In any cooling system, the heat removed from the stuff being cooled is more than compensated for by heat somewhere else. You know, laws of thermodynamics and all that.
So the question is, when this device activates to chill the beverage, what is it that gets hot?
Energy must be conserved, but nothing necessarily has to get hot, at least in the short term. If you put you can into an ice/water bath, the can will cool down, and the temperature of the ice/water bath will not change.
In general, you are correct; you can't cool something down without warming something up, but there are ways to buffer this chemically so that the cooling and the warming don't have to happen at the same time. In my example, the warming already happened, back when the ice was made (the coils of the refrigerator warmed up).
The real problem with airport security is that too many politicans (hounded by Islamic pressure groups) think that nationality profiling is "racist". There is nothing racist about (1) checking the bags and bodies of all non-American citizens from the USA and (2) performing a less intensive check of American citizens. The threat is from the Middle Easterner, not the average American.
It's not a matter of it being racist, it's a matter of it being stupid.
Profiling is the terrorist's friend, because it is predictable, and because it diverts effort from security measures that really are effective. It is easy to determine what is in the profile, simply by observing which people are subjected to extra screening and which are not. Then, it is trivial to make sure that your operational team doesn't fit the profile. Do you really think that a serious terrorist group can't assemble a couple of dozen people who don't fit any imaginable terrorist profile?
The terrorist's nightmare is random screening, because how can you avoid a random factor? When even elderly caucasians are being pulled out of the line, there is an additional, unavoidable element uncertainty introduced into any terrorist operation. In addition, it adds "noise" that obscures any real profile based screening. Was Fred Mohammed Smith pulled out of line because of his mustache, his middle name, or random chance?
And if any profile based screening is going on, it needs to be as covert as possible. If a bunch of Islamic-looking guys get onto a plane together (like the recent case of a traveling Middle-Eastern music troupe that panicked a journalist) you certainly don't want to pull an unusually high fraction of them out for extra screening. Pull out just one or two, and let them wonder if it was random or purposeful. If something looks suspect, place a few extra marshals on the flight, or run some background checks behind the scenes, but don't make it obvious to the passengers. Better to give the appearance of being oblivious, so that the real terrorists might fall into the trap.
The individual odds of any one person being killed by an asteroid impact are very low. The disturbing thing is that the odds of millions of people being killed are not all that much lower. It puts it in a very different category than individual risks.
You're probably right. I'm an Apple user myself and am not looking to bash Apple or something. But for a computer company that compares itself to BMW it is not acceptable that something like that should be possible at all. If you buy a BMW you don't want a model that has been known to be losing wheels in preproduction runs on the test circuit.
Yeah, you won't find a respectable company like BMW issuing recalls due to dangerous product defects
Now, now, all you iPod fans are going to jump down my throat about Real's shitty codecs and how Apple's non-sense is so much better... I just can't agree with you. I haven't heard Real's code but I have heard 100s of samples of Apple's *and* 35 full length tracks. Apple's codec sucks compared to even MP3
I've seen a number of comparative listening tests, and AAC virtually always comes off ahead of mp3 at the same bit rate. I'd like to use it, but I don't want the ability to play my music to be tied to Apple's fortunes. I'm sticking with mp3. I can usually buy CDs for close to the price (and if used, sometimes cheaper) of iTunes Music Store, and I have a backup than I can re-rip at a higher bit rate as storage gets cheaper. And I can stream mp3 to my TiVo, which doesn't like AAC. So if Apple wants my business at their music store, they need to offer an unprotected format. I understand that the music industry won't let them do that, but that's not my problem. At least Apple's software and player supports mp3 as well as their own format. Apple probably doesn't care which I use--iTMS is there to sell iPods, not the other way around, and I'll probably end up buying an iPod anyway.
Of course, Real isn't opening up Apple's proprietary format; they're just horning in for their own benefit. They may well be legally entitled to do so, but they aren't the White Knight here. If they really want to play that role, give me a utility to convert Real formatted music and video files to standard mp3 and mpg.
You are correct though that chemistry is simplest to understand when all the energy comes from one quanta of radiation. But it may not be the only bond breaking mechansim. Papers have been written, as I mentioned, on this new frontier.
Can you give me a reference to a paper that has demonstrated that kind of multi-photon bond breaking by low intensity RF fields?
What matters is the membrane POTENTIAL (volts to fractions of a volt) and the VOLTAGE DROP due to CURRENT through the intracellular medium across the width of the cell.
Not to membrane receptors and ion channels. They can only sense the potential gradient across the membrane.
That current can be enormous, because it is induced by MANY photons from the incoming wave. It is proportional to the signal strength, and has nothing to do with the wavelength of the signal compared to the thickness of the membrane. Dropping a voltage across the width of the cell large enough to modulate the activity of a voltage-sensitive cell-receptor molecule when the cell membrane focuses that differential on the receptor does not require meat-cooking intracellular currents.
Long wavelength means a shallow gradient, and little difference in potential across the cell, much less the membrane, unless the signal strength is enormous. Which is fortunate. If radio waves could induce potential differences of tens of millivolts across cell membranes, you'd have problems far more severe than a small increase in your long-term risk of cancer. Like falling down in convulsions if you walked past a radio tower.
So the entire voltage difference appears across the very thin membrane at the place where it is greatest. This is a LARGE field strength (in terms of volts/inch), though the field strength around the cell (in the same terms) is quite small.
But because the wavelength is so large, it can't compete with the strength of the membrane field due to ionic gradients, which is on the order of 200,000 volts/inch.
The cell membrane is oil-based, and an effective insulator. The surrounding fluid, and the fluid within the cell, are conductive. So the field strength across the membrane can be enormously stronger than the applied field producing it.
The effect of the dielectric properties of the membrane applies equally to the field produced by the ionic gradients maintained by the cell and external fields, so any effect of these comparatively small external fields is negligible, on the level of the noise produced by thermal fluctuations in membrane channel conductance.
Why are you all so reluctant to even entertain the notion that non-ionizing radiation might create a health risk?
1. Because it is very hard to come up with a plausible mechanism whereby radiation that doesn't have enough energy to damage biological molecules can nevertheless produce biological damage.
2. Because the effects that have been reported have been smaller than is considered reliable in retrospective correlative studies of this sort, and many studies have found no risk.
Third: Many cell-surface proteins, including those regulating cell activity, are affected by cell membrane potentials. Electric and electromagnetic fields affect those potentials, and may result in activation (or deactivation) of such signaling paths. That could inappropriately modulate cell activity, in ways that stress the cell and increase the chance for DNA damage.
This reflects a lack of understanding of the fields involved in regulating membrane ion channels. Even though it is only a potential difference of some tens of millivolts, it is acting across a width of perhaps 8 nm, so the field is actually very large. Compared with biological fields, external fields from radio antennas are negligible.
This is an important point that is no emphsized. What are the other things other than radio waves associated with AM towers? And, can they cause cancer? Assuming the correlation panned out, correlation with AM towers does not equal causation by radio waves.
This is the sort of thing that can easily confound this kind of retrospective study. Among other things, people who live close to power lines and AM towers are not necessarily typical of the general population. For example, one generally doesn't find towers in well-to-do neighborhoods, so you need to control for socioeconomic class.
This isn't a new thing. In fact, it's explained in my physical chemistry text book. Basically, you activate nearby molecules to sligtly excited states and they can build up energy in a small region and ionize something (perhaps DNA).
However, for this to happen, a quantum of radiation must carry enough energy to break a bond. Radiation for which this is not the case--such as AM radio waves--is known as "non-ionizing."
There are plenty of such mechanisms. For example, just about any circuit with a nonlinearity (like most biological cells) near a radio station will pick up a small audio frequency signal. Those signals are strong enough to be audible in stereo equipment, telephones, etc. that aren't well shielded. And low frequency electrical signals definitely have biological effects.
The fact that an amplifier designed to amplify RF signals can amplify a low amplitude RF signals proves nothing. And even when your radio can pick up such noise, it doesn't damage the radio. Biological "circuits" have very little in common with electronics. And while a few investigators have claimed to have observed biological effects of low frequency electrical signals, the evidence certainly does not rise to the level of "definitely."
Why is it the replies to this stuff always fall into two camps:
1) The sky is falling, we're doomed 2) There is no way anything I find useful could be harmful
How about a little balance, folks. There are plenty of times throughout history where something in widespread use was later found to be more dangerous than it was worth.
There is a third point of view: the scientific perspective:
1. It is an extraordinary claim that electromagnetic radiation of energy that is too low to damage any biological material can nevertheless cause biological damage. 2. Extraordinary claims require extraordinarily evidence. 3. Correlative retrospective studies are fraught with potential biases, which are difficult to anticipate and eliminate, and have often turned out to be misleading unless the effect is very large. A rule of thumb is to be very skeptical when the increase in risk is less than twofold.
Macs are fine, I have had them at home for 20 years without a problem. But... they are expensive and Apple is the king of planned obsolescence.
These days, you can get a Mac with built-in monitor for about $800. And you can save a lot more if you pick up an older model, used. I don't quite get the "planned obsolescence" remark. We've got Macs nearly a decade old that still work fine. Sure, if you want to take advantage of Apple's latest OS versions and nifty included applications, you need a fairly recent model. But an old Mac will work just fine for a lot of purposes, and you can even connect it to the net without worrying that it will be colonized overnight by spyware, worms, and viruses.
And don't exactly get the girls, either, suggesting that maybe genius is an evolutionary dead end.
It probably is. Beyond a certain point, intelligence doesn't help one in the evolutionary business of producing more surviving children than one's neighbor. Highly intelligent people have an unfortunate tendency to get distracted by other things from the serious business of reproduction. We probably are already at the evolutionary optimum intelligence for our species.
But such evolutionary constraints need not apply to machine intelligences.
Why not? Why aren't video editing facilities a cultural revolution? Go back a couple of hundred years. Find visual reference to what life was like. After that, go ahead a hundred years and do a little research on what the 21st century was like. Don't you realize that historians in future centuries will have a big whopping idea of what life was like? They'll have access to the music we listened to, videos us individuals have made, and words we have written from sites like livejournal.com?
Will they? Oddly enough, one of the consequences of the information singularity is that information is stored in more ephemeral forms. We used to store data on acid free paper that under reasonable conditions would survive for hundreds of years. Music was stored on vinyl that was nearly immortal if not abused. Now, we store them on CDs that probably have a lifespan of decades, if that. And there's a lot of information that is rapidly becoming inaccessible because it was stored in an obsolete format. Once, information would survive if just left alone. Today, preserving of information requires a positive effort to carry it forward as formats change and media degrades.
Outside of cosmology, which is wank, it's pretty clear what's truth and fiction in physics
I don't think you'll find many physicists who would agree that it is "pretty clear" whether string theory or spin networks are truth or fiction.
"Random information" is just this short from being an oxymoron. A pretty good definition of "random" is "carries no information". (Not the only reasonable definition, though.)
Actually, in information theory, random data has maximum information content. And once communicated, there is one additional, crucial piece of information--that data exists in just two places. That turns out to have substantial practical value--as a basis for perfectly secure encryption, for example.
Translation: "I don't doubt that soon we'll be able to simulate brain function." I won't bother to go into the simulacra issue, though (Searle's 1990's work lays this notion of "simulation" to waste, IMHO).
So far, we have found not a single aspect of neurobiology that is not amenable to simulation. Given reasonably accurate simulation of the machinery, the output should not be distinguishable from the output of a real brain. At this point in time, the notion that a brain cannot be simulated, given sufficient computing power, belongs more to the realm of faith than science. IMHO Searle's work is entirely irrelevant. I don't care whether the machine actually thinks, or the room actually understands Chinese, if it produces the same output as if it does (which was, of course, the point of Turing's "test").
In general terms a singularity is the point where a function goes to infinity. It cannot happen in the real world with physical resource constraints, instead of a singularity we have a step function with exponential growth which we're seeing at the moment, then the limits will kick in and it'll level off to a steady state plateau.
If you actually read Vinge's discussion of the singularity you will find that he does not suggest that any physical parameter literally goes to infinity. Nor is a soft landing on a plateau the only possible outcome. What Vinge is suggesting is more akin to a phase change.
I presume you are talking about the theorem that proves that you can't write a program that always will be capable of telling when an aribitrary other program will terminate.
But then, you probably can't find a human who can do this, either.
His assertion that this depends on the progress of computing hardware seems absurd to me. We already have as much computing hardware as we need, where computing hardware is all essentially capable of handling Turing-complete computation (in the lax sense of the phrase, obviously computational power and storage are finite, but not so limited that it's hampering our ability to simulate human intelligence).
Than we need to do what? We certainly don't have the computing power to simulate all of the neurons in a human brain in anything approaching real time. Perhaps human-competitive AI doesn't require that level of complexity. But perhaps it does.
Only a small number of third world countries are significant in the tech outsourcing business; and the benefits are reaped by only a small amount of their populations.
Yes, this is a relatively new phenomenon that is just beginning. Indeed, it wasn't even possible before the internet and modern low priced computers, which themselves are a relatively recent phenomena. The point is that it is now possible for people in 3rd world countries to compete in a highly technical field that until very recently was the exclusive province of first world nations.
Funny that since they're just writers. They're not scientists, just writers. Few things irritate me more then someone holding a Sci-Fi writer as some sort of visionary, if they actually did get something right, its because it was the obvious thing, or a fluke. They're not brilliant geniuses.
Actually, scientists are not really in the business of predicting the future. Scientiists tend to have relatively short perspectives: "What can I do now to increase our understanding?" Most scientists are specialists, knowing a great deal about a narrow area of study. This is often what you need to make progress, but it doesn't necessarily help you see the shape of the future. A writer of hard science fiction has to be familiar with many areas of science to come up with novel ideas for stories. And while they may not be scientists themselves, what they write needs to be scientifically plausible, because a lot of their readers are, and don't hesitate to point out errors (like Niven's unstable Ringworld).
And sometimes, I think, SF writers may even help to make the future Scientists read science fiction, and may take an interest in pursuing some of the ideas they read about in more rigorous ways. I can't help wondering how many of the guys now working on quantum "teleportation" were influenced by Star Trek's transporter....
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In any cooling system, the heat removed from the stuff being cooled is more than compensated for by heat somewhere else. You know, laws of thermodynamics and all that.
So the question is, when this device activates to chill the beverage, what is it that gets hot?
Energy must be conserved, but nothing necessarily has to get hot, at least in the short term. If you put you can into an ice/water bath, the can will cool down, and the temperature of the ice/water bath will not change.
In general, you are correct; you can't cool something down without warming something up, but there are ways to buffer this chemically so that the cooling and the warming don't have to happen at the same time. In my example, the warming already happened, back when the ice was made (the coils of the refrigerator warmed up).
The real problem with airport security is that too many politicans (hounded by Islamic pressure groups) think that nationality profiling is "racist". There is nothing racist about (1) checking the bags and bodies of all non-American citizens from the USA and (2) performing a less intensive check of American citizens. The threat is from the Middle Easterner, not the average American.
It's not a matter of it being racist, it's a matter of it being stupid.
Profiling is the terrorist's friend, because it is predictable, and because it diverts effort from security measures that really are effective. It is easy to determine what is in the profile, simply by
observing which people are subjected to extra screening and which are not. Then, it is trivial to make sure that your operational team doesn't fit the profile. Do you really think that a serious terrorist group can't assemble a couple of dozen people who don't fit any imaginable terrorist profile?
The terrorist's nightmare is random screening, because how can you avoid a random factor? When even elderly caucasians are being pulled out of the line, there is an additional, unavoidable element uncertainty introduced into any terrorist operation. In addition, it adds "noise" that obscures any real profile based screening. Was Fred Mohammed Smith pulled out of line because of his mustache, his middle name, or random chance?
And if any profile based screening is going on, it needs to be as covert as possible. If a bunch of Islamic-looking guys get onto a plane together (like the recent case of a traveling Middle-Eastern music troupe that panicked a journalist) you certainly don't want to pull an unusually high fraction of them out for extra screening. Pull out just one or two, and let them wonder if it was random or purposeful. If something looks suspect, place a few extra marshals on the flight, or run some background checks behind the scenes, but don't make it obvious to the passengers. Better to give the appearance of being oblivious, so that the real terrorists might fall into the trap.
The individual odds of any one person being killed by an asteroid impact are very low. The disturbing thing is that the odds of millions of people being killed are not all that much lower. It puts it in a very different category than individual risks.
Yeah, you won't find a respectable company like BMW issuing recalls due to dangerous product defects
Now, now, all you iPod fans are going to jump down my throat about Real's shitty codecs and how Apple's non-sense is so much better... I just can't agree with you. I haven't heard Real's code but I have heard 100s of samples of Apple's *and* 35 full length tracks. Apple's codec sucks compared to even MP3
I've seen a number of comparative listening tests, and AAC virtually always comes off ahead of mp3 at the same bit rate. I'd like to use it, but I don't want the ability to play my music to be tied to Apple's fortunes. I'm sticking with mp3. I can usually buy CDs for close to the price (and if used, sometimes cheaper) of iTunes Music Store, and I have a backup than I can re-rip at a higher bit rate as storage gets cheaper. And I can stream mp3 to my TiVo, which doesn't like AAC. So if Apple wants my business at their music store, they need to offer an unprotected format. I understand that the music industry won't let them do that, but that's not my problem. At least Apple's software and player supports mp3 as well as their own format. Apple probably doesn't care which I use--iTMS is there to sell iPods, not the other way around, and I'll probably end up buying an iPod anyway.
Of course, Real isn't opening up Apple's proprietary format; they're just horning in for their own benefit. They may well be legally entitled to do so, but they aren't the White Knight here. If they really want to play that role, give me a utility to convert Real formatted music and video files to standard mp3 and mpg.
You are correct though that chemistry is simplest to understand when all the energy comes from one quanta of radiation. But it may not be the only bond breaking mechansim. Papers have been written, as I mentioned, on this new frontier.
Can you give me a reference to a paper that has demonstrated that kind of multi-photon bond breaking by low intensity RF fields?
What matters is the membrane POTENTIAL (volts to fractions of a volt) and the VOLTAGE DROP due to CURRENT through the intracellular medium across the width of the cell.
Not to membrane receptors and ion channels. They can only sense the potential gradient across the membrane.
That current can be enormous, because it is induced by MANY photons from the incoming wave. It is proportional to the signal strength, and has nothing to do with the wavelength of the signal compared to the thickness of the membrane. Dropping a voltage across the width of the cell large enough to modulate the activity of a voltage-sensitive cell-receptor molecule when the cell membrane focuses that differential on the receptor does not require meat-cooking intracellular currents.
Long wavelength means a shallow gradient, and little difference in potential across the cell, much less the membrane, unless the signal strength is enormous. Which is fortunate. If radio waves could induce potential differences of tens of millivolts across cell membranes, you'd have problems far more severe than a small increase in your long-term risk of cancer. Like falling down in convulsions if you walked past a radio tower.
So the entire voltage difference appears across the very thin membrane at the place where it is greatest. This is a LARGE field strength (in terms of volts/inch), though the field strength around the cell (in the same terms) is quite small.
But because the wavelength is so large, it can't compete with the strength of the membrane field due to ionic gradients, which is on the order of 200,000 volts/inch.
The cell membrane is oil-based, and an effective insulator. The surrounding fluid, and the fluid within the cell, are conductive. So the field strength across the membrane can be enormously stronger than the applied field producing it.
The effect of the dielectric properties of the membrane applies equally to the field produced by the ionic gradients maintained by the cell and external fields, so any effect of these comparatively small external fields is negligible, on the level of the noise produced by thermal fluctuations in membrane channel conductance.
Why are you all so reluctant to even entertain the notion that non-ionizing radiation might create a health risk?
1. Because it is very hard to come up with a plausible mechanism whereby radiation that doesn't have enough energy to damage biological molecules can nevertheless produce biological damage.
2. Because the effects that have been reported have been smaller than is considered reliable in retrospective correlative studies of this sort, and many studies have found no risk.
Third: Many cell-surface proteins, including those regulating cell activity, are affected by cell membrane potentials. Electric and electromagnetic fields affect those potentials, and may result in activation (or deactivation) of such signaling paths. That could inappropriately modulate cell activity, in ways that stress the cell and increase the chance for DNA damage.
This reflects a lack of understanding of the fields involved in regulating membrane ion channels. Even though it is only a potential difference of some tens of millivolts, it is acting across a width of perhaps 8 nm, so the field is actually very large. Compared with biological fields, external fields from radio antennas are negligible.
This is an important point that is no emphsized. What are the other things other than radio waves associated with AM towers? And, can they cause cancer? Assuming the correlation panned out, correlation with AM towers does not equal causation by radio waves.
This is the sort of thing that can easily confound this kind of retrospective study. Among other things, people who live close to power lines and AM towers are not necessarily typical of the general population. For example, one generally doesn't find towers in well-to-do neighborhoods, so you need to control for socioeconomic class.
This isn't a new thing. In fact, it's explained in my physical chemistry text book. Basically, you activate nearby molecules to sligtly excited states and they can build up energy in a small region and ionize something (perhaps DNA).
However, for this to happen, a quantum of radiation must carry enough energy to break a bond. Radiation for which this is not the case--such as AM radio waves--is known as "non-ionizing."
There are plenty of such mechanisms. For example, just about any circuit with a nonlinearity (like most biological cells) near a radio station will pick up a small audio frequency signal. Those signals are strong enough to be audible in stereo equipment, telephones, etc. that aren't well shielded. And low frequency electrical signals definitely have biological effects.
The fact that an amplifier designed to amplify RF signals can amplify a low amplitude RF signals proves nothing. And even when your radio can pick up such noise, it doesn't damage the radio. Biological "circuits" have very little in common with electronics. And while a few investigators have claimed to have observed biological effects of low frequency electrical signals, the evidence certainly does not rise to the level of "definitely."
Why is it the replies to this stuff always fall into two camps:
1) The sky is falling, we're doomed
2) There is no way anything I find useful could be harmful
How about a little balance, folks. There are plenty of times throughout history where something in widespread use was later found to be more dangerous than it was worth.
There is a third point of view: the scientific perspective:
1. It is an extraordinary claim that electromagnetic radiation of energy that is too low to damage any biological material can nevertheless cause biological damage.
2. Extraordinary claims require extraordinarily evidence.
3. Correlative retrospective studies are fraught with potential biases, which are difficult to anticipate and eliminate, and have often turned out to be misleading unless the effect is very large. A rule of thumb is to be very skeptical when the increase in risk is less than twofold.
Macs are fine, I have had them at home for 20 years without a problem. But... they are expensive and Apple is the king of planned obsolescence.
These days, you can get a Mac with built-in monitor for about $800. And you can save a lot more if you pick up an older model, used. I don't quite get the "planned obsolescence" remark. We've got Macs nearly a decade old that still work fine. Sure, if you want to take advantage of Apple's latest OS versions and nifty included applications, you need a fairly recent model. But an old Mac will work just fine for a lot of purposes, and you can even connect it to the net without worrying that it will be colonized overnight by spyware, worms, and viruses.
And don't exactly get the girls, either, suggesting that maybe genius is an evolutionary dead end.
It probably is. Beyond a certain point, intelligence doesn't help one in the evolutionary business of producing more surviving children than one's neighbor. Highly intelligent people have an unfortunate tendency to get distracted by other things from the serious business of reproduction. We probably are already at the evolutionary optimum intelligence for our species.
But such evolutionary constraints need not apply to machine intelligences.
Why not? Why aren't video editing facilities a cultural revolution? Go back a couple of hundred years. Find visual reference to what life was like. After that, go ahead a hundred years and do a little research on what the 21st century was like. Don't you realize that historians in future centuries will have a big whopping idea of what life was like? They'll have access to the music we listened to, videos us individuals have made, and words we have written from sites like livejournal.com?
Will they? Oddly enough, one of the consequences of the information singularity is that information is stored in more ephemeral forms. We used to store data on acid free paper that under reasonable conditions would survive for hundreds of years. Music was stored on vinyl that was nearly immortal if not abused. Now, we store them on CDs that probably have a lifespan of decades, if that. And there's a lot of information that is rapidly becoming inaccessible because it was stored in an obsolete format. Once, information would survive if just left alone. Today, preserving of information requires a positive effort to carry it forward as formats change and media degrades.
Outside of cosmology, which is wank, it's pretty clear what's truth and fiction in physics
I don't think you'll find many physicists who would agree that it is "pretty clear" whether string theory or spin networks are truth or fiction.
"Random information" is just this short from being an oxymoron. A pretty good definition of "random" is "carries no information". (Not the only reasonable definition, though.)
Actually, in information theory, random data has maximum information content. And once communicated, there is one additional, crucial piece of information--that data exists in just two places. That turns out to have substantial practical value--as a basis for perfectly secure encryption, for example.
Translation: "I don't doubt that soon we'll be able to simulate brain function." I won't bother to go into the simulacra issue, though (Searle's 1990's work lays this notion of "simulation" to waste, IMHO).
So far, we have found not a single aspect of neurobiology that is not amenable to simulation. Given reasonably accurate simulation of the machinery, the output should not be distinguishable from the output of a real brain. At this point in time, the notion that a brain cannot be simulated, given sufficient computing power, belongs more to the realm of faith than science. IMHO Searle's work is entirely irrelevant. I don't care whether the machine actually thinks, or the room actually understands Chinese, if it produces the same output as if it does (which was, of course, the point of Turing's "test").
In general terms a singularity is the point where a function goes to infinity. It cannot happen in the real world with physical resource constraints, instead of a singularity we have a step function with exponential growth which we're seeing at the moment, then the limits will kick in and it'll level off to a steady state plateau.
If you actually read Vinge's discussion of the singularity you will find that he does not suggest that any physical parameter literally goes to infinity. Nor is a soft landing on a plateau the only possible outcome. What Vinge is suggesting is more akin to a phase change.
I presume you are talking about the theorem that proves that you can't write a program that always will be capable of telling when an aribitrary other program will terminate.
But then, you probably can't find a human who can do this, either.
The article mentions Clarke's idea of geosynchronous satellites, but that has to be one of the few technologies actually predicted by SF.
There were ray guns in science fiction well before the laser was invented, or even believed to be possible.
His assertion that this depends on the progress of computing hardware seems absurd to me. We already have as much computing hardware as we need, where computing hardware is all essentially capable of handling Turing-complete computation (in the lax sense of the phrase, obviously computational power and storage are finite, but not so limited that it's hampering our ability to simulate human intelligence).
Than we need to do what? We certainly don't have the computing power to simulate all of the neurons in a human brain in anything approaching real time. Perhaps human-competitive AI doesn't require that level of complexity. But perhaps it does.
Only a small number of third world countries are significant in the tech outsourcing business; and the benefits are reaped by only a small amount of their populations.
Yes, this is a relatively new phenomenon that is just beginning. Indeed, it wasn't even possible before the internet and modern low priced computers, which themselves are a relatively recent phenomena. The point is that it is now possible for people in 3rd world countries to compete in a highly technical field that until very recently was the exclusive province of first world nations.
Funny that since they're just writers. They're not scientists, just writers. Few things irritate me more then someone holding a Sci-Fi writer as some sort of visionary, if they actually did get something right, its because it was the obvious thing, or a fluke. They're not brilliant geniuses.
Actually, scientists are not really in the business of predicting the future. Scientiists tend to have relatively short perspectives: "What can I do now to increase our understanding?" Most scientists are specialists, knowing a great deal about a narrow area of study. This is often what you need to make progress, but it doesn't necessarily help you see the shape of the future. A writer of hard science fiction has to be familiar with many areas of science to come up with novel ideas for stories. And while they may not be scientists themselves, what they write needs to be scientifically plausible, because a lot of their readers are, and don't hesitate to point out errors (like Niven's unstable Ringworld).
And sometimes, I think, SF writers may even help to make the future Scientists read science fiction, and may take an interest in pursuing some of the ideas they read about in more rigorous ways. I can't help wondering how many of the guys now working on quantum "teleportation" were influenced by Star Trek's transporter....