Magnetic RAM is a possible bridge between these two worlds: it is non-volatile, faster than RAM, and lasts "forever" (as long as SRAM, I suppose, which lasts essentially forever). Currently they have only produced 4 Mbit MRAM chips, but MRAM has the potential to be packed into much smaller sizes. Suppose they can reach 1 GB by 2005 (VERY optimistic). Perhaps they could reach 10 GB by 2007, and then you could simply have 3 10 GB chips in your memory slots, and maybe use a hard disk as a backing store, until 100 GB chips are available. But I'd be happy with 30 GB as my primary drive, and storing movies on a traditional 180 GB HDD.
I'm curious what the seek times on this device might be. Suppose you could advance it into the writable era and up the storage capacity to, say, 100 GB on a sugar cube-sized volume. If seek times are measured in nanoseconds rather than milliseconds, transfer bandwidth/speed is sufficiently high, and the media is indefinitely re-writable, then you might have just found the device that can make magnetic spinning disks obsolete. And it's about time! The only thing that really makes computers slow anymore is the OS waiting for I/O on the disks.
"The IPN would behave more like e-mail. Data could be stored at any of various hubs around the solar system and transmitted to their destination via the best path at the moment."
I wonder what the first IPN spam message will be...
WiMax base stations cost something like $10,000, while the nodes themselve will be on par with cable modems, NAT routers, etc. You won't see anyone setting up a WiMax antenna on top of his house, though, to provide wireless connectivity for free to thousands.
But that would be cool. I think WiMax is the first real step towards Internet everywhere. 802.11 was just a sampling of what was possible...
I would volunteer for this mission. Besides it's not necessary one-way. If we sustained a human presence on the surface, certainly after a decade or so, someone would come along with a return vehicle, as outlined in The Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin.
Mars should be the ultimate destination for the next 15 years, but the moon should be a launchpad. Set up a small outpost on the moon and expand it from that point to a tiny village until it becomes the biggest extraterrestrial city in the solar system (that we know of). The resources of the moon are invaluable in our world's future, for its demanding energy requirements can easily be met by He-3 fusion and beamed solar electricity.
He-3 is worth $4 billion/ton and there are over a million tons of it. That's $4 quadrillion dollars (yes, quadrillion). Not to mention the lower cost of solar array deployment and relatively easy delivery.
Let's not forget that the number of graduates in the science and math areas DOUBLED during the 1960's because people were inspired to study hard and do something amazing with their lives. For the past thirty years we've been inspired by "ancient" technologies of Apollo, including computers with CPUs slower than that in my PDA.
I would argue that the space program is what made America the technological epicenter that it is today, and a return to the moon and Mars would only rejuvenate interest in the sciences. I know it worked for me, and hell I have to watch Apollo 13 every few months to remind myself!
Let's just see what the nation's reaction is when a new NASA direction is declared. Also, the American MER landers are arriving this January, and from what I learned in my interview with lead scientist Steve Squyres, it's going to be quite a show. Get ready for the next space race, and America ought to take the lead. Why? I think it's in our nation's collective blood. America is a nation of pioneers and was founded as one, and there's a whole lot of universe left to explore.
The X-Prize is a fantastic idea, and the X-Prize Cup is an amazing extension. This is what our space program needs: people in garages building new rockets. We need that good old fashioned American attitude to reshape our spacefaring aspirations. It's like the Rocket Boys (October Sky movie): a bunch of people with similar interest working on a common goal with space as the destination.
NASA has failed to excite us, or even deliver anything other than a few experiments on a very expensive orbiting autonomous laboratory with a bathroom and a view. I hate to say it NASA... I loved you so much growing up, but you're going nowhere.
Hell, NASA should be providing funding for X-Prize competitions!
Again, I wish they would make me administrator of NASA. I'd really kick ass.
I thought the same thing. I would like to ask the Brothers if that was their idea, but of course I doubt their e-mail address is on public display. The huge discs of electricity on the exterior of the Matrix hovercraft definitely appear to be some sort of electrogravitic propulsion.
The litmus test for me to determine whether this is some sort of antigravity technology comes down to the vacuum, since space flight is the ultimate goal here. This Wired article claims that NASA attempted to use this in a vacuum but failed. However there have been numerous reports from others over time, including the inventor of this, TT Brown, that it _does_ work in a vacuum. Is it possible that NASA didn't properly configure the device, or did TT Brown simply fudge his results in order to get more attention?
Even if it's not antigravity, the applications of a feasible derivative of this technology are quite amazing. However, as others have stated, until the lifter can lift its own power supply plus payload, and also have a suitable control system, it will remain the subject of test labs and back yards. Supposedly, though, JL Naudin at www.jlnlabs.org, pretty much the Internet publisher of the lifter technology program for the masses, has determined that the larger the size of the lifter is, the more weight it can carry with the same amount of voltage. So since the relationship between voltage and mass isn't linear, it's conceivable that enough cells could actually fly. Check out his site with information on the LifterCraft project.
I don't know if it's antigravity, but it's definitely fun to watch those things lift!
I dunno, I think the Segway is pretty damn sweet. I've only tried it once but I can see how people would be obsessed with it. It's funny to watch close-minded people go off about how riders of the segway are gay-looking and wasting thousands of dollars that could be used for other things, like stopping world hunger (ha, now THAT'S a pipe dream). All the while these people have never even tried it. I thought it was a wonderful experience and would happily buy one for around $3,000. It's a lot nicer to glide around on a pollutant-free vehicle that solves the problem of the short range transit (i.e. = 5 miles). Seeing as the average car ride in America is 3 miles, I think it's a pretty sweet invention.
I am curious where any average Joe can go to obtain liquid N2. I read this article in the Popular Science magazine the other day but still don't know if Home Depot stores pints of LN2.
NASA plans to sit around and do nothing exciting. Oh, they also plan to wait until some of their cutting-edge technologies are ready, then axe the programs. Like Project Prometheus? That'll be dead when it's about a month from completion. NASA just loves pulling the plug on really cool technologies.
It's almost like NASA _wants_ to keep humans grounded. Perhaps Armstrong & Aldrin really did see extraterrestrials on the moon and they're keeping us on Earth so we don't move in on their territory. I'm open to the possibility.:)
I agree---this was my plan all along. Stop them at the source! Burn their houses. We need vigilantes. You stop a dozen big spammers, and the amount of spam drops significantly. Don't forget that spammers can send millions of spams per day.
Actually the Segway is in the top 99.9% of items sold on Amazon.com right now, as it has been for quite some time now. If I had $5,000 I'd buy one too!
This is so amazing how many rich entrepreneurs are getting into the space business. I love to hear them putting their money and energy towards a good cause: the future of mankind.
Umm no.... I have been in several situations thus far where I had no choice but dialup. You know what I did? Nothing. I said my email can wait, and I'll use the phone if I need to find information.
The ills of our world will remain indefinitely. Hunger, cancer, AIDS, war, etc. Our future is in space, and without a space program we might as well just nuke our species now and save the universe the embarassment of our species.
Slashdot Mirror
Magnetic RAM is a possible bridge between these two worlds: it is non-volatile, faster than RAM, and lasts "forever" (as long as SRAM, I suppose, which lasts essentially forever). Currently they have only produced 4 Mbit MRAM chips, but MRAM has the potential to be packed into much smaller sizes. Suppose they can reach 1 GB by 2005 (VERY optimistic). Perhaps they could reach 10 GB by 2007, and then you could simply have 3 10 GB chips in your memory slots, and maybe use a hard disk as a backing store, until 100 GB chips are available. But I'd be happy with 30 GB as my primary drive, and storing movies on a traditional 180 GB HDD.
One can dream!
I'm curious what the seek times on this device might be. Suppose you could advance it into the writable era and up the storage capacity to, say, 100 GB on a sugar cube-sized volume. If seek times are measured in nanoseconds rather than milliseconds, transfer bandwidth/speed is sufficiently high, and the media is indefinitely re-writable, then you might have just found the device that can make magnetic spinning disks obsolete. And it's about time! The only thing that really makes computers slow anymore is the OS waiting for I/O on the disks.
"The IPN would behave more like e-mail. Data could be stored at any of various hubs around the solar system and transmitted to their destination via the best path at the moment."
I wonder what the first IPN spam message will be...
WiMax base stations cost something like $10,000, while the nodes themselve will be on par with cable modems, NAT routers, etc. You won't see anyone setting up a WiMax antenna on top of his house, though, to provide wireless connectivity for free to thousands.
But that would be cool. I think WiMax is the first real step towards Internet everywhere. 802.11 was just a sampling of what was possible...
I would volunteer for this mission. Besides it's not necessary one-way. If we sustained a human presence on the surface, certainly after a decade or so, someone would come along with a return vehicle, as outlined in The Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin.
Where's the application?
Mars should be the ultimate destination for the next 15 years, but the moon should be a launchpad. Set up a small outpost on the moon and expand it from that point to a tiny village until it becomes the biggest extraterrestrial city in the solar system (that we know of). The resources of the moon are invaluable in our world's future, for its demanding energy requirements can easily be met by He-3 fusion and beamed solar electricity.
He-3 is worth $4 billion/ton and there are over a million tons of it. That's $4 quadrillion dollars (yes, quadrillion). Not to mention the lower cost of solar array deployment and relatively easy delivery.
Let's not forget that the number of graduates in the science and math areas DOUBLED during the 1960's because people were inspired to study hard and do something amazing with their lives. For the past thirty years we've been inspired by "ancient" technologies of Apollo, including computers with CPUs slower than that in my PDA.
I would argue that the space program is what made America the technological epicenter that it is today, and a return to the moon and Mars would only rejuvenate interest in the sciences. I know it worked for me, and hell I have to watch Apollo 13 every few months to remind myself!
Let's just see what the nation's reaction is when a new NASA direction is declared. Also, the American MER landers are arriving this January, and from what I learned in my interview with lead scientist Steve Squyres, it's going to be quite a show. Get ready for the next space race, and America ought to take the lead. Why? I think it's in our nation's collective blood. America is a nation of pioneers and was founded as one, and there's a whole lot of universe left to explore.
Furthermore, I want my damn Millenium Falcon!
The X-Prize is a fantastic idea, and the X-Prize Cup is an amazing extension. This is what our space program needs: people in garages building new rockets. We need that good old fashioned American attitude to reshape our spacefaring aspirations. It's like the Rocket Boys (October Sky movie): a bunch of people with similar interest working on a common goal with space as the destination.
NASA has failed to excite us, or even deliver anything other than a few experiments on a very expensive orbiting autonomous laboratory with a bathroom and a view. I hate to say it NASA... I loved you so much growing up, but you're going nowhere.
Hell, NASA should be providing funding for X-Prize competitions!
Again, I wish they would make me administrator of NASA. I'd really kick ass.
I thought the same thing. I would like to ask the Brothers if that was their idea, but of course I doubt their e-mail address is on public display. The huge discs of electricity on the exterior of the Matrix hovercraft definitely appear to be some sort of electrogravitic propulsion.
The litmus test for me to determine whether this is some sort of antigravity technology comes down to the vacuum, since space flight is the ultimate goal here. This Wired article claims that NASA attempted to use this in a vacuum but failed. However there have been numerous reports from others over time, including the inventor of this, TT Brown, that it _does_ work in a vacuum. Is it possible that NASA didn't properly configure the device, or did TT Brown simply fudge his results in order to get more attention?
Even if it's not antigravity, the applications of a feasible derivative of this technology are quite amazing. However, as others have stated, until the lifter can lift its own power supply plus payload, and also have a suitable control system, it will remain the subject of test labs and back yards. Supposedly, though, JL Naudin at www.jlnlabs.org, pretty much the Internet publisher of the lifter technology program for the masses, has determined that the larger the size of the lifter is, the more weight it can carry with the same amount of voltage. So since the relationship between voltage and mass isn't linear, it's conceivable that enough cells could actually fly. Check out his site with information on the LifterCraft project.
I don't know if it's antigravity, but it's definitely fun to watch those things lift!
Yes it does, if we use nuclear power. But you will always have the pussy liberals who think nuclear power is the devil.
And let's assume hydrogen fuel cells can generate power in the future (or even better, a Kamen Stirling engine).
I dunno, I think the Segway is pretty damn sweet. I've only tried it once but I can see how people would be obsessed with it. It's funny to watch close-minded people go off about how riders of the segway are gay-looking and wasting thousands of dollars that could be used for other things, like stopping world hunger (ha, now THAT'S a pipe dream). All the while these people have never even tried it. I thought it was a wonderful experience and would happily buy one for around $3,000. It's a lot nicer to glide around on a pollutant-free vehicle that solves the problem of the short range transit (i.e. = 5 miles). Seeing as the average car ride in America is 3 miles, I think it's a pretty sweet invention.
I am curious where any average Joe can go to obtain liquid N2. I read this article in the Popular Science magazine the other day but still don't know if Home Depot stores pints of LN2.
Electrogravitic propulsion all the way!
o gy /gct_xprize_030615.html
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technol
NASA plans to sit around and do nothing exciting. Oh, they also plan to wait until some of their cutting-edge technologies are ready, then axe the programs. Like Project Prometheus? That'll be dead when it's about a month from completion. NASA just loves pulling the plug on really cool technologies.
:)
It's almost like NASA _wants_ to keep humans grounded. Perhaps Armstrong & Aldrin really did see extraterrestrials on the moon and they're keeping us on Earth so we don't move in on their territory. I'm open to the possibility.
I agree---this was my plan all along. Stop them at the source! Burn their houses. We need vigilantes. You stop a dozen big spammers, and the amount of spam drops significantly. Don't forget that spammers can send millions of spams per day.
Sign me up. :) I can't wait! The time has come!
Actually the Segway is in the top 99.9% of items sold on Amazon.com right now, as it has been for quite some time now. If I had $5,000 I'd buy one too!
This is so amazing how many rich entrepreneurs are getting into the space business. I love to hear them putting their money and energy towards a good cause: the future of mankind.
Umm no.... I have been in several situations thus far where I had no choice but dialup. You know what I did? Nothing. I said my email can wait, and I'll use the phone if I need to find information.
2018 is a little far off. But better late than never. Some day....
Wow... you've got 56k? That takes it back! If I have to choose between dialup and no Internet, I choose no Internet.
Both pay around $20K gross for a summer. Kicks Microsoft's a$$.
Shafe
Rafi and I lived one floor away when I was at UMD. I can't believe he went to the dark side, though. :(
LOL. Homer: "That's getting a little old."
But I still laughed. Anyway, I can't read the page. Again, I submit Slashdot's own caching system, the SlashCache, to address these issues.
The ills of our world will remain indefinitely. Hunger, cancer, AIDS, war, etc. Our future is in space, and without a space program we might as well just nuke our species now and save the universe the embarassment of our species.