Ah...so much energy wasted thinking about potential energy.
Amusingly phrased, but still...
I can think of no question more important over the next 30-40 years than "Where will the world get the energy to fuel its economic growth?"
China is almost 1.3B people and, in order to approach "developed" status, will need to increase its per-capita energy consumption by 3x to 5x.
India is just over 1.0B people and to reach the same status will need to increase its per-capita energy consumption by 5x to 10x.
It is far from clear whether the world's current primary sources (oil, coal, natural gas) can be delivered in the necessary quantities -- not to mention what it does in terms of CO2 production.
Strong interest in alternate sources that can be scaled up to large sizes is a good thing.
he was just pointing out the idiocy of people stocking up enough food for weeks, buying bomb shelters, etc.
Idiotic responses, granted.
Nevertheless, the potential threats only have to be real once for it to be a disaster.
There are lots of people in the world who hate the US.
Some of them have substantial sums of money at their disposal.
The technology to produce genetically-engineered diseases is getting cheaper all the time.
I'm willing to bet at least a beer that the first terrorist attack on the US using such a bug is at least ten years away, but less than 20 years.
Even with the 9/11 commisions, we are so focused on "intelligence" - who had it, who didn't, who ignored it, etc. How do you expect agencies to gather accurate intelligence wihtout stepping on some civil liberty toes? I know *in theory* this is wrong (save your Ben Franklin quotes), but what other *practical*, effective means do they have?
Arguably, the 9/11 attacks were successful (in three of four cases) because the US government and airlines continued to pursue a 40-year-old policy WRT hijacking situations.
If the cockpit in all commercial airliners were separated from the passenger compartment by a REAL bulkhead, a REAL door, and a REAL lock, along with a policy that in a hijack situation the plane would make an emergency landing at the nearest airport and be immediately disabled, none of the 9/11 attacks would have succeeded.
Four or five terrorists armed with box cutters could not seize control of the airplane.
Heck, in one of the 9/11 planes they could not maintain "control" when attacked by the unarmed passengers.
There is no evidence that suggests that the old airport security measures were ineffective in detecting weapons that could penetrate such a bulkhead/door combination.
Instead, tens of millions of passengers are inconvenienced (and worse) at possibly a higher total expense.
You must be too young to remember FAT-based systems.
Youngster.
Go back far enough in UNIX and it required PERFECT disk packs to function -- no handling of bad sectors.
Of course, those were the days when disk "drives" were the size of a small washing machine, the top opened, and you loaded/unloaded the multi-platter disk pack that was the size of a hat box.
Was always interesting to see one of the gurus arrive to troubleshoot your system carrying their own disk pack with their specialized utilities...:^)
You'll be a 200-year-old, withered, repulsive, barely-coherent husk of a human being... but dammit, you'll be healthy!
Emphasis on the barely-coherent...
I'm 50 and have already noticed that some amount of memory function is impaired -- I "lose" words, I don't learn new stuff as quickly or as easily, etc.
Heinlein's novels about the long-lifers also touch on the topic of keeping track of memories -- characters that go looking for a book they haven't finished, but that was 20 years ago.
As I understand it, the experts still have no real idea about how human memory functions down at the levels of cells and their interconnections.
So maybe the nanobots will be able to target cancer cells in 20 years,
and maybe they'll be able to clear out blocked arteries, but
I really doubt that they're going to be able to patch up our failing brains.
One solution to the last mile problem is to let individuals own it. Having individuals owning the wire to a neighborhood NOC and being able to rent services from anyone providing services to the NOC would distribute ownership of the last mile.
I've never understood how this works, in practice.
How big is the neighborhood NOC?
500 households?
1500 households?
Clearly this will involve active electronics to terminate the last-mile fiber -- who pays the bills to power that gear and to maintain it?
Who pays for the land where the NOC sits?
How do you handle on-going maintenance requirements, such as when someone with a backhoe rips up the fiber bundle?
How do you enforce payment of the repair bills by the property "owners"?
How do you tie ownership of these facilities to ownership of a house in a way that guarantees that subsequent owners will continue to pay?
Any explanation which ignores the success of Hong Kong in the second half of the 20th century is deficient.
You raise an interesting question -- more than one, actually.
My immediate reaction would be to say that asking why Hong Kong has been successful is much like asking why London is successful.
Neither can feed themselves, neither has the resources to produce the energy they consume, etc.
Both provide sophisticated goods and services that the surrounding area will exchange for food and fuel.
Since my own personal macroeconomic interests concern energy use, I'll point out that Hong Kong does use a lot of energy per capita.
Not as much as most rich countries, but the nature of their situation helps somewhat -- they avoid some energy-intense industries like farming or internal transportation.
For example, someone else is burning the energy to produce rice, harvest it, and ship it to Hong Kong.
Hong Kong is paying for it, but it doesn's show up in HK's official statistics on energy use (whereas the US energy use to get wheat to NYC does show up).
Over the course of the past 200 years, the US has not had to be as clever as Hong Kong in terms of finding and/or arranging for the energy needed to make its economy rich.
But both are rich in large part because they have figured out ways to apply large amounts of energy to their production processes.
it's... access to wealth (raw materials, energy sources, etc.)
Yep, particularly the energy sources.
Here's my short list of the things that led to the US being the richest large country in the world at the end of the 20th century.
Availability of cheap energy.
The US had lots of whatever energy source was needed by the technology of the day:
wood,
falling water,
coal,
petroleum.
As a result, the US could throw lots of cheap energy at whatever the problem was.
Relative physical isolation from competing powers.
WWI and WWII were not faught on US soil.
US infrastructure didn't get bombed flat and have to start over.
Flexible financial markets.
TTBOMK, the US is far and away the best place to seek funding if you are an individual with a new idea.
General acceptance of innovation.
As you go down the list of technical innovations of the 20th century, the US may have actually invented very few of them, but the US was a leader in broad adoption of them.
Cars.
Telephones.
Television.
Airplanes.
Computers.
Regardless of who invented them, there is little argument that the US was the leader at getting its version(s) into the hands of consumers.
Arguably,
the US will decline in the 21st century as some of those advantages disappear.
We've outgrown (or legislated against the use of) the energy resources we control.
Our physical isolation is not sufficient to defend against modern technology in the hands of a lunatic (think in terms of a designer plague that kills 100M people in a year).
Abuses of the financial markets by the people running them may eventually lead to the loss of a great deal of flexibility.
Okay, so it's ambiguous, but quickly browsing lower paragraphs shows they're scared by how easy it was to develop a virus, with a specific purpose/target to boot.
Indeed.
How many terrorist cells are starting to assemble the necessary lab facilities?
I've commented before that it wouldn't be too many years before the technology to develop something nasty would be available for just a few million dollars.
This story makes it sound like it got a lot cheaper a lot faster than I imagined.
Ebola, airborne, 30-day incubation period, released in LA, NYC, London and Paris.
Geez, and I was looking forward to a nice quiet retirement in just a few years...
If this government is in such dire financial straits, has the thought ever crossed his mind to cut down on whatever the hell it is they're spending so much money on?
Can't speak to Illinois' problems in this area, but in an increasing number of states, an insane amount of the state budget is outside the control of the state's elected officials.
Let's cut the amount of money we spend on medical care for the poor -- oops, that spending rate is set by the federal government, we can't change it.
Let's cut the amount we spend on schools -- oops, that spending rate is built into the state constitution now, we can't change it.
Let's move some of this money that we spend on the roads over to something more pressing -- oops, that's gasoline tax money and the law that created the tax requires it to be spent on roads.
Why did we hire another thousand school administrators last year -- oh yeah, have to file all those new reports with the feds.
I believe that the Economist recently estimated that 85% of California's annual spending is outside the control of the governor and legislature (Illinois is probably not that bad, California is being a trend-setter again).
Here in Colorado we are having a budget crisis in part because the state constitution mandates ever-increasing spending on K-12 education, but simultaneously caps total spending.
Very quickly, the choices for cutting significant amounts of spending come down to things like letting violent criminals out of prison early, closing the state parks, eliminating departments at the state universities, etc.
there's an old saying, along the lines of: "Borrow a dollar, and the bank owns you. Borrow a million dollars, and you own the bank." The more US debt is owned by foreign nations, the more interested those nations will be in seeing the US succeed economically.
There's a great deal of truth to that.
Still, at some point, the bank simply can't afford to lend you any more -- losing the million dollars will be painful, but losing two million will put you out of business.
In this case, not only is there some risk of default (even though the US has never done that), but there's also the risk that the US government will simply print dollars to repay the debt.
If I sat on the board of the central bank of Japan, I would be very, VERY nervous about the amount of US debt that I held.
In the past couple of years, dollar holdings of the Bank of Japan have lost on the order of $100B in purchasing power as the dollar lost value against the yen.
What happens if the US government decides to put the printing presses in high gear over the next few years as they try to pay for
overseas military adventures,
tax cuts for wealthy US citizens,
unfunded prescription drug benefits and
the impending retirement of the baby boom generation (to name a few things)?
Although I didn't see it, the lecturer talking about this at the time (he was researching in this area) said he'd seen fractal encodings of images which pull out more detail than was actually in the image that was encoded. Sounds like crazy talk to me though;)
Unlike an 8x8 DCT (for example), fractal compression is generally scale independent.
A block of pixels is represented by a contractive mapping that can be applied to ANY size block.
The mapping is applied iteratively and can be proved to converge, regardless of the initial values or the size of the block.
If applied to a bigger block than in the original, the algorithm is simply "making up" detail information that wasn't in the original.
In some cases, the detail looks quite realistic.
In other cases, it doesn't.
Researchers, of course, tend to show images that make their algorithms look good (that's not a criticism, just an observation).
Fractals are not the only class of algorithms where this can be done.
It is possible to extrapolate additional levels of detail (high-frequency) information from a wavelet-encoded image.
I have seen very effective image sharpening techniques based on wavelets that provide more detail than in the original image.
it wasn't perfect, but the decode was VERY fast and at really really high compression rates... It needed some improvements (more searching), and had some faults: around when it came out, it took a 600MHz Alpha (The fastest processor at that time, or darn near it) 24hours for a 30-sec clip, because it used brute force...
Indeed.
The problem with the effective fractal compression algorithms is basically that,
while there is a fast inverse transform to go from compressed to raw form,
there is no efficient forward transform to go from a raw frame to the compressed form.
There have been some exceptions -- the University of Bath once did a simple fractal compression scheme that went fast in the forward direction, but the compression rates were not very good.
TTBOMK, all of the fractal compression schemes that achieve high compression rates require searches over VERY large spaces.
If you can develop a fast forward transform, you may not get rich, but you'll be famous within a small circle of mathematicians.
The US economy is very dependant on foreign trade... But if it's [China's] the next big market as many people believe then what standards they use will most certainly matter to the US.
I think you have the direction of dependency reversed.
The Economist, among other sources, regularly bemoans the fact that the world is far too dependent on being able to export to the US, the "consumer of last resort".
If the US were to abruptly cut its imports by enough to eliminate its trade deficit, there would be some pain;
but the economies of countries like China and Korea would suffer far more.
At the present time, the US economy is just about ten times the size of the Chinese economy.
Assuming that China can outgrow the US by five percentage points per year (say 8% growth to 3%),
it will take 48 years for China to "catch up".
And the Chinese government is already trying to scale back their current growth rate, realizing that it is not sustainable.
China may be the next big market, but it will be a long time before that market is comparable in size to the US.
Unfortunately, we may all get a chance in a few years to see what happens when the US has to make big cuts in its spending habits.
The US consumer "engine" appears to be driven by debt, both public and private, and the situation will have to change.
Compressed air energy storage may be feasable on a small scale with the use of a compressed air powered generator... Use solar power to compress air to several hundred atmospheres during the day and run a generator from it during the night and during cloudy periods.
How efficient is compressed air storage going to be on a small scale?
It seems like quite a bit of energy would go into heating the air, and even with insulated tanks it would be hard to avoid losing the heat fairly quickly.
Are there any safety concerns with having a tank in your garage and/or back yard that contained compressed air at, say, 10,000 PSI (680 atmospheres times 14.7 PSI)?
Books are also the same way. If you buy a copy of, say, The Da Vinci Code, you do not get the rights to republish or copy it, but at the same time, you don't get the option of turning it in for a newer or different edition.
But you do get the right to do anything you want with the book OTHER than republishing or copying it.
No nonsense about where or how you can read it.
No problems about resale of the physical object.
Clear "fair use" rights for purposes such as literary criticism.
The DMCA has allowed the copyright holder to impose a great variety of restrictions on what and how the purchaser of the "copy" can make use of it -- terms that are much more typical of a license than a traditional copyright.
At the same time, the copyright holders (eg, the members of the MPAA) don't want to make it a "real" license because then they would be expected to warrant the performance of the medium through which they delivered the content.
IMO, one of the important distinctions between a movie on DVD and Windows XP on CD is that, after the original installation, there is seldom a reason to take the Windows CD off the shelf -- very little wear-and-tear.
The movie, OTOH, requires that you run it through a player and risk damage anytime you want to make use of it.
FCC rules require that any cable-company owned network that is not exclusively delivered by landlines must be made available to other signal providers without discrimination.
I have not kept track of costs, but due to the telecom bubble in the late 1990s, there's a hell of a lot of dark long-haul fiber out there.
Will it become affordable for Comcast to use that for distribution, perhaps dropping the smallest cable operators (those who operate in a single small market, for instance) and avoid satellite distribution so that they can cut off DirecTV and the Dish Network?
Do our anti-trust laws apply to companies overseas? If so, how come we haven't gone after DeBeers or Saudi Arabia... yet?
Our antitrust law applies to any companies operating in the US, at least to their US operations.
DeBeers does not sell diamonds in the US.
Many jewelers attempt to turn this into a virtue in their advertising, as in "We import our diamonds directly from Antwerp/wherever and pass the savings on to you."
In many cases, this should be interpreted as "We buy from DeBeers, and MUST do so outside the US, even though it's a hassle for us."
The Saudis do not sell oil outside of Saudi Arabia.
Similarly for the other OPEC members, whose attempts to fix oil prices would clearly be illegal if done in the US or the EU.
Future historians may in some sense have less to work with due to problems preserving digital data.
Absolutely!
If you want to write the source material for historians 100-150 years from now, use pigment-based ink on acid-free paper.
Send letters, not e-mail.
Send them to friends and relatives that will keep them in old trunks in the attic.
If you write a book, donate well-bound copies to your university library.
If you publish in magazines, archive high-quality paper proofs of the articles.
For still images, black-and-white silver-based negatives, with prints properly done on acid-free paper.
There are no good choices for movies and videos.
There are no 100-year digital media yet, and if you depend on people to copy from medium to medium and convert from format to format, the chances that no one will slip up over 100 years is darned close to zero.
Of course, with APL such a feature is completely useless unless it gives you the source character as well, no?....
Absolutely correct.
The debugger pointed to the exact point in the offending line where the exception occurred.
Not that that was necessarily a lot of help when you were trying to figure out why a matrix that was supposed to have three dimensions now had four...
In the USA, Industrial research unfortunately is usually the first to take a hit during bad economic conditions as we are presently in. Furthermore although some companies still do longterm innovative research that may not yield results for many years, this is becoming less common. What little research is still being done is done more for immediate application based work.
I worked in industrial R&D for 25 years before I was laid off.
Let me suggest another mechanism that has contributed to the reduction of the amount of research done in industry in the US:
massive industry consolidation.
When two large companies merge, it seems inevitable that the number of people involved in R&D will be less than the number at the two companies separately.
When the company where I worked was acquired, about 95% of the engineering staff at the acquired company was immediately laid off -- the executives at the acquiring company had decided that their existing R&D staff would be able to do all the necessary work for the combined company.
I suspect that, over time, this kind of thing leads to reduced demand for technical people for two reasons.
First, it leads to fewer opportunities at the large merging companies themselves.
Heck, it's supposed to -- improved efficiency (do more with fewer people) is almost always used as one of the reasons for doing the merger.
Second, it leads to fewer opportunities at the smaller companies that feed goods and services into the larger companies.
Where three companies may buy supplies from six smaller companies, when the three merge they may buy from only two of the smaller firms.
Within the overall structure of the technology industry, this causes a further reduction in opportunities.
Finally, I fear that over the long term, these problems will cause a drop-off in innovation.
When six different engineering teams solve the same problem, five of them come up with mundane solutions while the sixth invents something totally new.
If only one or two teams work on the problems, the chances of that innovative solution occurring are much smaller.
Java stack traces tell you the exact line number something went wrong, and the path taken to get there.
Just as a historical note, the APL system that I used in 1975 provided this capability.
When an exception occurred, the interpreter halted program execution, identified the problem and the source line, and provided access to the stack info on how (functions and line numbers) you had gotten there.
You also had the ability to examine any variable that was currently in scope, and could change values and resume execution.
Given the cryptic nature of the language, you needed all the debugging help you could get.
Still, for certain types of numerical problems, you could get a lot of effective code written in a very short period of time.
What I don't buy is companies moving jobs into other countries simply because they can pay the workers less money. That money, coming from our pockets as consumers, leaves the country and never comes back. Sure, it benefits the places where the jobs are outsourced, but what happens when there aren't enough jobs here to keep a reasonable demand for their product?
Well, unless the people in those countries (or some of their other trading partners) are papering the walls with $20 bills, the money HAS to come back to the US.
Unfortunately, it's coming back in exchange for government and corporate debt instruments.
"Exported" Treasury bonds don't happen to show up in the current accounts balance.
Like the deficit, the trade imbalance can't last forever (at current levels) --
at some point the rest of the world is going to refuse to loan us any more money.
If the US would get its budget in order, it would be harder for the central banks of Japan, China, etc to loan us the money to pay for imports.
It is interesting to think about how much offshoring can actually occur.
By your argument, there should be an equilibrium that occurs as US income (production of goods and services) decreases -- where each dollar "sent" overseas requires a corresponding decrease in the level of imports.
I suspect that it happens sooner than the doom-and-gloom types posting here believe, and that the "death spiral" stops of its own accord.
However, we need to keep in mind that corporations owe nothing to anybody besides their shareholders. If you happen to be wealthy enough to be a shareholder (50% of Americans) than all of this outsourcing stuff is good news because it increases margins. This is not a real problem. The real problem is a government that will not consider the needs of the not-rich (education, health care, etc) but only the wealthy.
I'd like to argue against two points here.
First, for a large company incorporated in the US, I can suggest several things for which they "owe" in addition to what they owe to their shareholders:
Well-enforced property rights,
Political stability, and
Large, stable, honest financial system.
There are good reasons that Intel is not hurrying to become an Indian or Chinese corporation, dependent on the Indian financial markets for funding or the Chinese legal system to protect their property.
I expect large companies to make significant contributions to maintaining the stability and wealth that benefits them.
Second, while more than 50% of all workers in this country may own stock, a very much smaller fraction are "capitalists" in the sense that the income from their investments can support them.
Much of that ownership occurs within an IRA or a 401(k) or similar retirement plan -- and contributes nothing to the worker's income today. The vast majority of workers will NEVER reach the point where the income from their accumulated wealth will be able to support them.
I'm right there with you on the considerations for the not-wealthy, health care in particular.
The US spends a bigger portion of its GDP on health care than any country in the world -- but 40M people can't get catestrophic coverage medical insurance, and on the order of 20% of our children get short-changed on some aspect of basic medical care.
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Amusingly phrased, but still... I can think of no question more important over the next 30-40 years than "Where will the world get the energy to fuel its economic growth?" China is almost 1.3B people and, in order to approach "developed" status, will need to increase its per-capita energy consumption by 3x to 5x. India is just over 1.0B people and to reach the same status will need to increase its per-capita energy consumption by 5x to 10x. It is far from clear whether the world's current primary sources (oil, coal, natural gas) can be delivered in the necessary quantities -- not to mention what it does in terms of CO2 production. Strong interest in alternate sources that can be scaled up to large sizes is a good thing.
Idiotic responses, granted. Nevertheless, the potential threats only have to be real once for it to be a disaster. There are lots of people in the world who hate the US. Some of them have substantial sums of money at their disposal. The technology to produce genetically-engineered diseases is getting cheaper all the time. I'm willing to bet at least a beer that the first terrorist attack on the US using such a bug is at least ten years away, but less than 20 years.
Arguably, the 9/11 attacks were successful (in three of four cases) because the US government and airlines continued to pursue a 40-year-old policy WRT hijacking situations. If the cockpit in all commercial airliners were separated from the passenger compartment by a REAL bulkhead, a REAL door, and a REAL lock, along with a policy that in a hijack situation the plane would make an emergency landing at the nearest airport and be immediately disabled, none of the 9/11 attacks would have succeeded. Four or five terrorists armed with box cutters could not seize control of the airplane. Heck, in one of the 9/11 planes they could not maintain "control" when attacked by the unarmed passengers.
There is no evidence that suggests that the old airport security measures were ineffective in detecting weapons that could penetrate such a bulkhead/door combination. Instead, tens of millions of passengers are inconvenienced (and worse) at possibly a higher total expense.
Youngster. Go back far enough in UNIX and it required PERFECT disk packs to function -- no handling of bad sectors. Of course, those were the days when disk "drives" were the size of a small washing machine, the top opened, and you loaded/unloaded the multi-platter disk pack that was the size of a hat box. Was always interesting to see one of the gurus arrive to troubleshoot your system carrying their own disk pack with their specialized utilities... :^)
Emphasis on the barely-coherent... I'm 50 and have already noticed that some amount of memory function is impaired -- I "lose" words, I don't learn new stuff as quickly or as easily, etc. Heinlein's novels about the long-lifers also touch on the topic of keeping track of memories -- characters that go looking for a book they haven't finished, but that was 20 years ago. As I understand it, the experts still have no real idea about how human memory functions down at the levels of cells and their interconnections. So maybe the nanobots will be able to target cancer cells in 20 years, and maybe they'll be able to clear out blocked arteries, but I really doubt that they're going to be able to patch up our failing brains.
I've never understood how this works, in practice. How big is the neighborhood NOC? 500 households? 1500 households? Clearly this will involve active electronics to terminate the last-mile fiber -- who pays the bills to power that gear and to maintain it? Who pays for the land where the NOC sits? How do you handle on-going maintenance requirements, such as when someone with a backhoe rips up the fiber bundle? How do you enforce payment of the repair bills by the property "owners"? How do you tie ownership of these facilities to ownership of a house in a way that guarantees that subsequent owners will continue to pay?
You raise an interesting question -- more than one, actually. My immediate reaction would be to say that asking why Hong Kong has been successful is much like asking why London is successful. Neither can feed themselves, neither has the resources to produce the energy they consume, etc. Both provide sophisticated goods and services that the surrounding area will exchange for food and fuel.
Since my own personal macroeconomic interests concern energy use, I'll point out that Hong Kong does use a lot of energy per capita. Not as much as most rich countries, but the nature of their situation helps somewhat -- they avoid some energy-intense industries like farming or internal transportation. For example, someone else is burning the energy to produce rice, harvest it, and ship it to Hong Kong. Hong Kong is paying for it, but it doesn's show up in HK's official statistics on energy use (whereas the US energy use to get wheat to NYC does show up).
Over the course of the past 200 years, the US has not had to be as clever as Hong Kong in terms of finding and/or arranging for the energy needed to make its economy rich. But both are rich in large part because they have figured out ways to apply large amounts of energy to their production processes.
Yep, particularly the energy sources. Here's my short list of the things that led to the US being the richest large country in the world at the end of the 20th century.
Arguably, the US will decline in the 21st century as some of those advantages disappear. We've outgrown (or legislated against the use of) the energy resources we control. Our physical isolation is not sufficient to defend against modern technology in the hands of a lunatic (think in terms of a designer plague that kills 100M people in a year). Abuses of the financial markets by the people running them may eventually lead to the loss of a great deal of flexibility.
Indeed. How many terrorist cells are starting to assemble the necessary lab facilities? I've commented before that it wouldn't be too many years before the technology to develop something nasty would be available for just a few million dollars. This story makes it sound like it got a lot cheaper a lot faster than I imagined. Ebola, airborne, 30-day incubation period, released in LA, NYC, London and Paris. Geez, and I was looking forward to a nice quiet retirement in just a few years...
A little digging on the Sion web site shows that they are Moltech, just using a different name.
Can't speak to Illinois' problems in this area, but in an increasing number of states, an insane amount of the state budget is outside the control of the state's elected officials. Let's cut the amount of money we spend on medical care for the poor -- oops, that spending rate is set by the federal government, we can't change it. Let's cut the amount we spend on schools -- oops, that spending rate is built into the state constitution now, we can't change it. Let's move some of this money that we spend on the roads over to something more pressing -- oops, that's gasoline tax money and the law that created the tax requires it to be spent on roads. Why did we hire another thousand school administrators last year -- oh yeah, have to file all those new reports with the feds.
I believe that the Economist recently estimated that 85% of California's annual spending is outside the control of the governor and legislature (Illinois is probably not that bad, California is being a trend-setter again). Here in Colorado we are having a budget crisis in part because the state constitution mandates ever-increasing spending on K-12 education, but simultaneously caps total spending. Very quickly, the choices for cutting significant amounts of spending come down to things like letting violent criminals out of prison early, closing the state parks, eliminating departments at the state universities, etc.
There's a great deal of truth to that. Still, at some point, the bank simply can't afford to lend you any more -- losing the million dollars will be painful, but losing two million will put you out of business. In this case, not only is there some risk of default (even though the US has never done that), but there's also the risk that the US government will simply print dollars to repay the debt. If I sat on the board of the central bank of Japan, I would be very, VERY nervous about the amount of US debt that I held. In the past couple of years, dollar holdings of the Bank of Japan have lost on the order of $100B in purchasing power as the dollar lost value against the yen. What happens if the US government decides to put the printing presses in high gear over the next few years as they try to pay for overseas military adventures, tax cuts for wealthy US citizens, unfunded prescription drug benefits and the impending retirement of the baby boom generation (to name a few things)?
Unlike an 8x8 DCT (for example), fractal compression is generally scale independent. A block of pixels is represented by a contractive mapping that can be applied to ANY size block. The mapping is applied iteratively and can be proved to converge, regardless of the initial values or the size of the block. If applied to a bigger block than in the original, the algorithm is simply "making up" detail information that wasn't in the original. In some cases, the detail looks quite realistic. In other cases, it doesn't. Researchers, of course, tend to show images that make their algorithms look good (that's not a criticism, just an observation).
Fractals are not the only class of algorithms where this can be done. It is possible to extrapolate additional levels of detail (high-frequency) information from a wavelet-encoded image. I have seen very effective image sharpening techniques based on wavelets that provide more detail than in the original image.
Indeed. The problem with the effective fractal compression algorithms is basically that, while there is a fast inverse transform to go from compressed to raw form, there is no efficient forward transform to go from a raw frame to the compressed form. There have been some exceptions -- the University of Bath once did a simple fractal compression scheme that went fast in the forward direction, but the compression rates were not very good. TTBOMK, all of the fractal compression schemes that achieve high compression rates require searches over VERY large spaces. If you can develop a fast forward transform, you may not get rich, but you'll be famous within a small circle of mathematicians.
I think you have the direction of dependency reversed. The Economist, among other sources, regularly bemoans the fact that the world is far too dependent on being able to export to the US, the "consumer of last resort". If the US were to abruptly cut its imports by enough to eliminate its trade deficit, there would be some pain; but the economies of countries like China and Korea would suffer far more.
At the present time, the US economy is just about ten times the size of the Chinese economy. Assuming that China can outgrow the US by five percentage points per year (say 8% growth to 3%), it will take 48 years for China to "catch up". And the Chinese government is already trying to scale back their current growth rate, realizing that it is not sustainable. China may be the next big market, but it will be a long time before that market is comparable in size to the US.
Unfortunately, we may all get a chance in a few years to see what happens when the US has to make big cuts in its spending habits. The US consumer "engine" appears to be driven by debt, both public and private, and the situation will have to change.
How efficient is compressed air storage going to be on a small scale? It seems like quite a bit of energy would go into heating the air, and even with insulated tanks it would be hard to avoid losing the heat fairly quickly. Are there any safety concerns with having a tank in your garage and/or back yard that contained compressed air at, say, 10,000 PSI (680 atmospheres times 14.7 PSI)?
But you do get the right to do anything you want with the book OTHER than republishing or copying it. No nonsense about where or how you can read it. No problems about resale of the physical object. Clear "fair use" rights for purposes such as literary criticism. The DMCA has allowed the copyright holder to impose a great variety of restrictions on what and how the purchaser of the "copy" can make use of it -- terms that are much more typical of a license than a traditional copyright. At the same time, the copyright holders (eg, the members of the MPAA) don't want to make it a "real" license because then they would be expected to warrant the performance of the medium through which they delivered the content. IMO, one of the important distinctions between a movie on DVD and Windows XP on CD is that, after the original installation, there is seldom a reason to take the Windows CD off the shelf -- very little wear-and-tear. The movie, OTOH, requires that you run it through a player and risk damage anytime you want to make use of it.
I have not kept track of costs, but due to the telecom bubble in the late 1990s, there's a hell of a lot of dark long-haul fiber out there. Will it become affordable for Comcast to use that for distribution, perhaps dropping the smallest cable operators (those who operate in a single small market, for instance) and avoid satellite distribution so that they can cut off DirecTV and the Dish Network?
Our antitrust law applies to any companies operating in the US, at least to their US operations. DeBeers does not sell diamonds in the US. Many jewelers attempt to turn this into a virtue in their advertising, as in "We import our diamonds directly from Antwerp/wherever and pass the savings on to you." In many cases, this should be interpreted as "We buy from DeBeers, and MUST do so outside the US, even though it's a hassle for us." The Saudis do not sell oil outside of Saudi Arabia. Similarly for the other OPEC members, whose attempts to fix oil prices would clearly be illegal if done in the US or the EU.
Absolutely! If you want to write the source material for historians 100-150 years from now, use pigment-based ink on acid-free paper. Send letters, not e-mail. Send them to friends and relatives that will keep them in old trunks in the attic. If you write a book, donate well-bound copies to your university library. If you publish in magazines, archive high-quality paper proofs of the articles. For still images, black-and-white silver-based negatives, with prints properly done on acid-free paper. There are no good choices for movies and videos. There are no 100-year digital media yet, and if you depend on people to copy from medium to medium and convert from format to format, the chances that no one will slip up over 100 years is darned close to zero.
Absolutely correct. The debugger pointed to the exact point in the offending line where the exception occurred. Not that that was necessarily a lot of help when you were trying to figure out why a matrix that was supposed to have three dimensions now had four...
I worked in industrial R&D for 25 years before I was laid off. Let me suggest another mechanism that has contributed to the reduction of the amount of research done in industry in the US: massive industry consolidation. When two large companies merge, it seems inevitable that the number of people involved in R&D will be less than the number at the two companies separately. When the company where I worked was acquired, about 95% of the engineering staff at the acquired company was immediately laid off -- the executives at the acquiring company had decided that their existing R&D staff would be able to do all the necessary work for the combined company.
I suspect that, over time, this kind of thing leads to reduced demand for technical people for two reasons. First, it leads to fewer opportunities at the large merging companies themselves. Heck, it's supposed to -- improved efficiency (do more with fewer people) is almost always used as one of the reasons for doing the merger. Second, it leads to fewer opportunities at the smaller companies that feed goods and services into the larger companies. Where three companies may buy supplies from six smaller companies, when the three merge they may buy from only two of the smaller firms. Within the overall structure of the technology industry, this causes a further reduction in opportunities.
Finally, I fear that over the long term, these problems will cause a drop-off in innovation. When six different engineering teams solve the same problem, five of them come up with mundane solutions while the sixth invents something totally new. If only one or two teams work on the problems, the chances of that innovative solution occurring are much smaller.
Just as a historical note, the APL system that I used in 1975 provided this capability. When an exception occurred, the interpreter halted program execution, identified the problem and the source line, and provided access to the stack info on how (functions and line numbers) you had gotten there. You also had the ability to examine any variable that was currently in scope, and could change values and resume execution. Given the cryptic nature of the language, you needed all the debugging help you could get. Still, for certain types of numerical problems, you could get a lot of effective code written in a very short period of time.
Well, unless the people in those countries (or some of their other trading partners) are papering the walls with $20 bills, the money HAS to come back to the US. Unfortunately, it's coming back in exchange for government and corporate debt instruments. "Exported" Treasury bonds don't happen to show up in the current accounts balance. Like the deficit, the trade imbalance can't last forever (at current levels) -- at some point the rest of the world is going to refuse to loan us any more money. If the US would get its budget in order, it would be harder for the central banks of Japan, China, etc to loan us the money to pay for imports.
It is interesting to think about how much offshoring can actually occur. By your argument, there should be an equilibrium that occurs as US income (production of goods and services) decreases -- where each dollar "sent" overseas requires a corresponding decrease in the level of imports. I suspect that it happens sooner than the doom-and-gloom types posting here believe, and that the "death spiral" stops of its own accord.
I'd like to argue against two points here. First, for a large company incorporated in the US, I can suggest several things for which they "owe" in addition to what they owe to their shareholders:
There are good reasons that Intel is not hurrying to become an Indian or Chinese corporation, dependent on the Indian financial markets for funding or the Chinese legal system to protect their property. I expect large companies to make significant contributions to maintaining the stability and wealth that benefits them.
Second, while more than 50% of all workers in this country may own stock, a very much smaller fraction are "capitalists" in the sense that the income from their investments can support them. Much of that ownership occurs within an IRA or a 401(k) or similar retirement plan -- and contributes nothing to the worker's income today. The vast majority of workers will NEVER reach the point where the income from their accumulated wealth will be able to support them.
I'm right there with you on the considerations for the not-wealthy, health care in particular. The US spends a bigger portion of its GDP on health care than any country in the world -- but 40M people can't get catestrophic coverage medical insurance, and on the order of 20% of our children get short-changed on some aspect of basic medical care.