Good point. But why for the love of (all that may or may not be holy in your particular jurisdiction) did you have to reference the cucumbers and bananas?
The most that a court should be able to do is ask Google not to continue caching content that has actually been removed from the various other Interweb servers by court order.
This is like arresting the person who points directions to the brothel to a tourist.
Sounds like the kind of overreaching and arbitrary judicial decision you might find in say, a country run by CENSORED-BY-GODWIN.
The market may provide the most cost-effective workable solutions, but if we define the problem as "stop contributing to global warming, humanity" it is pretty clear that governments have to set a significant and growing price on carbon, then we can let the market sort out the solutions.
Right now, the market provides no incentive to solve this problem. The market seems generally to be unable to look ahead further than a decade, and the fossil-carbon-based energy economy emissions problem is a multi-hundred-year debt being accrued by us.
Only the insurance industry seems to be starting to price in global warming into the cost of insurance, but that industry is too small a piece of the global economy as a whole (and the market as a whole) to turn the steering wheel of the entire economy. By the time the market reacts to this problem, it will be way too late, and the market will no doubt shift to how make profit off the various economic, health, and warfare disasters that ensue from global warming, fresh water scarcity, and widespread crop failure.
In the short term, the Microsoft report is about natural-gas fuelled fuel cells. New analyses are showing natural gas to be about equal to coal in CO2-equivalent greenhouse gas emissions per amount of energy output. The reasons are basically two-fold. One, there is a lot of gas escape and energy usage during the extraction and transport of natural gas, and two, natural gas is methane, which when it escapes into the atmosphere is 20-30 times worse in greenhouse warming effect than CO2 over a 100 year lifecycle in the atmosphere.
Now if microsoft was talking about putting in really large fields of PV or solar thermal electricity generators around each data center, and generating the hydrogen from water, then that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but then in that case, is hydrogen the best energy storage medium for a solar data center? Maybe molten salt (heat storage) or compressed air or underground pumped hydro or sodium-sulfur batteries would be better than compressed or liquid hydrogen.
In novel writing, like in programming of innovative things, you should write it once, then write it again, as well as make a series of incremental rewrites in the second version.
You have different priorities the first time round. Get the most difficult core algorithm or core concept things implemented fast, to learn fast what's wrong with them.
If you were a really really good programmer, you might try to build in generality, modularity even in that first go around, but you would have to make sure it wasn't locking in half-baked concepts. That's why old AI programmers loved LISP. It lets you build some of the generality and modularity, encapsulation, in all the way along the process from exploratory prototype, but in a way that's way easier than in say Java or C++ to tear apart and fundamentally re-factor. Lots and lots of tiny functions, each one in a way its own type checker and complexity hider.
Unfortunately, economics of the software industry often dictates that hurried prototypes get propped up and lipsticked into production code.
The tragedy of the spiral development model is you almost never get to go around the spiral more than once, or if you do, it's done too late and the second iteration is then way too expensive. At least Google, as an exception to the rule, had the resources to do it again, better, several times, valuing quality over schedule in each subsequent round.
Did you not get the memo that the US needs to shift its electricity generation mix to non-GHG-releasing methods in a frickin' hurry?
And no that is not optional.
So why not assume that shift in your calculations, assuming also that the shift is helped along by the rest of the international community putting a boot to the behind of the laggard countries.
I said the rational premise, as opposed to potty-mouthed 8 year old's tantrum premise that you have so eloquently stated in your rebuttal.
The free market would sort it out, if we could figure out how to change people so they value the future in the 50 to 100 year increments by which we are affecting it with the scale of our unregulated activity globally. Unfortunately, individual lifespan mitigates against giving a damn, it seems, for most people. But if we can't change human nature to care enough to act responsibly on these things and let everyone sort it out in a market, then those who are aware and care need to take charge. There is no room for democracy on a ship headed toward the falls, especially when people are typically arguing about (or deciding in a free market) what color the party favor napkins in the ship's dining hall should be.
http://www.ipcc.ch/ for thousands of relevant-topic PhDs' views on the subject of greenhouse-gas induced global warming and measures needed to counter it. They all had to go through thesis-defense and peer-review before being considered credible on the subject. What's your defense?
and one of the solutions for large-scale electric power grid storage to accommodate massive expansion of intermittent renewables.
We have to remember that the rational premise is we need to cut carbon emissions almost totally out of the economy, and fast, so why not experiment with multiple technologies as alternative energy and transportation infrastructure.
I don't see lithium battery powered intercontinental jetliners on the horizon any time soon do you? And it goes without saying that aviation can't continue to run on fossil fuel.
Have you ever asked: What is the best place to draw the boundary of this system (or rather the boundary of each nested semi-autonomous subsystem), especially in cases where it isn't crystal clear, like an ant colony, a virus+modified-host lifesystem, a port city.
The best boundary definition is probably informational (process-description-oriented) rather than physical-snapshot based. Question: Which subset of stuff around here acting together has the most to do with (the most influence over) its own evolution though spacetime? Draw the boundary there. If we add more stuff (or more process) in, we are just reducing the thing's ability to influence its own evolution; the system is burdened with cruft. If we take stuff (or process) away, it doesn't work as well, and won't influence its fate as much, and won't last as long.
And if within one of those "best boundaries", the system inside is making decisions (and affecting its own fate) in ways that are computationally complex enough to be inherently unpredictable, and yet the system is hanging together, persisting in time, with a stable description possible of what it consists of then we may as well say definitely that the system is "free" and if we see that it appears to be acting on itself and its environment in controlled ways, we may as well say that it has "free will"; that is, that whatever is being systematic within that informational "best boundary" has "free will".
Ok, if it's for aliens, then maybe you need tungsten, and spread about a billion of the things around in the vain hope one of them will actually be found against all odds.
But if it's for humans then consider. There are two scenarios: 1) There is a global catastrophe or mass insanity of such proportions that all trillion of the penny-sized server computers of the near future which each have enough storage to store significant percentages of our data as a whole are wiped out, along with all of the electricity infrastructure and the instructions on how to build more electricity infrastructure. In that case I submit that the 10 of us who temporarily survived the vancouver-island-sized meteor hit have more problems to deal with than resurrecting our facebook profiles and physics e-textbooks. Maybe something which told you which varieties of cockroaches were not poisonous to eat would be handy mind you.
2) There is no disaster of that scale, and a semblance of our current civilization survives somewhere, ergo, we still have a chunk of Internet somewhere, and a substantial chunk of all its content to date.
Notice that in scenario 2, the key issue is that we've finally learned how to back up our data and adequately distribute rendundant copies of it around the world, a process that should pretty much be automatic. Making sure we keep doing that is one of the most important things we can do to preserve digi-culture. It's really the only major thing we have to learn how to do and keep doing to save information for countless generations.
There is a distinction between the quest to define what makes a useful computer, and the murky info-physics question(s) about whether fundamental aspects of physical evolution in the universe may be well-modelled in terms of information theory, chaitin-kolmogorov information theory, and computational theory.
Both are interesting questions. The latter info-physics speculations would probably require generalization of what can be considered to be "holding or embodying information" and generalization of what computing (information transformation) is considered to be. They would not benefit from restriction of what is considered to be computing or a computer.
At the edge of speculative and as yet unfounded info-physics pondering, is it just me, or is (quantity,flow of, localization/dispersion of) energy looking suspiciously like it should be modelled in terms of quantity, flow, localization/dispersion of information? Especially when it comes to understanding what "classical" physics is about, and what the transformation from quantum states to classical states may be about? I'll stop there. I know nothing and I know it well.
That Saudi Arabia in particular and islam in general (and christianity for that matter) have a huge problem with both men and women expressing their human animal nature.
It's almost as if they don't realize or accept the most basic of truths; that we are animals, born naked, due to the instinct-driven activities of naked animals. Religion, on these issues, is a psychological problem, with a strong denial of reality aspect.
>The idea is probably wrong, mainly because every "my conception of the fundamental nature of the universe based on just discovered science" is wrong...
probably wrong but not necessarily wrong.
Maybe, if people keep coming up with new kinds of science (pun intended), one new theory will finally get a lot of the rest of the unknown bit (pun not intended) right.
Just because computing is the "latest thing" does not mean it is not a better analogy/explanation of certain things (minds, big chunks of physics) than for example, the steamworks, or electrical circuits, or levers and wheels analogies from before. To think so would be falling into another "believing the conventional wisdom" trap. Some theories are just better (or more comprehensively explanatory) than others. It doesn't really matter whether the theory is new.
Why can we not think of the information as being embodied in "some aspect or other of" the matter and energy undergoing evolution. It is only some observer that needs to see the information as having been encoded or decoded.
Metrics of computations, or measurements of information flows, may be a productive way of describing (and predicting) complex physical evolutions, regardless of whether the physical system itself is identifiably encoding and decoding information explicitly. You just have to establish your own observer convention for how you think the information is represented in the matter and energy under discussion, or you can even just think about "the maximum amount of information" that could be contained in that matter/energy/spacetime region, and the maximum possible amount of information flow there.
Slashdot Mirror
use the Internet again.
Good point. But why for the love of (all that may or may not be holy in your particular jurisdiction) did you have to reference the cucumbers and bananas?
The most that a court should be able to do is ask Google not to continue caching content that has actually been removed from the various other Interweb servers by court order.
This is like arresting the person who points directions to the brothel to a tourist.
Sounds like the kind of overreaching and arbitrary judicial decision you might find in say, a country run by CENSORED-BY-GODWIN.
Power is in the national interest.
Grant please.
QED.
Unless you are a supporter of that party that believes that ignorance and truthiness is power, of course.
The market may provide the most cost-effective workable solutions, but if we define the problem as "stop contributing to global warming, humanity" it is pretty clear that governments have to set a significant and growing price on carbon, then we can let the market sort out the solutions.
Right now, the market provides no incentive to solve this problem. The market seems generally to be unable to look ahead further than a decade, and the fossil-carbon-based energy economy emissions problem is a multi-hundred-year debt being accrued by us.
Only the insurance industry seems to be starting to price in global warming into the cost of insurance, but that industry is too small a piece of the global economy as a whole (and the market as a whole) to turn the steering wheel of the entire economy. By the time the market reacts to this problem, it will be way too late, and the market will no doubt shift to how make profit off the various economic, health, and warfare disasters that ensue from global warming, fresh water scarcity, and widespread crop failure.
In the short term, the Microsoft report is about natural-gas fuelled fuel cells.
New analyses are showing natural gas to be about equal to coal in CO2-equivalent greenhouse gas emissions per amount of energy output.
The reasons are basically two-fold. One, there is a lot of gas escape and energy usage during the extraction and transport of natural gas, and two, natural gas is methane, which when it escapes into the atmosphere is 20-30 times worse in greenhouse warming effect than CO2 over a 100 year lifecycle in the atmosphere.
Now if microsoft was talking about putting in really large fields of PV or solar thermal electricity generators around each data center, and generating the hydrogen from water, then that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but then in that case, is hydrogen the best energy storage medium for a solar data center? Maybe molten salt (heat storage) or compressed air or underground pumped hydro or sodium-sulfur batteries would be better than compressed or liquid hydrogen.
Most reasonably complex ecosystems are more valuable than you, and don't make me choose.
In novel writing, like in programming of innovative things, you should write it once, then write it again, as well as make a series of incremental rewrites in the second version.
You have different priorities the first time round. Get the most difficult core algorithm or core concept things implemented fast, to learn fast what's wrong with them.
If you were a really really good programmer, you might try to build in generality, modularity even in that first go around, but you would have to make sure it wasn't locking in half-baked concepts. That's why old AI programmers loved LISP. It lets you build some of the generality and modularity, encapsulation, in all the way along the process from exploratory prototype, but in a way that's way easier than in say Java or C++ to tear apart and fundamentally re-factor. Lots and lots of tiny functions, each one in a way its own type checker and complexity hider.
Unfortunately, economics of the software industry often dictates that hurried prototypes get propped up and lipsticked into production code.
The tragedy of the spiral development model is you almost never get to go around the spiral more than once, or if you do, it's done too late and the second iteration is then way too expensive. At least Google, as an exception to the rule, had the resources to do it again, better, several times, valuing quality over schedule in each subsequent round.
So undetected dark matter pulling stuff together more than expected and undetected dark energy pulling stuff apart more than expected.
Hmmm. Isn't it possible that the theory is just wrong about how gravity and spacetime works at really large scales?
Ok, when your product becomes a verb in several major languages, you can relax.
one of its users' heads is tapped lightly.
Sorry that was totally gratuitous M$oft bashing. I'm sure the company they bought that made Bing had a lot of smart people.
Remember - One word = 1 milli-picture.
and start being evil, or at least really really annoying.
Did you not get the memo that the US needs to shift its electricity generation mix to non-GHG-releasing methods in a frickin' hurry?
And no that is not optional.
So why not assume that shift in your calculations, assuming also that the shift is helped along by the rest of the international community putting a boot to the behind of the laggard countries.
I said the rational premise,
as opposed to potty-mouthed 8 year old's tantrum premise that you have so eloquently stated in your rebuttal.
The free market would sort it out, if we could figure out how to change people so they value the future in the 50 to 100 year increments by which we are affecting it with the scale of our unregulated activity globally. Unfortunately, individual lifespan mitigates against giving a damn, it seems, for most people.
But if we can't change human nature to care enough to act responsibly on these things and let everyone sort it out in a market, then those who are aware and care need to take charge. There is no room for democracy on a ship headed toward the falls, especially when people are typically arguing about (or deciding in a free market) what color the party favor napkins in the ship's dining hall should be.
http://www.ipcc.ch/ for thousands of relevant-topic PhDs' views on the subject of greenhouse-gas induced global warming and measures needed to counter it.
They all had to go through thesis-defense and peer-review before being considered credible on the subject. What's your defense?
and one of the solutions for large-scale electric power grid storage to accommodate massive expansion of intermittent renewables.
We have to remember that the rational premise is we need to cut carbon emissions almost totally out of the economy, and fast, so why not experiment with multiple technologies as alternative energy and transportation infrastructure.
I don't see lithium battery powered intercontinental jetliners on the horizon any time soon do you? And it goes without saying that aviation can't continue to run on fossil fuel.
Correction: "Freedom Evolves"
Have you ever asked: What is the best place to draw the boundary of this system (or rather the boundary of each nested semi-autonomous subsystem), especially in cases where it isn't crystal clear, like an ant colony, a virus+modified-host lifesystem, a port city.
The best boundary definition is probably informational (process-description-oriented) rather than physical-snapshot based. Question: Which subset of stuff around here acting together has the most to do with (the most influence over) its own evolution though spacetime? Draw the boundary there. If we add more stuff (or more process) in, we are just reducing the thing's ability to influence its own evolution; the system is burdened with cruft. If we take stuff (or process) away, it doesn't work as well, and won't influence its fate as much, and won't last as long.
And if within one of those "best boundaries", the system inside is making decisions (and affecting its own fate) in ways that are computationally complex enough to be inherently unpredictable, and yet the system is hanging together, persisting in time, with a stable description possible of what it consists of then we may as well say definitely that the system is "free" and if we see that it appears to be acting on itself and its environment in controlled ways, we may as well say that it has "free will"; that is, that whatever is being systematic within that informational "best boundary" has "free will".
Daniel Dennett "Free Will Evolves" 2004 - makes the same argument.
Ok, if it's for aliens, then maybe you need tungsten, and spread about a billion of the things around in the vain hope one of them will actually be found against all odds.
But if it's for humans then consider. There are two scenarios:
1) There is a global catastrophe or mass insanity of such proportions that all trillion of the penny-sized server computers of the near future which each have enough storage to store significant percentages of our data as a whole are wiped out, along with all of the electricity infrastructure and the instructions on how to build more electricity infrastructure.
In that case I submit that the 10 of us who temporarily survived the vancouver-island-sized meteor hit have more problems to deal with than resurrecting our facebook profiles and physics e-textbooks. Maybe something which told you which varieties of cockroaches were not poisonous to eat would be handy mind you.
2) There is no disaster of that scale, and a semblance of our current civilization survives somewhere, ergo, we still have a chunk of Internet somewhere, and a substantial chunk of all its content to date.
Notice that in scenario 2, the key issue is that we've finally learned how to back up our data and adequately distribute rendundant copies of it around the world, a process that should pretty much be automatic. Making sure we keep doing that is one of the most important things we can do to preserve digi-culture. It's really the only major thing we have to learn how to do and keep doing to save information for countless generations.
(deserved slap/punch)
There is a distinction between the quest to define what makes a useful computer, and the murky info-physics question(s) about whether fundamental aspects of physical evolution in the universe may be well-modelled in terms of information theory, chaitin-kolmogorov information theory, and computational theory.
Both are interesting questions. The latter info-physics speculations would probably require generalization of what can be considered to be "holding or embodying information" and generalization of what computing (information transformation) is considered to be. They would not benefit from restriction of what is considered to be computing or a computer.
At the edge of speculative and as yet unfounded info-physics pondering, is it just me, or is (quantity,flow of, localization/dispersion of) energy looking suspiciously like it should be modelled in terms of quantity, flow, localization/dispersion of information? Especially when it comes to understanding what "classical" physics is about, and what the transformation from quantum states to classical states may be about? I'll stop there. I know nothing and I know it well.
That Saudi Arabia in particular and islam in general (and christianity for that matter) have a huge problem with both men and women expressing their human animal nature.
It's almost as if they don't realize or accept the most basic of truths; that we are animals, born naked, due to the instinct-driven activities of naked animals. Religion, on these issues, is a psychological problem, with a strong denial of reality aspect.
>The idea is probably wrong, mainly because every "my conception of the fundamental nature of the universe based on just discovered science" is wrong...
probably wrong but not necessarily wrong.
Maybe, if people keep coming up with new kinds of science (pun intended), one new theory will finally get a lot of the rest of the unknown bit (pun not intended) right.
Just because computing is the "latest thing" does not mean it is not a better analogy/explanation of certain things (minds, big chunks of physics) than for example, the steamworks, or electrical circuits, or levers and wheels analogies from before. To think so would be falling into another "believing the conventional wisdom" trap.
Some theories are just better (or more comprehensively explanatory) than others. It doesn't really matter whether the theory is new.
Why can we not think of the information as being embodied in "some aspect or other of" the matter and energy undergoing evolution. It is only some observer that needs to see the information as having been encoded or decoded.
Metrics of computations, or measurements of information flows, may be a productive way of describing (and predicting) complex physical evolutions, regardless of whether the physical system itself is identifiably encoding and decoding information explicitly. You just have to establish your own observer convention for how you think the information is represented in the matter and energy under discussion, or you can even just think about "the maximum amount of information" that could be contained in that matter/energy/spacetime region, and the maximum possible amount of information flow there.