Back a few years ago, these speed increases really meant something.
There are still a lot of situations where faster CPU is great. I do scientific calculations for my work and, surprise, the faster the CPU, the quicker you get the results. Actually, cheap commodity PCs made a revolution in my field, where you no longer need an access to a terribly expensive supercomputer to do reasonable simulations.
I've got also a digital camera and image manipulation is very CPU intensive. Unsharp mask on a 6Mpixel file takes several seconds and if you need to aply it to hundreds of images, you can do the math. CPU is also important in ogg encoding, program compilation and just anything that takes 100% CPU if you check top.
They should also be better heat conductors than natural diamonds according to the theory. However, due to extreme cost of obtaining (almost) pure C-13 (its easier to remove 1% C-13 than 99% C-12), I'm not sure if anybody measured it experimentally.
If you REALLY wanted some fancy shit, try a diamond paste.Diamond is like 2000+ W/mK
And diamond made of pure C-12 is about 3500 W/mK.
link
(full article requires subscription).
Natural diamond has only about 1% of C-13 but these isotopic impurities result in phonon scattering which slows down the heat transfer.
At 0.1% C-13 concentration it is already about 3000 W/mK and these diamonds can be made albeit they are quite expensive.
It may sound a bit Dawkinsnish but why should I care about preserving humanity if I'm (or my family) not on the preserved colony? Humanity is a great concept but is totally abstract for a dead individual. If the Earth was going to be hit by an asteroid and 99.9999% people were going to be killed, I'd say it'd be more fair if all died.
Outsourcing programmers is frequently bashed here on Slashdot. If I was an unemployed programmer, I'd be unhappy and bash it, too. But I'm neither a programmer nor American nor manager and it does not affect me personally.
1. Is this really so bad idea?
We have American programmers, Indian (or Chinese, etc.) programmers, consumers and shareholders of software companies. Out of these 4 groups, only one loses, the rest benefits. I see it as a net gain. So this is rather a social problem (for unemployed), not economical.
2. Is there anything we can do about it?
If the same work can be done cheaper abroad, there is no way to stop it in the long run. Even if you do, the programmers abroad will not disapper and will still be competing. They may start to work on their own and sell you the final product.
3. "technology companies lose their capacity to innovate".
There is no vacuum in economy. If someone loses, someone can take advantage of it. Even if American companies stops to be innovative, the innovations can be done in other countries. Chineese are quite poor now. Isn't it fair to give them a chance to develop?
How can a deterministic molecular assempler allow for these?
And quantum states? They cannot be copied due to no-cloning theorem. In many cases it won't matter but if you assemble a complex and dynamic system (e.g. a living organism), will it work when all the quantum states of the molecules are random?
you can't just write on it, and even things like skull pictures could be interpreted as meaning "burial chamber
The same applies to chemical waste which is produced in levels that are orders of magnitude higher than nuclear waste. Anybody cares about it? And nuclear waste will be safer with time due to the decay process while chemical waste will be in most cases toxic forever.
Every year 300 million tons chemical waste is produced in the USA while only total 30000 tons of nuclear waste (and only a small fraction is high-level waste which is very dangerous) link.
Surely, some nuclear waste is more dangerous but there is a lot less of it.
A volunteer must meet all of the following inclusion criteria:
(...)
8. In good general health without clinically significant medical history.
So if you are terminally ill, don't bother.
Come on. This is a vaccine. Vaccines are used on healthy people. They need to check the dose and side-effects. But it won't cause the disease.
The candidate vaccine is synthesized using modified, inactivated genes from Ebola virus. This gives the immune system information about viral structures so that it can mount a rapid defense should the real virus ever be encountered. There is no infectious material in the vaccine, and the virus was not present during any stage of the manufacturing process
It's not made from the virus. Only some genes that cannot induce the disease are used.
As a theoretical chemist I do it (or rather try to do it) all the time.
All we need to fully understand (or simulate) properties of a substance is to solve its Schroedinger equation. The problem is non-trivial, though. The problem is hard already for simple molecules and any multi-electron systems must be solved in an approximate way. The approximations works worse and worse with the increasing size of the system. We can solve exactly only hydrogen atom. Light atoms can be solved approximately with very good accuracy, the same is with simple molecules. However, their interactions (which are important in solid state) or larger molcules are computationally much more demanding. Good methods usually scale as N^6 or higher and we quickly come to the limit of the computing power. If we do not need very good accuracy and are interested in qualitative or semi-quantitive properties, there are some good methods but they are way below the experiment. However, it is possible to predict some of the properties or design the molecules to be better suited to some problem and this is being done.
Matching experimental accuracy for non-trivial moleculs, especially in spectroscopy, will require either better methods or power of quantum computers or both.
39% of energy usage is from oil but electricity (which is a fraction of total energy consumption) is generated mostly from coal. 22% of total energy is from coal (the same document). No contradiction here.
Yes, generation of plastics requires energy but how much plastics is inside a PC? How much metals? All the raw materials (and energy required to build them) cost a few dollars at most. How much is a new PC? Do the math.
Yes, energy cost is inside of everything. But it is on average 5% and you can figure it out from global energy usage.
From the page, $102.7 billion of oil imports (56% of total oil consumption), fuel share of energy consumption: oil 39%. Therefore, total energy spending $470 billion (at most since oil is rather expensive compared to other fuels), GDP is $10.4 trillion and we have 5% of GDP.
I may be wrong and it can be 10% GDP but it is not THAT much.
You think those computers just pop into existence?
No, but the materials cost in CPU is negligible. Copper or aluminum is roughly $2 per kg. Think how many PCBs or CPUs you can made from one kg of these metals? Plastics is even cheaper. The ultra-clean factories cost a lot and research & development. Materials are almost free.
Yes, its cost is present in almost everything but in many cases it is negligible. Think about high-tech or services.
I figured it's about 5% from this page by dividing the cost of oil used by the percentage of oil in the energy usage. This is the true cost of energy in everything. 5% is much but not THAT much.
Mars is far and as inhabitable as Moon
on
The Case for the Moon
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Mars is where we need to go.
Mars may be cool but if you don't want to tranform the whole planet into second Earth there are almost no advantages of having Mars colonies compared to Moon colonies and there are many disadvantages caused by its distance from Earth. On average opositions it is 202 times farther from Earth than Moon and light travels a few minutes from it. It takes months for spaceprobes to travel to Mars during most favorable conditions.
It is important to explore Mars but its colonization is a completely different story.
The sunspots that produced these powerful flares during last days moved across the solar limb. They are now on the far side of the Sun. However, such huge suspots can last quite long and it is likely they will still be active after two weeks when the appear again on the side of the Sun facing Earth.
Can the signal be regenerated or amplified without disturbing the photons? (I doubt it.)
From the description of the system
it seems that they use superposition of polarization of photons. Any measurements across the path of the photons would destroy the superposition. Therefore, any amplifier that transforms optic data into electric data and back into optical would destroy the quantum state. However, purely optical polarization maintaining amplifiers exist and they might preserve the superposition.
Quantum state can also be transmitted via
Quantum Teleportation but this is much more sophisticated.
the Power consumed by the chip is probably MUCH greater than the power delivered by the chip as heat
No. Except tiny amount of energy emitted via radio waves ALL electric energy in a chip is eventually transformed into heat First Law of Thermodynamics.
However, you are right than only a fraction of the heat can be transformed into work via steam engine. A reversible heat engine that has hot reservoir at 370K and cold reservoir at 300K has maximum efficiency of 1-300/370= 18.9%
Efficiency of an engine. Silicon chips are too cold to be an effective heat engine.
Slashdot Mirror
There are still a lot of situations where faster CPU is great. I do scientific calculations for my work and, surprise, the faster the CPU, the quicker you get the results. Actually, cheap commodity PCs made a revolution in my field, where you no longer need an access to a terribly expensive supercomputer to do reasonable simulations.
I've got also a digital camera and image manipulation is very CPU intensive. Unsharp mask on a 6Mpixel file takes several seconds and if you need to aply it to hundreds of images, you can do the math. CPU is also important in ogg encoding, program compilation and just anything that takes 100% CPU if you check top.
I has already been discussed here
They should also be better heat conductors than natural diamonds according to the theory. However, due to extreme cost of obtaining (almost) pure C-13 (its easier to remove 1% C-13 than 99% C-12), I'm not sure if anybody measured it experimentally.
And diamond made of pure C-12 is about 3500 W/mK. link (full article requires subscription). Natural diamond has only about 1% of C-13 but these isotopic impurities result in phonon scattering which slows down the heat transfer. At 0.1% C-13 concentration it is already about 3000 W/mK and these diamonds can be made albeit they are quite expensive.
It may sound a bit Dawkinsnish but why should I care about preserving humanity if I'm (or my family) not on the preserved colony? Humanity is a great concept but is totally abstract for a dead individual. If the Earth was going to be hit by an asteroid and 99.9999% people were going to be killed, I'd say it'd be more fair if all died.
1. Is this really so bad idea?
We have American programmers, Indian (or Chinese, etc.) programmers, consumers and shareholders of software companies. Out of these 4 groups, only one loses, the rest benefits. I see it as a net gain. So this is rather a social problem (for unemployed), not economical.
2. Is there anything we can do about it?
If the same work can be done cheaper abroad, there is no way to stop it in the long run. Even if you do, the programmers abroad will not disapper and will still be competing. They may start to work on their own and sell you the final product.
3. "technology companies lose their capacity to innovate".
There is no vacuum in economy. If someone loses, someone can take advantage of it. Even if American companies stops to be innovative, the innovations can be done in other countries. Chineese are quite poor now. Isn't it fair to give them a chance to develop?
Maybe the reason it has not materialized yet is that Latex2e works just fine.
And quantum states? They cannot be copied due to no-cloning theorem. In many cases it won't matter but if you assemble a complex and dynamic system (e.g. a living organism), will it work when all the quantum states of the molecules are random?
Ever heard of RPMs? You can check the nearest RH mirror and find the version: here or here. No need to install.
Anyway, if you are not sure what's the version, don't mod it. False information is hardly "informative".
To moderators. When you mod something "informative", please check the facts first. Spamassasin in RH 9 is 2.44.
The same applies to chemical waste which is produced in levels that are orders of magnitude higher than nuclear waste. Anybody cares about it? And nuclear waste will be safer with time due to the decay process while chemical waste will be in most cases toxic forever.
Every year 300 million tons chemical waste is produced in the USA while only total 30000 tons of nuclear waste (and only a small fraction is high-level waste which is very dangerous) link. Surely, some nuclear waste is more dangerous but there is a lot less of it.
From the desctription of the study
A volunteer must meet all of the following inclusion criteria: (...) 8. In good general health without clinically significant medical history.
So if you are terminally ill, don't bother. Come on. This is a vaccine. Vaccines are used on healthy people. They need to check the dose and side-effects. But it won't cause the disease.
The candidate vaccine is synthesized using modified, inactivated genes from Ebola virus. This gives the immune system information about viral structures so that it can mount a rapid defense should the real virus ever be encountered. There is no infectious material in the vaccine, and the virus was not present during any stage of the manufacturing process
It's not made from the virus. Only some genes that cannot induce the disease are used.
In the article they show width of 2.3 MeV. 1 MeV is about 10e-21s so it is about half of 10e-21s.
The article will be published in Physical Review Letters.
Cancerous cells different from normal cells. Most of them are killed by our immunological systems and only those more "clever" can form tumors.
The cancer attacking viruses may exploit different receptors on the cancer cells.
Article in Scientific American.
As a theoretical chemist I do it (or rather try to do it) all the time.
All we need to fully understand (or simulate) properties of a substance is to solve its Schroedinger equation. The problem is non-trivial, though. The problem is hard already for simple molecules and any multi-electron systems must be solved in an approximate way. The approximations works worse and worse with the increasing size of the system. We can solve exactly only hydrogen atom. Light atoms can be solved approximately with very good accuracy, the same is with simple molecules. However, their interactions (which are important in solid state) or larger molcules are computationally much more demanding. Good methods usually scale as N^6 or higher and we quickly come to the limit of the computing power. If we do not need very good accuracy and are interested in qualitative or semi-quantitive properties, there are some good methods but they are way below the experiment. However, it is possible to predict some of the properties or design the molecules to be better suited to some problem and this is being done.
Matching experimental accuracy for non-trivial moleculs, especially in spectroscopy, will require either better methods or power of quantum computers or both.
Energy != electricity.
39% of energy usage is from oil but electricity (which is a fraction of total energy consumption) is generated mostly from coal. 22% of total energy is from coal (the same document). No contradiction here.
Yes, generation of plastics requires energy but how much plastics is inside a PC? How much metals? All the raw materials (and energy required to build them) cost a few dollars at most. How much is a new PC? Do the math.
Yes, energy cost is inside of everything. But it is on average 5% and you can figure it out from global energy usage.
I may be wrong and it can be 10% GDP but it is not THAT much.
You think those computers just pop into existence?
No, but the materials cost in CPU is negligible. Copper or aluminum is roughly $2 per kg. Think how many PCBs or CPUs you can made from one kg of these metals? Plastics is even cheaper. The ultra-clean factories cost a lot and research & development. Materials are almost free.
Quote from the linked site:
"At the Moon's surface the beam is roughly four miles wide"
Yes, the reflector is smaller but it needn't be larger. The beem is quite wide, though. Much more than 46 cm^2.
I figured it's about 5% from this page by dividing the cost of oil used by the percentage of oil in the energy usage. This is the true cost of energy in everything. 5% is much but not THAT much.
Mars may be cool but if you don't want to tranform the whole planet into second Earth there are almost no advantages of having Mars colonies compared to Moon colonies and there are many disadvantages caused by its distance from Earth. On average opositions it is 202 times farther from Earth than Moon and light travels a few minutes from it. It takes months for spaceprobes to travel to Mars during most favorable conditions.
It is important to explore Mars but its colonization is a completely different story.
The sunspots that produced these powerful flares during last days moved across the solar limb. They are now on the far side of the Sun. However, such huge suspots can last quite long and it is likely they will still be active after two weeks when the appear again on the side of the Sun facing Earth.
From the description of the system it seems that they use superposition of polarization of photons. Any measurements across the path of the photons would destroy the superposition. Therefore, any amplifier that transforms optic data into electric data and back into optical would destroy the quantum state. However, purely optical polarization maintaining amplifiers exist and they might preserve the superposition.
Quantum state can also be transmitted via Quantum Teleportation but this is much more sophisticated.
No. Except tiny amount of energy emitted via radio waves ALL electric energy in a chip is eventually transformed into heat First Law of Thermodynamics.
However, you are right than only a fraction of the heat can be transformed into work via steam engine. A reversible heat engine that has hot reservoir at 370K and cold reservoir at 300K has maximum efficiency of 1-300/370= 18.9% Efficiency of an engine. Silicon chips are too cold to be an effective heat engine.