" by being considered more attractive than other birds (a situation that is mostly a result of genetics although diet and other environmental factors also play a role). In modern human society the ability to kick butt does not generally enhance the chances for reproduction. In the US being wealthy and buying a large house can help in the mating game, but unless you are a boxer or hockey player it is doubtful that butt kicking is going to help one gain those sexually advantageous items.
To extend this analogy to the space race although personally I find stretching biological facts into epistomological facts about the world in general as pointless as deriving philosophical truth from quantum mechanics. Commercial space interests such as the X-prize contestants are generally looking to develop technology to the point where low earth orbit becomes cheap thanks to economies of scale. National space programs however tend to be more interested in prestige building programs: such as putting people in orbit, landing on the moon, and interplanetary missions which will not necessarily make achieving low earth orbit economical. Therefore there is room for cooperation between those who want to make space cheap and those who want to push the boundaries.
Science Fiction as a genre driven by extrapolation of technology seems to be running out of wiggle room. The stories of Vernes and Wells are so technologically backwards now they are more quaint fantastic literature than "science" fiction. Heinlein's (I can never spell that right) and Asimov's space exploration driven narratives with otherwise 1950's era technology: large expensive computing facilities requiring extremely heirarchic societies and little in the way of personal technology than the occasional ray gun also seems to have fallen out of favor. Now it seems stories based on ubiquitous cheap personal technology a la Gibson's cyberpunk dystopias and Cory Doctorow's work seems to be the predominant model in sci fi by number of critical reviews if not by sales anyway. This too shall probably change as small scale build to order manufacturing and personally customized medicine becomes a reality and is integrated into society without (hopefully) a dystopic effect. This seems to leave room only for Star Wars and Star Trek type fantasies which almost explicitly ignore facts that make much of their universe physically impossible in the same way old Warner Brothers cartoons ignore Newtonian physics. I have a hard time considering these stories science fiction however because science seems to have little to do with the story, to me at least they seem to be fantastic morality tales of which other examples would be Kafka's The Metamorphosis or a Brother's Grimm fairy tale. While worthwile these stories don't seem to be extrapolations of the effects of science on society perhaps a little narrow but that's generally what I consider science fiction. So now to my question, as technological development accelerates and visions of a space travel oriented society or future dystopia dim in the rear view mirror of history do stories driven by extreme extrapolation of science have a future or will sci fi become indistinguishable from fantasy with laser guns?
Or should that be too leading a question, what purpose is there for science fiction these days (aside from storylines that gross $100 million at the local multiplex)?
Is that similar to the implementation of concurrency in Ada?
I'm not familiar with concurrency in Ada. In Erlang, processes are extremely lightweight and communicate via message passing. The processes themselves are done in the runtime, so there are no limits imposed by the OS (besides system resources, of course). With a shared heap, even the memory requirements are extremely low (compared to Java or C, for instance).
As an Ada programmer I can tell you that it depends on your compiler. The Ada compiler I use GNAT uses the OS resources to map Ada tasks to threads so they are as light as system threads. The Rational Ada 83 compiler had its own thread library I believe (I don't care to go looking for it). I'm too lazy to check right now but I believe the Ada RM leaves it open to the implementation as to whether Ada tasks reflect OS based entities or not.
Re:I drove a VW Diesel
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I had a 1983 IBM PC with an Intel CPU and I can't see what the big deal was. Storage was on slow noisy small floppy disks. If I typed to fast in WordPerfect the screen lagged in updating. It didn't have a network connection. I could only get 16 colors on the screen at once (an it cost an arm and leg to do it). I wonder if anything has improved since then?
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Even if the writer's conclusion is true, it is not so obvious as to justify stating it without argument.
All physical computers are a finite implementation of a register machine. All programs for a register machine are equivalent to programs for all other known kinds of computers (Turing Machines, single stack machines, functional systems, even Quantum Mechanical devices), so changing the architecture is not going to change the argument. All programs for register machines can ultimately be described as a binary string. All binary strings can be interpreted as a base 2 representation of an integer. Therefore all programs that may ever be produced for any computer can be an integer value and so there exists a one to one mapping of all programs to the integers which are denumerable, therefore all programs are denumerable.
You can get more rigorous with this argument, such as by proving equivalence of function systems, Turing machines, proving that all programs have a binary representation etc. but that's the basic outline of a proof and it's not surprising. It may not be immediately obvious to those who don't study logic, computer science (or rather the philosophical basis of computation) or mathematics, but it's really an undergraduate level problem in those disciplines. So no, it's not really necessary to justify that statement, it's sufficient to state the theorem "all computer programs may be mapped to integers and hence are denumerable" which has a well understood and uncontroversial proof, and get on to interesting problems.
I specifically said muscle cars of a generation ago (about a decade in car technology terms) for a reason. Corvettes have significantly improved in terms of fuel efficiency and horsepower over the years. The C6 engine is an engineering marvel, producing 400HP with good fuel efficiency. The BMW M3 powerplant is more comparable in power to the base engine in the C4 'vettes, which is why I specified older muscle cars. I know the 'vette isn't typically considered a muscle car, but its engine is more similar to a muscle car engine: a large displacement, pushrod V8 than other sports cars.
Anyway, gearing works against the M3. The city mileage is based on running the car at a constant 20mph, the highway at 48mph. Thanks to gearing the M3 has to turn anywhere from 1.2 to 1.5 times the rate of the vette to maintain the same speed. Factoring in the M3's higher compression ratio and the M3's advantage due to smaller capacity almost vanishes. By my back of the envelope calculations you'd still expect a small efficiency advantage for the M3 engine, but much less than the advantage it enjoys due to displacement, but I'm sure we can make that disappear if we took intake and exhaust inefficiencies into account. An M3 with lower gear ratios would regain fuel efficiency at the cost of no longer being a high performance car.
You're right, I was sloppy with my terms. The compression ratio is defined as the ratio of the maximum to minimum area of the cylinder. I just meant that once the turbo spools up the air is compressed before reaching the cylinder leading to a higher effective compression ratio than a naturally aspirated engine of the same geometry would have. More air requires more fuel, so turbocharging trades fuel efficiency for volumetric efficiency. In general a turbocharged engine acts like an engine of larger displacement, and suffers similar fuel efficiency penalties. Coupled with the huge displacement of the Veyron engine it's obvious that fuel economy is going to suffer. Not that it's really a concern for this type of automobile, although Porsche is making an effort to produce high performance engines that don't have poor efficiency at lower power, like the GT3.
OK, it sounds like this technology is starting to make it to mass market. Let's see if it lasts. As I said before, there have been attempts to do this before and they have been less than successful. The fact that GM only deactivates cylinders in limp home mode may indicate that they can't do it on a regular basis for fuel economy. Also since Saab is a division of GM and pursuing a different method of varying displacement that could be a sign that deactivating cylinders is not an optimal solution. Maybe Daimler-Chrysler has solved that problem, or maybe it's the second coming of active suspension; another neat technology that failed to catch on in the market place, time will tell.
Bzzt. You're _mostly_ right, but you've got a few critical things wrong.
Fair enough, let's try it point by point because I'm feeling peevish.
Mileage is partially caused by the efficiency of the motor, and partly by the efficiency of the package it's wrapped in.
I believe I mentioned aerodynamic efficiency. Mechanical efficiency, like properly inflated tires, low rolling resistance tires (which is generally synonymous with low traction) and other effects also come into play. However I believe the message I was replying to was focused on the relationship of engine horsepower to mileage so I wanted to ignore packaging issues. Furthermore the original point was that horsepower cannot be used to infer mileage, but high horsepower does imply large engine displacement, holding the redline and compression ratio constant and allowing for similar engine material and component technology. Engine displacement is a large component of fuel efficiency and the Veyron's engine is huge in terms of displacement. There is simply no way (including caveats about red lines, compression etc.) to make an 8 liter engine as fuel efficient as a 3.5 liter engine.
My _98_ Corvette, while it has much less drag than the 89
I'd be surprised if that's really true, but I don't have anything at hand to answer that definitively. Suffice it to say though, Corvette's have generally gotten larger with each generation and whatever wind tunnel work has been done on the C5 may be offset by its increase frontal area with respect to the C4.
Several manufaturers are releasing a displacement on command feature. making the V8 a V4 by shutting down four cylinders and removing the oil that keeps the lifters filled (and hence, lifting valves.) GM, Porsche and IIRC BMW have motors announced.
Two nits to pick here: first of all what you are talking about is a variable number of active cylinders, a variable displacement engine actually changes the engine displacement without changing the number of active cylinders. Secondly, the idea of varying the number of active cylinders for efficiency is almost as old as the piston engine itself. No one has made one work reliably yet, so I'll consider it vaporware for now. For an idea as to how difficult this is to implement in practice, consider that we've got fully elctronically automated engines, hybrid powertrains and even Miller and Wankel designs all developed in the last 4 decades with no commercially produced variable active cylinder engines for automobiles yet.
The next really REALLY cool tech you'll see is a camless motor. Lotus has done a LOT of research on solenoid actuated valves.
While I appreciate the work of the wizards at Lotus as much as the next guy, this is more blue sky technology for the Popular Science "Aurora exists" crowd. Camless engines may become a regular production item someday, but at this point someday is no less than a decade or two away, just after they put the finishing touches on their fusion reactor. On the other hand, the existence of all these technologies makes GM's claim of producing a competitive fuel cell car by 2010 pretty silly. If you were working on technology that won't be productized for 10 or 20 years would you still do it if you knew it would be obsolete?
You can tune the motor to optimum fuel efficiency, max low end torque or max upper end hp.
Horsepower is torque times angular velocity, times a proportionality factor to take care of units. Thus max upper end HP is the same as max upper end torque. In general, current cam designs necessitate a trade off in the torque curve, although that is less the case with new engines, but that's a pecularity of the engineering not a fundamental difference between power and torque.
I don't even know why I wased my time writing this, like I said, just peevish I guess.
Big powerfull engines only give you the potential to waste full, they do not cause the full usage.
Correct.
If you had 2 identical cars, but one has twice the HP they will both get the same mileage,
Incorrect. Fuel consumption is based on a few variables, horsepower is not one of them. It is possible that two engines with widely different horespower ratings will have the same mileage performance but that's a matter of coincidence not science. As an example consider the highly efficient 100HP/liter powerplants in the S2000, 911 and M3 compared to the 5.7 liter (and that's a key number) powerplants of American muscle cars of a generation ago (Mustang, Camaro, Corvette etc.).
In general, mileage is a combination of compression ratio, engine size, gearing, torque curve, aerodynamic and mechanical (especially tire) efficiency, valve train mechanics and a host of other factors. Horsepower is simply not one of them.
but people being people many would get worse mileage with the more HP version since they would use it more and accel. faster.
Again, generally true
But for a driver who knows what they are doing they would get the same either way.
Again no, the largest factor in mileage these days is engine capacity. To run an engine you need to maintain stoichiometric balance of the fuel to air ratio, typically between 12 and 14 parts fuel to air by mass. The larger the engine capacity the worse the fuel efficiency at equivalent rpm and compreson ratios. Some manufacturers experimented with shutting down fuel flow to cylinders at cruise in order to make the engine effectively smaller. Emission problems due to accumulation of oil in deactivated cylinders, poor engine life due to thermal stress and pumping losses made that a failed technology. The next big thing in fuel efficiency for conventional piston engines is the variable timing and lift technology now available in BMW's 4.5liter V8 and soon to come form other manufacturers. Fully variable timing and lift allow optimization of pumping losses across the rev range, as well as improved combustion efficiency for higher torque at equivalent RPM, at the price of potentially larger valve train mechanical losses. Total power may also be limited by a lower RPM limit compared to other engines in the same class, although Formula 1 powerplants, which use a different but related valve control system, can apporach 20,000 rpm.
Still to say this thing sucks fuel based on peak power is not correct.
True, but the turbocharged (= high compression ratio at high rpm) 8! liter capacity of the engine doesn't help.
I haven't got the exact figures, but I reckon 99% of all code written out there must be written in Imperative (sometimes pseudo OO) languages. There must be SOME reason functional languages are not so popular.
This was also true of procedural languages versus assembly prior to the mid '70's, true of COBOL versus other languages prior to the early '80's, true of C versus OO languages prior to the mid '90's...
It's not just for mutual funds that the past is a poor predictor of the future.
Functional language are only good in theory. Sure, you can easily write programs in them, but they abstract over how the program is executed. And the programs are going to be executed in an imperative manner; machine code is imperative, remember?
Although the register machine at the heart of most people's computer operates explicitly on state it does not mean it maps naturally to an imperative style of programming. For starters, the CPU is generally tightly constrained with respect to data types and the number of state values of which it can keep track, versus typical imperative (especially in imperative OO languages) code which assume infinite memory resources and types of arbitrary complexity. Secondly, for FPGA type computing, functional style programming is often a better fit.
Thus, there's a MASSIVE performance loss when a functional programming language is executed on any of the existing processors. Because the compilers can't think and optimise the code to best fit the imperative model. Where as the human being s can. That's why we should stick to imperative programming languages.
As is oft pointed out, there's a performance penalty to any newer/less widely deployed technology when adapted to older hardware. Over time that disappears (reiterate past as a poor predictor comment here). Would you hire a programmer who'd spend 99% of their time writing and optimising machine code, or a programmer who intelligently evaluates the available computing/development platforms (probably ending up with C++ or Java) and writing a relatively modern OO style program to run your new mission critical $7 billion production center? Note that the more details the programmer is responsible of keeping track of (down to making sure they remember the binary representations of the 2-300 instructions a modern processor can execute) the more likely they are to introduce bugs/errors.
The day someone actually invents a function processor, we could start promoting these fringe langauges. Till then, let's keep Haskell as part of CS811 Thank you for listening. That's the end of my rant.So then you prefer the Liberal myth that one can only achieve success by suckling at the taxpayer teat?
No, I prefer the myth that I am the chosen one; specially favored among all creation.
An irrelevant and unrealistic example. That implies that the investors have no other investments besides the risky one to choose from.
For all the posters who take analogies too literally, a little research would probably have clued you in that I was referring to recent results in economics and finance which indicate that individual ability is not the only driving factor in wealth distributions, more info here. I am not arguing against personal responsibility or merit, merely pointing out that there are financial forces as inevitable as the curvature of spacetime which shape the course of events as well. The upshot is, whether everyone is equally able or not, as long as there is a chance of failure in investment activities, wealth will not be evenly distributed. In fact, as time passes, inequalities will increase, this has nothing to do with taxation, victimization or the availability of a good insurance policy. There are quite a few corollaries to consider as well, but I'll let you return to your ad hominem straw man attacks now.
The Libertarian myth that people will arrive at their appropriate station in life due to their own merits always amuses me. It becomes positively hilarious when you actually talk to them and realize they live in Lake Wobegon: where all the children are above average.
Regardless of ability, poverty will result simply as a result of random chance. As long as there is an independent probability of a negative result there will be winners and losers, regardless of ability. In a large enough population there will be people who lose most of the time, through no fault of their own. They will be relatively poor then, but it has nothing to do with their personal ability.
As a quick example, two investors mine some resource that's only available near fault lines. An earthquake comes, one investor's mine collapses and they are destitute. With the market all to themselves now the other is even wealthier than they would have been if the earthquake hadn't hit. They of course will write, or more precisely have someone ghost write, an autobiography lauding them as a business genius.
Internet cafes are not uncommon in the major population centers of Uganda: Kampala, Mbabara, Masaka, Kabale etc. Should any Slashdot readers find themselves in Kampala they are invited to visit my brother's Internet Cafe, Jupiter Communications in Kisimente. There are a couple of bars nearby where European and American expatriates like to hang out also.
That said, your friend probably attends university some distance from any major city. IT infrastructure in the nonurban areas of Uganda is lacking in all senses, it is likely that the school machines at his university are 10 year old 486 or even 386 devices with 5.25" floppies that were donated by some well meaning alumnus now based overseas. The problem with simply donating more machines, or even gifting the school with an entire network is that it is unlikely they have any personnel who can support it. To be fair then, rather than simply gifting a Ugandan school with this technology one should either arrange for the network to be remotely administered or provide funds for a system administrator, which will probably include funds for housing, food and transportation as well as a salary.
Furthermore, Uganda has a government mandated telecommunications duopoly, making service prices for high speed internet outrageous where phone lines are available. Satellite connections are severely limited by law, the telecoms duopoly also being in operation there. I don't think cellular data services are available although a clever hacker may be able to piggy back dial up service over a few cellular lines. Given the phone line quality it may actually be the preferred approach. Uganda also has high tariffs on importation of electronics, cell phones moreso than computers but high end computers, especially laptops are likely to be difficult to clear through customs cheaply. I'm not sure if making such a shipment as a charity case would help. Actually, it would probably help local education and industry to set up a shop to assemble computers from parts. This would help in establishing a base to train local talent in machine maintanance. The school could offer a course in these services to help defray costs in the same way some vocational high schools sell the services of their students.
As for those who are worried about availability of electricity (definitely a problem but improving in Uganda), clean water, food (actually that's one area that Uganda does not head help in), school books, pencils, etc. rather than dumping computers in a society without the infrastructure to support them, I say give people a chance. The more options they have the more likely they are to find a solution to their own problems. A Uganda in which the vast store of information that is the internet is widely available, is a Uganda which stands a better chance of breeding local enterpreneurs who will organize to provide running water to villages, run power lines, and have up to date educational materials. I am not a raging libertarian or free market zealot, but it has been the case that countries who have followed a development plan dictated by aid delivered from outside agencies (mostly in Africa and Central America) have lagged behind countries that have sought to create and protect local industry (mostly in Asia). I don't want this to degenerate into a rant about H1Bs, Indian immigration policies, or the valuation of Chinese currency, so suffice it to say, giving a Ugandan school a functioning, maintanable internet connection is not going to unemploy some worthy US based programmer or system administrator.
Hmm, I seem to have earned a higher moderation than necessary for some poorly recalled Biblical history. So I turned to the ever faithful Google, and lo the first five links are crackpots.
After swimming through that stuff you get to the encyclopedic summary of the Sunday school lessons I never paid attention to. So my first error, Jacob had 11 sons, of which he adopted the two grandsons of one, Joseph, leading to 13 tribes. But then why do people refer to 12 tribes of Israel? Because the 13th tribe descended from the 3rd son, Levi, is a special case. The Levites, were the priest class and had no land in Israel although they controlled the temple. Incidentally, the high priests were known as Kohanim, from which we get the last name Cohen. There is evidence that we can trace the dispersal of the Kohanim Levites down through the ages via genetics. One of the odder places this line turns up is among the Lemba tribe of South Africa.
OK, so that settles the issue of the number and origins of the tribes of Israel. So now I'll apologize to any Mormons whose beliefs I have mischaracterised. I understood that Mormons believed a group of Jews had arrived in North America, I was mistaken in that I supposed Mormons believed in an otherwise unknown tribe of Israel. If you really want to amuse yourself, follow the crackpot Google links into some head spinning discussions about the Biblical role the modern United States is supposed to play.
The 10 Tribes were not "lost" in the sense of being missing. The short story is that the Hebrews organized themselves into 12 tribes, presumably founded by the sons of the patriarch Jacob who had 11 sons but the tribes descended from Joseph traced their roots to his two sons. Each of these tribes occupied a different area of
When the Babylonians returned the tribes to Israel and Jerusalem, which was located in the lands of the tribe of Judah, was reconstructed, some of the other tribes began traditions that were an amalgamation of ancient Hebrew and Babylonian culture. The tribe of Benjamin sided with Judah in returning to a more strictly Jewish lifestyle. So that's how the other 10 tribes were "lost", a more accurate description would be they, left the faith, or were, lost to God, depending on whose point of view you wich to honor.
At any rate, we know exactly where those 10 tribes went. The lands they occupied became known as Samaria or the home of the Samaritans, hence the story of the good Samaritan.
The idea of a 13th tribe is peculiar to the Mormons though, although I think other Judeo-Christian sects claim to be yet another unknown tribe of Hebrews. I believe according to Mormons the 13th tribe were the ancestors of Native Americans.
Incidentally the Biblical use of the word tribe is more closely related to the modern idea of a clan: a people group related by blood. A tribe is a people group related by language and custom, usually made up of multiple clans. The clan system helps prevent inbreeding since your close relatives are easily identified.
I'm in the process of upgrading a B&W G3 to Radeon 7000 graphics and a 466MHz G4. For prices you can't beat EBay, the Radeons only show up rarely but I got one for $89 versus about $120 retail. DayStarTech sells CPU upgrades. You can get better prices on Daystar's equipment on EBay than at their website, I got a G4 466 for $145 versus $189 retail.
The apocryphal nuclear suitcase bomb notwithstanding, it is very difficult to make nuclear weapons small enough for tactical use. To save you from greater chance of carpal tunnel syndrome, I am aware of nuclear artillery shells, but they only fit the largest of howitzers. On the other hand, weapons based on this technology could conceivably be deployed at the squad level in a manner similar to an RPG or bazooka. It makes it much harder to control its use when deployed in such fashion. With standing armies of hundreds of thousands of soldiers the fallout from such a weapon used in combat would probably litter the countryside in a manner similar to land mines in such now forgotten conflicts (by most in the Western world) as the Namibian war for independence from South Africa.
To join in with the amoral, technophilic point of view preferred in this forum. From a technical point of view the problem with fallout seems to be related to the rate at which the halfnium explodes compared to the rate at which its volume is exposed to an x-ray source. Thus it seems that forming the halfnium in a thin shell around, and surrounded by, an x-ray source should mitigate fallout. However, I can't think to too many switchable x-ray sources other than a fission reaction which off course will cause its own problems...
Somewhat, and no I wouldn't consider most of it worthwhile but as far as practical guidance goes Cicero and Seneca are far more worthwhile than Plato.
This being Slashdot I was writing in a very imprecise manner, hence equating the achievements of all civilizations in all the areas mentioned. Of course some civilations were better than others in the areas of building, philosophy, art etc.
Because you know, it's not how many people died, it's the weapons used!
No, it's whether the collateral damage makes the battlefield useless afterwards. Little chunks of gamma emitters with a 31 year half life lying all over the place means whoever is left around has to deal with the consequences of a fight they may have had no part in, or may not even remember what the conflict was all about to begin with.
It seems that it will be the case that the ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Chinese etc. left beautiful ruins and philosophy, and Anglo-American civilization will leave little poison pills for future archeologists to uncover.
Please perform the following thought experiment. If you insist on perceiving interactions as "particles ramming into each other" consider the electromagnetic interaction. In the case of two electrons (a and b), a emits a photon, which "rams" into b and b moves "away" from a. OK, now make b a positron, a emits a photon, which "rams" into b and b moves "towards" a. Perhaps the idea of particles "ramming" into each other needs to be reconsidered.
BTW, every "% of humanity" statistic has to consider that most humans are Chinese.
If you want to be even remotely close to statistically significant you have to include citizens of India as well most of whom are very different from those of Chinese descent. . In fact most people will probably be an Indian citizen within the next 20 years. However citizens of India are a more heterogeneous population than that of China. Then again, Chinese of the diaspora (eg. in Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philipines, Vancouver etc.) are also a large population but can be very different than mainland Chinese. So I guess in the end every % of humanity statistic that measures some culturally derived phenomenon has to be considered BS.
I haven't read the book, I'll look into it though. The comment that started off this thread implied that evolutionary success is largely determined by the ability of an organism to destroy (I believe the exact term was "kick ass") other organisms. I merely wished to point out that by and large evolutionary responses are far more subtle. Who knows what the proverbial microbe did, it may have crawled under a rock containing some tasty goop while an asteroid wiped out all its foes and simply come out standing. At any rate there are a myriad of organizational principles at the macroscopic level: from humans in cities (intraspecies) to cattle egrets and water buffalo (interspecies) but they don't necessarily extend to the microscopic. At this point things could vere into the realm of the influence of our gene's "need" to replicate is reflected in our concious decisions (I personally think it's minimal) but that's getting too far afield. As for humanity being above evolutionary pressures I claim no such thing. What I think is unique about humanity is we have reached the point where we can decide that we don't want anymore smallpox or SARS viruses or even mosquitoes to exist. So in effect we've become the proverbial 10km asteroid from beyond as far as many species are concerned, except we have an attitude. In a sense humanity has turned many predator prey relationships completely around. Furthermore we can reduce the populations of other organisms at a rate so much larger than their reproductive capacity that evolution has no chance to act to compensate. All in all a pretty unusual state of affairs that has only been true for the last 5,000 or so years out of the 3.5 billion year history of life on earth.
My point is that competition in the biological world is usually a race to differentiate in a manner that alleviates conflict rather than to destroy another species completely. Until the 20th century when smallpox was eradicated, the malaria parasite removed from much of the world and polio nearly eradicated the response of organisms to parasitic organisms was to develop traits; like the sickle cell gene in the case of malaria, which alleviate the problem without destroying the parasite. The sickle cell gene makes one less vulnerable to malaria but it does not destroy the parasite.
Granted, humanity's ability to modify its behavior and environment, through public health campaigns in the case of smallpox or DDT in the case of malaria is a new and historically unprecendented phenomenon which changes the rules of biology. However it also a very recent phenomenon and has not been in effect during the evolutionary processes that led to humanity.
I didn't say that evolution "chooses" cooperation over competition. Merely that in the case of evolution flight (through changes in genotype that often lead to phenotypic changes) is more often chosen than fight (physically destroying another species) to badly mix metaphors. It's not an either or proposition either, but by and large direct interspecies competition is far rarer than the Discovery Channel and Ted Nugent would have you believe.
Even in the case of economics, flight through identification of underserved markets and first mover advantage is generally preferable to fight. One example is the response of European automobile manufacturers to the Japanese in the American market (the Europeans developed strong "brand" identities and sold cars at upmarket prices to those for whom a car is as much a lifestyle choice as a necessity) while GM, Ford et al. attempted to build their own small automobiles in direct competition with Toyota and Honda. The corporate history of Sun and Apple in response to Microsoft's expanding product lines: Apple essentially becoming the BMW of PC makers and Sun taking Microsoft head on is similar.
Don't get me wrong, I like to deliver a good butt kicking as much as the next craven, sadistic narcissist. However, I don't need to justify my actions by claiming "that's how the world works".
While the idea of evolution as an endless ass kicking contest holds sway with the Ted Nugent crowd it is neither rational nor an accurate protrayal of evolutionary processes. In the Darwinian sense competition is really a struggle of an organism against its changing environment. As the environment changes the organisms best capable of dealing with the changes survive. This is counterbalanced by the increased rate of reproduction that organisms closely attuned to a very specific set of environmental conditions can achieve. Hence, smaller mammals with lower caloric requirements, warm blood, large broods, short generations and omnivourous diets are better able to survive a cataclysmic event like the nuclear winter like event that ended the reign of the dinosaurs. Furthermore direct competition between species is rarely observed. For example, a lion will rarely go out of its way to attack a leopard unless the lion is near starvation and the leopard has recently made a kill. If the lion is such a poor hunter that it needs to steal food to survive it will probably not be able to reproduce as it will starve to death when the leopard leaves its territory and no other creature will provide food for it to scavenge.
The primary force driving evolution then is the external environment. Direct competition generally occurs only within members of the same species but rarely leads to speciation. Also, direct competition usually is related to sexual (as opposed to asexual) mating and not all organisms that reproduce sexually compete directly. For example male songbirds "compete" by being considered more attractive than other birds (a situation that is mostly a result of genetics although diet and other environmental factors also play a role). In modern human society the ability to kick butt does not generally enhance the chances for reproduction. In the US being wealthy and buying a large house can help in the mating game, but unless you are a boxer or hockey player it is doubtful that butt kicking is going to help one gain those sexually advantageous items.
To extend this analogy to the space race although personally I find stretching biological facts into epistomological facts about the world in general as pointless as deriving philosophical truth from quantum mechanics. Commercial space interests such as the X-prize contestants are generally looking to develop technology to the point where low earth orbit becomes cheap thanks to economies of scale. National space programs however tend to be more interested in prestige building programs: such as putting people in orbit, landing on the moon, and interplanetary missions which will not necessarily make achieving low earth orbit economical. Therefore there is room for cooperation between those who want to make space cheap and those who want to push the boundaries.
So when is the mighty industrial combine that is stavatti going to have time to finish working the bugs out of this gun? After they complete their first sale of their F-16 replacement? Or maybe when their supersonic stealth bomber, is in "advanced development"? Or how about when the prototype supersonic sea plane/executive bizjet flies? My money is on just after the sale of the 100,000th Moller flying car hits the skies. But that's not bad for a defense contractor based at a Minnesotta general aviation airport founded during the sophomore year of a kid with a bachelor's degree
Science Fiction as a genre driven by extrapolation of technology seems to be running out of wiggle room. The stories of Vernes and Wells are so technologically backwards now they are more quaint fantastic literature than "science" fiction. Heinlein's (I can never spell that right) and Asimov's space exploration driven narratives with otherwise 1950's era technology: large expensive computing facilities requiring extremely heirarchic societies and little in the way of personal technology than the occasional ray gun also seems to have fallen out of favor. Now it seems stories based on ubiquitous cheap personal technology a la Gibson's cyberpunk dystopias and Cory Doctorow's work seems to be the predominant model in sci fi by number of critical reviews if not by sales anyway. This too shall probably change as small scale build to order manufacturing and personally customized medicine becomes a reality and is integrated into society without (hopefully) a dystopic effect. This seems to leave room only for Star Wars and Star Trek type fantasies which almost explicitly ignore facts that make much of their universe physically impossible in the same way old Warner Brothers cartoons ignore Newtonian physics. I have a hard time considering these stories science fiction however because science seems to have little to do with the story, to me at least they seem to be fantastic morality tales of which other examples would be Kafka's The Metamorphosis or a Brother's Grimm fairy tale. While worthwile these stories don't seem to be extrapolations of the effects of science on society perhaps a little narrow but that's generally what I consider science fiction. So now to my question, as technological development accelerates and visions of a space travel oriented society or future dystopia dim in the rear view mirror of history do stories driven by extreme extrapolation of science have a future or will sci fi become indistinguishable from fantasy with laser guns?
Or should that be too leading a question, what purpose is there for science fiction these days (aside from storylines that gross $100 million at the local multiplex)?
As an Ada programmer I can tell you that it depends on your compiler. The Ada compiler I use GNAT uses the OS resources to map Ada tasks to threads so they are as light as system threads. The Rational Ada 83 compiler had its own thread library I believe (I don't care to go looking for it). I'm too lazy to check right now but I believe the Ada RM leaves it open to the implementation as to whether Ada tasks reflect OS based entities or not.
I had a 1983 IBM PC with an Intel CPU and I can't see what the big deal was. Storage was on slow noisy small floppy disks. If I typed to fast in WordPerfect the screen lagged in updating. It didn't have a network connection. I could only get 16 colors on the screen at once (an it cost an arm and leg to do it). I wonder if anything has improved since then?