SD cards store the data in electric charge trapped in special types of transistors. This charge does leak over time at a very slow rate. The cheaper flash chips are only rated for a limited number of years without the data being accessed and recopied. These effects are temperature dependent, and I think 25 years isn't too long of a time period, but it isn't forever.
Truth be told, the private copyright cops have no reason to lie or cheat. What they are doing is quite easy and straightforward. All they have to do is hit a major torrent site like TPB, click a tracker with their hacked version of an open source bittorrent client, and save all the IP addresses in the swarm. The rest is just meaningless fluff that costs stupendous sums of money. The IP addresses they record are by PREPONDERANCE OF EVIDENCE (meaning at least a 51% chance) guilty of infringement. 51% chance is a pretty darn low threshold to reach, and we know that millions of people occasionally pirate, so legally it's an open and shut case.
If the U.S. legal system were in any way remotely efficient or speedy, it would dispose of all these cases in a week. And if the legislature were also not so corrupt, the fines for these infringements would be in some way based on reality.
Yes. Molecular manufacturing nanotechnology could do this easily. A quick summary of the idea : molecular manufacturing posits a machine capable of creating an arbitrary 3d structure that is atomically precise. It also posits that the machine itself is only composed of a few million atoms per subunit, so the machine could be used to replicate itself.
With self replication over a reasonable timescale (say a few weeks), you get incredibly rapid exponential growth. So you'd start with 1 machine, and within a few years have warehouses full of these things taking up the land area of entire states, all these machines busily converting matter into useful products or more of themselves. Please note that these machines are macroscale : they are housed inside stainless steel vacuum chambers, and an assembled machine is quite large and eats a lot of power. They would get their power from either solar or cheaply printed nuclear reactors. (right now, a nuclear reactor costs billions of dollars. If you could print out the parts for one in a way that was atomically perfect, they would be much cheaper. )
Anyways, you have these machines print devices that are a solar panel on the top side, and an array of nanoscale gas pumps on the underside. They selectively grab CO2 from the atmosphere, combine it with water to produce some type of plastic that is long term stable. The resulting pellets of plastic are buried in the ocean or vast landfills. You deploy these things over the ocean or something. It would take about 10 years, but you could completely collect all of the CO2 that humanity has added since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
Right. A war isn't a negative sum game when you have an unbeatable technological advantage over the other group. With a big enough tech advantage, you can fight and easily win with few losses yourself.
In the examples you gave, not only did the Europeans have guns, they had the written word. That alone made all the difference. (because text language lets you coordinate groups over large distances and record knowledge for the future)
Uhh...no. Warfare is a negative-sum game. Both parties in a war usually lose far more than they gain. A successful race will have the technological and military tools needed to make sure that any potential foes face a serious deterrent against attacking, but said race will not initiate an attack themselves unless it is one of the rare scenarios where fighting yields more benefits than trading.
Everything we know now about technology and technological progress says that SETI is a total waste of time. Unless our understanding of the universe is fundamentally flawed, there is nothing we will be able to find. This is why :
1. As radio technology advances, the signals become closer and closer to noise. Already, most digital radios today would be totally indistinguishable from noise when observed from lightyears away. Also, as the radios get better, the signals become more and more directional. It is reasonable to expect that in 50 years, all the radios used in most applications will use frequency hopping, very low power, ultra wide band, and will steer their signals to the locations of other nodes in a mesh network. 50 years is probably a pessimistic estimate for this.
2. If our theories about the Singularity are true, by the time our light reaches other stars, within another 1000 years or so we'll be roaring in on starships, running self replicating machinery that systematically converts all matter into more useful products. The presence of post-singularity humanity will be completely impossible to miss. Thus, the reason we cannot see other civilizations doing the same thing is because we are the first one in our region of space.
Obviously, your "1 penny per month" is pure ignorance. Your opinions and misreading of your utility bill (you have to compare it to EXACTLY the same load for everything else in your house...meaning you need to measure what everything is is drawing) does not change the laws of physics. Those bulbs do draw 1/5 the power of what you had before. End of message.
As for premature failures : try a better brand, maybe look up a review? Get the ecosmarts from Home Depot, those have the best reviews by far. They are less than 2 bucks a bulb. I've never had one burn out on me in 5 years.
Human beings have only 2 ears. Most of the sound comes in through the ear canal. Thus, the way you perceive direction has both to do with having 2 ears, and also the ability to move your head.
Stereo sound gives you directionality for the first bit, but not the second. Wouldn't a pair of very high quality headphones with a head position sensor allow you to hear movies in the full 62.2 format without needing $50,000 worth of equipment? Very high quality headphones with a good sensor might cost $100-$200 a pair, and obviously you'd need a monstrous rack of audio processing equipment to keep up.
You want a practical route? Buy a car or convert one to run on natural gas. There's tons and tons of it being pumped, for dirt cheap, and this will continue for decades until the easy to frack reservoirs are drained. One way or another all that methane is going to be used, you might as well burn it when it is cheap.
1. That's what I am saying. For the system as a whole, LESS resources are used if you do some skilled labor for someone and trade that labor for solar cells than if you were doing hard labor in your own backyard. Sure, people USED to do everything on their own lands, but the population has been too high for this to be possible for centuries now.
2. I'm saying that anyone BUT a hillbilly with no education or capital will get more usable energy, faster with solar cells than wasting time with ethanol.
3. The thermoelectric effect is useless for energy production of any noticeable quantity. Go take a few math and physics classes. http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/
Yes, but you can't grow nearly everything else needed for you to survive in your back field, either.
The point is that in the long run, cheap solar cells will be produced that need very little in the way of resources to make (whether it be skilled labor, materials, or energy). The fact that China can make a profit (albeit yes with some cheating such as a deflated currency, and no OSHA standards) selling them this cheap means that the resources in them are already down to moderate levels.
Silicon is pretty darn common an element. The rare earths aren't, but some solar cells types need very little of those.
Infinite states? Doesn't the universe have a finite resolution?
Also, doesn't quantum uncertainty and noise mean that regardless of the large number of states the transistor is capable of, only a far smaller number of states are actually distinguishable or matter in a working system.
When I'm launching my rockets full of explorers from the planet Kerth, we don't do aborts! If the engines are still attached to the ship, I'm punching the throttle and hitting the stage selection control! We're going to the Mun (or at least leaving the ground) no matter what!
Also, I don't do any pansy ass "test flights" guided by computer to some orbiting tin can! Every one of my flights is crewed by red blooded, beer chugging, motorcycle riding Kerbals who LOVE it even when it all goes wrong.
SpaceX and NASA could learn a lot from my experiences...
Not revolutionary - just problematic to achieve a working plant. Certain forms of fusion release almost exclusively beta particles, which are pure electrons.
What's you're really doing is using photosynthesis, a form of solar energy, to produce your fuel. Fun fact : most crops are between 1-2% efficient at converting sunlight to chemical energy. Then, you're going to lose at least half of that energy converting the crops to ethanol, then you'll lose 2/3 of the energy in the ethanol when you burn it for motive power.
Also, those crops need water and fertilizer, generally, costing you energy. If you use the good fertilizer, you won't even gain energy doing this.
Or you could use cheap Chinese made solar cells (less than $1 a watt) and use it to charge batteries. Commercial solar cells are 7-14% efficient, and the battery charging is around 80% efficient or better. When you drive the car on those batteries, another 80% or more of that power actually propels the car.
Do the math. The problem today are the high technology items needed to make all this work have high manufacturing costs (that are falling rapidly). However, in the long run, it seems pretty obvious where this is heading.
Wool IS an excellent story. It should be thought of as a series of books : honestly, the first 5 wool books would fit into one movie. (normally it's the other way around)
With point to point mesh networking using beam forming antenna, I'm not sure how effective any countermeasure would realistically be. Basically, all the drones in a swarm as well as various other aircraft as a relay station have point to point links between them. Any RF signal not coming in a straight line from the location of an allied system is more or less ignored. There would be hundreds or more nodes in the mesh network, and the encryption would be one time pad.
With this kind of inter-unit communication, the only thing that would be able to realistically break the com-links would be weapons capable of frying the radios themselves. And the drones could have limited artificial intelligence - in 20 years, they would probably be able to fight enemy aircraft and bomb an existing target without needing further instructions from their controllers.
Most of the IRS staff would no longer be needed : enforcing a simpler tax would require far fewer people, and could be a mostly automated process.
Most tax accountants and tax attorneys would no longer be needed.
All those lobbyists who lobby to keep a loophole alive would no longer be needed.
All those banks who create elaborate tax shelters for rich people no longer need to offer those services, since with a simpler tax code, most shelters would no longer work.
And so on. This could be a million jobs or more.
Worse, the superrich who have spent years creating elaborate shelters would be facing HUGE tax increases, since the shelters they spent all that time and money building would be defunct. THIS is why the idea of the fair tax is a non-starter.
This is a classic example of free market failure. Making the consoles more efficient costs the manufacturers money. There's the cost to add power gating transistors to all the multi-core chips, use more expensive versions of the same chip binned for lower power consumption, and write the firmware to maximize power efficiency.
All this will create a benefit that the consumers cannot perceive, directly. Almost no consumers own a Kill-a-Watt, and they don't have any options because there are not many competing consoles, there are only 3, and they are not remotely equivalent to each other. (a consumer unhappy with xbox/ps3 power consumption will not get the same gaming experience on the Wii)
The Obama adminstration actually solves this problem, as I understand it. Here's what I know about their process :
1. Somehow they filter the spawn and mass mailings
2. A group of staffers actually DO read and respond to every email message with a reasoned reply taken from some kind of script consistent with Obama's position.
3. A small number of these messages are printed out and the President does read this. I think they are chosen randomly or perhaps a single exceptional message sneaks through directly.
With all this said, just because you email Obama, even if you are the smartest person on the planet, it doesn't mean he will pay any attention. Now, if you are a rich or powerful person, then you might get a meeting.
None of those methods can contaminate massive areas of land all at once. You can clean up a broken windfarm with ordinary equipment, not specialized robotics, and it's a lot cheaper.
Burning natural gas, while it does have a negative long term consequence for the entire planet, is far cheaper than nuclear, and can provide base-load generation just fine. Natural gas is ideal to use in conjunction with renewable energy because you can easily start up and shut down gas turbines as the wind/solar etc fluctuate.
NOTHING is free. Everything takes time and money to create. Now, for various reasons, people give software away...but this is a massive corporation producing software worth billions of dollars, and a key part of it depends on software that was developed at a cost of millions of dollars.
So a reasonable few million bucks to Oracle for their trouble seems fair.
The more scientists who commit fraud and outcompete honest scientists for funding, the higher the bar becomes for the honest scientists. With dwindling tenure positions (and far more scientists competing for those positions), in order to be considered for tenure you have to meet very high productivity standards : a large number of peer reviewed papers in high-impact journals.
Well, real research takes time, money, and if it's good research, it will FAIL most of the time. It HAS to fail...to find something truly new you have to leave the bounds of existing knowledge, and most solutions anyone attempts are going to fail. The only way to guarantee an experiment will succeed is to :
1. Research something you really already know the answer to. Hence the popularity of further research on the dangers of smoking. Throw a dart at a picture of a human body, check if someone else has researched it, if not, check. You will "discover" that cigarette smoke is quite harmful to or increases the prevalence of . This kind of research is not fraud, per say, but is really boring to high impact journals SO
2. Discover something marginal with real research, then use photoshop and obscure statistical methods to make it look like you have a real discovery. Make outlandish claims about the prospect of your discovery revolutionizing everything.
And so on. The problem is, there ARE real discoveries made, every now and then, that would be huge IF large sums of money were spent to develop the REAL advances. But, if you have 10 fakers for every legitimate discovery, and you try to fund them all equally, most of the money gets wasted and so we live in a society without effective treatments for cancer, without a cost effective way to reach low earth orbits, without any of the other things that technology theoretically could make possible.
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SD cards store the data in electric charge trapped in special types of transistors. This charge does leak over time at a very slow rate. The cheaper flash chips are only rated for a limited number of years without the data being accessed and recopied. These effects are temperature dependent, and I think 25 years isn't too long of a time period, but it isn't forever.
Truth be told, the private copyright cops have no reason to lie or cheat. What they are doing is quite easy and straightforward. All they have to do is hit a major torrent site like TPB, click a tracker with their hacked version of an open source bittorrent client, and save all the IP addresses in the swarm. The rest is just meaningless fluff that costs stupendous sums of money. The IP addresses they record are by PREPONDERANCE OF EVIDENCE (meaning at least a 51% chance) guilty of infringement. 51% chance is a pretty darn low threshold to reach, and we know that millions of people occasionally pirate, so legally it's an open and shut case.
If the U.S. legal system were in any way remotely efficient or speedy, it would dispose of all these cases in a week. And if the legislature were also not so corrupt, the fines for these infringements would be in some way based on reality.
Yes. Molecular manufacturing nanotechnology could do this easily. A quick summary of the idea : molecular manufacturing posits a machine capable of creating an arbitrary 3d structure that is atomically precise. It also posits that the machine itself is only composed of a few million atoms per subunit, so the machine could be used to replicate itself.
With self replication over a reasonable timescale (say a few weeks), you get incredibly rapid exponential growth. So you'd start with 1 machine, and within a few years have warehouses full of these things taking up the land area of entire states, all these machines busily converting matter into useful products or more of themselves. Please note that these machines are macroscale : they are housed inside stainless steel vacuum chambers, and an assembled machine is quite large and eats a lot of power. They would get their power from either solar or cheaply printed nuclear reactors. (right now, a nuclear reactor costs billions of dollars. If you could print out the parts for one in a way that was atomically perfect, they would be much cheaper. )
Anyways, you have these machines print devices that are a solar panel on the top side, and an array of nanoscale gas pumps on the underside. They selectively grab CO2 from the atmosphere, combine it with water to produce some type of plastic that is long term stable. The resulting pellets of plastic are buried in the ocean or vast landfills. You deploy these things over the ocean or something. It would take about 10 years, but you could completely collect all of the CO2 that humanity has added since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
Right. A war isn't a negative sum game when you have an unbeatable technological advantage over the other group. With a big enough tech advantage, you can fight and easily win with few losses yourself.
In the examples you gave, not only did the Europeans have guns, they had the written word. That alone made all the difference. (because text language lets you coordinate groups over large distances and record knowledge for the future)
Uhh...no. Warfare is a negative-sum game. Both parties in a war usually lose far more than they gain. A successful race will have the technological and military tools needed to make sure that any potential foes face a serious deterrent against attacking, but said race will not initiate an attack themselves unless it is one of the rare scenarios where fighting yields more benefits than trading.
Everything we know now about technology and technological progress says that SETI is a total waste of time. Unless our understanding of the universe is fundamentally flawed, there is nothing we will be able to find. This is why :
1. As radio technology advances, the signals become closer and closer to noise. Already, most digital radios today would be totally indistinguishable from noise when observed from lightyears away. Also, as the radios get better, the signals become more and more directional. It is reasonable to expect that in 50 years, all the radios used in most applications will use frequency hopping, very low power, ultra wide band, and will steer their signals to the locations of other nodes in a mesh network. 50 years is probably a pessimistic estimate for this.
2. If our theories about the Singularity are true, by the time our light reaches other stars, within another 1000 years or so we'll be roaring in on starships, running self replicating machinery that systematically converts all matter into more useful products. The presence of post-singularity humanity will be completely impossible to miss. Thus, the reason we cannot see other civilizations doing the same thing is because we are the first one in our region of space.
Obviously, your "1 penny per month" is pure ignorance. Your opinions and misreading of your utility bill (you have to compare it to EXACTLY the same load for everything else in your house...meaning you need to measure what everything is is drawing) does not change the laws of physics. Those bulbs do draw 1/5 the power of what you had before. End of message.
As for premature failures : try a better brand, maybe look up a review? Get the ecosmarts from Home Depot, those have the best reviews by far. They are less than 2 bucks a bulb. I've never had one burn out on me in 5 years.
Human beings have only 2 ears. Most of the sound comes in through the ear canal. Thus, the way you perceive direction has both to do with having 2 ears, and also the ability to move your head.
Stereo sound gives you directionality for the first bit, but not the second. Wouldn't a pair of very high quality headphones with a head position sensor allow you to hear movies in the full 62.2 format without needing $50,000 worth of equipment? Very high quality headphones with a good sensor might cost $100-$200 a pair, and obviously you'd need a monstrous rack of audio processing equipment to keep up.
How many Soyuz launches have killed their crew because the rocket failed? Zero.
And if the death rate is the same, would you rather spend more money or less?
You want a practical route? Buy a car or convert one to run on natural gas. There's tons and tons of it being pumped, for dirt cheap, and this will continue for decades until the easy to frack reservoirs are drained. One way or another all that methane is going to be used, you might as well burn it when it is cheap.
1. That's what I am saying. For the system as a whole, LESS resources are used if you do some skilled labor for someone and trade that labor for solar cells than if you were doing hard labor in your own backyard. Sure, people USED to do everything on their own lands, but the population has been too high for this to be possible for centuries now.
2. I'm saying that anyone BUT a hillbilly with no education or capital will get more usable energy, faster with solar cells than wasting time with ethanol.
3. The thermoelectric effect is useless for energy production of any noticeable quantity. Go take a few math and physics classes. http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/
Yes, but you can't grow nearly everything else needed for you to survive in your back field, either.
The point is that in the long run, cheap solar cells will be produced that need very little in the way of resources to make (whether it be skilled labor, materials, or energy). The fact that China can make a profit (albeit yes with some cheating such as a deflated currency, and no OSHA standards) selling them this cheap means that the resources in them are already down to moderate levels.
Silicon is pretty darn common an element. The rare earths aren't, but some solar cells types need very little of those.
Infinite states? Doesn't the universe have a finite resolution?
Also, doesn't quantum uncertainty and noise mean that regardless of the large number of states the transistor is capable of, only a far smaller number of states are actually distinguishable or matter in a working system.
When I'm launching my rockets full of explorers from the planet Kerth, we don't do aborts! If the engines are still attached to the ship, I'm punching the throttle and hitting the stage selection control! We're going to the Mun (or at least leaving the ground) no matter what!
Also, I don't do any pansy ass "test flights" guided by computer to some orbiting tin can! Every one of my flights is crewed by red blooded, beer chugging, motorcycle riding Kerbals who LOVE it even when it all goes wrong.
SpaceX and NASA could learn a lot from my experiences...
Not revolutionary - just problematic to achieve a working plant. Certain forms of fusion release almost exclusively beta particles, which are pure electrons.
What's you're really doing is using photosynthesis, a form of solar energy, to produce your fuel. Fun fact : most crops are between 1-2% efficient at converting sunlight to chemical energy. Then, you're going to lose at least half of that energy converting the crops to ethanol, then you'll lose 2/3 of the energy in the ethanol when you burn it for motive power.
Also, those crops need water and fertilizer, generally, costing you energy. If you use the good fertilizer, you won't even gain energy doing this.
Or you could use cheap Chinese made solar cells (less than $1 a watt) and use it to charge batteries. Commercial solar cells are 7-14% efficient, and the battery charging is around 80% efficient or better. When you drive the car on those batteries, another 80% or more of that power actually propels the car.
Do the math. The problem today are the high technology items needed to make all this work have high manufacturing costs (that are falling rapidly). However, in the long run, it seems pretty obvious where this is heading.
The story was NOT finished, and does end on a cliffhanger. Don't listen to the AC.
Wool IS an excellent story. It should be thought of as a series of books : honestly, the first 5 wool books would fit into one movie. (normally it's the other way around)
With point to point mesh networking using beam forming antenna, I'm not sure how effective any countermeasure would realistically be. Basically, all the drones in a swarm as well as various other aircraft as a relay station have point to point links between them. Any RF signal not coming in a straight line from the location of an allied system is more or less ignored. There would be hundreds or more nodes in the mesh network, and the encryption would be one time pad.
With this kind of inter-unit communication, the only thing that would be able to realistically break the com-links would be weapons capable of frying the radios themselves. And the drones could have limited artificial intelligence - in 20 years, they would probably be able to fight enemy aircraft and bomb an existing target without needing further instructions from their controllers.
Think of all the jobs that would eliminate.
Most of the IRS staff would no longer be needed : enforcing a simpler tax would require far fewer people, and could be a mostly automated process.
Most tax accountants and tax attorneys would no longer be needed.
All those lobbyists who lobby to keep a loophole alive would no longer be needed.
All those banks who create elaborate tax shelters for rich people no longer need to offer those services, since with a simpler tax code, most shelters would no longer work.
And so on. This could be a million jobs or more.
Worse, the superrich who have spent years creating elaborate shelters would be facing HUGE tax increases, since the shelters they spent all that time and money building would be defunct. THIS is why the idea of the fair tax is a non-starter.
This is a classic example of free market failure. Making the consoles more efficient costs the manufacturers money. There's the cost to add power gating transistors to all the multi-core chips, use more expensive versions of the same chip binned for lower power consumption, and write the firmware to maximize power efficiency.
All this will create a benefit that the consumers cannot perceive, directly. Almost no consumers own a Kill-a-Watt, and they don't have any options because there are not many competing consoles, there are only 3, and they are not remotely equivalent to each other. (a consumer unhappy with xbox/ps3 power consumption will not get the same gaming experience on the Wii)
The Obama adminstration actually solves this problem, as I understand it. Here's what I know about their process :
1. Somehow they filter the spawn and mass mailings
2. A group of staffers actually DO read and respond to every email message with a reasoned reply taken from some kind of script consistent with Obama's position.
3. A small number of these messages are printed out and the President does read this. I think they are chosen randomly or perhaps a single exceptional message sneaks through directly.
With all this said, just because you email Obama, even if you are the smartest person on the planet, it doesn't mean he will pay any attention. Now, if you are a rich or powerful person, then you might get a meeting.
None of those methods can contaminate massive areas of land all at once. You can clean up a broken windfarm with ordinary equipment, not specialized robotics, and it's a lot cheaper.
Burning natural gas, while it does have a negative long term consequence for the entire planet, is far cheaper than nuclear, and can provide base-load generation just fine. Natural gas is ideal to use in conjunction with renewable energy because you can easily start up and shut down gas turbines as the wind/solar etc fluctuate.
NOTHING is free. Everything takes time and money to create. Now, for various reasons, people give software away...but this is a massive corporation producing software worth billions of dollars, and a key part of it depends on software that was developed at a cost of millions of dollars.
So a reasonable few million bucks to Oracle for their trouble seems fair.
The more scientists who commit fraud and outcompete honest scientists for funding, the higher the bar becomes for the honest scientists. With dwindling tenure positions (and far more scientists competing for those positions), in order to be considered for tenure you have to meet very high productivity standards : a large number of peer reviewed papers in high-impact journals.
Well, real research takes time, money, and if it's good research, it will FAIL most of the time. It HAS to fail...to find something truly new you have to leave the bounds of existing knowledge, and most solutions anyone attempts are going to fail. The only way to guarantee an experiment will succeed is to :
1. Research something you really already know the answer to. Hence the popularity of further research on the dangers of smoking. Throw a dart at a picture of a human body, check if someone else has researched it, if not, check. You will "discover" that cigarette smoke is quite harmful to or increases the prevalence of . This kind of research is not fraud, per say, but is really boring to high impact journals SO
2. Discover something marginal with real research, then use photoshop and obscure statistical methods to make it look like you have a real discovery. Make outlandish claims about the prospect of your discovery revolutionizing everything.
And so on. The problem is, there ARE real discoveries made, every now and then, that would be huge IF large sums of money were spent to develop the REAL advances. But, if you have 10 fakers for every legitimate discovery, and you try to fund them all equally, most of the money gets wasted and so we live in a society without effective treatments for cancer, without a cost effective way to reach low earth orbits, without any of the other things that technology theoretically could make possible.