> 2000 BC -- First text indexes > 200 BC -- Cataloged library (at Alexandria) > 1000 AD -- Collaborative encyclopedia > 1590 -- Controlled experiment (Roger Bacon) > 1600 -- Laboratory > 1609 -- Telescopes and microscopes > 1650 -- Society of experts > 1665 -- Repeatability (Robert Boyle) > 1665 -- Scholarly journals > 1675 -- Peer review > 1687 -- Hypothesis/prediction (Isaac Newton) > 1920 -- Falsifiability (Karl Popper) > 1926 -- Randomized design (Ronald Fisher) > 1937 -- Controlled placebo > 1946 -- Computer simulation > 1950 -- Double blind experiment > 1962 -- Study of scientific method (Thomas Kuhn) > > Projecting forward, Kelly had five things to say about the next 100 years in > science... > > 1) There will be more change in the next 50 years of science than in the > last 400 years.
All the advancements he lists are in one small area. It is believable that in the field of indexing information, there will be more advancements in the next 50 years than there were in the last 400. But...Indexing information is not all that science is. We will NOT have more scientific advancements in the next 50 years than we had in the last 400! We WILL change the way we live by advancements in a few small areas.
For example, all nuclear power plants use steam turbines (fancy, high-RPM steam engines.) These same turbines are used for thermal-solar power generation. How much advancement does he think will occur in the field of steam engines? During the early 1800's the world adopted rail roads...and the amount of rail road track doubled every year for several decades. This led to the people being able to travel to a range of destinations that were increasing by orders of magnitude. It was an imporant step, but did not sum up an entire civilization. Medicine still had something to say about how well people lived. (Though steam locomotives brought vaccines and antibiotics to towns that would have never had them otherwise.) My point is: not even railroads changed the entire civilization. They did change the way people traveled.
How many advancements will be made in the field of electricity? We have DC, AC, and 3-phase power. How far will we push these basic principles? During the 1800's the world changed - based on the work of a few gneiuses. We are not making massive breakthroughs on the scale of Tesla's alternating current on a daily basis, but we are doing with our computers the same thing he did with his AC power.
Finally, one thing that might actually cause massive increases in scientific knowledge will be the rising crop of hundreds of millions of technical people in countries such as India and China. Every tinkerer who can publish his/her results, and who reads the publications in his/her field adds to the base of knowledge. (Side Node: We need to return the USA to a technically led society, instead of one led by accountants.)
I wrote a program in 1996 to help the guys at fed.gov snoop out kiddie porn.
I simply mapped every image to see what percentage of the pixles were what colors, and them compared that to common skin tones. My apporach mostly only worked for white people (think about it - the reasons should be obvious) but it found porn images regardless of the title or contents of the page around them.
Then, to find out which images were kiddie porn, I searched the pages for references to children. (Acutally, the easier text-search came first for efficiency.)
Voilla! Instant results, but the FBI boys didn't care. I think they would rather keep their jobs surfing the web looking for illegal porn than to have a PC do that while they file forms.
The problem is not that new technologies can not be invented....
It's not even that there are not a few of us who live outside the law, and invent despite the IP regime that claims anyone showing an image in the Internet is violating a US patent (as per a recent/. story)
It's not that we can not get out inventions, code, etc. distributed - anyone can ignore DMCA notices by going to foreign web hosting and domain name registration. (DMCA notices are notices under the Digital Millinenum Copyright Act that you have invented something new, that makes the BSA / RIAA / MPAA organized crime family look bad. Think of it as a death threat.)
It's that people like him still use IANA name servers, and don't see the real Internet.
Activision released "Test Drive 2: The Duel" in the early 90's, and I begged (as a child) for the game for my birthday. It was expensive enough that that was all I got. It still does not work to this day, and still sets on a shelf to remind me of the hazards of commerical software.
I will not buy software. It comes with no warranty. Would you buy a car from some guy who made you sign a 15 page contract every time you put the key in the ignition? The contract says that he can not be sued for fraud, deceptive trade practices, or any other scam. It says that he can watch everyplace you drive in your car. It also says that he can take the car back without refunding your money at any time.
Speaking as a Type I Diabetic, why do we care? Everyone knows that totempotent and polypotent (embryonic) stem cells are a death sentence to anyone treated with them. We know that no useful cures can come from something that kills everyone it's given to.
Stop the PC crap and concentrate on adult stem cells for a change.
> Wait!!! We'd die off, or we'd have to go back to living the way we did before we had all this > (plastic) technology (or do you posit we've depleted enough natural resources to make that > untenable (or are you referring to geeks as the "we" who'd die off))?
Before modern agriculture, the world could NOT have supported 6 billion people. If all the food production stopped due to the machines breaking down, we (humans) would die in mass. We can NOT sustain even 1 billion people without serious technology. In the 1960's, the great fear was that the world's population would outstrip the food supply when we had 5 billion people. They said it was impossible to feed 5 billion. Then, genetic engineering became common and GMOs replaced heirloom varieties...instant food boom. We've never had this little hunger (as a percentage) in the history of Man. We can support 10 billion on our current level of farming.
At one point, the USA kept 3 years of food for every human in our country - today, it's a matter of months. That means a disruption in the food supply would be BAD. When people are starving, and every gadget we depend on has gone bye-bye, things would get VERY nasty.
People would be killing each other, burning buildings, etc. A single fire would easily turn into a fire storm with no fire department. Remember, fire fighting equipment does not work without plastics.
The only hope for an individual (and even this is a long shot) would be to: (1) Hide and live on previously prepared supplies until the die-off was over. This would take months if everyone shared equally, but would more likely take decades as people killed each other for supplies, and even turned cannibalistic. See S M Stirling's "Dies the Fire" for a SMALL taste of what would happen. At least in that book, the compound bows still worked. He he he...the cams would be eaten by bacteria in this case. (2) Work the Earth (farm) while living on previously prepared supplies until a harvest came in. Because of the timing, you would have to wait until the September following the February following the end of the die off. That could easily be 2 years post-collapse. All this time, the handles on my tools have decayed; the bushings and electronics are fried, etc. (3) Learn to live without modern technology. Rebuild.
You would have a different population (in physical characteristics, and knowledge.) Well fed modern people are bigger than, but not as strong as our ancient counterparts. Evolution would take an interesting turn.
We would also have a different base of raw materials to deal with.
To answer your question about raw materials...I'm not too keen on digging a mine and pulling out ore to smelt if I've got a perfectly good piece of sheet metal sitting in front of my (from a car, for example.) Eventually, we'd salvage the materials that kept 6 billion people going, and use them for the few million that would be left. Metal does not disappear, even when melted in a fire storm. It would be MUCH easier to access in a twisted pile of rubble than it was originally 100 feet underground. If the fecal matter well and truly enters the ventilation, I would love to own a scrap yard or city dump a few years later. Scavenging for parts, or the material to make parts, would be lucrative.
I might be the only one who remembers Larry Niven's "Ring World" series - SciFi about a ring that completely circles a star, and that provides many millions of times the living area of Earth. The Ring World's civilization was destroyed through the introduction of a plastic-eating microorganism. (The things ate the superconductors.)
I've long worried that some entrepreneurial little microbe would learn to efficiently eat modern plastics, and spread. My truck wouldn't run without plastics. My computer would not work. My carry pistol's polymer frame would be eaten (no that it would help vs. microbes.) Food packaging would be targeted. All that storable food in 5 gallon buckets and Food Saver bags would be exposed. The handle would fall off my pocket knife! My cheap, optical microscope that I put aside for post-nuclear-war diagnosis would be trashed. Most lab equipment is plastic, and would be eaten. Plastic pipes and valves would die, causing problems. We would not have the technology left to beat the little buggers, and we'd die off.
Whatever you do, don't do what my IT dept did...they had used a 100MB quota on mail for years, but made many exceptions. One day, without notice, they got rid of the exceptions. Outlook on the web didn't give me any warning that I saw, but I could not send or receive eMail.
I sent in an eMail saying that I would be out sick (I'm a college professor - if I blow off a few classes, people notice) and Outlook said it sent...it didn't. So, I get this call at 8:30am asking where I am. After trying to get the moron (my boss) to check her eMail for 10 minutes, I crawl out of bed and take a closer look at my eMail system.
4 hours later, the eMail started working again. All the assignments my students tried to hand in for 48 hours were permanently lost.
The morals of this story are: (1) Give a BIG WARNING if the account is near or over it's limit. (2) Give a constant status bar showing how close every user is to his/her limit. I should not have had to call IT to find out what my quota was. (3) Never use Outlook.
Don't worry about the music industry...They're connected with the Mob. Either the AG will find them innocent, and through the constitutional provision against re-trial, prevent any future actions...or he will be assasinated by the RIAA / MPAA / BSA thugs.
As a college professor, I routinely assign my networking & security students to probe (e.g., prot scan) systems to see what they will get.
The real story here is the hypocracy. The professor assigns his students to go probe other peoples' systems, while the school has a policy against people probing their systems.
This piece tells you that if you don't read the license agreement, you might get stung. For example, if you pull code from a GPLed program, you may have to state that on your product.
If the author were not a lying weasel, he would admit that proprietary software has the same problems. For example, did you know that on many Microsoft license agreements, they used to put that you could not use that software to compete with Microsoft? Unilt the anti-trust litigation started, you could not use MS Windows to test a competitor to MS office.
The US Congress is given the obligation to pretect the rights of authors and inventors. They have failed at this point, and have no explicit power in the US Constitution to maintain the current patent / IP system. Actually, the 10th amendment prohibits them from maintaining this patent regime.
It's time to shut it down, but we all know that will never happen peacefully.
If I were the Commander in Chief of a nuclear power (e.g., President of the United States,) I'd give those damn Japs an ultimatum: Restore basic human rights (to commerce) or we nuke your asses (again.)
Of course, that would be after we cleaned up what was left of the radioactive remains of D.C., the RIAA, MPAA, and BSA.
You know, when you spend 8 hours looking and pick the perfect job, apply, get an interview, and are totally confused becuase they don't know what job you're talking about. They just pulled you to put you in a pool of candidates - the job they advertised never existed.
That is just as dishonest as my getting to a job interview and explaining that the college degrees I listed don't really exist - I just wanted to build a pool of potential employers. That's why I don't deal with certain companies (IBM, Motorola) - they lied to me 10 years ago, and I remember people who lie on their job applications.
I'm sitting here laughing at every one of you...read Sun Tzu...the copyirght war is over...you lost...and you're still debating how to reason with them....he he he he....pffttt....halarious!
You've got some interesting points, though I think you missed 3 fundamental concepts (see the paragraph below.) I dont' see references to core memory very often. What's your background?
I disagree on several points: (1) the time it takes for memory to loose it's data has nothing to do with the speed of reading / writing that memory. (2) We will do anything that makes economic sense. You seem to think that some rules are hard-and-fast. There are no hard-and-fast rules except performance and cost. (3) You seem to have missed the memory pyramid.
> I was talking strictly non-volatile. If you want to > talk about volatile RAM, like DRAM, where you are going > to refresh the contents every few nanoseconds, > degradation of contents - provided it is slower than > your refresh rate - is completely unimportant.
My point was that we have used memories where the contents degraded, and we ahve used the very succesfully. We just need to refresh the contents. If I could get 1,000 times the storage, but had to have a powered connection to it, I would gladly take the leap and spend the bucks on a BIG UPS.
> In fact, fast degradation is a GOOD thing for volatile > RAM. It means you can change the contents extremely > quickly. Completely the opposite requirement of > non-volatile storage, where retention is the key > consideration.
Ummm....No
Non-volatile storage media do not have to wait until the data decays to change it - they can rewrite the data at any time. Having to refresh the data is just a PITA, but one that we can live with if it gives us enough extra performance in some other area (e.g., speed, capcity, cost savings, etc.)
> Volatile RAM also has to remain powered at all times. > Again, this is a GOOD thing. Old-fashioned "core" > memories could retain data for a hundred years plus, > which made rebooting somewhat of a lengthy process. You > would not, for example, build a CPU where the internal > registers used "core" memory or any other form of > non-volatile memory. At least, not unless you were very > drunk.
Ummm....No
If it's slow to rewrite the memory, that's different from the refresh rate. The refresh rate is how often you have to have a special chip update the memory.
> On the other hand, if you wanted to replace a hard > drive, DRAM is next to useless.
> Sure, you can have a stack of NiCad batteries in > parallel to keep the memory going, provided you > remember to replace/recharge them as needed.
For enough performance (speed, capacity, low cost, etc.) I'll build in the batteries. Given the cost / size / life of cell phone batteries and sealed lead acid (SLA) batteries, it would not be difficult to power a one-watt system through days of power outtage.
> Wouldn't help you, though, if you had a short.
Not much will help your PC if it's shorted out.
> For mass storage, where the contents absolutely needs > to be retained for a long period of time, you > absolutely do NOT want to use DRAM.
Again, it's an economic decision. If I can get 1,000,000 x more capacity, I'll think about it.
> When you get right down to it, though, if the CPU had a > gig or four of register-speed RAM on board, you > wouldn't really want DRAM for anything. Main memory is > only useful because it's substantially cheaper than > register-speed RAM and it wouldn't be trivial to build > a processor big enough to hold that much memory. Main > memory, for a long time now, has been treated as little > more than a cache for virtual memory, where all the > real storage is on disk, and as a dumping ground for > what memory the processor does have. If CPUs held > enough, and/or mass storage was fast enough, main > memory would go the way of the dodo. It's a relic that > persists only because the alternatives are too lim
> I would also question the usefulness of the proposed > system. I am not confident you could change the spin of > anything at that scale for any useful length of time. > Too many variables and too much "noise". If you want to > change a property, it needs to be a property that can > "latch" in whatever state you place it and have no > trivial way of unlatching itself without significant > input. Otherwise, your data will degrade very rapidly.
I completely agree - DRAM is absurd. We should have never tried it because it degrades and has to be refreshed constantly. SRAM makes a lot more sense, but not as much sense as FLASH for our RAM.
Of course, DRAM is orders of magnitude cheaper at the same performance level, but that never bothered me. I go with what makes sense to me at the moment.
Every time you buy form these bastards, you support their efforts to destroy our computers, but installing their big-brother crap on them. I have a God given right to do whatever I want on my PC. I will not allow them to install their DRM crap and root kits on my PC.
We have 2 options:
(1) Grab an AK and walk into the stock holders meeting for one of the RIAA / MPAA / BSA member companies, and give our lives defending our right to play with source code.
(2) Shoot them in the wallet by not buying from them, and not associating with anyone who does. Simply put, if my friend puts an RIAA approved CD in, I demand (s)he stop the vehicle, then I walk.
Lock and load, one way or another. We have to shoot every one of the mother fuckers, one at a time.
>> The issue is...one turbine generates 10% of the power for an island...and then it gets rusty. >> He he he....maintenance is a b!tch, then she gets PMS. Imagine loosing 10% of your generation >> capacity instantly.
> Wow - power plants require maintenance have downtime....
They all have maintenance requirements. However, a single plant being 10% of your capacity makes taking it down for maintenance a costly endeavor. I would recommend several, smaller plants so that they can be taken down one at a time. Think of it this way: if you have a fleet of vehicles, you can repair one at a time and not feel it. If you only have one vehicle (like I do) then when it needs a new clutch (like mine did this week) it's a big deal to get around while it's in the shop. Unfortunately, you cann't go to Avis rent-a-power-plant and take care of your nation's power grid for a few weeks.
>> Most waves only travel along the surface...I wonder what a good, strong >> underwater (tsunami-type) wave would do to it?
> Nothing. > > Seriously, absolutely no effect.
> It's not "most waves only travel along the surface" - ALL waves travel through their medium. > Waves aren't currents, they're transmitted motion. Use this page's Java applet [udel.edu] to > see the effect in the water for yourself, keeping in mind Tsunami are long period waves > (figure 30 minutes), typically under a meter high, and the turbines are 75-200 meters deep.
> Apparently someone skipped gradeschool science. Or has never been to a beach, noticed the > lack of devastation on the sand as a non-breaking waves passes over...
I'm not an expert on waves, but I do recall a Discovery Channel program on waves. Most waves do nothing to the sea floor, (thus the lack of dsruption to the sand) but a few do disturb it. It has to do with the kind of wave. There are waves that throw multi-story-tall boulders around on the sea floor, hundreds of feet down. I think I recall those being the same waves that cause tsunamis.
My point was that that turbine has a LOT of area to act on, and a rare wave that does move boulders hitting it from the side could do some interesting things.
> Now, about your publicly calling other folks "moron"...
I'm calling anyone who wants to stop the building of a turbine because it would "alter" ocean currents a moron. Islands much larger than the turbine don't stop the currents.
The issue is not hurting fish! Velocity has to be relative to something. From the fish's perspective, the turbine's velocity is relative to the ocean's water. A 150 foot long turbine will spin close to the speed of the ocean water. It will have less velocity vs. ocean water than will a coral reef!
The issue is not stopping the currents! An island in this location would scarcely be noticed, and the turbine will do MUCH less than an island to stop the ocean's flow!
At least it's far enough down to not get destroyed by the first tropical storm. OTOH, anything poking near the surface will get smashed regularly.
The issue is...one turbine generates 10% of the power for an island...and then it gets rusty. He he he....maintenance is a b!tch, then she gets PMS. Imagine loosing 10% of your generation capacity instantly.
Most waves only travel along the surface...I wonder what a good, strong underwater (tsunami-type) wave would do to it?
> LWATCDR writes "The US government is upset over > restrictions of freedom of speech on the Internet.
WTF?!?!? The authors of the DMCA are worried about free speech on the Internet? WTF?!?!? My BS meter broke, and the needle shot into the wall across the room.
If anyone here thinks my statement is wrong - then sort through all the cases of human trials of stem cell therapies, and find me ONE patient who was alive and did not have cancer 18 months after a treatment with embryonic stem cells. I've got $20 (paid by PayPal) for the first person to post a link to a case study with such an example.
At one time, saying the Earth was round could have been claimed to be a "Bold Statement" but not today. Ditto for the fact that everyone treated with embryonic stem cells receives a death sentence. If you don't know this, you must be a goat-fucking backward Neanderthal.
Let me guess...you believe that in the beginning, there was nothing...and then it exploded. You believe this without being able to recreate it in a lab, and without the theory being consistent with itself. You believe this, despite it being 20 years out of date in the scientific community. And you believe that anyone who (like me) refuses to accept an explanation if you cannot recreate the chain of events in a lab must be ignorant of "science" - how am I doing?
I guess that you cannot differentiate between the fact that when I drop something in my lab it will very likely fall down (we call this gravity) and the total fantasy that we "know" that the "law of gravity" applies everywhere in the universe. We have not tested this on even 0.1% of the planets in our own galaxy. WTF makes someone think it will hold in another galaxy? If you have not been there to test it, don't believe it.
Slashdot Mirror
"[DRMs] inconvenience legitimate users" is the understatement of the century.
DRMs, Big Software's legal departments, the BSA, rediculous EULAs, and absurd copy protection make commerical, closed-source software unusable.
That's why I made the jump to Knoppix Linux.
That's why we are installing the Gnu Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) on 200+ computers instead of Adobe's Photoshop.
Andy Out!
> 2000 BC -- First text indexes
> 200 BC -- Cataloged library (at Alexandria)
> 1000 AD -- Collaborative encyclopedia
> 1590 -- Controlled experiment (Roger Bacon)
> 1600 -- Laboratory
> 1609 -- Telescopes and microscopes
> 1650 -- Society of experts
> 1665 -- Repeatability (Robert Boyle)
> 1665 -- Scholarly journals
> 1675 -- Peer review
> 1687 -- Hypothesis/prediction (Isaac Newton)
> 1920 -- Falsifiability (Karl Popper)
> 1926 -- Randomized design (Ronald Fisher)
> 1937 -- Controlled placebo
> 1946 -- Computer simulation
> 1950 -- Double blind experiment
> 1962 -- Study of scientific method (Thomas Kuhn)
>
> Projecting forward, Kelly had five things to say about the next 100 years in
> science...
>
> 1) There will be more change in the next 50 years of science than in the
> last 400 years.
All the advancements he lists are in one small area. It is believable that in the field of indexing information, there will be more advancements in the next 50 years than there were in the last 400. But...Indexing information is not all that science is. We will NOT have more scientific advancements in the next 50 years than we had in the last 400! We WILL change the way we live by advancements in a few small areas.
For example, all nuclear power plants use steam turbines (fancy, high-RPM steam engines.) These same turbines are used for thermal-solar power generation. How much advancement does he think will occur in the field of steam engines? During the early 1800's the world adopted rail roads...and the amount of rail road track doubled every year for several decades. This led to the people being able to travel to a range of destinations that were increasing by orders of magnitude. It was an imporant step, but did not sum up an entire civilization. Medicine still had something to say about how well people lived. (Though steam locomotives brought vaccines and antibiotics to towns that would have never had them otherwise.) My point is: not even railroads changed the entire civilization. They did change the way people traveled.
How many advancements will be made in the field of electricity? We have DC, AC, and 3-phase power. How far will we push these basic principles? During the 1800's the world changed - based on the work of a few gneiuses. We are not making massive breakthroughs on the scale of Tesla's alternating current on a daily basis, but we are doing with our computers the same thing he did with his AC power.
Finally, one thing that might actually cause massive increases in scientific knowledge will be the rising crop of hundreds of millions of technical people in countries such as India and China. Every tinkerer who can publish his/her results, and who reads the publications in his/her field adds to the base of knowledge. (Side Node: We need to return the USA to a technically led society, instead of one led by accountants.)
Andy Out!
Oh come one...This is NOT the first.
I wrote a program in 1996 to help the guys at fed.gov snoop out kiddie porn.
I simply mapped every image to see what percentage of the pixles were what colors, and them compared that to common skin tones. My apporach mostly only worked for white people (think about it - the reasons should be obvious) but it found porn images regardless of the title or contents of the page around them.
Then, to find out which images were kiddie porn, I searched the pages for references to children. (Acutally, the easier text-search came first for efficiency.)
Voilla! Instant results, but the FBI boys didn't care. I think they would rather keep their jobs surfing the web looking for illegal porn than to have a PC do that while they file forms.
Andy Out@
The real story is that 95% of the "pirated" copies are totally legit.
However, they are being sold below the full retail price, which violates Microsoft's policy on price fixing.
Andy Out!
The problem is not that new technologies can not be invented....
/. story)
It's not even that there are not a few of us who live outside the law, and invent despite the IP regime that claims anyone showing an image in the Internet is violating a US patent (as per a recent
It's not that we can not get out inventions, code, etc. distributed - anyone can ignore DMCA notices by going to foreign web hosting and domain name registration. (DMCA notices are notices under the Digital Millinenum Copyright Act that you have invented something new, that makes the BSA / RIAA / MPAA organized crime family look bad. Think of it as a death threat.)
It's that people like him still use IANA name servers, and don't see the real Internet.
Andy Out!
Activision released "Test Drive 2: The Duel" in the early 90's, and I begged (as a child) for the game for my birthday. It was expensive enough that that was all I got. It still does not work to this day, and still sets on a shelf to remind me of the hazards of commerical software.
I will not buy software. It comes with no warranty. Would you buy a car from some guy who made you sign a 15 page contract every time you put the key in the ignition? The contract says that he can not be sued for fraud, deceptive trade practices, or any other scam. It says that he can watch everyplace you drive in your car. It also says that he can take the car back without refunding your money at any time.
Andy Out!
Speaking as a Type I Diabetic, why do we care? Everyone knows that totempotent and polypotent (embryonic) stem cells are a death sentence to anyone treated with them. We know that no useful cures can come from something that kills everyone it's given to.
Stop the PC crap and concentrate on adult stem cells for a change.
Andy Out!
> Wait!!! We'd die off, or we'd have to go back to living the way we did before we had all this
> (plastic) technology (or do you posit we've depleted enough natural resources to make that
> untenable (or are you referring to geeks as the "we" who'd die off))?
Before modern agriculture, the world could NOT have supported 6 billion people. If all the food production stopped due to the machines breaking down, we (humans) would die in mass. We can NOT sustain even 1 billion people without serious technology. In the 1960's, the great fear was that the world's population would outstrip the food supply when we had 5 billion people. They said it was impossible to feed 5 billion. Then, genetic engineering became common and GMOs replaced heirloom varieties...instant food boom. We've never had this little hunger (as a percentage) in the history of Man. We can support 10 billion on our current level of farming.
At one point, the USA kept 3 years of food for every human in our country - today, it's a matter of months. That means a disruption in the food supply would be BAD. When people are starving, and every gadget we depend on has gone bye-bye, things would get VERY nasty.
People would be killing each other, burning buildings, etc. A single fire would easily turn into a fire storm with no fire department. Remember, fire fighting equipment does not work without plastics.
The only hope for an individual (and even this is a long shot) would be to:
(1) Hide and live on previously prepared supplies until the die-off was over. This would take months if everyone shared equally, but would more likely take decades as people killed each other for supplies, and even turned cannibalistic. See S M Stirling's "Dies the Fire" for a SMALL taste of what would happen. At least in that book, the compound bows still worked. He he he...the cams would be eaten by bacteria in this case.
(2) Work the Earth (farm) while living on previously prepared supplies until a harvest came in. Because of the timing, you would have to wait until the September following the February following the end of the die off. That could easily be 2 years post-collapse. All this time, the handles on my tools have decayed; the bushings and electronics are fried, etc.
(3) Learn to live without modern technology. Rebuild.
You would have a different population (in physical characteristics, and knowledge.) Well fed modern people are bigger than, but not as strong as our ancient counterparts. Evolution would take an interesting turn.
We would also have a different base of raw materials to deal with.
To answer your question about raw materials...I'm not too keen on digging a mine and pulling out ore to smelt if I've got a perfectly good piece of sheet metal sitting in front of my (from a car, for example.) Eventually, we'd salvage the materials that kept 6 billion people going, and use them for the few million that would be left. Metal does not disappear, even when melted in a fire storm. It would be MUCH easier to access in a twisted pile of rubble than it was originally 100 feet underground. If the fecal matter well and truly enters the ventilation, I would love to own a scrap yard or city dump a few years later. Scavenging for parts, or the material to make parts, would be lucrative.
Andy Out!
I might be the only one who remembers Larry Niven's "Ring World" series - SciFi about a ring that completely circles a star, and that provides many millions of times the living area of Earth. The Ring World's civilization was destroyed through the introduction of a plastic-eating microorganism. (The things ate the superconductors.)
I've long worried that some entrepreneurial little microbe would learn to efficiently eat modern plastics, and spread. My truck wouldn't run without plastics. My computer would not work. My carry pistol's polymer frame would be eaten (no that it would help vs. microbes.) Food packaging would be targeted. All that storable food in 5 gallon buckets and Food Saver bags would be exposed. The handle would fall off my pocket knife! My cheap, optical microscope that I put aside for post-nuclear-war diagnosis would be trashed. Most lab equipment is plastic, and would be eaten. Plastic pipes and valves would die, causing problems. We would not have the technology left to beat the little buggers, and we'd die off.
Andy Out!
Whatever you do, don't do what my IT dept did...they had used a 100MB quota on mail for years, but made many exceptions. One day, without notice, they got rid of the exceptions. Outlook on the web didn't give me any warning that I saw, but I could not send or receive eMail.
I sent in an eMail saying that I would be out sick (I'm a college professor - if I blow off a few classes, people notice) and Outlook said it sent...it didn't. So, I get this call at 8:30am asking where I am. After trying to get the moron (my boss) to check her eMail for 10 minutes, I crawl out of bed and take a closer look at my eMail system.
4 hours later, the eMail started working again. All the assignments my students tried to hand in for 48 hours were permanently lost.
The morals of this story are:
(1) Give a BIG WARNING if the account is near or over it's limit.
(2) Give a constant status bar showing how close every user is to his/her limit. I should not have had to call IT to find out what my quota was.
(3) Never use Outlook.
Andy Out!
Don't worry about the music industry...They're connected with the Mob. Either the AG will find them innocent, and through the constitutional provision against re-trial, prevent any future actions...or he will be assasinated by the RIAA / MPAA / BSA thugs.
I suspect that the bribes have already been sent.
Andy Out!
As a college professor, I routinely assign my networking & security students to probe (e.g., prot scan) systems to see what they will get.
The real story here is the hypocracy. The professor assigns his students to go probe other peoples' systems, while the school has a policy against people probing their systems.
Andy Out!
This piece tells you that if you don't read the license agreement, you might get stung. For example, if you pull code from a GPLed program, you may have to state that on your product.
If the author were not a lying weasel, he would admit that proprietary software has the same problems. For example, did you know that on many Microsoft license agreements, they used to put that you could not use that software to compete with Microsoft? Unilt the anti-trust litigation started, you could not use MS Windows to test a competitor to MS office.
Andy Out!
The US Congress is given the obligation to pretect the rights of authors and inventors. They have failed at this point, and have no explicit power in the US Constitution to maintain the current patent / IP system. Actually, the 10th amendment prohibits them from maintaining this patent regime.
It's time to shut it down, but we all know that will never happen peacefully.
Andy Out!
If I were the Commander in Chief of a nuclear power (e.g., President of the United States,) I'd give those damn Japs an ultimatum: Restore basic human rights (to commerce) or we nuke your asses (again.)
Of course, that would be after we cleaned up what was left of the radioactive remains of D.C., the RIAA, MPAA, and BSA.
Andy Out!
I'm sick of people lying on job web sites...
You know, when you spend 8 hours looking and pick the perfect job, apply, get an interview, and are totally confused becuase they don't know what job you're talking about. They just pulled you to put you in a pool of candidates - the job they advertised never existed.
That is just as dishonest as my getting to a job interview and explaining that the college degrees I listed don't really exist - I just wanted to build a pool of potential employers. That's why I don't deal with certain companies (IBM, Motorola) - they lied to me 10 years ago, and I remember people who lie on their job applications.
Andy Out!
I'm sitting here laughing at every one of you...read Sun Tzu...the copyirght war is over...you lost...and you're still debating how to reason with them....he he he he....pffttt....halarious!
Andy Out!
You've got some interesting points, though I think you missed 3 fundamental concepts (see the paragraph below.) I dont' see references to core memory very often. What's your background?
I disagree on several points:
(1) the time it takes for memory to loose it's data has nothing to do with the speed of reading / writing that memory.
(2) We will do anything that makes economic sense. You seem to think that some rules are hard-and-fast. There are no hard-and-fast rules except performance and cost.
(3) You seem to have missed the memory pyramid.
> I was talking strictly non-volatile. If you want to
> talk about volatile RAM, like DRAM, where you are going
> to refresh the contents every few nanoseconds,
> degradation of contents - provided it is slower than
> your refresh rate - is completely unimportant.
My point was that we have used memories where the contents degraded, and we ahve used the very succesfully. We just need to refresh the contents. If I could get 1,000 times the storage, but had to have a powered connection to it, I would gladly take the leap and spend the bucks on a BIG UPS.
> In fact, fast degradation is a GOOD thing for volatile
> RAM. It means you can change the contents extremely
> quickly. Completely the opposite requirement of
> non-volatile storage, where retention is the key
> consideration.
Ummm....No
Non-volatile storage media do not have to wait until the data decays to change it - they can rewrite the data at any time. Having to refresh the data is just a PITA, but one that we can live with if it gives us enough extra performance in some other area (e.g., speed, capcity, cost savings, etc.)
> Volatile RAM also has to remain powered at all times.
> Again, this is a GOOD thing. Old-fashioned "core"
> memories could retain data for a hundred years plus,
> which made rebooting somewhat of a lengthy process. You
> would not, for example, build a CPU where the internal
> registers used "core" memory or any other form of
> non-volatile memory. At least, not unless you were very
> drunk.
Ummm....No
If it's slow to rewrite the memory, that's different from the refresh rate. The refresh rate is how often you have to have a special chip update the memory.
> On the other hand, if you wanted to replace a hard
> drive, DRAM is next to useless.
> Sure, you can have a stack of NiCad batteries in
> parallel to keep the memory going, provided you
> remember to replace/recharge them as needed.
For enough performance (speed, capacity, low cost, etc.) I'll build in the batteries. Given the cost / size / life of cell phone batteries and sealed lead acid (SLA) batteries, it would not be difficult to power a one-watt system through days of power outtage.
> Wouldn't help you, though, if you had a short.
Not much will help your PC if it's shorted out.
> For mass storage, where the contents absolutely needs
> to be retained for a long period of time, you
> absolutely do NOT want to use DRAM.
Again, it's an economic decision. If I can get 1,000,000 x more capacity, I'll think about it.
> When you get right down to it, though, if the CPU had a
> gig or four of register-speed RAM on board, you
> wouldn't really want DRAM for anything. Main memory is
> only useful because it's substantially cheaper than
> register-speed RAM and it wouldn't be trivial to build
> a processor big enough to hold that much memory. Main
> memory, for a long time now, has been treated as little
> more than a cache for virtual memory, where all the
> real storage is on disk, and as a dumping ground for
> what memory the processor does have. If CPUs held
> enough, and/or mass storage was fast enough, main
> memory would go the way of the dodo. It's a relic that
> persists only because the alternatives are too lim
> I would also question the usefulness of the proposed
> system. I am not confident you could change the spin of
> anything at that scale for any useful length of time.
> Too many variables and too much "noise". If you want to
> change a property, it needs to be a property that can
> "latch" in whatever state you place it and have no
> trivial way of unlatching itself without significant
> input. Otherwise, your data will degrade very rapidly.
I completely agree - DRAM is absurd. We should have never tried it because it degrades and has to be refreshed constantly. SRAM makes a lot more sense, but not as much sense as FLASH for our RAM.
Of course, DRAM is orders of magnitude cheaper at the same performance level, but that never bothered me. I go with what makes sense to me at the moment.
Andy Out!
Have you shot an RIAA member today?
Every time you buy form these bastards, you support their efforts to destroy our computers, but installing their big-brother crap on them. I have a God given right to do whatever I want on my PC. I will not allow them to install their DRM crap and root kits on my PC.
We have 2 options:
(1) Grab an AK and walk into the stock holders meeting for one of the RIAA / MPAA / BSA member companies, and give our lives defending our right to play with source code.
(2) Shoot them in the wallet by not buying from them, and not associating with anyone who does. Simply put, if my friend puts an RIAA approved CD in, I demand (s)he stop the vehicle, then I walk.
Lock and load, one way or another. We have to shoot every one of the mother fuckers, one at a time.
Andy Out!
>> The issue is...one turbine generates 10% of the power for an island...and then it gets rusty.
>> He he he....maintenance is a b!tch, then she gets PMS. Imagine loosing 10% of your generation
>> capacity instantly.
> Wow - power plants require maintenance have downtime....
They all have maintenance requirements. However, a single plant being 10% of your capacity makes taking it down for maintenance a costly endeavor. I would recommend several, smaller plants so that they can be taken down one at a time. Think of it this way: if you have a fleet of vehicles, you can repair one at a time and not feel it. If you only have one vehicle (like I do) then when it needs a new clutch (like mine did this week) it's a big deal to get around while it's in the shop. Unfortunately, you cann't go to Avis rent-a-power-plant and take care of your nation's power grid for a few weeks.
>> Most waves only travel along the surface...I wonder what a good, strong
>> underwater (tsunami-type) wave would do to it?
> Nothing.
>
> Seriously, absolutely no effect.
> It's not "most waves only travel along the surface" - ALL waves travel through their medium.
> Waves aren't currents, they're transmitted motion. Use this page's Java applet [udel.edu] to
> see the effect in the water for yourself, keeping in mind Tsunami are long period waves
> (figure 30 minutes), typically under a meter high, and the turbines are 75-200 meters deep.
> Apparently someone skipped gradeschool science. Or has never been to a beach, noticed the
> lack of devastation on the sand as a non-breaking waves passes over...
I'm not an expert on waves, but I do recall a Discovery Channel program on waves. Most waves do nothing to the sea floor, (thus the lack of dsruption to the sand) but a few do disturb it. It has to do with the kind of wave. There are waves that throw multi-story-tall boulders around on the sea floor, hundreds of feet down. I think I recall those being the same waves that cause tsunamis.
My point was that that turbine has a LOT of area to act on, and a rare wave that does move boulders hitting it from the side could do some interesting things.
> Now, about your publicly calling other folks "moron"...
I'm calling anyone who wants to stop the building of a turbine because it would "alter" ocean currents a moron. Islands much larger than the turbine don't stop the currents.
Andy Out!
The issue is not hurting fish! Velocity has to be relative to something. From the fish's perspective, the turbine's velocity is relative to the ocean's water. A 150 foot long turbine will spin close to the speed of the ocean water. It will have less velocity vs. ocean water than will a coral reef!
The issue is not stopping the currents! An island in this location would scarcely be noticed, and the turbine will do MUCH less than an island to stop the ocean's flow!
At least it's far enough down to not get destroyed by the first tropical storm. OTOH, anything poking near the surface will get smashed regularly.
The issue is...one turbine generates 10% of the power for an island...and then it gets rusty. He he he....maintenance is a b!tch, then she gets PMS. Imagine loosing 10% of your generation capacity instantly.
Most waves only travel along the surface...I wonder what a good, strong underwater (tsunami-type) wave would do to it?
Andy Out!
> LWATCDR writes "The US government is upset over
> restrictions of freedom of speech on the Internet.
WTF?!?!? The authors of the DMCA are worried about free speech on the Internet? WTF?!?!? My BS meter broke, and the needle shot into the wall across the room.
Andy Out!
If anyone here thinks my statement is wrong - then sort through all the cases of human trials of stem cell therapies, and find me ONE patient who was alive and did not have cancer 18 months after a treatment with embryonic stem cells. I've got $20 (paid by PayPal) for the first person to post a link to a case study with such an example.
Andy Out!
"Bold Statement" WTF!?!?!
At one time, saying the Earth was round could have been claimed to be a "Bold Statement" but not today. Ditto for the fact that everyone treated with embryonic stem cells receives a death sentence. If you don't know this, you must be a goat-fucking backward Neanderthal.
Let me guess...you believe that in the beginning, there was nothing...and then it exploded. You believe this without being able to recreate it in a lab, and without the theory being consistent with itself. You believe this, despite it being 20 years out of date in the scientific community. And you believe that anyone who (like me) refuses to accept an explanation if you cannot recreate the chain of events in a lab must be ignorant of "science" - how am I doing?
I guess that you cannot differentiate between the fact that when I drop something in my lab it will very likely fall down (we call this gravity) and the total fantasy that we "know" that the "law of gravity" applies everywhere in the universe. We have not tested this on even 0.1% of the planets in our own galaxy. WTF makes someone think it will hold in another galaxy? If you have not been there to test it, don't believe it.
Andy Out!