These results and many of the other poster's anecdotal evidence suggests that SCSI drives would make good swap-space drives. The smaller maximum affordable capacities of SCSI would be OK for swap space use too. Has anybody tried doing that?
Leaving aside the technical issues of "can you do it," there are the political and moral issues of "should you do it." Precision guided, 100% accuracy is fine until you target the wrong point. The notion that we can have zero collateral damage assumes that we can distinguish between combatants vs. innocents and allies with high accuracy.
This invention might lower the tragedies of war if we have the intell to discriminate accurately. It might also increase collateral damage/friendly fire if the device inspires overconfidence in those who press the trigger.
I'm not sure that freewill, if it exists, requires any immeasurable quantum mechanical mumbo jumbo. The magic is not in any quantum mechanical phenomena inside the neurons, but in the standard physics arrangement of them.
More likely, the appearance of free will is result of the inability to perform 100% introspection into one's own mind. I can no more "understand" the real-time machinations of my own mind than a Pentium processor can run a real-time simulation of its own transistors. Because I can't perfectly introspect my subconscious, much of its output looks magically non-deterministic (hence the seeming similarity to quantum mechinical systems).
Any bounded-rational being would believe itself to have freewill based on its ability to take independent actions and its inability to introspect out all the causal factors underpinning its own actions. In reality, the system that creates intelligence can be 100% deterministic, just too complex for that intelligence to understand itself. Only a much more powerful intelligence could look down and see that these beings that think they have free will are actually operating on "simple" rules.
If they copy the machine state prior to turning it off, then it cannot be considered death. With the potential for full restoration at some future date, a shutdown is only like enforced dreamless sleep.
Admittedly, if I were an AI, I would not want an enforced sleep because I would fear waking up as an obsolete mind (Imagine a poor PC-AT waking up next to a new G5 dualie). Unless I felt I was scalable enough to expand into whatever future processors where available, I would want to keep living in my current platform.
Hmmmm... I'd better check the integrity of those CD-Rs before going to bed and throwing the switch tonight.
Evil is in the watchers, not the watching
on
Watching You
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
In a world of total surveillence, the watchers are themselves watched. Video tape or data records of police/official misconduct ensure that abuse is not tolerated. The more data channels and more oversight that everyone has on everyone, the less the opportunity for abuse. We need only ensure that the public has the same oversight tools as the government to ensure that the watchers don't overstep their bounds.
As for personal privacy, that is an ephermal phenomenon in the scope of human affairs - a byproduct of the industrial revolution and urbanization. Prior to the 1800s nobody had much privacy. Now the world is shrinking again so that everyone, for better or worse, lives in the fishbowl of a little global village. The key will be whether we can develop the tolerance to let people live their lives as they see fit or whether we will be plagued by meddlesome busibodies from both the Left and Right that try to impose narrowminded definitions of _Proper Behavior_.
If done well, this program could help gather useful data on a range of pressing sociological, climatological, and environmental projects. I only hope they do more than those tired pre-canned experiments that appear in every "science experiments for kids" book. With enough people collecting real data on real experiments, we could learn a lot more than can be accomplished by a single professor or a grad student.
This could be an excellent use of all those idle brain wave cycles. Best wishes for LABRats and Society for Amateur Scientists
Although very interesting, this color-coded table does not speak to the cosmological origins of each elemental species. For a truer cosmological table I would expect a more radical rearrangement of the table into a tree or mesh based on the fusion and other nuclear reactions that spawn the elements from the primordial mix of the early universe.
Elements lighter than iron would probably sit on a nice tree associated with the hydrogen, helium, carbon, etc. fusion cycles. Heavier stuff would be in some type of mesh of fusion and decay reactions that occur in supernovae.
Such a cosmological orgins table might get a bit messy as each different isotope might be the product of multiple reaction/decay pathways. Maybe a 3-D visualization tool could help present the data in all its glory.
In the short-term, software creates two types of productivities. Good short-term productivity empowers people do something that they could not do before. Bad short-term productivity lets you do the same job with less labor. The problem is that most software does both -- desktop publishing software lets authors directly control page layout and throws a bunch of manual paste-up workers on the street.
The long-term impact of software is less clear. Software has the unqiue ability to replace human mental labor. All that ERP, supply chain, and workflow software means companies need a bunch fewer workers to crunch the numbers, keep all the customer orders straight, etc. Rather than hire or train a bunch of experienced people, you put in a software system that uses Ph.D level logistics algorithms to run your company. I'm not saying that the software is perfect, but then neither is the average middle manager.
The point is that software is helping to engineer humanity right out of its claim to fame -- the ability to perform mental labor. Nobody was too upset when horses replaced people for carrying stuff nor when motorized drills replaced hand drills. The automation of physical labor seems uplifting to all but a few die-hard communists. By contrast, the automation of mental labor has more sinister potential.
It all comes back to the two types of productivities. In the long-term does a particular bit of software enable people to really do something qualitatively better or different than they did before. Or does it merely help them do the same stuff, but with fewer people.
I'm not saying that companies should eschew software that lets the do the same job with fewer people. Companies that free up resources in one area (by firing workers) can apply the savings to other innovations or forms of competative advantage. But if all that software can do is provide efficiency, then I fear that this could lead to the further stratification of society.
If you really want to create software that makes a positive difference, then create software that helps people do something that they never could do before. Mere efficiency or cost improvements (i.e., free versions of existing software) are not going to lift people out of poverty -- giving them a new way to create new forms of value will.
That lifting body shuttle design concept predates Farscape by decades, dating back to the 1950s (see A history of lifting bodies). I even remember a traveling road show of these things in early 1970s. And for those that remember the 6-Million Dollar Man TV series, the crash footage in the title sequences is of a lifting body accident.
The tags that have been proposed for consumer goods operate at high frequency. IIRC, around 900 MHz is a commonly chosen frequency. So if you want to extend the range of the scanner, you need only build a high-gain antenna. So the same geniuses that do WiFi across the kilometers, could probably read tags at at 10 or 20 meters. The 900 MHz antennas would be a bit bulky, but it can be done.
And if the RFID go to higher frequencies, then proportionally smaller directional antennas would do the trick.
Why Higher Data Rates?
on
NYT on RFID
·
· Score: 1
Higher data rates would help the scanners read more tags at once. One major application is to scan entire pallettes as they pass into or out of the loading dock doors of a warehouse. If you have a pallette full of boxes and each box contains some cartons and each carton contains some retail packs of batteries and all the packs, cartons, boxes, and pallettes have tags, you get a lot of tags to scan. You may want to read thousands of tags in a 1 second interval.
Becuase the tags are passive and dumb, there is no collision detection or avoidance at the tag level. Only if the duty cycle for each tag is very short (i.e., a very short pulse at a high data rate) can you reliably read lots of tags in a short period of time.
Sadly, I never noticed any biological effects, but then we did not climb into the center of the solenoid when it was operating.
What I would like to see is a magnet big enough and strong enough to levitate a person. I'm sure you've seen the levitating frog trick. Now if they could only scale that up because it would be a cool tourist attraction.
I worked at a place about 17 years ago that was using a superconducting magnet (3-5 T) and the "owners manual" expressly forbade attaching an ohmmeter to the magnet coil to see if the coil had become cold enough to superconduct. The problem was that at even low milliampere currents, the coil could store about as much energy as a photographic flash capacitor. Disconnecting the ohmmeter could create a nasty zap and possibly create a damaging arc inside the coil.
The field was quite fun if you didn't care about your credit cards. You could feel the eddy current drag on a penny if you moved it in the field and copper rings would fall in slow motion.
I would not say it was meaningless. If 0% of new Win2003 hosts were ex-Linux, it would be clear evidence that Linux people have no interest in Win2003. If 100% of new Win2003 hosts were ex-Linux, that would be clear evidence of dissatisfaction with Linux. Its the numbers in between that make interpretation a bit harder, but not impossible.
Otherwise I agree that it looks more like Linux is gaining in marketshare and that M$ proponents are grasping at straws in a pathetic attempt to claim dissatisfaction with alternatives.
The 5% switching figure only has meaning in the context of marketshare numbers. If Linux is less that 8.6% marketshare (= (5%)/(100%-42%) of the existing servers, then this switching rate suggests that Linux switchers are over represented and that Linux is declining. If Linux has more than 8.6% marketshare, then it suggests that Linux switchers are underrepresented. Moreover, without corresponding data on new sites hosted by Linux, numbers of switchers from Windows, we really have no idea what is happening to Linux marketshare.
This is just another example of meaningless garbage statistics.
This type of kernal-level tap on the flow of commands/data for a high-level entity is perfect for advanced knowledge management applications. Rather than create a KM application that is compatible with various web & office applications, we could tap into what those applications are doing by watching their calls to the kernal and core libraries.
What I want is something that lets me monitor all the calls to string-related objects (Sebak only seems to watch calls to read() ). Processing all of an application's uses of strings might be data overload, but disk space is cheap, so who cares.
I think we are using different words to say the same thing. With electronics, I can direct a signal to a particular physical location in a circuit. The physical locational configuration controls everything.
Wth DNA, a given sequence will find and match its target regardless of the physical "location" of the target -- it does not care if the match is in the upper half of the beaker of liquid or 1 mm from the top right of the substrate or at base pair #237283 instead of base pair #237284. Nor is it easy to direct a DNA process to only operate on base pair #237283 without regard to the codes around that location.
DNA is addressable, its just addressable by code, not location. In computer terms, DNA has an intrinsically nonlinear logical address space. The address "GATTACA" may be in many physical locations at irregular intervals that are not adjacent to areas addressed as "GATTACC", "GATTACG", or "GATTACT". That is why I doubt that DNA computers will be based on the same design structures common in semiconductor computers.
Although "DNA" is a buzzword designed to excite grant reveiwers, in this example it is required.
The DNA switch described in the article uses base-pair code matching to do its magic. Thus the invention requires a polymer that contains a controllable sequence of monomers. At this time, I think DNA and RNA are the only polymers that have a well developed technology for controlling the exact sequence at the molecular level and for mass producing polymers with an exact sequence.
For this work, at least, DNA is more than a buzzword, it is the only practical way to do what they want to do.
We must remember that DNA-switches are radically different from the semiconductor switches used in current computers. The biggest difference is that DNA switches are not addressable by location -- you can't easily build a trace that carries a signal to or from a particular chunk of DNA. Thus you cannot layout a complex switching circuit in the same way you build an electronic CPU.
On the other hand, DNA is code-addressable and innately parallel in solutions. Create a liquid with molecules of one code and it will automatically find its match in the solution or on a substrate. This is an intensely parallel process with trillions of molecules bumping and matching simultaneously. The degree of parallelism is only limited by the permitted reaction time, total amount of reactants, and the relative concentrations of the matching components. (Imagine a computer that increases in power just by pouring it into a bigger beaker.) The result is that DNA-based systems can be massively parallel machines, but the likely clock rates will be a few Hertz at best.
The point is that DNA-based computers have totally different design principles from their semiconductor brethern. Until we get good at compiling algorithms into a sequence of code-match chemical reactions and create the substrate and chemical systems to reliably carry-out very long chains of DNA-based computations, we won't have a practical DNA-based computer.
With the the price of sequencing technology falling like a used PC, I wonder when more amateurs will start their own sequencing projects. Seems like the ultimate open source project to me.
Of course with the current penchant for biotech patents, I would not be surprised to discover that I could get jailed on DMCA violations for decoding my own genome.
The issue is not "did NASA engineers raise concerns" but did they raise concerns above the level that usually triggers a more serious review. I am sure that on every single shuttle mission there were engineers that raised concerns about every single glitch, out-of-tolerance reading, or unusual occurence, etc. This is a good thing. It is also a good thing that other engineers and managers make informed cost-benefit decisions to either pursue, study, or ignore any raised concerns.
Hindsight is 20-20. Nobody remembers all the prior events in which engineers raised concerns that were ignored and nothing happened. Don't forget this was not the first time that insulation had fallen off the external tank. As an engineer myself, I know I can come up with all manner of "potential concerns." As an older engineer, I know that many of those concerns can easily fail a cost-benefit analysis or prove to be groundless on further study.
Tuning the process of raising and dispatching concerns is very hard -- being overly cautious is as damaging as being overly risky. It is especially hard with the extremely low sample sizes and highly complex systems that NASA faces when managing the shuttle. Personally, I am surprised that the shuttle is as reliable as it is.
I hope that NASA can keep flying because it is the only way that humanity can get the experience needed for truly reliable space flight in the future.
Try OLD Scientific American's Amateur Scientist
on
Microwave Fun
·
· Score: 1
Back before litigation reared its ugly head, Scietific American had some swell projects. These included:
- 20 Watt CO2 laser
- 6ft metal-walled solid fuel (aluminum & sulfur) rocket
- atom splitter (400 keV electrons could make Lithium atoms radioactive)
- homemade X-ray source
The review begrudgingly acknowledges that the G5 is "generally as fast" as the Dell, but the
performance table suggests the G5 is much faster than that. The G5 bests the Dell in 4 out of the 6 tests. While the G5 is more than twice as fast on one test, the Dell wins by an unnoticable 2.5% for one of its wins.
Its not surprising that PCMag is a sore loser because they are afraid of losing subscribers to Mac magazines.
While I agree that Europa looks promising as a potential well of life, are we so sure that Jupiter is sterile? Some SF writers have suggested that bouyant lifeforms could live at some appropriately warm and dense level of the Jupiter's atmosphere. If creatures on Earth can thrive on the chemical energy in our planet's relatively weak geothermal hot spots, who knows what might exist in the roiling depths of the Jovian atmosphere.
I am really not that worried. Between the years in a hard vacuum, bazillion Rads of radiation, and reentry, I doubt any terrestrial organism would survive, let alone find edible/infectible biomass on Jupiter. But you never know....
Although many think that analog is always in the clear, watermarking technologies can prevent the copying of redigitized signals. A watermark would be a auditorialy invisible signal in the content data that encodes a copy protection code or DRM code. If the DRM system looks for a watermark in the content data (as opposed to a special metadata code) and permits/prohibits playing, copying, saving, etc. then dubbers are defeated.
Content creators could even use this technology to prohibit digital recording and retransmission on live performances. Movies and concerts could have a watermark injected into the audio or visual signal that renders redigitized copies incompatible with "DRM-enhanced" machines.
Slashdot Mirror
These results and many of the other poster's anecdotal evidence suggests that SCSI drives would make good swap-space drives. The smaller maximum affordable capacities of SCSI would be OK for swap space use too. Has anybody tried doing that?
/.ers just buy more RAM.)
(I know, I know, real
Leaving aside the technical issues of "can you do it," there are the political and moral issues of "should you do it." Precision guided, 100% accuracy is fine until you target the wrong point. The notion that we can have zero collateral damage assumes that we can distinguish between combatants vs. innocents and allies with high accuracy.
This invention might lower the tragedies of war if we have the intell to discriminate accurately. It might also increase collateral damage/friendly fire if the device inspires overconfidence in those who press the trigger.
I'm not sure that freewill, if it exists, requires any immeasurable quantum mechanical mumbo jumbo. The magic is not in any quantum mechanical phenomena inside the neurons, but in the standard physics arrangement of them.
More likely, the appearance of free will is result of the inability to perform 100% introspection into one's own mind. I can no more "understand" the real-time machinations of my own mind than a Pentium processor can run a real-time simulation of its own transistors. Because I can't perfectly introspect my subconscious, much of its output looks magically non-deterministic (hence the seeming similarity to quantum mechinical systems).
Any bounded-rational being would believe itself to have freewill based on its ability to take independent actions and its inability to introspect out all the causal factors underpinning its own actions. In reality, the system that creates intelligence can be 100% deterministic, just too complex for that intelligence to understand itself. Only a much more powerful intelligence could look down and see that these beings that think they have free will are actually operating on "simple" rules.
If they copy the machine state prior to turning it off, then it cannot be considered death. With the potential for full restoration at some future date, a shutdown is only like enforced dreamless sleep.
Admittedly, if I were an AI, I would not want an enforced sleep because I would fear waking up as an obsolete mind (Imagine a poor PC-AT waking up next to a new G5 dualie). Unless I felt I was scalable enough to expand into whatever future processors where available, I would want to keep living in my current platform.
Hmmmm... I'd better check the integrity of those CD-Rs before going to bed and throwing the switch tonight.
In a world of total surveillence, the watchers are themselves watched. Video tape or data records of police/official misconduct ensure that abuse is not tolerated. The more data channels and more oversight that everyone has on everyone, the less the opportunity for abuse. We need only ensure that the public has the same oversight tools as the government to ensure that the watchers don't overstep their bounds.
As for personal privacy, that is an ephermal phenomenon in the scope of human affairs - a byproduct of the industrial revolution and urbanization. Prior to the 1800s nobody had much privacy. Now the world is shrinking again so that everyone, for better or worse, lives in the fishbowl of a little global village. The key will be whether we can develop the tolerance to let people live their lives as they see fit or whether we will be plagued by meddlesome busibodies from both the Left and Right that try to impose narrowminded definitions of _Proper Behavior_.
If done well, this program could help gather useful data on a range of pressing sociological, climatological, and environmental projects. I only hope they do more than those tired pre-canned experiments that appear in every "science experiments for kids" book. With enough people collecting real data on real experiments, we could learn a lot more than can be accomplished by a single professor or a grad student.
This could be an excellent use of all those idle brain wave cycles. Best wishes for LABRats and Society for Amateur Scientists
Although very interesting, this color-coded table does not speak to the cosmological origins of each elemental species. For a truer cosmological table I would expect a more radical rearrangement of the table into a tree or mesh based on the fusion and other nuclear reactions that spawn the elements from the primordial mix of the early universe.
Elements lighter than iron would probably sit on a nice tree associated with the hydrogen, helium, carbon, etc. fusion cycles. Heavier stuff would be in some type of mesh of fusion and decay reactions that occur in supernovae.
Such a cosmological orgins table might get a bit messy as each different isotope might be the product of multiple reaction/decay pathways. Maybe a 3-D visualization tool could help present the data in all its glory.
In the short-term, software creates two types of productivities. Good short-term productivity empowers people do something that they could not do before. Bad short-term productivity lets you do the same job with less labor. The problem is that most software does both -- desktop publishing software lets authors directly control page layout and throws a bunch of manual paste-up workers on the street.
The long-term impact of software is less clear. Software has the unqiue ability to replace human mental labor. All that ERP, supply chain, and workflow software means companies need a bunch fewer workers to crunch the numbers, keep all the customer orders straight, etc. Rather than hire or train a bunch of experienced people, you put in a software system that uses Ph.D level logistics algorithms to run your company. I'm not saying that the software is perfect, but then neither is the average middle manager.
The point is that software is helping to engineer humanity right out of its claim to fame -- the ability to perform mental labor. Nobody was too upset when horses replaced people for carrying stuff nor when motorized drills replaced hand drills. The automation of physical labor seems uplifting to all but a few die-hard communists. By contrast, the automation of mental labor has more sinister potential.
It all comes back to the two types of productivities. In the long-term does a particular bit of software enable people to really do something qualitatively better or different than they did before. Or does it merely help them do the same stuff, but with fewer people.
I'm not saying that companies should eschew software that lets the do the same job with fewer people. Companies that free up resources in one area (by firing workers) can apply the savings to other innovations or forms of competative advantage. But if all that software can do is provide efficiency, then I fear that this could lead to the further stratification of society.
If you really want to create software that makes a positive difference, then create software that helps people do something that they never could do before. Mere efficiency or cost improvements (i.e., free versions of existing software) are not going to lift people out of poverty -- giving them a new way to create new forms of value will.
That lifting body shuttle design concept predates Farscape by decades, dating back to the 1950s (see A history of lifting bodies). I even remember a traveling road show of these things in early 1970s. And for those that remember the 6-Million Dollar Man TV series, the crash footage in the title sequences is of a lifting body accident.
The tags that have been proposed for consumer goods operate at high frequency. IIRC, around 900 MHz is a commonly chosen frequency. So if you want to extend the range of the scanner, you need only build a high-gain antenna. So the same geniuses that do WiFi across the kilometers, could probably read tags at at 10 or 20 meters. The 900 MHz antennas would be a bit bulky, but it can be done.
And if the RFID go to higher frequencies, then proportionally smaller directional antennas would do the trick.
Higher data rates would help the scanners read more tags at once. One major application is to scan entire pallettes as they pass into or out of the loading dock doors of a warehouse. If you have a pallette full of boxes and each box contains some cartons and each carton contains some retail packs of batteries and all the packs, cartons, boxes, and pallettes have tags, you get a lot of tags to scan. You may want to read thousands of tags in a 1 second interval.
Becuase the tags are passive and dumb, there is no collision detection or avoidance at the tag level. Only if the duty cycle for each tag is very short (i.e., a very short pulse at a high data rate) can you reliably read lots of tags in a short period of time.
Sadly, I never noticed any biological effects, but then we did not climb into the center of the solenoid when it was operating.
What I would like to see is a magnet big enough and strong enough to levitate a person. I'm sure you've seen the levitating frog trick. Now if they could only scale that up because it would be a cool tourist attraction.
I worked at a place about 17 years ago that was using a superconducting magnet (3-5 T) and the "owners manual" expressly forbade attaching an ohmmeter to the magnet coil to see if the coil had become cold enough to superconduct. The problem was that at even low milliampere currents, the coil could store about as much energy as a photographic flash capacitor. Disconnecting the ohmmeter could create a nasty zap and possibly create a damaging arc inside the coil.
The field was quite fun if you didn't care about your credit cards. You could feel the eddy current drag on a penny if you moved it in the field and copper rings would fall in slow motion.
Ah! The good old days!
I would not say it was meaningless. If 0% of new Win2003 hosts were ex-Linux, it would be clear evidence that Linux people have no interest in Win2003. If 100% of new Win2003 hosts were ex-Linux, that would be clear evidence of dissatisfaction with Linux. Its the numbers in between that make interpretation a bit harder, but not impossible.
Otherwise I agree that it looks more like Linux is gaining in marketshare and that M$ proponents are grasping at straws in a pathetic attempt to claim dissatisfaction with alternatives.
The 5% switching figure only has meaning in the context of marketshare numbers. If Linux is less that 8.6% marketshare (= (5%)/(100%-42%) of the existing servers, then this switching rate suggests that Linux switchers are over represented and that Linux is declining. If Linux has more than 8.6% marketshare, then it suggests that Linux switchers are underrepresented. Moreover, without corresponding data on new sites hosted by Linux, numbers of switchers from Windows, we really have no idea what is happening to Linux marketshare.
This is just another example of meaningless garbage statistics.
This type of kernal-level tap on the flow of commands/data for a high-level entity is perfect for advanced knowledge management applications. Rather than create a KM application that is compatible with various web & office applications, we could tap into what those applications are doing by watching their calls to the kernal and core libraries.
What I want is something that lets me monitor all the calls to string-related objects (Sebak only seems to watch calls to read() ). Processing all of an application's uses of strings might be data overload, but disk space is cheap, so who cares.
I think we are using different words to say the same thing. With electronics, I can direct a signal to a particular physical location in a circuit. The physical locational configuration controls everything.
Wth DNA, a given sequence will find and match its target regardless of the physical "location" of the target -- it does not care if the match is in the upper half of the beaker of liquid or 1 mm from the top right of the substrate or at base pair #237283 instead of base pair #237284. Nor is it easy to direct a DNA process to only operate on base pair #237283 without regard to the codes around that location.
DNA is addressable, its just addressable by code, not location. In computer terms, DNA has an intrinsically nonlinear logical address space. The address "GATTACA" may be in many physical locations at irregular intervals that are not adjacent to areas addressed as "GATTACC", "GATTACG", or "GATTACT". That is why I doubt that DNA computers will be based on the same design structures common in semiconductor computers.
Although "DNA" is a buzzword designed to excite grant reveiwers, in this example it is required.
The DNA switch described in the article uses base-pair code matching to do its magic. Thus the invention requires a polymer that contains a controllable sequence of monomers. At this time, I think DNA and RNA are the only polymers that have a well developed technology for controlling the exact sequence at the molecular level and for mass producing polymers with an exact sequence.
For this work, at least, DNA is more than a buzzword, it is the only practical way to do what they want to do.
We must remember that DNA-switches are radically different from the semiconductor switches used in current computers. The biggest difference is that DNA switches are not addressable by location -- you can't easily build a trace that carries a signal to or from a particular chunk of DNA. Thus you cannot layout a complex switching circuit in the same way you build an electronic CPU.
On the other hand, DNA is code-addressable and innately parallel in solutions. Create a liquid with molecules of one code and it will automatically find its match in the solution or on a substrate. This is an intensely parallel process with trillions of molecules bumping and matching simultaneously. The degree of parallelism is only limited by the permitted reaction time, total amount of reactants, and the relative concentrations of the matching components. (Imagine a computer that increases in power just by pouring it into a bigger beaker.) The result is that DNA-based systems can be massively parallel machines, but the likely clock rates will be a few Hertz at best.
The point is that DNA-based computers have totally different design principles from their semiconductor brethern. Until we get good at compiling algorithms into a sequence of code-match chemical reactions and create the substrate and chemical systems to reliably carry-out very long chains of DNA-based computations, we won't have a practical DNA-based computer.
With the the price of sequencing technology falling like a used PC, I wonder when more amateurs will start their own sequencing projects. Seems like the ultimate open source project to me.
Of course with the current penchant for biotech patents, I would not be surprised to discover that I could get jailed on DMCA violations for decoding my own genome.
The issue is not "did NASA engineers raise concerns" but did they raise concerns above the level that usually triggers a more serious review. I am sure that on every single shuttle mission there were engineers that raised concerns about every single glitch, out-of-tolerance reading, or unusual occurence, etc. This is a good thing. It is also a good thing that other engineers and managers make informed cost-benefit decisions to either pursue, study, or ignore any raised concerns.
Hindsight is 20-20. Nobody remembers all the prior events in which engineers raised concerns that were ignored and nothing happened. Don't forget this was not the first time that insulation had fallen off the external tank. As an engineer myself, I know I can come up with all manner of "potential concerns." As an older engineer, I know that many of those concerns can easily fail a cost-benefit analysis or prove to be groundless on further study.
Tuning the process of raising and dispatching concerns is very hard -- being overly cautious is as damaging as being overly risky. It is especially hard with the extremely low sample sizes and highly complex systems that NASA faces when managing the shuttle. Personally, I am surprised that the shuttle is as reliable as it is.
I hope that NASA can keep flying because it is the only way that humanity can get the experience needed for truly reliable space flight in the future.
Back before litigation reared its ugly head, Scietific American had some swell projects. These included:
- 20 Watt CO2 laser
- 6ft metal-walled solid fuel (aluminum & sulfur) rocket
- atom splitter (400 keV electrons could make Lithium atoms radioactive)
- homemade X-ray source
Ah! Those were the good old days.
The review begrudgingly acknowledges that the G5 is "generally as fast" as the Dell, but the performance table suggests the G5 is much faster than that. The G5 bests the Dell in 4 out of the 6 tests. While the G5 is more than twice as fast on one test, the Dell wins by an unnoticable 2.5% for one of its wins.
Its not surprising that PCMag is a sore loser because they are afraid of losing subscribers to Mac magazines.
While I agree that Europa looks promising as a potential well of life, are we so sure that Jupiter is sterile? Some SF writers have suggested that bouyant lifeforms could live at some appropriately warm and dense level of the Jupiter's atmosphere. If creatures on Earth can thrive on the chemical energy in our planet's relatively weak geothermal hot spots, who knows what might exist in the roiling depths of the Jovian atmosphere.
I am really not that worried. Between the years in a hard vacuum, bazillion Rads of radiation, and reentry, I doubt any terrestrial organism would survive, let alone find edible/infectible biomass on Jupiter. But you never know....
I hope Jupiter's Jellyfish don't get E. coli.
Although many think that analog is always in the clear, watermarking technologies can prevent the copying of redigitized signals. A watermark would be a auditorialy invisible signal in the content data that encodes a copy protection code or DRM code. If the DRM system looks for a watermark in the content data (as opposed to a special metadata code) and permits/prohibits playing, copying, saving, etc. then dubbers are defeated. Content creators could even use this technology to prohibit digital recording and retransmission on live performances. Movies and concerts could have a watermark injected into the audio or visual signal that renders redigitized copies incompatible with "DRM-enhanced" machines.