Yes, well, if they're going to be charging a lot of money for an uncomfortable experience, it doesn't seem very smart to pre-annoy the living heck out of the customers before they even get on the aircraft.
They don't need to be doing any of this nonsense. They just need to armor the cockpit and plop an air marshal on each flight. That reduces the threat to the less than it used to be; the trigger for all this hysteria was flying the aircraft into extremely high value and heavily populated buildings. So make that impossible and let the rest of us get on with our lives.
The real problem here is that hysteria is meat and potatoes for political stumping. Politicians have every reason to push this crap around -- it saves them from having to deal with real issues. Like health care, the infrastructure, the national debt, erosion of the constitution... you know, stuff that actually matters. But a huge number of people are gullible and stupid, and that's why this crap will never end, barring total collapse of the government.
Democracy is flawed from the outset. It allows any two uninformed people to outvote an informed person in a context where informed people are rare. Both in the general public and in the congress. Game rigged to fail, right there.
Ocean liner. Fine meals, suites, good company, pools, ocean view, time to reflect, luxury in general. When you get where you're going, rent a private vehicle, presuming you're going significantly inshore. Possibly train travel; depends on the country. Trains can be luxurious and fine; or they can be just like aircraft. Research is worth doing before you travel.
When I compare going on an aircraft to an ocean liner, the aircraft comes off as an experience somewhat akin to a few hours in a hamster cage. With crowded, angry hamsters and mad scientists at the cage door.
Add to that the fact that the average airline seat was designed to fit the human body perfectly... by testing the fit against a one-armed, one-legged midget with a fetish for being confined.
The implication was, of course, that the faster brain is interconnected similarly; and contrary to your assertion, speed is an issue. It affects everything from thinking to recall and reaction time.
I don't think superconducting power cables, if installed here, are going to be a significant issue when Yellowstone goes. They'll probably keep right on working under the multiple feet of ash that kills everyone and everything.
We can't continue that trend unless we surpass the limits of the human brain. Therefore the limits of the human brain will be sirpassed(sic)." This kind of resoning(sic) is a total load of crap.
Insofar as anyone thinks this is how things work, I agree with you - utter nonsense.
However, there's this historic trend of ever increasing rate of change. There is some chance that this will lead to technologies that change the face of how we live and understand the world. That, I think, is the singularity. Today, people are comfortable saying "AI is impossible." At some point, they may find themselves saying, "I dunno, lemme ask the AI." Which may itself understand far deeper into things than we do. Remains to be seen, of course.
It's not gonna happen: the curve will platau once we hit the rate of change which makes it too hard to understand the state of the art and contribute to a field before your understanding is obsolete.
Really? What if our intelligence is augmented? What if the technology comes from a superior intelligence, either a digital AI or a designed biological intelligence, either from scratch or a genetically modified animal (which of course would include humans)?
What if one technology requires the other -- but at the different levels, doesn't require the understanding of the other? For instance, I'm an engineer; I can whip a gate array into shape, and I know what they are in a vague way as compared to the person who actually makes the silicon... but I don't need to know that. I'm a programmer, and I've written a number of very complex applications, designed lots of hardware at the PCB level, even won some awards, got my name in the ARRL handbook... but I couldn't put a single IC CPU together if given the tools to do it. I also use compilers, and although I actually have written a couple, I'm a lot better at using them to do other things.
You see, you definitely don't have to understand one technology in order to leverage it to create new technology. You just need to be able to use it. That's why your analysis is wrong, even if it were right about complexity of any one technology reaching a point where no one can improve on it, which I have to say I doubt.
In the reputation contest between Ray Kurzweil and slashdot user "lgw", Kurzweil wins. Sorry.
Every futurist in the history of mankind who has projected current trends indefinitely into the future has been proven wrong in time, usually within 50 years. Moore's law in particular... [clipped]
Look; predicting that technology -- which is not equivalent to a specific like Moore's law -- is going to continue to extend along the same curve is based upon the progress of many individual areas, a very surprising number of which show yearly doublings. Yes, some go, as we expect Moore's law to, but others arrive and the general curve stays quite stable. Arguing that technology won't continue to increase based on Moore's law running into end of life is like arguing that men won't find women attractive anymore because fur coats have gone out of fashion. It isn't about a specific technology; it is about how technology in general progresses, which is something we can observe by looking at large groups of technologies.
The one for practical fusion power, which has been "fifty years from now" for decades?
You're confusing optimistic predictions with actual progress. Lots of progress has been made with regard to fusion. It's a difficult problem and is not yet solved (like a lot of others, for that matter.) I would not assume that fusion is due on any particular date, but I *would* assume fusion (in the sense of being over-unity, controlled and useful in that regard) is due on some date. When it arrives, looking back, we'll be able to track the things that had the most effect on its development, and I suspect, like most other technological curves, you'll find it was exponential. But as it isn't here yet, I am, of course, speculating.
The graphs for speed of travel, which plateaued 40 years ago?
You mean speed of attempted travel, not the available technology to go fast. Speed of travel itself hasn't plateaued at all, especially in the sense that if we want to, we can get things -- including you, if you'd like to volunteer and collect the funds -- up to speeds far in excess of those we could have during the Apollo projects. We just haven't needed to. Some technologies languish unused for the simple reason that they are not presently needed, or they aren't cost-effective. That doesn't mean we can't get them done.
The graphs for energy reserves, which indicate that more than half of all the fossil fuel that ever existed has been burned in the last couple of centuries?
Are you seriously trying to call fossil fuel reserves a "technology"? Please. Consumption and recovery involve technology; deposits are fixed. Also, on general graphs of energy reserves, fossil fuels aren't going to even be a blip. Ask yourself how much retrievable energy is there in fissionables? How much in fusionables? Fossil fuel. Pah. Silly to even worry about it in the sense of energy reserves; it's a local, short-term social problem. And yes, it'll be that very technological curve that makes it a non-issue.
The standard assumption that machines would get smarter and smarter (faster and faster is not the same thing) with human-level AIs commonplace by the end of the 20th?
Again, you're confusing predictions, which are not technology, with actual progress, which has been substantial. This, like fusion, is a very hard problem because although we're pretty smart in some areas, we are not gifted with the ability to easily perceive our own operating mechanisms, and technologies to do so are just now coming online. Again, I expect it'll get solved, and I expect it'll be a log curve with at least 1/2 the work required done in the last binary period of the curve. In the meantime, we have associative memory, all manner of perception instrumentation, speech and speech recognition... all solved. The curve is visible, we just don't know what the terminus (for AI) is. Might be tomorrow; might be 100 years from now. Predictions are irrelevant, though. Progress is the issue at hand. Most interestingly, the vast majority of these problems have been solved not as a consequence of faster hardware as you mention, but as a matter of algorithms -- algorithms that can run on extremely minimal hardware. Speech synthesis, for instance, can be done on a 1970's era machine quite easily. Now that we know how.
Not to mention the price of food. Little detail: hungry people don't do good science.
Well, food is a lot less scarce these days. Technology is responsible for the most part. All kinds of technology. Transport, agriculture, etc. I expect this trend will also continue until there's enough food, at which point, like "going faster", there won't be a lot of point in going any further, though we probably could if the goal were to make longer, stronger graphs for y
But perspective is important here. When you say "close to the speed of light" with the implication that one cannot go any faster, that's a little bit insufficient as a description of the situation. As one approaches the speed of light relative to some initial pair of reference points at a relatively static distance from one another, time dilation causes time to pass slower for the traveler as compared to the reference points. This relationship (time passing less, or more slowly) continues to increase the closer one approaches the speed of light, and with the more energy one applies to accelerating the increasing mass of the traveller. As this increases, the time the traveler experiences between point A and point B decreases just as it would as if he was actually "going faster"; the point can be made that if I can travel five light years in one year of "my time", then as far as I am concerned, I'm traveling at 5x the speed of light. Regardless of the fact that the people I left behind are aging much faster than I am.
Since Analog has been dragged into this, let me point to Poul Anderson's excellent SF work "Tau Zero" in which this precise matter was a significant plot element.:-)
Well, you won't be running power lines that swing in the air; but power lines in a channel in the ground are possible in regions where seismic activity isn't a threat. Anyway, you can certainly make wires out of ceramic superconductors, is all I was getting at.
You've reached the wrong conclusion; if it isn't ductile, you can't use it for wires that bend; however, you can certainly use it for wires that follow nonlinear paths.
My only point here is that exponential growth never lasts forever.
And my point was that just when you think it's going to hit a wall, it changes form and continues despite your pessimism. While it cannot continue *forever*, it can continue into the indefinite far future. The present graphs of technological increase are remarkably linear; there's no sign at all of a slowdown in the doublings, which are approximately yearly. Again, see Kurzweil for more on this; he's done a lot of very specific and careful work in this area.
Dude, Moore's "law" will cease to apply in just a few years. It's not a law of nature, it's an observation that chip fab facilities double their resolution every 18 months. But you can only take that so far. Soon, quantum tunneling will make it impossible to print circuits any finer.
When relays reached max density, tubes appeared. Tubes were shrunk, and at about the time when they couldn't get a lot smaller, transistors appeared. Those shrunk for a while, then IC's appeared. IC's have been shrinking for a while, with various technologies, each able to go smaller than before, driving that change. Now IC's are within reach of maximum density in the 2D zone, but the 3rd dimension beckons, especially to low-power (hence low heat) technologies. Two layers gives a doubling in the same 2d space; four does it again... that's probably good for quite a few doublings before the 3rd dimension becomes unwieldy. In the meantime, can we anticipate what might come next? Biologicals are one possibility; look at the brain. 3d and fits in a funny shape. Brains come in all sizes, and who is to say that the one we have is either the best design or the largest or the fastest? What if materials that work 2x as fast as our neurons are found? Look at the recent development of memristors; how many people saw that coming? Not many! And they're not even in hardware yet. They have the potential to spike memory density up, power down, speed up, and more... because they aren't transistors at all. And they're small. In fact, the smaller they are, the better they seem to work. There's a limit in there somewhere, but still, how cool is that?
Furthermore, Moore's law is just one aspect of technology; we are also experiencing doublings along many other paths (see Ray Kurzweil's observations for details on that) and some of them aren't about materials or hardware, they're about knowledge leveraging next steps. For instance, in the late 1970's, we had microprocessors that were very capable, but we didn't have many kinds of software. If we had it at the time, we could have done more, earlier... nothing but knowledge. But instead, many of these software technologies didn't show up for years. Yet we could take one of those microprocessors (a 6809 or a z80, for instance) and program all *manner* of cool things on them today, were it called for. And build them huge memory spaces, too. To put it another way, with what I know after 40 years of programming, if I could go back in time to 1979, what I now know how to do with microprocessors would make me a very rich man. Technology has come a long way regardless of Moore's law. Technology multiplies itself.
Honestly, there is nothing that falls so flat on my ears as doomlike predictions of technology reaching an unbreachable wall. Not going to happen. What's going to happen is technology will continue to double. The consequences of that are shrouded in mystery, but the one thing that is clear is that there will be extremely significant consequences.
Here's an observation for you: When you have projects that are pendant upon technologies that are experiencing doublings in a particular time period, those projects will typically get 1/2 of the total work done in the last time period.
For example, four time periods of doublings: 1 - 2 4 8 16... a total factor of 31, of which 16 occurred in the last period. It is because of this that projects like the human genome project look stalled at first; half of the work required to get them done will occur in the last doubling period (about a year in that case.) I suspect that's exactly what we're looking at with fusion as well; we're just not far enough up the curve yet.
No, not all of them work that way. There are color sensors in use in the commercial space that have RGB sensors stacked in the same pixel; they don't use filters. Google Sigma / Foveon.
The only "weird" thing about animal rights is that they have very few; which in turn is one indicator (of many I could cite) that people aren't nearly as smart as they pretend to be.
Except in the dark? Oh no, we can see you just fine in the dark. Above a whisper? Heck, we can read your lips with no sound at all. And of course we can hear your slightest whisper as well, even through deafening levels of background noise. And your mail. And everything on your computer. And your bank account. And your medical records. Thought police plugging in randomly? Computers that watch all the time, buddy. If the thought police are needed, they'll be called automatically, no worries. Field of vision? The cameras will be everywhere. Everywhere. They cost but pennies to make now. Just a chip. Beach sand. Lenses made of water. Wireless connections to the network. Everywhere.
Everything you say, and everywhere you say it, can be used against you. If that's not sufficient, we'll waterboard you until you confess your crimes. You are guilty as soon as we say you are. That's your first principle; your axiom; your raison d'être.
You gave your liberties up. It was for the children. The 100% surveilled, sexually repressed, mythologically inculcated, minor servants of the state who informed on you for digging that camera-free hole where you could be alone.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I've done it several times. I have a relative in Greece. Next time, I'm hoping to find network access on the boat; one can hope. Satellites, etc.
Yes, well, if they're going to be charging a lot of money for an uncomfortable experience, it doesn't seem very smart to pre-annoy the living heck out of the customers before they even get on the aircraft.
They don't need to be doing any of this nonsense. They just need to armor the cockpit and plop an air marshal on each flight. That reduces the threat to the less than it used to be; the trigger for all this hysteria was flying the aircraft into extremely high value and heavily populated buildings. So make that impossible and let the rest of us get on with our lives.
The real problem here is that hysteria is meat and potatoes for political stumping. Politicians have every reason to push this crap around -- it saves them from having to deal with real issues. Like health care, the infrastructure, the national debt, erosion of the constitution... you know, stuff that actually matters. But a huge number of people are gullible and stupid, and that's why this crap will never end, barring total collapse of the government.
Democracy is flawed from the outset. It allows any two uninformed people to outvote an informed person in a context where informed people are rare. Both in the general public and in the congress. Game rigged to fail, right there.
Ocean liner. Fine meals, suites, good company, pools, ocean view, time to reflect, luxury in general. When you get where you're going, rent a private vehicle, presuming you're going significantly inshore. Possibly train travel; depends on the country. Trains can be luxurious and fine; or they can be just like aircraft. Research is worth doing before you travel.
When I compare going on an aircraft to an ocean liner, the aircraft comes off as an experience somewhat akin to a few hours in a hamster cage. With crowded, angry hamsters and mad scientists at the cage door.
Add to that the fact that the average airline seat was designed to fit the human body perfectly... by testing the fit against a one-armed, one-legged midget with a fetish for being confined.
I don't fly any longer.
There are other reasons as well, but in a nutshell, the entire process has gone so far downhill I'd rather drive, even all the way across the country.
The implication was, of course, that the faster brain is interconnected similarly; and contrary to your assertion, speed is an issue. It affects everything from thinking to recall and reaction time.
I don't think superconducting power cables, if installed here, are going to be a significant issue when Yellowstone goes. They'll probably keep right on working under the multiple feet of ash that kills everyone and everything.
Insofar as anyone thinks this is how things work, I agree with you - utter nonsense.
However, there's this historic trend of ever increasing rate of change. There is some chance that this will lead to technologies that change the face of how we live and understand the world. That, I think, is the singularity. Today, people are comfortable saying "AI is impossible." At some point, they may find themselves saying, "I dunno, lemme ask the AI." Which may itself understand far deeper into things than we do. Remains to be seen, of course.
Really? What if our intelligence is augmented? What if the technology comes from a superior intelligence, either a digital AI or a designed biological intelligence, either from scratch or a genetically modified animal (which of course would include humans)?
What if one technology requires the other -- but at the different levels, doesn't require the understanding of the other? For instance, I'm an engineer; I can whip a gate array into shape, and I know what they are in a vague way as compared to the person who actually makes the silicon... but I don't need to know that. I'm a programmer, and I've written a number of very complex applications, designed lots of hardware at the PCB level, even won some awards, got my name in the ARRL handbook... but I couldn't put a single IC CPU together if given the tools to do it. I also use compilers, and although I actually have written a couple, I'm a lot better at using them to do other things.
You see, you definitely don't have to understand one technology in order to leverage it to create new technology. You just need to be able to use it. That's why your analysis is wrong, even if it were right about complexity of any one technology reaching a point where no one can improve on it, which I have to say I doubt.
In the reputation contest between Ray Kurzweil and slashdot user "lgw", Kurzweil wins. Sorry.
Look; predicting that technology -- which is not equivalent to a specific like Moore's law -- is going to continue to extend along the same curve is based upon the progress of many individual areas, a very surprising number of which show yearly doublings. Yes, some go, as we expect Moore's law to, but others arrive and the general curve stays quite stable. Arguing that technology won't continue to increase based on Moore's law running into end of life is like arguing that men won't find women attractive anymore because fur coats have gone out of fashion. It isn't about a specific technology; it is about how technology in general progresses, which is something we can observe by looking at large groups of technologies.
However, as those of us steeped in childhood lore know full well, Futility is a Tapir.
You're confusing optimistic predictions with actual progress. Lots of progress has been made with regard to fusion. It's a difficult problem and is not yet solved (like a lot of others, for that matter.) I would not assume that fusion is due on any particular date, but I *would* assume fusion (in the sense of being over-unity, controlled and useful in that regard) is due on some date. When it arrives, looking back, we'll be able to track the things that had the most effect on its development, and I suspect, like most other technological curves, you'll find it was exponential. But as it isn't here yet, I am, of course, speculating.
You mean speed of attempted travel, not the available technology to go fast. Speed of travel itself hasn't plateaued at all, especially in the sense that if we want to, we can get things -- including you, if you'd like to volunteer and collect the funds -- up to speeds far in excess of those we could have during the Apollo projects. We just haven't needed to. Some technologies languish unused for the simple reason that they are not presently needed, or they aren't cost-effective. That doesn't mean we can't get them done.
Are you seriously trying to call fossil fuel reserves a "technology"? Please. Consumption and recovery involve technology; deposits are fixed. Also, on general graphs of energy reserves, fossil fuels aren't going to even be a blip. Ask yourself how much retrievable energy is there in fissionables? How much in fusionables? Fossil fuel. Pah. Silly to even worry about it in the sense of energy reserves; it's a local, short-term social problem. And yes, it'll be that very technological curve that makes it a non-issue.
Again, you're confusing predictions, which are not technology, with actual progress, which has been substantial. This, like fusion, is a very hard problem because although we're pretty smart in some areas, we are not gifted with the ability to easily perceive our own operating mechanisms, and technologies to do so are just now coming online. Again, I expect it'll get solved, and I expect it'll be a log curve with at least 1/2 the work required done in the last binary period of the curve. In the meantime, we have associative memory, all manner of perception instrumentation, speech and speech recognition... all solved. The curve is visible, we just don't know what the terminus (for AI) is. Might be tomorrow; might be 100 years from now. Predictions are irrelevant, though. Progress is the issue at hand. Most interestingly, the vast majority of these problems have been solved not as a consequence of faster hardware as you mention, but as a matter of algorithms -- algorithms that can run on extremely minimal hardware. Speech synthesis, for instance, can be done on a 1970's era machine quite easily. Now that we know how.
Well, food is a lot less scarce these days. Technology is responsible for the most part. All kinds of technology. Transport, agriculture, etc. I expect this trend will also continue until there's enough food, at which point, like "going faster", there won't be a lot of point in going any further, though we probably could if the goal were to make longer, stronger graphs for y
But perspective is important here. When you say "close to the speed of light" with the implication that one cannot go any faster, that's a little bit insufficient as a description of the situation. As one approaches the speed of light relative to some initial pair of reference points at a relatively static distance from one another, time dilation causes time to pass slower for the traveler as compared to the reference points. This relationship (time passing less, or more slowly) continues to increase the closer one approaches the speed of light, and with the more energy one applies to accelerating the increasing mass of the traveller. As this increases, the time the traveler experiences between point A and point B decreases just as it would as if he was actually "going faster"; the point can be made that if I can travel five light years in one year of "my time", then as far as I am concerned, I'm traveling at 5x the speed of light. Regardless of the fact that the people I left behind are aging much faster than I am.
Since Analog has been dragged into this, let me point to Poul Anderson's excellent SF work "Tau Zero" in which this precise matter was a significant plot element. :-)
OK, what part of "While it cannot continue *forever*" did you not understand?
Northeastern Montana, for one. Right where I live.
But for more details, go here.
Well, you won't be running power lines that swing in the air; but power lines in a channel in the ground are possible in regions where seismic activity isn't a threat. Anyway, you can certainly make wires out of ceramic superconductors, is all I was getting at.
You've reached the wrong conclusion; if it isn't ductile, you can't use it for wires that bend; however, you can certainly use it for wires that follow nonlinear paths.
And my point was that just when you think it's going to hit a wall, it changes form and continues despite your pessimism. While it cannot continue *forever*, it can continue into the indefinite far future. The present graphs of technological increase are remarkably linear; there's no sign at all of a slowdown in the doublings, which are approximately yearly. Again, see Kurzweil for more on this; he's done a lot of very specific and careful work in this area.
When relays reached max density, tubes appeared. Tubes were shrunk, and at about the time when they couldn't get a lot smaller, transistors appeared. Those shrunk for a while, then IC's appeared. IC's have been shrinking for a while, with various technologies, each able to go smaller than before, driving that change. Now IC's are within reach of maximum density in the 2D zone, but the 3rd dimension beckons, especially to low-power (hence low heat) technologies. Two layers gives a doubling in the same 2d space; four does it again... that's probably good for quite a few doublings before the 3rd dimension becomes unwieldy. In the meantime, can we anticipate what might come next? Biologicals are one possibility; look at the brain. 3d and fits in a funny shape. Brains come in all sizes, and who is to say that the one we have is either the best design or the largest or the fastest? What if materials that work 2x as fast as our neurons are found? Look at the recent development of memristors; how many people saw that coming? Not many! And they're not even in hardware yet. They have the potential to spike memory density up, power down, speed up, and more... because they aren't transistors at all. And they're small. In fact, the smaller they are, the better they seem to work. There's a limit in there somewhere, but still, how cool is that?
Furthermore, Moore's law is just one aspect of technology; we are also experiencing doublings along many other paths (see Ray Kurzweil's observations for details on that) and some of them aren't about materials or hardware, they're about knowledge leveraging next steps. For instance, in the late 1970's, we had microprocessors that were very capable, but we didn't have many kinds of software. If we had it at the time, we could have done more, earlier... nothing but knowledge. But instead, many of these software technologies didn't show up for years. Yet we could take one of those microprocessors (a 6809 or a z80, for instance) and program all *manner* of cool things on them today, were it called for. And build them huge memory spaces, too. To put it another way, with what I know after 40 years of programming, if I could go back in time to 1979, what I now know how to do with microprocessors would make me a very rich man. Technology has come a long way regardless of Moore's law. Technology multiplies itself.
Honestly, there is nothing that falls so flat on my ears as doomlike predictions of technology reaching an unbreachable wall. Not going to happen. What's going to happen is technology will continue to double. The consequences of that are shrouded in mystery, but the one thing that is clear is that there will be extremely significant consequences.
Here's an observation for you: When you have projects that are pendant upon technologies that are experiencing doublings in a particular time period, those projects will typically get 1/2 of the total work done in the last time period.
For example, four time periods of doublings: 1 - 2 4 8 16... a total factor of 31, of which 16 occurred in the last period. It is because of this that projects like the human genome project look stalled at first; half of the work required to get them done will occur in the last doubling period (about a year in that case.) I suspect that's exactly what we're looking at with fusion as well; we're just not far enough up the curve yet.
So call me compulsive. dbtxt 1.1 is posted, and now supports editable binary and floating point types. There are some other improvements as well.
The dove is released....
The visitor waves hands in wide circle
ahk ahk ahk ahk AHK! PzzzZZT!
Nothing left but feathers...
It's dead, Jim. Fossilized. Now come away.
No, not all of them work that way. There are color sensors in use in the commercial space that have RGB sensors stacked in the same pixel; they don't use filters. Google Sigma / Foveon.
The only "weird" thing about animal rights is that they have very few; which in turn is one indicator (of many I could cite) that people aren't nearly as smart as they pretend to be.
Except in the dark? Oh no, we can see you just fine in the dark. Above a whisper? Heck, we can read your lips with no sound at all. And of course we can hear your slightest whisper as well, even through deafening levels of background noise. And your mail. And everything on your computer. And your bank account. And your medical records. Thought police plugging in randomly? Computers that watch all the time, buddy. If the thought police are needed, they'll be called automatically, no worries. Field of vision? The cameras will be everywhere. Everywhere. They cost but pennies to make now. Just a chip. Beach sand. Lenses made of water. Wireless connections to the network. Everywhere.
Everything you say, and everywhere you say it, can be used against you. If that's not sufficient, we'll waterboard you until you confess your crimes. You are guilty as soon as we say you are. That's your first principle; your axiom; your raison d'être.
You gave your liberties up. It was for the children. The 100% surveilled, sexually repressed, mythologically inculcated, minor servants of the state who informed on you for digging that camera-free hole where you could be alone.
For the children. How noble. Thank you, citizen.