Technically, it would only need to be 3400 miles long (the extension cord). Ultimately, I imagine a grid of cables circling the moon with vast factories running in the shade of solar panels that cover the surface. We would need self-replicating machinery to set this kind of infrastructure up, which I think will be possible in 50-100 years.
With molecular manufacturing (which DOES work, nature does it 24/7) we could do better than terraforming. Rather than try to convert a whole planet, we would have molecular blueprints for rotating space habitats that we could build in mass. We would need only the raw elements and energy to build these things. A dead astroid or small planet with no atmosphere is perfect starting material.(molecular manufacturing means you have the technology to somehow control the individual placement of atoms when you build things. That means, by definition, that you can duplicate your manufacturing equipment exponentially. This is how all living things work, and living organisms do duplicate exponentially if they have the necessary resources)
Big companies can screw over the little guy all week long but someone expecting a 181.5 million dollar payday isn't someone you can screw over like that. He would be able to afford the best attorneys in the world and if it really were a week before the vesting date it's an open and shut case of fraud. All the people who approved a decision like that would be fired and probably face losing their personal assets for approving outright fraud.
Now, if it's a year before the vesting date...that's a trickier case. Rest assured, though, if they were to fire him he would get a 'golden parachute' of at least tens of millions of dollars to avoid problems.
Maybe I have to arm wave a little bit, but check your history. Did Charles Babbage have to arm-wave, or did he have all the money and equipment he needed to build his computers? (which DID WORK)
Did Werner Von Braun have every detail of his rockets worked out?
Etc. Point is, none of those historical figures were 500 years ahead of their time. They were 50-60 years at most.
A quantum dot is a pit for electrical charge and they are not theoretical, they are quite real. I have to send the hot potato back the other direction : how do you know anything if you didn't type the phrase into google and find the millions of references to it.
You inject charge into quantum dots as part of the clamp holding the substrate in your print head to stabilize intermediate states. You remove the charge at the same time you place the next atom that results in a final, stable state.
We don't have to understand why steel is what it is - we just have to know exactly which atoms go where and what the bonds are. All materials science no matter how complex is ultimately just a limited number of elements bonded a limited number of ways.
So an incredibly hard seeming problem - create steel from scratch - is simplified to 'reproduce this exact pattern of iron and carbon atoms stored in this data array' and that is simplified to actual machine steps that individual subunits of your equipment can perform.
Right now, today, we can already build micro structures that function in machinery. In limited scenarios, we can create atomically precise structures. We know that nature has working nanotechnology, and we can reprogram it readily. (the catch is that coding standards are so poor that we can only get predictable outcomes in limited scenarios)
Just so you know, amino acids in nature are atomically precise and the actual synthesis steps natural enzymes use involve positioning single atom reactive intermediates where they need to go.
Anyways, I can tell from your comments that you are ignorant about the subject. Read a book on it or something. And the technology I'm describing would have significant drawbacks, such as the printing heads wearing out and very high energy consumption. (it would take vastly more energy to create a block of steel by using machinery to position atoms one by one in a controlled manner than just melting stuff in a forge)
On the other hand, steel isn't magic. If we could try different molecular patterns of carbon and iron systematically, we could probably find a pattern that has better properties than any metal available today.
Just what I read, I'm not an electrical engineer. But it isn't at all surprising that there's tradeoffs, which is why we use rare earth motors so often right now. Switched reluctance does sound like the ultimate way to do electric motors, however. Even better if the wire in one is made with superconductors.
Source for your statement? This isn't Stargate "replicators"...it's machinery made atom by atom that can position reactive atomic intermediates automatically. A full up printer would use trillions of identical subunits that work this way.
Technology like this, even early versions of it, would be more valuable than essentially any other possible technology that we could plausibly build in the visible future.
We can already make things atom by atom right now. If you look into the past, you find very few technologies that the people of our past could explain and describe in exact detail that did not exist within 50-100 years. (while we don't quite have the software modeling tools and automated machinery to actually build our first nanotech printing devices, we understand extremely well what this entails)
Nanotechnology like I'm describing has only existed as a consistent idea for 28 years. So your "500-1000" year estimate seems like pure fluff.
get ssd life free. This program tracks your total writes over time and calculates your remaining lifespan. You have to have the program installed for a few months to give an accurate estimate. I use my SSD for my OS and programs on a computer that is in use 24/7. According to SSD life, at the current rate of use I have over a century of media life remaining. (the SSD will undoubtedly be too obsolete for use long before then, or it would die from an electronic part failing long before a century passed). SSD is an X-25M 80 GB.
With fusion, we have a method to build an incredibly expensive power generator that does the same thing we can do with a fission plant right now (except the fusion plant would likely be much more expensive). We can get effectively unlimited energy using fission plants and well understood technology right now..the problem is the manufacturing and operating costs to build a reliable and safe fission reactor are prohibitive. (hence the reason why corners get cut and nasty things happen)
Nanotechnology effectively means the ability to build '3d printers' that can print themselves and almost any arbitrary object, given sufficient time, energy, and the elements needed. Then we could fix our environmental problems or just convert the moon or Mars into a cloud of space habitats or whatever.
And there IS a technology visible on the horizon that would basically do the same thing for all elements that electrolysis did for aluminum. It's called molecular manufacturing. In short, if we ever develop the tech, we would be able to build molecular sorters that could, given enough energy, separate basically any feedstock into the constituent elements. And the sorters themselves could be manufactured for almost no cost because they would be produced by equipment that can exponentially self-replicate.
Article I read explained that specific RPM ranges the particular motor is tuned for, a rare earth motor can have a higher torque because you get a certain amount of field strength 'for free' with the field generated by the rare earth. To get that same field strength with switched reluctance, you need to add more weight in the form of thicker wires so you can use more current.
ONE inbox with all official government documents ever sent. If the government had a competent infrastructure to support it (with quintuply redundant backups etc etc) this could work extremely well.
Furthermore, they could make this the official delivery mechanism for official documents, court orders, subpoenas, etc. No more shit lost in the mail.
The primary problems :
1. Privacy. A computer hacker who did breach the system could conceivably copy the entire database and expose the private files of millions of people.
2. Security. Information in these documents could be used by someone to steal money or entire identities.
The problems are not unsolvable. Both come down to identity. There has to be an unbreakable mechanism for both encrypting the documents and for verifying identity. The technology to do both exists. It's called one time pad. Dedicated microcontrollers attached to gigabytes of flash memory would be distributed in pairs, sharing a unique hardware generated pad file. One unit of the pair would exist in a vault in a government data center, the other in the possession of the citizen.
To add documents to the stash, a key held on the microcontroller would be used to encrypt the files. To access the files, the user must verify identity by a communication exchange between the one time pad in the government vault and the card the user carries. The files would then be streamed through the micro-controller in the vault which would do the decrypting and on to the user. For redudancy, the government would actually need 3 instances of the microcontroller located in separate vaults.
This way, no plaintext version of the file would ever exist after it is stored in the electronic 'cubby hole'.
The second thing : the need for a new socket : is a technical requirement. The new socket, socket 2011, has TWO THOUSAND eleven pins. The current top of the line socket uses only ONE thousand, one hundred fifty five pins.
The extra pins are mostly to give enough wiring traces so that four separate memory sticks can be accessed at the same time in parallel. (aka quad channel memory)
addendum : cryogenic freezing and religion are not mutually exclusive - a rational person would use one as a hedge against the other failing. No modern interpretation of the bible/koran/etc has a problem with submitting to molecular surgery after storage for decades or centuries. It would be no different than receiving a modern medical procedure that only a few religions have trouble with. Even Jehavah's witnesses might not have a problem with cryonics since technically you aren't exchanging blood with anyone when all your blood is pumped out and replaced with cryo-protectant...
Out of curiosity, have you considered cryogenic freezing of your brain and/or body when the inevitable happens and your body fails? While an economic crash so bad that it actually threatens the physical well being of someone as wealthy as yourself is unlikely, the medical system WILL fail you. End of line. And religion is a pretty desperate and irrational straw to grasp (that most of the population cling to, but you might be one of the ones who can see through religion.)
Cryogenics is absolutely not a guarantee, it's a calculated gamble for a relative modest cost. But it offers you a better chance of seeing the far future on this planet, most of your memories intact, than religion does.
Ok, I looked at Linode. TRANSFER LIMITS. Their $40/month plan is limited to 400 gigabytes/month. So if I'm using a program running on a linode box to act as my proxy to the outside world, giving me a publicly accessible IP, I can't transfer very much data.
I have an Into VPS account which for that price has a 2000 gigabyte monthly limit. Currently I run a minecraft server but I suppose I could set the machine up as my proxy to allow me to play multiplayer games that have port forwarding problems. This just seems like a really kludgey way to do it...surely there are proxy services out there that use dedicated ASICs for the proxy routing.
Ok, I was trying to google for how to do this. I can't even find the right search phrase - I either get a blizzard of results related to VPNs for a business or a blizzard of results related to people wanting slow and crummy free proxy servers to go to restricted websites.
As I understand it, with a virtual host I am limited by the upload speed of that host, right? So if I wanted to have a full 50mbps connection to the outside world that I can receive incoming connections to, I would need a virtual host that has 50 megabit upload and a big enough bandwidth allocation to make use of it?
Right now, I pay $40/month for my minecraft server because I didn't have a fast enough upload where I used to live.
I'm not sure if the machines inside the walled garden can talk to each other, either. I don't think that they can. (unless I put several of my own computers on the same switch, I don't think they can see each other)
Please understand...I hate this architecture and I think it stinks, but I can see why the ISP is doing it this way.
I just moved into an apartment with internet provided by ethernet jacks in the walls. The actual architecture is a major ISP has set up their own routers somewhere, putting me permanently behind a NAT. I cannot open a single port, so no incoming connections can ever reach my computers without one of my machines sending a packet out first.
This has SIGNIFICANT advantages : most worms cannot spread because my computers cannot receive a packet from any machine without software on my machine actively establishing a connection first. No exceptions. It means that bittorrents and other P2P software barely work at all. And so on.
For the ISP, this is ideal. And, the ISP offers unheard of speeds in this restricted setup. 4meg upload/4 meg download is free with the apartment rent, and for $40 a month they'll give me 50 meg upload 50 meg download. For a USA ISP, that is crazy fast...but the limitations make the high upload close to useless.
And, the other interesting thing is that nearly everything I've ever done on the internet still works. My computer is unable to communicate with anyone without the help of a server and is a permanent client, but in today's world that's the norm.
Are you being sarcastic? Some things that cause negative externalities are not computable with data and methods we have today. However, burning a fossil fuel and dumping it into the atmosphere is something that coming up with a reasonable approximation of the cost of the externalities is something we can do with current knowledge and current math.
Most reasonable guesses at this say that gas should cost something like 5 or 6 bucks a gallon once you include these costs. If this is true, that means society as a whole DOES PAY THAT COST even if it doesn't show up at the pump. So the republitard argument that higher gas prices 'hurt small business' is false because those same small businesses are paying those externalities in other ways, at least on the aggregate.
But in any case, we cannot raise gas prices because the overwhelming majority of Americans is not educated enough to understand this idea, and will vote against it, even though by doing so they are voting against their own interests.
It is highly reasonable to think that one will inflate faster than the other. Oil is a limited resource that is rapidly running out. (well, I should say the cheap sources of oil are rapidly being depleted). A more fuel efficient car could potentially be made by melting down the metal in the cars we have now and rearranging the atoms into a more efficient arrangement. (that's what actually happens but it takes many steps to accomplish in many separate factories). The energy to do all this comes from natural gas and coal, two resources that are not running out so quickly.
CPUs that are overvolted and overclocked to the point of actually failing tend to make mistakes and BSOD pretty often. Are you sure they overclock them THAT heavily? They could merely overclock to around 4-4.5 ghz with Intel's stuff (assuming that is the architecture they used) safely.
Slashdot Mirror
Technically, it would only need to be 3400 miles long (the extension cord). Ultimately, I imagine a grid of cables circling the moon with vast factories running in the shade of solar panels that cover the surface. We would need self-replicating machinery to set this kind of infrastructure up, which I think will be possible in 50-100 years.
With molecular manufacturing (which DOES work, nature does it 24/7) we could do better than terraforming. Rather than try to convert a whole planet, we would have molecular blueprints for rotating space habitats that we could build in mass. We would need only the raw elements and energy to build these things. A dead astroid or small planet with no atmosphere is perfect starting material.(molecular manufacturing means you have the technology to somehow control the individual placement of atoms when you build things. That means, by definition, that you can duplicate your manufacturing equipment exponentially. This is how all living things work, and living organisms do duplicate exponentially if they have the necessary resources)
Big companies can screw over the little guy all week long but someone expecting a 181.5 million dollar payday isn't someone you can screw over like that. He would be able to afford the best attorneys in the world and if it really were a week before the vesting date it's an open and shut case of fraud. All the people who approved a decision like that would be fired and probably face losing their personal assets for approving outright fraud.
Now, if it's a year before the vesting date...that's a trickier case. Rest assured, though, if they were to fire him he would get a 'golden parachute' of at least tens of millions of dollars to avoid problems.
Maybe I have to arm wave a little bit, but check your history. Did Charles Babbage have to arm-wave, or did he have all the money and equipment he needed to build his computers? (which DID WORK)
Did Werner Von Braun have every detail of his rockets worked out?
Etc. Point is, none of those historical figures were 500 years ahead of their time. They were 50-60 years at most.
A quantum dot is a pit for electrical charge and they are not theoretical, they are quite real. I have to send the hot potato back the other direction : how do you know anything if you didn't type the phrase into google and find the millions of references to it.
You inject charge into quantum dots as part of the clamp holding the substrate in your print head to stabilize intermediate states. You remove the charge at the same time you place the next atom that results in a final, stable state.
We don't have to understand why steel is what it is - we just have to know exactly which atoms go where and what the bonds are. All materials science no matter how complex is ultimately just a limited number of elements bonded a limited number of ways.
So an incredibly hard seeming problem - create steel from scratch - is simplified to 'reproduce this exact pattern of iron and carbon atoms stored in this data array' and that is simplified to actual machine steps that individual subunits of your equipment can perform.
Right now, today, we can already build micro structures that function in machinery. In limited scenarios, we can create atomically precise structures. We know that nature has working nanotechnology, and we can reprogram it readily. (the catch is that coding standards are so poor that we can only get predictable outcomes in limited scenarios)
Just so you know, amino acids in nature are atomically precise and the actual synthesis steps natural enzymes use involve positioning single atom reactive intermediates where they need to go.
Anyways, I can tell from your comments that you are ignorant about the subject. Read a book on it or something. And the technology I'm describing would have significant drawbacks, such as the printing heads wearing out and very high energy consumption. (it would take vastly more energy to create a block of steel by using machinery to position atoms one by one in a controlled manner than just melting stuff in a forge)
On the other hand, steel isn't magic. If we could try different molecular patterns of carbon and iron systematically, we could probably find a pattern that has better properties than any metal available today.
Just what I read, I'm not an electrical engineer. But it isn't at all surprising that there's tradeoffs, which is why we use rare earth motors so often right now. Switched reluctance does sound like the ultimate way to do electric motors, however. Even better if the wire in one is made with superconductors.
Source for your statement? This isn't Stargate "replicators"...it's machinery made atom by atom that can position reactive atomic intermediates automatically. A full up printer would use trillions of identical subunits that work this way.
Technology like this, even early versions of it, would be more valuable than essentially any other possible technology that we could plausibly build in the visible future.
We can already make things atom by atom right now. If you look into the past, you find very few technologies that the people of our past could explain and describe in exact detail that did not exist within 50-100 years. (while we don't quite have the software modeling tools and automated machinery to actually build our first nanotech printing devices, we understand extremely well what this entails)
Nanotechnology like I'm describing has only existed as a consistent idea for 28 years. So your "500-1000" year estimate seems like pure fluff.
get ssd life free. This program tracks your total writes over time and calculates your remaining lifespan. You have to have the program installed for a few months to give an accurate estimate. I use my SSD for my OS and programs on a computer that is in use 24/7. According to SSD life, at the current rate of use I have over a century of media life remaining. (the SSD will undoubtedly be too obsolete for use long before then, or it would die from an electronic part failing long before a century passed). SSD is an X-25M 80 GB.
Fusion isn't what we need. It's nanotechnology.
With fusion, we have a method to build an incredibly expensive power generator that does the same thing we can do with a fission plant right now (except the fusion plant would likely be much more expensive). We can get effectively unlimited energy using fission plants and well understood technology right now..the problem is the manufacturing and operating costs to build a reliable and safe fission reactor are prohibitive. (hence the reason why corners get cut and nasty things happen)
Nanotechnology effectively means the ability to build '3d printers' that can print themselves and almost any arbitrary object, given sufficient time, energy, and the elements needed. Then we could fix our environmental problems or just convert the moon or Mars into a cloud of space habitats or whatever.
And there IS a technology visible on the horizon that would basically do the same thing for all elements that electrolysis did for aluminum. It's called molecular manufacturing. In short, if we ever develop the tech, we would be able to build molecular sorters that could, given enough energy, separate basically any feedstock into the constituent elements. And the sorters themselves could be manufactured for almost no cost because they would be produced by equipment that can exponentially self-replicate.
Article I read explained that specific RPM ranges the particular motor is tuned for, a rare earth motor can have a higher torque because you get a certain amount of field strength 'for free' with the field generated by the rare earth. To get that same field strength with switched reluctance, you need to add more weight in the form of thicker wires so you can use more current.
At which point you receive a threatening letter stating that not checking your inbox at least once every is a crime punishable by fine...
ONE inbox with all official government documents ever sent. If the government had a competent infrastructure to support it (with quintuply redundant backups etc etc) this could work extremely well.
Furthermore, they could make this the official delivery mechanism for official documents, court orders, subpoenas, etc. No more shit lost in the mail.
The primary problems :
1. Privacy. A computer hacker who did breach the system could conceivably copy the entire database and expose the private files of millions of people.
2. Security. Information in these documents could be used by someone to steal money or entire identities.
The problems are not unsolvable. Both come down to identity. There has to be an unbreakable mechanism for both encrypting the documents and for verifying identity. The technology to do both exists. It's called one time pad. Dedicated microcontrollers attached to gigabytes of flash memory would be distributed in pairs, sharing a unique hardware generated pad file. One unit of the pair would exist in a vault in a government data center, the other in the possession of the citizen.
To add documents to the stash, a key held on the microcontroller would be used to encrypt the files. To access the files, the user must verify identity by a communication exchange between the one time pad in the government vault and the card the user carries. The files would then be streamed through the micro-controller in the vault which would do the decrypting and on to the user.
For redudancy, the government would actually need 3 instances of the microcontroller located in separate vaults.
This way, no plaintext version of the file would ever exist after it is stored in the electronic 'cubby hole'.
The second thing : the need for a new socket : is a technical requirement. The new socket, socket 2011, has TWO THOUSAND eleven pins. The current top of the line socket uses only ONE thousand, one hundred fifty five pins.
The extra pins are mostly to give enough wiring traces so that four separate memory sticks can be accessed at the same time in parallel. (aka quad channel memory)
addendum : cryogenic freezing and religion are not mutually exclusive - a rational person would use one as a hedge against the other failing. No modern interpretation of the bible/koran/etc has a problem with submitting to molecular surgery after storage for decades or centuries. It would be no different than receiving a modern medical procedure that only a few religions have trouble with. Even Jehavah's witnesses might not have a problem with cryonics since technically you aren't exchanging blood with anyone when all your blood is pumped out and replaced with cryo-protectant...
Out of curiosity, have you considered cryogenic freezing of your brain and/or body when the inevitable happens and your body fails? While an economic crash so bad that it actually threatens the physical well being of someone as wealthy as yourself is unlikely, the medical system WILL fail you. End of line. And religion is a pretty desperate and irrational straw to grasp (that most of the population cling to, but you might be one of the ones who can see through religion.)
Cryogenics is absolutely not a guarantee, it's a calculated gamble for a relative modest cost. But it offers you a better chance of seeing the far future on this planet, most of your memories intact, than religion does.
Ok, I looked at Linode. TRANSFER LIMITS. Their $40/month plan is limited to 400 gigabytes/month. So if I'm using a program running on a linode box to act as my proxy to the outside world, giving me a publicly accessible IP, I can't transfer very much data.
I have an Into VPS account which for that price has a 2000 gigabyte monthly limit. Currently I run a minecraft server but I suppose I could set the machine up as my proxy to allow me to play multiplayer games that have port forwarding problems. This just seems like a really kludgey way to do it...surely there are proxy services out there that use dedicated ASICs for the proxy routing.
Ok, I was trying to google for how to do this. I can't even find the right search phrase - I either get a blizzard of results related to VPNs for a business or a blizzard of results related to people wanting slow and crummy free proxy servers to go to restricted websites.
As I understand it, with a virtual host I am limited by the upload speed of that host, right? So if I wanted to have a full 50mbps connection to the outside world that I can receive incoming connections to, I would need a virtual host that has 50 megabit upload and a big enough bandwidth allocation to make use of it?
Right now, I pay $40/month for my minecraft server because I didn't have a fast enough upload where I used to live.
I'm not sure if the machines inside the walled garden can talk to each other, either. I don't think that they can. (unless I put several of my own computers on the same switch, I don't think they can see each other)
Please understand...I hate this architecture and I think it stinks, but I can see why the ISP is doing it this way.
I just moved into an apartment with internet provided by ethernet jacks in the walls. The actual architecture is a major ISP has set up their own routers somewhere, putting me permanently behind a NAT. I cannot open a single port, so no incoming connections can ever reach my computers without one of my machines sending a packet out first.
This has SIGNIFICANT advantages : most worms cannot spread because my computers cannot receive a packet from any machine without software on my machine actively establishing a connection first. No exceptions. It means that bittorrents and other P2P software barely work at all. And so on.
For the ISP, this is ideal. And, the ISP offers unheard of speeds in this restricted setup. 4meg upload/4 meg download is free with the apartment rent, and for $40 a month they'll give me 50 meg upload 50 meg download. For a USA ISP, that is crazy fast...but the limitations make the high upload close to useless.
And, the other interesting thing is that nearly everything I've ever done on the internet still works. My computer is unable to communicate with anyone without the help of a server and is a permanent client, but in today's world that's the norm.
Are you being sarcastic? Some things that cause negative externalities are not computable with data and methods we have today. However, burning a fossil fuel and dumping it into the atmosphere is something that coming up with a reasonable approximation of the cost of the externalities is something we can do with current knowledge and current math.
Most reasonable guesses at this say that gas should cost something like 5 or 6 bucks a gallon once you include these costs. If this is true, that means society as a whole DOES PAY THAT COST even if it doesn't show up at the pump. So the republitard argument that higher gas prices 'hurt small business' is false because those same small businesses are paying those externalities in other ways, at least on the aggregate.
But in any case, we cannot raise gas prices because the overwhelming majority of Americans is not educated enough to understand this idea, and will vote against it, even though by doing so they are voting against their own interests.
They have to charge lower prices for the vehicles that are less desirable and sky high prices for the most desirable vehicles.
It is highly reasonable to think that one will inflate faster than the other. Oil is a limited resource that is rapidly running out. (well, I should say the cheap sources of oil are rapidly being depleted). A more fuel efficient car could potentially be made by melting down the metal in the cars we have now and rearranging the atoms into a more efficient arrangement. (that's what actually happens but it takes many steps to accomplish in many separate factories). The energy to do all this comes from natural gas and coal, two resources that are not running out so quickly.
CPUs that are overvolted and overclocked to the point of actually failing tend to make mistakes and BSOD pretty often. Are you sure they overclock them THAT heavily? They could merely overclock to around 4-4.5 ghz with Intel's stuff (assuming that is the architecture they used) safely.