You know what's even better than that? With Modern Technology, you don't have to remember ANY of that. You can type:
the speed of light in furlongs per fortnight
into http://google.com/ (or just click This Link) and it responds with an answer. I didn't check if it's the RIGHT answer, but the 10^14 factor seems to be in the ballpark.
$100M for the first kg of lunar material moved, without rocket propulsion, to a Lagrange point.
I predict the winner will use a rail gun on the moon. This will likely be decades before a space elevator is placed on the Earth, and probably centuries before one is on the Moon.
Re:Top Five reasons why the space program should b
on
Apollo 12 at 35
·
· Score: 1
5. The world population doubles every 40 years. Eventually, we will have to either expand across other planets or enforce population control.
Space exploration (and eventualy, sooner-better-than-later colonization) will of course be helpful for the near and mid future, but for the far future you can't argue with math: Population growth is an exponential function, and will eventually overtake the cubic function of physical growth and expansion, even if it's in all three dimensions at the speed of light. Population control will happen eventually, whether it's natural or human-directed.
4. Every dollar invested in NASA pays off seven dollars in terms of technological development for the US economy.
Sounds good, I want to believe it, please provide a reference or two.
3. We must expand from Earth to escape the threat of civilization-ending natural disasters, like a supervolcano, which could lower global temperatures below freezing for years. The chance of dying in a civilization-ending event is 1/455. Not to be grim, but that's 10 times more likely than dying in an commercial aircraft.
This is a simple, but good strong argument that we should colonize space so we don't continue to have all our eggs (and sperm and other things) in one basket.
1. To provide the sense of progress which yields human happiness.
"...My perception is that one must verify that you don't infringe on any patents when developing new cool software, and that the explosion of patents granted by the USPTO has reached epic proportions. If this perception is true, then that makes it almost impossible for the Lone Coder to create something new that doesn't infringe on other patents. The amount of money required to perform the due diligence research seems like it would be greater than the amount of money needed to develop the software, or even the total revenues that the software could ever generate.
Yes, it seem unlikely that the individual/small company could possibly do "due dilligence" in avoiding patents. This may also be partly true of large companies, but they have assets (other than the obvious one of money) that small companies don't: A large body of patents. Another company claiming patent infringement will have its products carefully compared againt the first company's patents, and there will likely be infringement found. At this point, rather than fight it out in court, the companies sign a cross-licensing agreement and go on their ways. Smaller companies that don't have the IP/patent assetts cannot play this came, and of course cannot defend themselves from infingement claims (whether valid or not).
I keep reading advice not to bother with a patent unless you have literally millions to defend it.
While most will probably scoff at what I'm saying (mod me down, but read first if you don't mind),
Sorry, I don't have mod points right now, and I'd rather reply to these comments anyway.
While most will probably scoff at what I'm saying (mod me down, but read first if you don't mind), can you imagine the number of trees had this been a junk-mail business?
1. If it had been junk mail through the USPS, the sender would have paid for those threes, as well as the cost of turning them into paper, the ink, the copywriter (when you spend real money on real advertisements, it's worth it to make it professional), AND the postage.
2. Trees used to make paper are a renewable resource. They don't make paper from old-growth hardwoods from rain forests.
3. Spam is extra-low-cost advertising to the spammer. Getting spams inso email inboxes is a few orders of magnitude lower in cost than getting the same number of flyers (legally) into the same number of postal mailboxes. There's no comparison: Spammers would not bother if they had to pay what it costs, even with USPS bulk rate and advertising rate, to send their messages through the USPS.
I do not think they should be jailed as a criminal.
PLease read through the "Information about spam" llnks on this website, written at least eight years ago when spam was much less of a problem yet still as relevant today, and see you can still justify that statement:
http://spam.abuse.net/overview/
While that site also describes many peripheral issues involving content, the fact is, regardless of content, spam is theft of Internet services.
Lets face the fact, at least in America, advertising always finds its way into every media medium, and the Internet is no different.
That's what banner ads on websites are. People pay the website owners to put those ads on their sites. Spam is different.
Typesetting machines should have resolution something like that (they shine light onto photographic paper), they were in the thousands of lines per inch 20 years ago. This should be easy technology, if not as cheap as the $89 all-in-one printer/scanner/copiers with the $49 replacement print cartridges.
With a laser, a few mirrors and the negative on a drum similar to laser-printer technology, the resolution can be arbitrarily high, limited by the grain of the film. Since the laser can go as slow or be as powerful as we want, the film can have smaller (less sensitive) grains and have greater resolution than even "real" holograms (where 30-second and longer exposures would have reciprocity failure).
I can see holograms being computer-recorded as well as printed: instead of the film plate, one puts up a very high density CCD array, and saves the interference pattern. We got big drives to save it on... "we have the technology"...
Legally binding? I don't think so. EULAs have questionable legal status at best (I'm sure some lawyer could argue for the fact that the fact that the EULA is not printed on the box and the fact that some say "If you do not agree, you cannot install this software" could very well amount to coercion or something. EULAs have never been tested in court.
ISTR a legal case or two involving EULA's, but without any far-reaching rulings. I suspect this will remain a legal gray area for a long time.
I'd like to be the last person to have something to do with the content of a commercially produced software CD-ROM and add some text:
"By installing this software, you agree to... bla bla bla... and to give to us through legal adoption your first-born child."
Aren't all vehicle tires tubeless nowadays? I recall seeing car tire tubes as floats in pools and lakes, but that was many years (decades) ago. There are mountain bike inner tubes, but they're barely big enough for a turntable plinth. Is there a source for "NOS car inner tubes?"
HE-NE lasers are much more available than decades ago, but some things are HARDER to find...
When I worked with Dr. Gabor at CBS Labs in the 60s, we did indeed create pretty, life-sized holographic TV images in color,
This brings back an old memory. As a preteen misspending (well not really, I didn't have computer access back then) my late nights, I recall The Monkees on The Tonight Show (with Johnny Carson) circa 1969-1970. They (or IIRC Mickey) had apparently got a laser and a few holograms from Edmund Scientific, and were all excited, saying "20 years from now we'll have 3D television, it'll be great..."
Of course, we didn't have 3D Television 20 years later, and we won't have it 40 years after he said that either (the perils of prediction). But holography is still neat, and we got some other neat things since then too...
For you and the "Scientific American archive" poster suggesting the book of SA readings "Light and its uses..." here's another alternative to Paul's product: This CD set (a CD of ALL Scientific American's "The Amateur Scientist" columns and more, and another CD of science-related programs I haven't even looked at yet), I just got my copy in the mail:
Okay, the 1920's were all about amateur telescope making, which is a Good Thing, though some of that had no meat, just pics and descriptions of various readers' telescopes. But a lot of this is DEEP science and the technology to make scientific instruments. The amateur diffraction-grating-making device is just amazing. If you're really interested in making your own lasers, holograms, or other gee-whiz scientific stuff, The Amateur Scientist archive is a gotta-have, whether it's this CD or access to the actual printed magazines, though the CD has lots of extra/addon/related articles as well. All the articles are HTML and text-searchable, though I've noticed several misspellings.
Unfortunately, Scientific American is at a lower level than it used to be as far as good hard-hitting content. It looks like it's filling the "Omni Magazine" void. Where can one go thesedays to get a good Hard Science fix? FWIW, http://www.sas.org/ looks interesting.
I think that you think that he thinks about JPG, which is usually lossy format, but I think you should think about him thinking about PNG, which iss lossless
The bitmap formats discussed for storing primes is an earlier meaning of the word (before the.bmp picture file format), simply a long string of 1's and 0's where the 1's represent the presence of something (in this case that the number represented at that bit number is prime) or 0 for its absence (that the number is composite).
Yes, I suppose you could convert it to a.bmp file format and then convert that to a.png which I presume is a lossless compression format. However, primes represented in binary forms such as a bitmap tend to be no more compressible than random numbers by their nature, so running such a file through a data compression algorithm won't get you much compression.
Check out my page below, with some non-guaranteed C code (compiles with Borland C++ 4.5 compiler). Using a full 8 bits to store prime gaps is rather inefficient, I do the same with almost half the number of bits. Since the vast majority of prime differences for primes less than 2^32 is less than 30, the differences can be stored as one of 30/2=15 numbers, and thus stored in four bits. I only use 15 values available in 4 bits to represent gaps from 2 to 30, and use the 16th for an escape code to mean the next 4 bits represents a gap value of 16 through 30 (or something like that - read the webpage, read the code documentation for whatever you can get out of it, I wrote this last century...).
I did a little more work since writing the webpage. Using four bits for gap storage appears to be the most compact up to 2^32, but not too far above that (I forget where), five-bit gaps become more compact. Writing code to pack and unpack five-bit gaps is, of course, left as an exercise for the student.
(btw [sneaking in metadiscussion], for some odd reason, I now have excellent karma, and my posts sart out at +2, which I can presumably prevent by checking the "No Karma Bonus" box. Why would I ever want to do that?)
It appears you may be reinventing The Wheel. (I always wanted to say that, sorry...) That article discusses using the wheel for factorization, but it can also be used for compact storage of primes in a bit array. For example, a bitmap corresponding to only odd numbers would be a "wheel size" of two. If you also drop every bit divisible by three, you have a "wheel size" of six.
It isn't usefull unless you make sure that automatic search and replace will break the code. You should USE that in somewhere else like "Al" or "Bl" or A1h or B1h it will make it more funny indeed.
The A1h's (that some assemblers would take as a hex value A1) should remind one to also use these strings as hex constants: 0xA1, 0xB1, and of course have idenfifiers starting with the letter O as OxA1, OxBl, Oxe4c. (okay, I had to use a little hac|3r 5p33|k - hmm, don't recall seeing any of that in these entries. Is it disallowed, the judges not like it, none of the winning entries happened to have any, or did I miss one?).
I attempted to write something obfuscated many years back, I though it would be funny to have some #defines and such that would make the code's main body look like FORTRAN, Cobol or BASIC code, or even just a short sentence, "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country" or "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog."
C is absolutely the perfect programming language for such a contest.
"What a lot of us do not know, however, is how a CPU is created."
And how do you 'know' this ? My guess is that you don't. Maybe upto 50% of your audience knows how a chip is made.... who knows.
I wouldn't be surprised if 50 percent know more about making semiconductors than does the author of TFA.
Anybody know what the average age of the slashdot herd is ? 22? 15? 10?
I'm an Old Fart at 47. An age distribution of/.ers would be Interesting, but the knowledge distribution (who knows what languages, how to use a 7490 and 741, what's the charge carrier in P material) would be quite Informative.
CrzyP writes "Most of us have seen flowcharts and heard lectures on how a CPU functions in a computer. What a lot of us do not know, however, is how a CPU is created.
I swear I envisioned decisions of how many registers to do what, what the instruction set should include, pipelining, hardwired vs. microprogramming, etc. Insteresting Stuff, at least to this nerd.
BUT NOOOOOO, it's about:
Sudhian describes the step-by-step process of how a CPU is made, from grains of sand to a wafer of circuits.
It's about Semiconductor Physics, and has no special relation to CPU's any more than it does to RAM, IC Op-Amps, RF amplifiers or LED's. Okay, CPU's and RAM are a little different, unlike the others, they are made as dense as possible.
Then I actually read TFA, and I have to agree with other comments, it's a grammar-school general-technology lesson: Listen Up, boyz and girlz, Computers are made from Sand!
I've seen lots better stuff in the obligatory semiconductor-physics first chapter of any transistor circuits analysis book from the past 50 or more years. Of course that chapter was like the Venn diagrams that start out many high school math books, very few readers would ever actually use the info in a later class or in a career.
For some Real Info, I recall a "The Amateur Scientist" column from late-60's or early 70's Scientific American that described making "thin-film transistors" - surely not the quality of a commercial 2-cent 2N2222, but something that has gain.
Or even the Smithsonian Magazine article on an Intel manufacturing plant, ISTR the cover had someone in a bunny suit holding a wafer. It wasn't even about the chips themselves, but about the evolution of the clean room, and factoids about the waterfall process to clean the air - did you know the air in clean rooms is completely replaced three times a minute? Not a lot of Real Technical stuff, but still more informative than TFA.
So this past month, I took the plunge and purchased DIRECWAY satellite service.
Didn't DirecWAY used to be named DirecPC, and didn't they have a class action suit against them for advertising "unlimited access" and then throttling back data rate until the next month after you DL'ed so many gigs? I knew someone who had the service and told me about this. He was often complaining about DirecPC not working, having problems, etc.
Fastest but most controversial way to go to Mars.
on
Hibernating to Mars
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Perhaps there will be less hibernating time necessary, but this method wouldn't be controversial if the mission were to the nearest star...
That's right, make it a one-way trip! Without the return leg, it would be substantially less expensive. And of course, yes, only send those of sound mind who freely decide to go, knowing they won't come back, at least not on this ship.* For that matter, it might even be less expensive to also send unpersonned supply ships every few months to keep them alive and exploring indefinitely than to do just one 'standard' round trip mission. The amount learned about Mars would certainly be much greater with a permanent base for the first mission than with several round trips in the same timeframe.
* How to handle the public reaction, or whether to tell the public the truth, and other such PR stuff is beyond the scope of this comment.
Well, here goes my karma...
Re:I wonder if in 100 years..
on
The Cult of Mac
·
· Score: 1
Apple already had it's Sacred Elite. I recall when Guy Kawasaki spoke at AMUG, his official title at Apple was Evangelist.
Slashdot Mirror
You know what's even better than that? With Modern Technology, you don't have to remember ANY of that. You can type:
the speed of light in furlongs per fortnight
into http://google.com/ (or just click This Link) and it responds with an answer. I didn't check if it's the RIGHT answer, but the 10^14 factor seems to be in the ballpark.
It's .397 inches,
Wrong, 10 millimeters is 0.3937 inches.
you ignorant savages.
You have us nailed on that one.
You forgot the warning in 72-point type: "Use ONLY in a Well-Ventilated Area."
Also, these warnings are printed in eight different languages, all translated by Babelfish.
$100M for the first kg of lunar material moved, without rocket propulsion, to a Lagrange point.
I predict the winner will use a rail gun on the moon. This will likely be decades before a space elevator is placed on the Earth, and probably centuries before one is on the Moon.
5. The world population doubles every 40 years. Eventually, we will have to either expand across other planets or enforce population control.
Space exploration (and eventualy, sooner-better-than-later colonization) will of course be helpful for the near and mid future, but for the far future you can't argue with math: Population growth is an exponential function, and will eventually overtake the cubic function of physical growth and expansion, even if it's in all three dimensions at the speed of light. Population control will happen eventually, whether it's natural or human-directed.
4. Every dollar invested in NASA pays off seven dollars in terms of technological development for the US economy.
Sounds good, I want to believe it, please provide a reference or two.
3. We must expand from Earth to escape the threat of civilization-ending natural disasters, like a supervolcano, which could lower global temperatures below freezing for years. The chance of dying in a civilization-ending event is 1/455. Not to be grim, but that's 10 times more likely than dying in an commercial aircraft.
This is a simple, but good strong argument that we should colonize space so we don't continue to have all our eggs (and sperm and other things) in one basket.
1. To provide the sense of progress which yields human happiness.
Megadildoes...
if television weren't so bad already.
"...My perception is that one must verify that you don't infringe on any patents when developing new cool software, and that the explosion of patents granted by the USPTO has reached epic proportions. If this perception is true, then that makes it almost impossible for the Lone Coder to create something new that doesn't infringe on other patents. The amount of money required to perform the due diligence research seems like it would be greater than the amount of money needed to develop the software, or even the total revenues that the software could ever generate.
Yes, it seem unlikely that the individual/small company could possibly do "due dilligence" in avoiding patents. This may also be partly true of large companies, but they have assets (other than the obvious one of money) that small companies don't: A large body of patents. Another company claiming patent infringement will have its products carefully compared againt the first company's patents, and there will likely be infringement found. At this point, rather than fight it out in court, the companies sign a cross-licensing agreement and go on their ways.
Smaller companies that don't have the IP/patent assetts cannot play this came, and of course cannot defend themselves from infingement claims (whether valid or not).
I keep reading advice not to bother with a patent unless you have literally millions to defend it.
Imagine ion propulsion in our cars! Just gimme some months to reach those 55 mph... I had a 1973 VW Beetle that drove like that.
While most will probably scoff at what I'm saying (mod me down, but read first if you don't mind),
Sorry, I don't have mod points right now, and I'd rather reply to these comments anyway.
While most will probably scoff at what I'm saying (mod me down, but read first if you don't mind), can you imagine the number of trees had this been a junk-mail business?
1. If it had been junk mail through the USPS, the sender would have paid for those threes, as well as the cost of turning them into paper, the ink, the copywriter (when you spend real money on real advertisements, it's worth it to make it professional), AND the postage.
2. Trees used to make paper are a renewable resource. They don't make paper from old-growth hardwoods from rain forests.
3. Spam is extra-low-cost advertising to the spammer. Getting spams inso email inboxes is a few orders of magnitude lower in cost than getting the same number of flyers (legally) into the same number of postal mailboxes. There's no comparison: Spammers would not bother if they had to pay what it costs, even with USPS bulk rate and advertising rate, to send their messages through the USPS.
I do not think they should be jailed as a criminal.
PLease read through the "Information about spam" llnks on this website, written at least eight years ago when spam was much less of a problem yet still as relevant today, and see you can still justify that statement:
http://spam.abuse.net/overview/
While that site also describes many peripheral issues involving content, the fact is, regardless of content, spam is theft of Internet services.
Lets face the fact, at least in America, advertising always finds its way into every media medium, and the Internet is no different.
That's what banner ads on websites are. People pay the website owners to put those ads on their sites. Spam is different.
Typesetting machines should have resolution something like that (they shine light onto photographic paper), they were in the thousands of lines per inch 20 years ago. This should be easy technology, if not as cheap as the $89 all-in-one printer/scanner/copiers with the $49 replacement print cartridges.
... "we have the technology" ...
With a laser, a few mirrors and the negative on a drum similar to laser-printer technology, the resolution can be arbitrarily high, limited by the grain of the film. Since the laser can go as slow or be as powerful as we want, the film can have smaller (less sensitive) grains and have greater resolution than even "real" holograms (where 30-second and longer exposures would have reciprocity failure).
I can see holograms being computer-recorded as well as printed: instead of the film plate, one puts up a very high density CCD array, and saves the interference pattern. We got big drives to save it on
Legally binding? I don't think so. EULAs have questionable legal status at best (I'm sure some lawyer could argue for the fact that the fact that the EULA is not printed on the box and the fact that some say "If you do not agree, you cannot install this software" could very well amount to coercion or something. EULAs have never been tested in court.
... bla bla bla ... and to give to us through legal adoption your first-born child."
ISTR a legal case or two involving EULA's, but without any far-reaching rulings. I suspect this will remain a legal gray area for a long time.
I'd like to be the last person to have something to do with the content of a commercially produced software CD-ROM and add some text:
"By installing this software, you agree to
Aren't all vehicle tires tubeless nowadays? I recall seeing car tire tubes as floats in pools and lakes, but that was many years (decades) ago. There are mountain bike inner tubes, but they're barely big enough for a turntable plinth. Is there a source for "NOS car inner tubes?"
HE-NE lasers are much more available than decades ago, but some things are HARDER to find...
When I worked with Dr. Gabor at CBS Labs in the 60s, we did indeed create pretty, life-sized holographic TV images in color,
This brings back an old memory. As a preteen misspending (well not really, I didn't have computer access back then) my late nights, I recall The Monkees on The Tonight Show (with Johnny Carson) circa 1969-1970. They (or IIRC Mickey) had apparently got a laser and a few holograms from Edmund Scientific, and were all excited, saying "20 years from now we'll have 3D television, it'll be great..."
Of course, we didn't have 3D Television 20 years later, and we won't have it 40 years after he said that either (the perils of prediction). But holography is still neat, and we got some other neat things since then too...
For you and the "Scientific American archive" poster suggesting the book of SA readings "Light and its uses..." here's another alternative to Paul's product: This CD set (a CD of ALL Scientific American's "The Amateur Scientist" columns and more, and another CD of science-related programs I haven't even looked at yet), I just got my copy in the mail:
http://www.brightscience.com/AmSciIndividual.html
Okay, the 1920's were all about amateur telescope making, which is a Good Thing, though some of that had no meat, just pics and descriptions of various readers' telescopes. But a lot of this is DEEP science and the technology to make scientific instruments. The amateur diffraction-grating-making device is just amazing. If you're really interested in making your own lasers, holograms, or other gee-whiz scientific stuff, The Amateur Scientist archive is a gotta-have, whether it's this CD or access to the actual printed magazines, though the CD has lots of extra/addon/related articles as well. All the articles are HTML and text-searchable, though I've noticed several misspellings.
Unfortunately, Scientific American is at a lower level than it used to be as far as good hard-hitting content. It looks like it's filling the "Omni Magazine" void. Where can one go thesedays to get a good Hard Science fix? FWIW, http://www.sas.org/ looks interesting.
It is fast, safe, and stabi... ..#*r~|@@@
NO CAREER
_
I think that you think that he thinks about JPG, which is usually lossy format, but I think you should think about him thinking about PNG, which iss lossless
.bmp picture file format), simply a long string of 1's and 0's where the 1's represent the presence of something (in this case that the number represented at that bit number is prime) or 0 for its absence (that the number is composite).
.bmp file format and then convert that to a .png which I presume is a lossless compression format. However, primes represented in binary forms such as a bitmap tend to be no more compressible than random numbers by their nature, so running such a file through a data compression algorithm won't get you much compression.
The bitmap formats discussed for storing primes is an earlier meaning of the word (before the
Yes, I suppose you could convert it to a
IOW, Fugetaboutit.
Check out my page below, with some non-guaranteed C code (compiles with Borland C++ 4.5 compiler). Using a full 8 bits to store prime gaps is rather inefficient, I do the same with almost half the number of bits. Since the vast majority of prime differences for primes less than 2^32 is less than 30, the differences can be stored as one of 30/2=15 numbers, and thus stored in four bits. I only use 15 values available in 4 bits to represent gaps from 2 to 30, and use the 16th for an escape code to mean the next 4 bits represents a gap value of 16 through 30 (or something like that - read the webpage, read the code documentation for whatever you can get out of it, I wrote this last century...).
t ml
http://mindspring.com/~benbradley/number_theory.h
I did a little more work since writing the webpage. Using four bits for gap storage appears to be the most compact up to 2^32, but not too far above that (I forget where), five-bit gaps become more compact. Writing code to pack and unpack five-bit gaps is, of course, left as an exercise for the student.
(btw [sneaking in metadiscussion], for some odd reason, I now have excellent karma, and my posts sart out at +2, which I can presumably prevent by checking the "No Karma Bonus" box. Why would I ever want to do that?)
It appears you may be reinventing The Wheel. (I always wanted to say that, sorry...) That article discusses using the wheel for factorization, but it can also be used for compact storage of primes in a bit array. For example, a bitmap corresponding to only odd numbers would be a "wheel size" of two. If you also drop every bit divisible by three, you have a "wheel size" of six.
Surf around that site (http://primepages.org/), there's lots of good info there.
It isn't usefull unless you make sure that automatic search and replace will break the code. You should USE that in somewhere else like "Al" or "Bl" or A1h or B1h it will make it more funny indeed.
The A1h's (that some assemblers would take as a hex value A1) should remind one to also use these strings as hex constants: 0xA1, 0xB1, and of course have idenfifiers starting with the letter O as OxA1, OxBl, Oxe4c. (okay, I had to use a little hac|3r 5p33|k - hmm, don't recall seeing any of that in these entries. Is it disallowed, the judges not like it, none of the winning entries happened to have any, or did I miss one?).
I attempted to write something obfuscated many years back, I though it would be funny to have some #defines and such that would make the code's main body look like FORTRAN, Cobol or BASIC code, or even just a short sentence, "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country" or "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog."
C is absolutely the perfect programming language for such a contest.
"What a lot of us do not know, however, is how a CPU is created."
/.ers would be Interesting, but the knowledge distribution (who knows what languages, how to use a 7490 and 741, what's the charge carrier in P material) would be quite Informative.
And how do you 'know' this ? My guess is that you don't. Maybe upto 50% of your audience knows how a chip is made.... who knows.
I wouldn't be surprised if 50 percent know more about making semiconductors than does the author of TFA.
Anybody know what the average age of the slashdot herd is ? 22? 15? 10?
I'm an Old Fart at 47. An age distribution of
First the misleading part:
CrzyP writes "Most of us have seen flowcharts and heard lectures on how a CPU functions in a computer. What a lot of us do not know, however, is how a CPU is created.
I swear I envisioned decisions of how many registers to do what, what the instruction set should include, pipelining, hardwired vs. microprogramming, etc. Insteresting Stuff, at least to this nerd.
BUT NOOOOOO, it's about:
Sudhian describes the step-by-step process of how a CPU is made, from grains of sand to a wafer of circuits.
It's about Semiconductor Physics, and has no special relation to CPU's any more than it does to RAM, IC Op-Amps, RF amplifiers or LED's. Okay, CPU's and RAM are a little different, unlike the others, they are made as dense as possible.
Then I actually read TFA, and I have to agree with other comments, it's a grammar-school general-technology lesson: Listen Up, boyz and girlz, Computers are made from Sand!
I've seen lots better stuff in the obligatory semiconductor-physics first chapter of any transistor circuits analysis book from the past 50 or more years. Of course that chapter was like the Venn diagrams that start out many high school math books, very few readers would ever actually use the info in a later class or in a career.
For some Real Info, I recall a "The Amateur Scientist" column from late-60's or early 70's Scientific American that described making "thin-film transistors" - surely not the quality of a commercial 2-cent 2N2222, but something that has gain.
Or even the Smithsonian Magazine article on an Intel manufacturing plant, ISTR the cover had someone in a bunny suit holding a wafer. It wasn't even about the chips themselves, but about the evolution of the clean room, and factoids about the waterfall process to clean the air - did you know the air in clean rooms is completely replaced three times a minute? Not a lot of Real Technical stuff, but still more informative than TFA.
So this past month, I took the plunge and purchased DIRECWAY satellite service.
Didn't DirecWAY used to be named DirecPC, and didn't they have a class action suit against them for advertising "unlimited access" and then throttling back data rate until the next month after you DL'ed so many gigs? I knew someone who had the service and told me about this. He was often complaining about DirecPC not working, having problems, etc.
Perhaps there will be less hibernating time necessary, but this method wouldn't be controversial if the mission were to the nearest star...
That's right, make it a one-way trip! Without the return leg, it would be substantially less expensive. And of course, yes, only send those of sound mind who freely decide to go, knowing they won't come back, at least not on this ship.* For that matter, it might even be less expensive to also send unpersonned supply ships every few months to keep them alive and exploring indefinitely than to do just one 'standard' round trip mission. The amount learned about Mars would certainly be much greater with a permanent base for the first mission than with several round trips in the same timeframe.
* How to handle the public reaction, or whether to tell the public the truth, and other such PR stuff is beyond the scope of this comment.
Well, here goes my karma...
Apple already had it's Sacred Elite. I recall when Guy Kawasaki spoke at AMUG, his official title at Apple was Evangelist.