If it is government subsidized, digital TV will probably stay expensive. On the other hand, if manufacturers realize that there is a huge market for low-end digital TVs and set-top boxes for lower-end consumers who don't have cable, the price will probably drop precipitously.
Let's consider a ball with a string attatched to it. Say you pick up the ball, and twirl it around your head. The centripetal force OUTWARD is constant. It is an unbalanced force. Without the string providing the INWARD force, it would fly off. There is absolutely no inward force without the string(ignoring friction).
It is nonsensical to talk about an outward centripetal force, because the term means "center seeking." Under the circumstances you describe, the forces are equal and balanced--otherwise the ball would be changing its distance from the center. It is entirely arbitrary as to whether you regard the ball as spinning around the center, constrained by a centripetal force, or you regard the universe as spinning, with the string preventing the ball from flying off due to a centrifugal force.
The force of which you speak does not exist. Newton's 3rd law does not make it exist. Trying to say it exists in your PoV is like assuming that the Earth is the center of the universe. It's a valid PoV, but we all know it's untrue.
Says who? If it is a valid perspective, what makes it untrue? Can you prove that the earth is not at the center of the universe?
When you start arguing about truth, you are exiting the realm of science and entering the realm of philosophy and religion. Scientifically, validity is the only appropriate criterion. I think that it is misleading to insist that one perspective is more "true" than another. One frame of reference may provide a simpler, more convenient, or more symmetrical description of the laws of nature for the purpose of answering particular questions. But so long as all observable consequences are the same, one is as valid as any other.
No, the force vector is directed *toward* the center of the Earth.
I'm not talking about that force vector. I'm talking about the equal and oppositely force vector required by Newton's 3rd law. It points outward from the center and is therefore centrifugal.
In a car, you feel drawn away from the center of the turn, but that's because the car's wheels constrain the car to move and you're pulled along with the car.
Or I can think of the car as stationary and the universe as rotating around it, with a force directed outward from the center of the turn. What makes your view more valid than mine?
When you're orbiting the Earth, even on the Moon, you'll not feel anything because the centripetal force (in this case, gravity) is pulling you together with the Moon.
Where's any perception of outward force, in any reference frame?
In the reference frame in which I am stationary, and the universe is rotating around the center of the earth, I feel nothing because the centrifugal force exactly balances the force of gravity (and also because both forces act equally upon all of my atoms).
That's not a centifugal force though. There is no centrifugal force.
It is a force vector directed away from the center. In what sense is that not centrifugal?
Centrifugal force was just a bit of confusion on the parts of scientists at the time. There is only centripital force and the force from the constraing body acting on the object in UCM, there is no centrifugal force.
I would say rather that scientists at the time were clever enough to appreciate that perceived forces depend upon one's frame of reference.
You will hate me for this comment but just so you know there is no such thing as a centrifugal force. There is centripetal force, but no centrifugal.
I disagree. If one exerts a centripetal force on an object to constrain it into circular motion, then the object exerts a centrifugal force in reaction. Newton's 3rd law. Whether you choose to talk about the centrifugal or centripetal force is purely a matter of frame of reference. If you are in a rotating frame of reference, there is most definitely a centrifugal force.
What they did with Doom 3 is very simple, however: They took a game with a legacy of being a first person shooter, and they made it into a horror game.
So that's why Doom 3 is the first game in the series that I've really enjoyed. After all, who needs realistic lighting effects for a shooter? But they make a big difference for a horror game.
I still hold that we know so little about the conditions for the formation of life, and so little about the conditions on other planets in general that Occam's razor is a very poor tool for estimating life in the universe. But you are right that even our one sample does tell us a fair bit.
Actually, I don't think that Occam's Razor is a good tool for estimating anything. I don't think that there is any basis for arguing that the simplest hypothesis is more likely to be correct. I see Occam's Razor merely as a rule of thumb for efficiently ordering plausible hypotheses for testing.
I am assuming that the conditions on the early earth are just about a perfect fit for our form of life. This is nothing more than taking the worst case scenario for life being rare. The less suitable the earth's conditions were, the more likely the half life is smaller.
Yes, the real problem is that the statistical argument only gets us halfway. We can conclude that under ideal conditions life will form fairly promptly. But because of the anthropic principle we have no basis for estimating how common those conditions are. Arguments have been made that planets like earth could be quite rare, and observational data is not adequate to resolve the question. My suspicion is that conditions for the formation of life are broader than we tend to think, simply because we are biased to expect that life has form in the same way it did here, and there may be other pathways. But I see no way to put that suspicion on any kind of solid basis.
This assumes a bell curve distribution. I can't think of any good reason that the formation of life would follow this[1], and several that suggest that it does not.
Other plausible distributions yield similar conclusions. Probably the simplest assumption is an exponential distribution, which would be the case if there is a constant probability per unit time that life forms. In this case, there is a half-life with which lifeless planets transform into planets with life, and there is a 96% probability that a randomly selected planet (i.e. ours) has a time to formation of life that is no more than 4 half-lives. Again, this allows us to argue with a high degree of statistical certainty that the average waiting time for life to form is short, and therefore that the probability of formation is fairly high.
Given the sample size, average doesn't tell us much, if anything at all. Or in other words, we have very little idea what the average time to form life really is.
It doesn't tell us a lot, but it is the only sample that we have. Out of a statistical distribution, any single randomly selected sample is by definition far more likely to be near the median than many standard deviations out on one of the tails. So out of the statistical distribution of the time for life to form, earth is most likely fairly typical, in which case formation of life on planets like earth is a high probability event. Of course, there is a very small likelihood that formation of life is very improbable and we were just extraordinarily lucky, but that's not the way to bet.
Note that we cannot apply the same reasoning to the distribution of planets suitable for life. All living observers will find themselves on a planet suitable for life, whether that is a high or low probability event. So it could still be that formation of life on a suitable planet is a high probability event, but that suitable planets are extraordinarily rare.
Like trying to figure out how many teeth a horse has when you have only seen one, and it hasn't opened it's mouth yet.
Perhaps, but if you lifted a random spot on a horse's lip and saw a tooth there, would you be willing to bet that it's the only tooth that it has?
The simplest solution is usually the best. Are we alone? yes. Its much simpler to say yes than to expect the insanely high odds that some more elements should combine in the perfect way to create an organism from not much.
Occam's Razor is not a basis for determining which hypothesis is correct. Indeed, historically, the simplest hypothesis has usually turned out to be wrong.
What Occam's Razor really is is an algorithm for ordering the universe of possible hypotheses for testing. It is most efficient to start by eliminating the simplest hypotheses, then the next simplest, etc.
Its much simpler to say yes than to expect the insanely high odds that some more elements should combine in the perfect way to create an organism from not much.
In this case, the simplest hypothesis is that the odds are not enormously high, and that given the appropriate conditions, the evolution of life is a near certainty. This would fit with the fact that life seems to have appeared on earth fairly early, almost as soon as the earth's crust stabilized. If it is really such an improbable event, then the average waiting time for life to form should be long. So if formation of life is really improbable, then our planet is not only remarkably lucky to have life at all, but remarkably lucky to have developed it so quickly.
Actually, the proved it. When they slid buttered bread off a table, it landed butter side down, because of the rotational speed of toast and the height of the table. However, if they dropped toast off of a high building, or dropped it edgewise to eliminate this factor, it didn't.
No, you can accelerate at 1g indefinitely, and your fuel requirements will remain constant (ignoring decrease in ship mass due to fuel utilization). However, your velocity will not increase indefinitely, but rather will approach c asymptotically. You can still cover astronomical distances in a reasonable period of time, but because of time dilation the time elapsed in the outside world becomes very long. See the relativistic rocket
Headline: Brains More Like Neural Nets Than Traditional Programs
Yes, the article seems to be addressing a straw man. I don't know anybody in neuroscience who believes in a serial model of neural processing. And of course, it has no relevance to simulation of human-like thought in a computer, except that it isn't going to be easy (but we knew that already, didn't we)?
Of course, this may just be the overblown interpretation of Cornell's publicity department, and the investigators may be cringing as they read the article.
I think that making the leap from "Jobs didn't go cell and instead switched to Intel" to "Cell must not be that good." is an incredible, and incorrect, leap of logic. There is a vast array of other factors involved in that choice.
It has been reported that Sony tried to convince Apple to go with the Cell, but Jobs was disappointed with it. Now it is clear why. A quirky processor that requires specialized coding would be a disaster for a company with a few percent of the computer market. On the other hand, it may work out for Sony, since they'll probably sell a ton of the things, and developers will be strongly motivated to figure them out. Oddly enough, Sony seems to have turned into Nintendo, who (when they were the market leader) always came out with these weird systems that turned out to be very powerful for Nintendo and those few other developers willing to make the substantial investment into figuring out how to work around their limitations.
It will be interesting to see what Nintendo comes out with this time around. They've taken a very laid-back "it's all about the games" line. After all the hype, wouldn't it be amusing if the next-generation Nintendo box stomps both Sony and Microsoft?
Re:Agreed, We Need More Geek TV
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The only two channels I watch are...
Why does every single thread about anything on TV bring out the guys who want to brag about how little TV they watch and how most of it is crap.
Face it guys...we're old enough to make up our own minds. You don't like TV and don't watch it. Fine. To each his own. It doesn't make it special, and if you really aren't interested in TV, why do you bother reading these threads and cluttering them up with useless "I'm better than you because I'm too smart for TV" posts?
It's good strategy, but given the current legal stance of the entertainment industry regarding P2P, it would be career suicide for anybody to admit to doing it.
Re:Then how is the production funded?
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P2P and TV
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· Score: 1
Exactly...my first thought was 'gee wonder how he'll feel when 1 person *buys* his boxed set, and the other 10,000 download it for free?'"
I'd buy the boxed set. I'm not really interested in spending hours downloading something over the internet and tying up my hard disk space when I can buy it at Amazon or rent it from Netflix in 30 seconds and have it show up in may mailbox.
Double click and their ilk have poisoned the well, and now are complaining because nobody wants to drink the water. The fact is that most people don't mind static well-behaved ads enough to bother to seek out ad-blocking software. What has driven the development of ad-blocking technology is obtrusive ads that pop-up, pop-under, or use flashing or obtrusive animation.
If they'd been a bit more creative, the ACS would have realized that they have the inside track for developing PubChem. Instead of trying to get Congress to protect their monopoly, created in part with federal funds, they should be seeking federal grant funds to take their database public to make it part of PubChem.
This disturbs me because there is a very important scientific use of black and white film--autoradiography. This is a powerful and economical method whereby a tissue slice is exposed to a radioactive substance, and then the tissue is rinsed and placed into contact with a sheet of black & white film. After a few days or weeks, the film is developed and the optical density is measured to determine the amount of radioactivity taken up in different regions of the tissue.
Unfortunately, black & white film suitable for autoradiography is becoming harder to find. I know of at least one research project that was delayed because investigators could not obtain suitable film in the US (I believe they ultimately imported film from Europe). If black and white film becomes a specialized item manufactured only for scientific use, its cost will likely rise by an order of magnitude.
I write as a scientist who has been reading science fiction for 50 years.
Back in the old days, there were a handful of writers producing what was known as "hard SF." which some people now wish to rename "mundane" SF (an odd word choice for people who style themselves as advocates). Stories built off of extrapolation contemporary developments in science and current theory. Hard SF provided an important counterpoint to space opera that incorporated outlandish fantasy elements like ray guns and hand-held computers.
And as time went on, adolescent readers of science fiction grew up, went into science. But many of them never lost interest in the outlandish notions of the space operas they read in childhood. And today we have lasers, and particle beams, and microcomputers. And physicists are seriously pursuing ideas like teleportation, wormholes, and alternate universes. Some of these notions will doubtless never become physical reality--the prospects for faster-than-light wormhole travel still look pretty slim. But even in these cases, the investigation of these "impossible" ideas has yielded important insights into nature and mathematics. I contend that fantastic SF has made at least as great a contribution to scientific progress than "mundane" SF, both in terms of inspiring interest in science and in providing ideas that have yielded important scientific insights.
There will always be a role for hard SF. It hasn't gone away. Conservative and wild speculation provide the boundaries of the future--with the caveat that the real future will probably include elements so fantastic that even the most fantastic writers don't expect them, such the ubiquity of internet commerce and communication. Pedantic attempts to draw hard boundaries are foolish. Even among scientists, you will find wild diversity of opinion as to the boundaries between the probable and the possible.
It seems silly to make the assumption that Apple and Intel haven't been working together for a while prior to the announcement...
The assumption is that it will take even Intel a year or two to be able to come up with processors that will enable Apple to substantially surpass the performance of current Dual-G5 systems.
Um.. hate to burst your bubble, but *all* companies are about money.
So let's make it about money. How about a large export duty for all products made by companies that produce products or services that support political censorship in countries with repressive government? And perhaps an additional tax--say 100%--on domestic products sold by such companies?
Think of it this way: would it be better for Microsoft to simply shut down MSN China, and for other companies to do the same with their Chinese operations, and leave the Chinese people with no voice of expression as opposed to a limited one?
Yes, I believe that it would. Forcing the Chinese government to directly censor expression makes the degree of repression more obvious. American corporations should not be in the business of doing the Chinese government's dirty work. A censored voice is no voice at all.
Slashdot Mirror
If it is government subsidized, digital TV will probably stay expensive. On the other hand, if manufacturers realize that there is a huge market for low-end digital TVs and set-top boxes for lower-end consumers who don't have cable, the price will probably drop precipitously.
Let's consider a ball with a string attatched to it. Say you pick up the ball, and twirl it around your head. The centripetal force OUTWARD is constant. It is an unbalanced force. Without the string providing the INWARD force, it would fly off. There is absolutely no inward force without the string(ignoring friction).
It is nonsensical to talk about an outward centripetal force, because the term means "center seeking." Under the circumstances you describe, the forces are equal and balanced--otherwise the ball would be changing its distance from the center. It is entirely arbitrary as to whether you regard the ball as spinning around the center, constrained by a centripetal force, or you regard the universe as spinning, with the string preventing the ball from flying off due to a centrifugal force.
The force of which you speak does not exist. Newton's 3rd law does not make it exist. Trying to say it exists in your PoV is like assuming that the Earth is the center of the universe. It's a valid PoV, but we all know it's untrue.
Says who? If it is a valid perspective, what makes it untrue? Can you prove that the earth is not at the center of the universe?
When you start arguing about truth, you are exiting the realm of science and entering the realm of philosophy and religion. Scientifically, validity is the only appropriate criterion. I think that it is misleading to insist that one perspective is more "true" than another. One frame of reference may provide a simpler, more convenient, or more symmetrical description of the laws of nature for the purpose of answering particular questions. But so long as all observable consequences are the same, one is as valid as any other.
No, the force vector is directed *toward* the center of the Earth.
I'm not talking about that force vector. I'm talking about the equal and oppositely force vector required by Newton's 3rd law. It points outward from the center and is therefore centrifugal.
In a car, you feel drawn away from the center of the turn, but that's because the car's wheels constrain the car to move and you're pulled along with the car.
Or I can think of the car as stationary and the universe as rotating around it, with a force directed outward from the center of the turn. What makes your view more valid than mine?
When you're orbiting the Earth, even on the Moon, you'll not feel anything because the centripetal force (in this case, gravity) is pulling you together with the Moon.
Where's any perception of outward force, in any reference frame?
In the reference frame in which I am stationary, and the universe is rotating around the center of the earth, I feel nothing because the centrifugal force exactly balances the force of gravity (and also because both forces act equally upon all of my atoms).
That's not a centifugal force though. There is no centrifugal force.
It is a force vector directed away from the center. In what sense is that not centrifugal?
Centrifugal force was just a bit of confusion on the parts of scientists at the time. There is only centripital force and the force from the constraing body acting on the object in UCM, there is no centrifugal force.
I would say rather that scientists at the time were clever enough to appreciate that perceived forces depend upon one's frame of reference.
You will hate me for this comment but just so you know there is no such thing as a centrifugal force. There is centripetal force, but no centrifugal.
I disagree. If one exerts a centripetal force on an object to constrain it into circular motion, then the object exerts a centrifugal force in reaction. Newton's 3rd law. Whether you choose to talk about the centrifugal or centripetal force is purely a matter of frame of reference. If you are in a rotating frame of reference, there is most definitely a centrifugal force.
What they did with Doom 3 is very simple, however: They took a game with a legacy of being a first person shooter, and they made it into a horror game.
So that's why Doom 3 is the first game in the series that I've really enjoyed. After all, who needs realistic lighting effects for a shooter? But they make a big difference for a horror game.
What annoyed me most was the "No Duct Tape on Mars?" concept.
Actually, it would be amusing if there was a roll of duct tape hidden somewhere in the game. "Forget the BFG, where do I find the tape??!!"
I still hold that we know so little about the conditions for the formation of life, and so little about the conditions on other planets in general that Occam's razor is a very poor tool for estimating life in the universe. But you are right that even our one sample does tell us a fair bit.
Actually, I don't think that Occam's Razor is a good tool for estimating anything. I don't think that there is any basis for arguing that the simplest hypothesis is more likely to be correct. I see Occam's Razor merely as a rule of thumb for efficiently ordering plausible hypotheses for testing.
I am assuming that the conditions on the early earth are just about a perfect fit for our form of life. This is nothing more than taking the worst case scenario for life being rare. The less suitable the earth's conditions were, the more likely the half life is smaller.
Yes, the real problem is that the statistical argument only gets us halfway. We can conclude that under ideal conditions life will form fairly promptly. But because of the anthropic principle we have no basis for estimating how common those conditions are. Arguments have been made that planets like earth could be quite rare, and observational data is not adequate to resolve the question. My suspicion is that conditions for the formation of life are broader than we tend to think, simply because we are biased to expect that life has form in the same way it did here, and there may be other pathways. But I see no way to put that suspicion on any kind of solid basis.
This assumes a bell curve distribution. I can't think of any good reason that the formation of life would follow this[1], and several that suggest that it does not.
Other plausible distributions yield similar conclusions. Probably the simplest assumption is an exponential distribution, which would be the case if there is a constant probability per unit time that life forms. In this case, there is a half-life with which lifeless planets transform into planets with life, and there is a 96% probability that a randomly selected planet (i.e. ours) has a time to formation of life that is no more than 4 half-lives. Again, this allows us to argue with a high degree of statistical certainty that the average waiting time for life to form is short, and therefore that the probability of formation is fairly high.
Given the sample size, average doesn't tell us much, if anything at all. Or in other words, we have very little idea what the average time to form life really is.
It doesn't tell us a lot, but it is the only sample that we have. Out of a statistical distribution, any single randomly selected sample is by definition far more likely to be near the median than many standard deviations out on one of the tails. So out of the statistical distribution of the time for life to form, earth is most likely fairly typical, in which case formation of life on planets like earth is a high probability event. Of course, there is a very small likelihood that formation of life is very improbable and we were just extraordinarily lucky, but that's not the way to bet.
Note that we cannot apply the same reasoning to the distribution of planets suitable for life. All living observers will find themselves on a planet suitable for life, whether that is a high or low probability event. So it could still be that formation of life on a suitable planet is a high probability event, but that suitable planets are extraordinarily rare.
Like trying to figure out how many teeth a horse has when you have only seen one, and it hasn't opened it's mouth yet.
Perhaps, but if you lifted a random spot on a horse's lip and saw a tooth there, would you be willing to bet that it's the only tooth that it has?
The simplest solution is usually the best. Are we alone? yes. Its much simpler to say yes than to expect the insanely high odds that some more elements should combine in the perfect way to create an organism from not much.
Occam's Razor is not a basis for determining which hypothesis is correct. Indeed, historically, the simplest hypothesis has usually turned out to be wrong.
What Occam's Razor really is is an algorithm for ordering the universe of possible hypotheses for testing. It is most efficient to start by eliminating the simplest hypotheses, then the next simplest, etc.
Its much simpler to say yes than to expect the insanely high odds that some more elements should combine in the perfect way to create an organism from not much.
In this case, the simplest hypothesis is that the odds are not enormously high, and that given the appropriate conditions, the evolution of life is a near certainty. This would fit with the fact that life seems to have appeared on earth fairly early, almost as soon as the earth's crust stabilized. If it is really such an improbable event, then the average waiting time for life to form should be long. So if formation of life is really improbable, then our planet is not only remarkably lucky to have life at all, but remarkably lucky to have developed it so quickly.
Hmm. Myth-busters I recall disproved that one.
Actually, the proved it. When they slid buttered bread off a table, it landed butter side down, because of the rotational speed of toast and the height of the table. However, if they dropped toast off of a high building, or dropped it edgewise to eliminate this factor, it didn't.
No, you can accelerate at 1g indefinitely, and your fuel requirements will remain constant (ignoring decrease in ship mass due to fuel utilization). However, your velocity will not increase indefinitely, but rather will approach c asymptotically. You can still cover astronomical distances in a reasonable period of time, but because of time dilation the time elapsed in the outside world becomes very long. See the relativistic rocket
Headline: Brains More Like Neural Nets Than Traditional Programs
Yes, the article seems to be addressing a straw man. I don't know anybody in neuroscience who believes in a serial model of neural processing. And of course, it has no relevance to simulation of human-like thought in a computer, except that it isn't going to be easy (but we knew that already, didn't we)?
Of course, this may just be the overblown interpretation of Cornell's publicity department, and the investigators may be cringing as they read the article.
I think that making the leap from "Jobs didn't go cell and instead switched to Intel" to "Cell must not be that good." is an incredible, and incorrect, leap of logic. There is a vast array of other factors involved in that choice.
It has been reported that Sony tried to convince Apple to go with the Cell, but Jobs was disappointed with it. Now it is clear why. A quirky processor that requires specialized coding would be a disaster for a company with a few percent of the computer market. On the other hand, it may work out for Sony, since they'll probably sell a ton of the things, and developers will be strongly motivated to figure them out. Oddly enough, Sony seems to have turned into Nintendo, who (when they were the market leader) always came out with these weird systems that turned out to be very powerful for Nintendo and those few other developers willing to make the substantial investment into figuring out how to work around their limitations.
It will be interesting to see what Nintendo comes out with this time around. They've taken a very laid-back "it's all about the games" line. After all the hype, wouldn't it be amusing if the next-generation Nintendo box stomps both Sony and Microsoft?
The only two channels I watch are...
Why does every single thread about anything on TV bring out the guys who want to brag about how little TV they watch and how most of it is crap.
Face it guys...we're old enough to make up our own minds. You don't like TV and don't watch it. Fine. To each his own. It doesn't make it special, and if you really aren't interested in TV, why do you bother reading these threads and cluttering them up with useless "I'm better than you because I'm too smart for TV" posts?
It's good strategy, but given the current legal stance of the entertainment industry regarding P2P, it would be career suicide for anybody to admit to doing it.
Exactly...my first thought was 'gee wonder how he'll feel when 1 person *buys* his boxed set, and the other 10,000 download it for free?'"
I'd buy the boxed set. I'm not really interested in spending hours downloading something over the internet and tying up my hard disk space when I can buy it at Amazon or rent it from Netflix in 30 seconds and have it show up in may mailbox.
Double click and their ilk have poisoned the well, and now are complaining because nobody wants to drink the water. The fact is that most people don't mind static well-behaved ads enough to bother to seek out ad-blocking software. What has driven the development of ad-blocking technology is obtrusive ads that pop-up, pop-under, or use flashing or obtrusive animation.
If they'd been a bit more creative, the ACS would have realized that they have the inside track for developing PubChem. Instead of trying to get Congress to protect their monopoly, created in part with federal funds, they should be seeking federal grant funds to take their database public to make it part of PubChem.
This disturbs me because there is a very important scientific use of black and white film--autoradiography. This is a powerful and economical method whereby a tissue slice is exposed to a radioactive substance, and then the tissue is rinsed and placed into contact with a sheet of black & white film. After a few days or weeks, the film is developed and the optical density is measured to determine the amount of radioactivity taken up in different regions of the tissue.
Unfortunately, black & white film suitable for autoradiography is becoming harder to find. I know of at least one research project that was delayed because investigators could not obtain suitable film in the US (I believe they ultimately imported film from Europe). If black and white film becomes a specialized item manufactured only for scientific use, its cost will likely rise by an order of magnitude.
I write as a scientist who has been reading science fiction for 50 years.
Back in the old days, there were a handful of writers producing what was known as "hard SF." which some people now wish to rename "mundane" SF (an odd word choice for people who style themselves as advocates). Stories built off of extrapolation contemporary developments in science and current theory. Hard SF provided an important counterpoint to space opera that incorporated outlandish fantasy elements like ray guns and hand-held computers.
And as time went on, adolescent readers of science fiction grew up, went into science. But many of them never lost interest in the outlandish notions of the space operas they read in childhood. And today we have lasers, and particle beams, and microcomputers. And physicists are seriously pursuing ideas like teleportation, wormholes, and alternate universes. Some of these notions will doubtless never become physical reality--the prospects for faster-than-light wormhole travel still look pretty slim. But even in these cases, the investigation of these "impossible" ideas has yielded important insights into nature and mathematics. I contend that fantastic SF has made at least as great a contribution to scientific progress than "mundane" SF, both in terms of inspiring interest in science and in providing ideas that have yielded important scientific insights.
There will always be a role for hard SF. It hasn't gone away. Conservative and wild speculation provide the boundaries of the future--with the caveat that the real future will probably include elements so fantastic that even the most fantastic writers don't expect them, such the ubiquity of internet commerce and communication. Pedantic attempts to draw hard boundaries are foolish. Even among scientists, you will find wild diversity of opinion as to the boundaries between the probable and the possible.
It seems silly to make the assumption that Apple and Intel haven't been working together for a while prior to the announcement...
The assumption is that it will take even Intel a year or two to be able to come up with processors that will enable Apple to substantially surpass the performance of current Dual-G5 systems.
Um .. hate to burst your bubble, but *all* companies are about money.
So let's make it about money. How about a large export duty for all products made by companies that produce products or services that support political censorship in countries with repressive government? And perhaps an additional tax--say 100%--on domestic products sold by such companies?
Think of it this way: would it be better for Microsoft to simply shut down MSN China, and for other companies to do the same with their Chinese operations, and leave the Chinese people with no voice of expression as opposed to a limited one?
Yes, I believe that it would. Forcing the Chinese government to directly censor expression makes the degree of repression more obvious. American corporations should not be in the business of doing the Chinese government's dirty work. A censored voice is no voice at all.