Re:No fact of the matter prior to measurement
on
Subatomic Darwinism
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· Score: 1
No. Decoherence in the einselection framework eliminates the many worlds interpretation. What is says is that, for a large quantum system, there is only a very small subset of states that are stable to perturbation by observers. Therefore, at the macroscopic level, decoherence can only lead to one observable universe.
Insightful my a$$. W. H. Zurek is one of the giants of quantum mechanics. This is a proven mathematical theory in one of the most respected peer reviewed scientific journal out there. The theory has been under scrutiny for years and years.
FYI, it is precisely because einselection works that the macroscopic universe appears as an single, objective, sensible reality to all observers.
I thought that during the internet/telecom/optics bubble, there were a huge amount of fiber optic capacity laid by the likes of Global Crossing. What happened to all that fiber and more importantly, the tunnels that they sit in and the lasers, repeaters, etc? Why does SBC need to spend several billion dollars laying new fiber when dark fiber abound?
Interesting you mention fletchets. Janes Defense Weekly mentioned that fletchets are used today to attack chemical and biological weapons sites. The idea is that they puncture containers to make the sites unuseable, but there's no explosion to disperse the agents.
Terrorism is currently the greatest threat because anything more overt and damaging would cause the offending party to be pulverized by the US Military. If we don't keep up our overwhelming military advantage, people like Osama wouldn't need to have their buddies blowing themselves up while attacking us. They'll just overrun our interests with tanks.
The rule of thumb in war is that a sensible enemy will strike you where he has the greatest relative advantage. Today, our enemies are forced into terrorism. If we leave the door open for more conventional and damaging types of warfare in the future, he'll use that.
In Vietnam we lost 50,000 dead killed millions of Vietnamese. We should try not to go back to the bad old times.
Unfortunately, the last I heard, many of the EF2000's "capabilities" are still only paper specs. The first generation model Eurofighter is air to air only. Who knows when the air to ground version will come out (though all of their publicity material already say the EF2000 is a multirole fighter).
Furthermore, the plane is horribly overbudget and over a decade late. Oh well, I guess that's what happens when you have bureaucrats and politicians from several different country bungling a project that those from a single country are perfectly capable of bungling all on their own.;-)
This laser works in the infra red. Bicycle strips and most other materials that are reflective in the visible band will not be reflective against this laser. They will absorb heat nicely and go kaboom.
A Mach 10 aircraft would not be able to fly around the world faster than an
ICBM, which travels at ~Mach 25 through orbit and can reach any target in the
world 30 minutes after launch from the continental US.
On the other hand, while a rocket needs to carry its own propellant, the
scramjet uses atmospheric air. It is therefore much more efficient, and for a
given size and weight constraint, one could build a scramjet powered vehicle
that could have some combination of greater speed and range over conventional
rocket propelled vehicles.
For the military, this means that you could probably pack a Mach 10, six hundred
mile range missile into a SM-II launcher. Then every destroyer and cruiser
in the Navy would be able to carry dozens of missiles that can hit targets six
hundred miles away within six minutes of launch. Once it gets there, its
warhead, traveling at Mach 10, will have several times the destructive power of
a warhead on a cruise missile, which travels at just below Mach 1.
The characteristics of a scramjet powered missile would allow the military to
attack deeply burried bunkers and highly mobile targets with cruise missiles
launched from hundreds of miles away. It's a military wet dream.
Towards the end of this year, PCI-Express and next generation graphics cards using them will come to market.
How is this significant for the DARPA race?
Well, newer generation graphics cards with highly programmable graphics pipelines can act as very powerful SIMD processors. Up until now, their capability has not seen much use outside of graphics because the AGP bus allows data to travel at full bandwidth in only one direction at a time. This meant that every time you need to download data from the video card, you had to flush the AGP bus, loosing or delaying the uploaded data.
With PCI-Express, data could travel both ways concurrently at full bandwidth, so there's the potential for using the graphics card as a specialized SIMD processor.
I bet much of the processing for the vision and obstacle avoidance could be done on a GPU. If that's the case, instead of having a 1.5 gigaflops CPU per pc, you could have 10 or 20 gigaflops (IIRC) of processing power at your disposal for little over $1000, thus making the necessary computing hardware much cheaper.
Currently, the CMU team, for example, has multi-itanium servers aboard their Hummer, which is NOT something doable on a shoe string budget.
The New Scientist has a nice writeup of the qualifying round as it now stands. The last paragraph is particularly interesting.
DARPA says it will do everything it can to make sure all vehicles capable of stopping safely qualify, which includes allowing them multiple chances to qualify and perhaps ignoring rare crashes. The finalists will be announced on Friday morning.
Caltech manages JPL, the NASA lab that developed the rovers and their associated software.
Originally, the Caltec team was using rover software. However, when DARPA changed contest rules a couple months ago, it went back on its earlier ruling and said that Caltech was no longer allowed to use the rover software because that software was not commercially available.
This led to Caltech redoing much of the work on their vision software. They are now using the modified version of a commercial vision package.
I personally think that DARPA could have done better by asking JPL to make the software available to ALL teams instead of taking it away from Caltech.
Instead of saying "Our troops will be to your left doing field exercises for 24 to 48 hours, please disregard hostile sounding noises during that time"
They'll break it up into several im lines: Friendlies at xxxx coordinates. Conduct field exercise. Duration 24-48 hours. Disregard hostile sounds.
The displayed images were translucent and lacked contrast. They were working on fixing this. I don't think it's a fixable problem if they used the right combination of projector and screen material.
That should read: I think it IS fixable with the right combination of sreen material and projector.
About a year ago the Actuality people did a demonstration for a group that I worked for with a functional prototype.
Basically, their display consisted of a number of projectors projecting a 3 dimensional image onto a rotating plexiglass screen.
The upside: The were indeed 3D, which allowed you to have a much better sense of their shape and structure.
The downside: The display was rather loud because of the rapidly spinning plexiglass plate. The Actuality guys said they were working on a solution.
The plexiglass was spinning so quickly, I had the feeling that it was going to fly apart and kill everyone in the room. This is not to say that their display is flimsey, but that they should use high strength materials to prevent this from happening...maybe they already do.
The 3-D objects themselves were small. This is probably limited by the projection technology that they are using. I'd imagine that if they switched to projecting images with scanning lasers, then they would be able to project a distortion free image over a bigger portion of the screen.
You still felt separated from the objects projected because of the glass barrier. This is not something that they could correct, but better interface devices would help.
The displayed images were translucent and lacked contrast. They were working on fixing this. I don't think it's a fixable problem if they used the right combination of projector and screen material.
The displayed images were kinda fuzzy. This might have to do with the thickness of the rotating plexiglass part, so I'm not sure how they could correct this.
The price. OUCH. Not only do you have to buy the display, but you also have to license the software at tens of thousands of dollars per year. That's the kind of money that only a dot com would be willing to shell out for the product that they had, and there aren't many of those around now.
Summary
Interesting technology, but shortfalls and exorbitant price means it's not quite ready for market.
Makes me wonder if Hitachi is infringing on Actuality's IP.
Very interesting info on the SFW. Can you tell me your source for this information? I have not seen accounts of this encounter in any of the lessons learned reports I've read.
I know perfectly well how close we came to oblivion. I also know that had we not built nuclear weapons, we might well have been balsed to glowing smitherines by the Soviets.
The roots of conflict lie not in the tools of conflict, but in much deeper social, political, and economic causes. Thinking that being defenseless will resolve conflict is tantamount to burying your head in the proverbial sand.
Aircraft are extremely vulnerable and can be destroyed by a variety of means including man portable missiles and, significantly, NUCLEAR WEAPONS. If we start weaponizing the skies, other nations will do the same. Therefore, there is no benefit to having an airforce.
Ships are even slower and more ungainly than aircraft. They can be taken out by anti-ship missiles, or heck a ballistic missile tipped with a nuclear war head. If we start weaponizing the seas, what's to stop other nations from doing the same? Since we do a lot more shipping than other nations, we stand to loose much more than they do. We should therefore take weapons off of ships to prevent an arms race!
Now come to think of it, land based forces are the most vulnerable of all. Heck, any enemy soldier can walk up to a tank and shoot off a RPG. They don't even need nukes.
Fuck, we should just disband the military and go home. That way there will be no arms races and no way to hurt us since WE WON'T HAVE ANY CENTER OF GRAVITY TO SPEAK OF.
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No. Decoherence in the einselection framework eliminates the many worlds interpretation. What is says is that, for a large quantum system, there is only a very small subset of states that are stable to perturbation by observers. Therefore, at the macroscopic level, decoherence can only lead to one observable universe.
Insightful my a$$. W. H. Zurek is one of the giants of quantum mechanics. This is a proven mathematical theory in one of the most respected peer reviewed scientific journal out there. The theory has been under scrutiny for years and years.
FYI, it is precisely because einselection works that the macroscopic universe appears as an single, objective, sensible reality to all observers.
Ahh, that makes sense.
I thought that during the internet/telecom/optics bubble, there were a huge amount of fiber optic capacity laid by the likes of Global Crossing. What happened to all that fiber and more importantly, the tunnels that they sit in and the lasers, repeaters, etc? Why does SBC need to spend several billion dollars laying new fiber when dark fiber abound?
Any other questions?
Interesting you mention fletchets. Janes Defense Weekly mentioned that fletchets are used today to attack chemical and biological weapons sites. The idea is that they puncture containers to make the sites unuseable, but there's no explosion to disperse the agents.
Most modern US area attack/denial bomblets (though not yet mines) will disarm themselve after a given time period.
Terrorism is currently the greatest threat because anything more overt and damaging would cause the offending party to be pulverized by the US Military. If we don't keep up our overwhelming military advantage, people like Osama wouldn't need to have their buddies blowing themselves up while attacking us. They'll just overrun our interests with tanks.
The rule of thumb in war is that a sensible enemy will strike you where he has the greatest relative advantage. Today, our enemies are forced into terrorism. If we leave the door open for more conventional and damaging types of warfare in the future, he'll use that.
In Vietnam we lost 50,000 dead killed millions of Vietnamese. We should try not to go back to the bad old times.
Unfortunately, the last I heard, many of the EF2000's "capabilities" are still only paper specs. The first generation model Eurofighter is air to air only. Who knows when the air to ground version will come out (though all of their publicity material already say the EF2000 is a multirole fighter).
;-)
Furthermore, the plane is horribly overbudget and over a decade late. Oh well, I guess that's what happens when you have bureaucrats and politicians from several different country bungling a project that those from a single country are perfectly capable of bungling all on their own.
This laser works in the infra red. Bicycle strips and most other materials that are reflective in the visible band will not be reflective against this laser. They will absorb heat nicely and go kaboom.
On the other hand, while a rocket needs to carry its own propellant, the scramjet uses atmospheric air. It is therefore much more efficient, and for a given size and weight constraint, one could build a scramjet powered vehicle that could have some combination of greater speed and range over conventional rocket propelled vehicles.
For the military, this means that you could probably pack a Mach 10, six hundred mile range missile into a SM-II launcher. Then every destroyer and cruiser in the Navy would be able to carry dozens of missiles that can hit targets six hundred miles away within six minutes of launch. Once it gets there, its warhead, traveling at Mach 10, will have several times the destructive power of a warhead on a cruise missile, which travels at just below Mach 1.
The characteristics of a scramjet powered missile would allow the military to attack deeply burried bunkers and highly mobile targets with cruise missiles launched from hundreds of miles away. It's a military wet dream.
Globalsecurity.org, as always, has a nice write-up.
To get rid of the DRM crap?
You tried to oppose a networked military.
As the Iraqi Army found out, the Internet kills very very well.
Towards the end of this year, PCI-Express and next generation graphics cards using them will come to market.
How is this significant for the DARPA race?
Well, newer generation graphics cards with highly programmable graphics pipelines can act as very powerful SIMD processors. Up until now, their capability has not seen much use outside of graphics because the AGP bus allows data to travel at full bandwidth in only one direction at a time. This meant that every time you need to download data from the video card, you had to flush the AGP bus, loosing or delaying the uploaded data.
With PCI-Express, data could travel both ways concurrently at full bandwidth, so there's the potential for using the graphics card as a specialized SIMD processor.
I bet much of the processing for the vision and obstacle avoidance could be done on a GPU. If that's the case, instead of having a 1.5 gigaflops CPU per pc, you could have 10 or 20 gigaflops (IIRC) of processing power at your disposal for little over $1000, thus making the necessary computing hardware much cheaper.
Currently, the CMU team, for example, has multi-itanium servers aboard their Hummer, which is NOT something doable on a shoe string budget.
You can look at the latest pictures, the teams' relative positions, and status charts.
http://www.grandchallenge.org/
Caltech manages JPL, the NASA lab that developed the rovers and their associated software.
Originally, the Caltec team was using rover software. However, when DARPA changed contest rules a couple months ago, it went back on its earlier ruling and said that Caltech was no longer allowed to use the rover software because that software was not commercially available.
This led to Caltech redoing much of the work on their vision software. They are now using the modified version of a commercial vision package.
I personally think that DARPA could have done better by asking JPL to make the software available to ALL teams instead of taking it away from Caltech.
Instead of saying
"Our troops will be to your left doing field exercises for 24 to 48 hours, please disregard hostile sounding noises during that time"
They'll break it up into several im lines:
Friendlies at xxxx coordinates.
Conduct field exercise.
Duration 24-48 hours.
Disregard hostile sounds.
At least, I hope that's what they are doing.
That should read: I think it IS fixable with the right combination of sreen material and projector.
About a year ago the Actuality people did a demonstration for a group that I worked for with a functional prototype.
Basically, their display consisted of a number of projectors projecting a 3 dimensional image onto a rotating plexiglass screen.
The upside:
The were indeed 3D, which allowed you to have a much better sense of their shape and structure.
The downside:
The display was rather loud because of the rapidly spinning plexiglass plate. The Actuality guys said they were working on a solution.
The plexiglass was spinning so quickly, I had the feeling that it was going to fly apart and kill everyone in the room. This is not to say that their display is flimsey, but that they should use high strength materials to prevent this from happening...maybe they already do.
The 3-D objects themselves were small. This is probably limited by the projection technology that they are using. I'd imagine that if they switched to projecting images with scanning lasers, then they would be able to project a distortion free image over a bigger portion of the screen.
You still felt separated from the objects projected because of the glass barrier. This is not something that they could correct, but better interface devices would help.
The displayed images were translucent and lacked contrast. They were working on fixing this. I don't think it's a fixable problem if they used the right combination of projector and screen material.
The displayed images were kinda fuzzy. This might have to do with the thickness of the rotating plexiglass part, so I'm not sure how they could correct this.
The price. OUCH. Not only do you have to buy the display, but you also have to license the software at tens of thousands of dollars per year. That's the kind of money that only a dot com would be willing to shell out for the product that they had, and there aren't many of those around now.
Summary
Interesting technology, but shortfalls and exorbitant price means it's not quite ready for market.
Makes me wonder if Hitachi is infringing on Actuality's IP.
Very interesting info on the SFW. Can you tell me your source for this information? I have not seen accounts of this encounter in any of the lessons learned reports I've read.
I wish this was true, but WWI and especially WWII have disproved this.
I know perfectly well how close we came to oblivion. I also know that had we not built nuclear weapons, we might well have been balsed to glowing smitherines by the Soviets.
The roots of conflict lie not in the tools of conflict, but in much deeper social, political, and economic causes. Thinking that being defenseless will resolve conflict is tantamount to burying your head in the proverbial sand.
Aircraft are extremely vulnerable and can be destroyed by a variety of means including man portable missiles and, significantly, NUCLEAR WEAPONS. If we start weaponizing the skies, other nations will do the same. Therefore, there is no benefit to having an airforce.
Ships are even slower and more ungainly than aircraft. They can be taken out by anti-ship missiles, or heck a ballistic missile tipped with a nuclear war head. If we start weaponizing the seas, what's to stop other nations from doing the same? Since we do a lot more shipping than other nations, we stand to loose much more than they do. We should therefore take weapons off of ships to prevent an arms race!
Now come to think of it, land based forces are the most vulnerable of all. Heck, any enemy soldier can walk up to a tank and shoot off a RPG. They don't even need nukes.
Fuck, we should just disband the military and go home. That way there will be no arms races and no way to hurt us since WE WON'T HAVE ANY CENTER OF GRAVITY TO SPEAK OF.
Brilliant analysis isn't it?