Excellent work! Given that the chance that the manufacturers will provide this data approaches zero, this is the only way we're going to get realistic figures for the longevity of flash chips. Hopefully, this will encourage more independent hardware testing in other fields
Remember, Jupiter orbits the sun once every 12 years. So, if we were trying to detect our own solar system at 10 light years, how long would it take to detect Jupiter's effect on Sol's position?
Possibly never. One of the reason we can detect so-called "hot Jupiters" is not just that their orbital period is very short, but also because, being close to their parent stars, the gravitational attraction of the planet upon the star is very, very strong. Gravity falls off in proportion to the square of the distance, so a Jupiter-sized planet in a Jupiter-like orbit makes its star wobble a lot less than a Jupiter-sized planet in an extremely tight orbit.
Needless to say, this is going to profoundly bias one's results if you take this kind of inherently limited sample and extrapolate to stellar systems in general. To make the obligatory car analogy, this is like standing under a bridge and only being able to observe the vehicles that make the bridge shake a lot as they pass over. It will seem as if all vehicles are tractor trailers because you just can't detect the much larger number of small cars passing over.
Mind you, this doesn't mean that these stellar systems don't represent the norm, and if we eventually detect systems like this in most of the places we look, they will turn out to be the norm even if we can't ever detect smaller planets. However, at this point, it's way too early to say.
So we have the latest news on the competition between a nefarious closed-source near monopoly on the one hand, and a nefarious closed-source and closed-platform wannabe monopoly on the other hand.
As Henry Kissinger said during the Iran-Iraq war, "Too bad they can't both lose."
You can't expect much grasp of metric units from Americans. It was bad enough when they used the Imperial system, but nowadays they have only two units of scale: a human hair and the state of Texas. Anything in between is just passed over in embarrassed silence.
Exactly. As another poster noted, when CD-R discs first became available, most hard drives were smaller than 650 megs, so it made sense as a backup medium. Now, the largest commonly available hard drive is 2 terabytes, and backing that up even with Blu-Ray is like backing up a CD-ROM on floppies. In recent years, I've taken to buying hard drives in pairs: one for the working data, and one for the backup. (Yes, I know, but this is adequate for personal use. I'd use RAID arrays in a corporate environment.) All of the traditional backup media lag far behind HDDs in capacity, speed, and reliability.
Until someone comes up with a cheap, fast storage medium that is at least a substantial fraction of current hard drive sizes, it doesn't much matter.
What's really offensive is that, in this day and age, we can't just say "shit" when we mean "shit". Queen Victoria may not be amused, but the Victorian age has been over for a long, long time.
This fad with inkjet is amazingly short-sided by people who would buy this junk and just print off their digital photos, instead of buying digital picture frames to load up their images to have around the house.
I got my first inkjet printer around the time my daughter was born, seventeen years ago. Inkjet printers may be many things -- including sharp-edged tools to gouge the hell out of people's wallets -- but they are not a fad.
Digital picture frames are not a replacement for printed photos. They're arguably tacky, especially on a wall with a power cable, they're small, they emit rather than reflect light which is often undesirable, and they have a smaller color gamut and much lower resolution than (good quality) prints, to say nothing of being overpriced themselves. When I just want to look at my pictures, I already have a monitor that's larger and higher quality than any digital frame. The biggest detraction is their power consumption. You can buy a lot of ink for what it costs to power a bunch of digital frames "around the house".
All that said, yes, the ink is grossly overpriced. I expect this will change in time as patents slowly expire.
And the expression is "short-sighted", not "short-sided". The implication is that people are, metaphorically, not looking very far ahead, not that they are somehow impaired by being tiny polygons.
A 20 year patent seems ridiculous when product lifecycles and discoveries are moving much more quickly.
Definitely. In some industries -- practically anything electronics-based, for example -- a five year patent would probably be excessive. Patents would be a lot more productive if they were scaled to the rate of change in their industry, and perhaps more importantly, could be invalidated if it was shown that a particular patent was causing irreparable harm to individuals, as might be the case where someone is denied medical care as a result.
The only people to be hurt by the 'fragmentation/obsolescence' issue is developers. I don't want to downplay the developer issue, but as far as consumers are concerned , most of the big-time apps have no trouble supporting multiple iterations of the platform.
On the contrary, please do downplay the developer issue. Obviously, it matters a great deal to us as developers, but the purpose of hardware and software -- at least in the commercial market -- isn't to please developers, it's to please customers so they'll give money to the companies that employ the developers. If enough customers want a device that requires the developers to read documentation in cuneiform and write code in assembly language, then we'll be reading documentation in cuneiform and writing code in assembly language, or the software companies will find someone who will.
Don't get me wrong; *I* care about these issues as much as the next developer. But nobody but us cares about these issues or what we think about them. For the vast majority of us who don't work at mythical miracle companies that actually give a wet crap what their programming staff thinks, we'll end up coding for whatever platform the bean counters and bizdev monkeys decide is going to sell. And if they're wrong -- a decision that's ultimately going to be made by consumers with even less technical knowledge than the bean counters -- then we'll end up working on something else, possibly at another company if the last one didn't have enough capital reserves to withstand a product failure.
That being the case, the author of TFA is either out of touch with the reality of the industry or, as several posters have suggested, this is just astroturf FUD designed to scare consumers away by using long, scary words -- like fragmentation, for example -- whose meaning they don't know, just as most of them probably have no idea what an operating system is or that Android is an OS. I'd be willing to wager a decent chunk of change that most non-technical customers would read the headline and the first couple of sentences of TFA -- they're certainly not going to read the whole thing -- and conclude that the gist of the article is that Android phones are more likely to physically break into little bits than iPhones.
iConji is a set of user-created 32x32-pixel symbols that represent words or ideas, not dissimilar from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics
I'm going to assume that these guys did next to no actual research before making this statement. Egyptian hieroglyphs were mostly consonantal symbols with the occasional ideogram appended to words to clarify the ambiguity stemming from the lack of written vowels. There were a very few cases where an entire word was represented with a single symbol; in the overwhelming majority of cases, words were spelled out with multiple symbols just as they were in the truly alphabetic scripts that arose later.
Oh, and hieroglyphic is an adjective; the noun is hieroglyph. You can talk about hieroglyphic writing or about hieroglyphs, but talking about hieroglyphics shrieks the same degree of ignorance that one sees in people who think "orientate" and "administrate" are actual words.
The problem with portable computing devices -- at least the ones that aren't tied to an expensive cell plan -- is that they are such narrow margin markets that few manufacturers are interested in them. Let's say that you want a lightweight, long battery life, portable computer with a full-sized keyboard to do actual work on: word processor, spreadsheet, or for the more technically inclined, a text editor and a copy of gcc, and you don't give a shit about watching video or browsing Flash-heavy sites.
Good luck with that.
It's not that there's any technical barrier involved here. You could do all of that just fine on a 90MHz Pentium fifteen years ago, or even a 50MHz 80486 twenty years ago. Odds are that the processor and memory in a third-rate cell phone could blow those specs away. Add a real screen and a keyboard, and you've got a device that could retail under $100. Of course, that means that it would probably wholesale for around $40, and the manufacturer's profit would likely be a couple of bucks, but only for the month or two it would take every factory in Taiwan to rush out clones. And that's provided it wasn't stillborn because every clueless tech "journalist" started bitching about how you couldn't watch video or play the latest games on it. Frankly, you can't really blame the manufacturers for not wanting to jump on that wagon.
So instead, we get the overpriced toys of the netbook world which, while capable computing platforms in the abstract, are so crippled by their toy keyboards that they're basically DVD viewers with built-in web browsers. It's like the final, terrifying revenge of WebTV.
I suspect that if you want something else, you're going to have to find an otherwise suitable netbook and substantially modify the hardware yourself. Personally, I've been giving serious thought to stuffing the guts of a netbook inside of a vintage IBM Model M keyboard and building a custom cover for it.
Can we just make a rule that any image you post on the internet doesn't belong to you anymore? Anyone with any sense already figured that out a decade ago anyway.
Only if you want to see all of the professional and most of the amateur content on the internet yanked overnight. While the current "intellectual property" laws are absurd, reasonable, limited term copyrights do actually benefit both the creators and the common good.
Try this thought experiment: In the absence of copyright and also the absence of net neutrality -- we're 50% there already -- then everyone's creative work ends up being copied by a few large media corporations and made available only through their sites. Forget direct access; the handful of megacorporate ISPs won't provide it for sites that don't pay their fees. Forget about any payment or even credit to the creators. Independent creators are essentially frozen out, and the general public just gets the same kind of bland, focus group tested crap that ends up on television.
Thanks, but I'll pass. Comcast and Verizon are bad enough as they are. I don't want to find out what they'd be like with a monopoly on all networked content.
The worlds moves on, and one either moves or gets run over. And just look at the unemployment rate in the US to see what happens to those that get run over. Sure you can hold rallies and complain about taxes and blame the immigrants, but you are still run over.
The difference in scale and significance here is awe-inspiring, though it pales beside the energy you've put into swallowing Apple's marketing BS. No one, and I mean absolutely no one is going to be "run over" for ignoring the iPad. It's a goddamn toy, for fuck's sake, not globalism and mass migration. All the iPad does is provide Apple fans with another expensive trinket to feel superior over. Yay for you. At the end of the day, you are not the vanguard of the future, you're just a bunch of middle to upper-middle class consumers buying this season's luxury toy. Apple's current product line has and will have no more broad societal impact than that of their nearest competitors: The Sharper Image and Brookstone.
But this doesn't really change anything in the computer world.
Exactly. As much as I find him personally obnoxious, I do have to admire the way that Jobs has very skilfully turned his niche into a popular fashion item like designer jeans and sports cars. And he's making money hand over fist as a result. Good for him.
But all of this makes about as much difference to the overall computer industry as designer jeans and sports cars, too. Or, to be fair, the Blackberry: there were relatively minor shifts in corporate computing to accommodate it, and then life went on pretty much as before. Except, of course, that as with designer jeans and sports cars, people who bought Blackberries put on airs about being hipper than people who didn't. So it is with the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.
A lot of things that seem like interesting but irrelevant phenomena at the outset turn out to be tremendously important later; that's why pure science is so important, yet so hard to justify to short-sighted "results-oriented" people like your average congresscritter. Whether it's the integrated circuit or, for that matter, electricity itself, fundamental discoveries and inventions tend to precede their applications, often by decades. Later, when someone attempts to solve a particular practical problem, some previously unused discovery is picked up and used as part of the solution, and only then does its significance become apparent.
It's a safe bet that fifty years from now, someone with a ten-digit Slashdot user ID will post a story about how clueless we were in 2010 about the earth-shattering importance of something few of us have heard of today except as a scientific curiosity. (And, no doubt, some of us who are still alive then will post thoughtful replies about obsolete technologies that will be immediately tagged "getoffmylawn" by younger folks.)
It seems quite likely to me that normal geological processes in the last few billion years must have opened up much larger sudden releases of oil (even under the ocean) many many times.
Probably so. There's also a major impact event on the Chicxulub scale every 30-60 million years or so, and life goes on. However, unless you live on geological time scales and not the ~75 years the rest of us do, none of that matters. A species can endure lots of population collapses without the species becoming extinct, but that's precious little comfort to the individuals like you and me who comprise that collapse.
Exactly how bad this is going to be remains to be seen. It is, however, already very bad and certain to have some pretty severe ecological and economic consequences whether they rise to the level of an "Earth extinction event" or not. And for you and me and everyone else who lives in a blink of an eye of geological time, the fact that everything will probably be okay in the long run could not possibly matter less.
We haven't had a decent manned space plan. Galileo, Cassini, Spirit & Opportunity, and plenty others worked out very well.
This is really the crucial point. We have done some first rate science without having any meat on board, and in most cases, we couldn't have done it with meat on board because meat is just not tough enough to do the job, and launching the necessary equipment to keep meat alive in space for years at a time is prohibitively expensive, and meat wouldn't serve any actual practical purpose in most cases.
Mind you, I am an enthusiastic supporter of manned spaceflight, but let's be reasonable and make sure we're putting people into space because we need them to do specific jobs that machines can't do, not just because it's cool to put people in space. All of the proposals for manned spaceflight I've seen in recent years start with the unquestioned and unsupported assumption that putting meat in space is a good thing. Seldom ever does anyone start by saying that accomplishing X would be a good and useful thing, and X requires a human presence in space, which probably shouldn't be surprising, since there isn't actually much of anything we need a human presence to accomplish right now.
The bottom line is that there is no end of productive scientific projects we could pursue with robots for a fraction of the cost of a handful of much less productive manned projects. Moreover, the more we learn about the solar system through robotic probes, the more likely we are to discover actual reasons for a manned presence in space.
Agreed. I didn't quite have the nerve to ask my doctor to let me sit me upright so I could watch the procedure like one of my friends did, but the procedure itself was quite painless, and I was just a little sore for a few days afterward. The worst part was the conversation between my neocortex and my brainstem, where my brainstem was shrieking, "That old guy is cutting open my scrotum!" and my neocortex kept coming up with irreverent jokes about making leather wallets at summer camp.
But hey, you know what? Ten years later, I still have to worry about contracting STDs, but I don't have to worry about getting anyone pregnant. And quite frankly, if the procedure had involved banging on my nuts with a rubber mallet instead of a quick and painless outpatient procedure, it would have been totally worth it. Though granted, there might have been more screaming at first.
Take a math text book for example. How many of those are tedious and boring to read because of over complication.
Most of them that I've seen are tedious and boring because of oversimplification, endless examples explaining the same simple crap over and over again for the benefit of people who weren't interested in the first place, flashy and largely irrelevant sidebars and callouts, and reduction of complex but coherent mathematical structures into simple but disconnected parts. There is a danger of over-complication, of course, but this usually arises from writers and teachers who either lack communication skills or a sufficiently complete grasp of the subject to be able to communicate it clearly in the first place.
The problem with thinking that reducing everything into simple parts is sufficient is that the interrelation of those parts is anything but simple. All mathematics, for example, can be reduced to set theory, and set theory is itself composed of very simple parts. But going the other way around -- starting with set theory and ending up at, let's say, integral calculus -- is neither easy nor simple. You can use mathematics without a deep understanding, but in so doing you make it all but certain that you will eventually (and possibly frequently) run into situations where your math is impeccably correct but your application of it is in error because you don't fully understand the context the math was designed to work in or the implications of extending it beyond that context.
Granted, most people get through life just fine by half-assing their way through it, but I can't help but think that half-assing one's way through life is not a very worthwhile goal.
[...] intelligently designed 'serious games' could allow complex situations to be presented in a simple way.
The problem is that, eventually, you have to present complex situations in a complex way. As an introduction, simulations are a great way to provide a high-level view. They're also often good ways to hone skills. The danger -- as with television "science" programs -- is that people often walk away with them thinking they've learned a great deal from something with the informational content of an index card. Personally, I find the trend toward oversimplification alarming. The universe is a complex place, and if all of our problems were amenable to simple solutions, simpletons would have ushered in a utopian age long ago.
All that said, as part of a more complete educational system, this sort of thing could be quite useful.
You just have to redefine a basic property of your system as "calculation"
Isn't this what we do with conventional computers? All any electronic computer does is open and close logic gates and send and receive signals in such a way that those operations conceptually map to logical and arithmetical operations in the minds of humans. The collection of colored dots you're looking at right now are only "text" because you have been trained to interpret them that way. Whether any event in the universe is a "calculation" ultimately represents a judgment on the part of a human mind about that event. There is no inherent calculation-ness out there.
The sooner we get rid of mechanical storage the better. Solids are more robust, more energy efficient, quicker, denser, lighter. Cost and longevity issues are coming along. Yes, lets ditch the antiques already!
We have quite a way to go before that's practical for high-capacity write-intensive applications. And, as always, we won't know how much longevity to expect until we get there: the manufacturers will make wildly optimistic guesses early on, switching to bald-faced lies later, the same as they've done with every other storage medium. If you want to ditch your antiques, I'll be happy to put them to use biding my time while the bleeding edge bleeds.;)
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Excellent work! Given that the chance that the manufacturers will provide this data approaches zero, this is the only way we're going to get realistic figures for the longevity of flash chips. Hopefully, this will encourage more independent hardware testing in other fields
Remember, Jupiter orbits the sun once every 12 years. So, if we were trying to detect our own solar system at 10 light years, how long would it take to detect Jupiter's effect on Sol's position?
Possibly never. One of the reason we can detect so-called "hot Jupiters" is not just that their orbital period is very short, but also because, being close to their parent stars, the gravitational attraction of the planet upon the star is very, very strong. Gravity falls off in proportion to the square of the distance, so a Jupiter-sized planet in a Jupiter-like orbit makes its star wobble a lot less than a Jupiter-sized planet in an extremely tight orbit.
Needless to say, this is going to profoundly bias one's results if you take this kind of inherently limited sample and extrapolate to stellar systems in general. To make the obligatory car analogy, this is like standing under a bridge and only being able to observe the vehicles that make the bridge shake a lot as they pass over. It will seem as if all vehicles are tractor trailers because you just can't detect the much larger number of small cars passing over.
Mind you, this doesn't mean that these stellar systems don't represent the norm, and if we eventually detect systems like this in most of the places we look, they will turn out to be the norm even if we can't ever detect smaller planets. However, at this point, it's way too early to say.
So we have the latest news on the competition between a nefarious closed-source near monopoly on the one hand, and a nefarious closed-source and closed-platform wannabe monopoly on the other hand.
As Henry Kissinger said during the Iran-Iraq war, "Too bad they can't both lose."
80 meters is a pretty substantial hair.
You can't expect much grasp of metric units from Americans. It was bad enough when they used the Imperial system, but nowadays they have only two units of scale: a human hair and the state of Texas. Anything in between is just passed over in embarrassed silence.
Exactly. As another poster noted, when CD-R discs first became available, most hard drives were smaller than 650 megs, so it made sense as a backup medium. Now, the largest commonly available hard drive is 2 terabytes, and backing that up even with Blu-Ray is like backing up a CD-ROM on floppies. In recent years, I've taken to buying hard drives in pairs: one for the working data, and one for the backup. (Yes, I know, but this is adequate for personal use. I'd use RAID arrays in a corporate environment.) All of the traditional backup media lag far behind HDDs in capacity, speed, and reliability.
Until someone comes up with a cheap, fast storage medium that is at least a substantial fraction of current hard drive sizes, it doesn't much matter.
What's really offensive is that, in this day and age, we can't just say "shit" when we mean "shit". Queen Victoria may not be amused, but the Victorian age has been over for a long, long time.
This fad with inkjet is amazingly short-sided by people who would buy this junk and just print off their digital photos, instead of buying digital picture frames to load up their images to have around the house.
I got my first inkjet printer around the time my daughter was born, seventeen years ago. Inkjet printers may be many things -- including sharp-edged tools to gouge the hell out of people's wallets -- but they are not a fad.
Digital picture frames are not a replacement for printed photos. They're arguably tacky, especially on a wall with a power cable, they're small, they emit rather than reflect light which is often undesirable, and they have a smaller color gamut and much lower resolution than (good quality) prints, to say nothing of being overpriced themselves. When I just want to look at my pictures, I already have a monitor that's larger and higher quality than any digital frame. The biggest detraction is their power consumption. You can buy a lot of ink for what it costs to power a bunch of digital frames "around the house".
All that said, yes, the ink is grossly overpriced. I expect this will change in time as patents slowly expire.
And the expression is "short-sighted", not "short-sided". The implication is that people are, metaphorically, not looking very far ahead, not that they are somehow impaired by being tiny polygons.
A 20 year patent seems ridiculous when product lifecycles and discoveries are moving much more quickly.
Definitely. In some industries -- practically anything electronics-based, for example -- a five year patent would probably be excessive. Patents would be a lot more productive if they were scaled to the rate of change in their industry, and perhaps more importantly, could be invalidated if it was shown that a particular patent was causing irreparable harm to individuals, as might be the case where someone is denied medical care as a result.
So does this tell us how to travel faster than light?
I know this is a serious topic, but... I... can't resist....
BRAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIINNNNSSSS!!!
The only people to be hurt by the 'fragmentation/obsolescence' issue is developers. I don't want to downplay the developer issue, but as far as consumers are concerned , most of the big-time apps have no trouble supporting multiple iterations of the platform.
On the contrary, please do downplay the developer issue. Obviously, it matters a great deal to us as developers, but the purpose of hardware and software -- at least in the commercial market -- isn't to please developers, it's to please customers so they'll give money to the companies that employ the developers. If enough customers want a device that requires the developers to read documentation in cuneiform and write code in assembly language, then we'll be reading documentation in cuneiform and writing code in assembly language, or the software companies will find someone who will.
Don't get me wrong; *I* care about these issues as much as the next developer. But nobody but us cares about these issues or what we think about them. For the vast majority of us who don't work at mythical miracle companies that actually give a wet crap what their programming staff thinks, we'll end up coding for whatever platform the bean counters and bizdev monkeys decide is going to sell. And if they're wrong -- a decision that's ultimately going to be made by consumers with even less technical knowledge than the bean counters -- then we'll end up working on something else, possibly at another company if the last one didn't have enough capital reserves to withstand a product failure.
That being the case, the author of TFA is either out of touch with the reality of the industry or, as several posters have suggested, this is just astroturf FUD designed to scare consumers away by using long, scary words -- like fragmentation, for example -- whose meaning they don't know, just as most of them probably have no idea what an operating system is or that Android is an OS. I'd be willing to wager a decent chunk of change that most non-technical customers would read the headline and the first couple of sentences of TFA -- they're certainly not going to read the whole thing -- and conclude that the gist of the article is that Android phones are more likely to physically break into little bits than iPhones.
iConji is a set of user-created 32x32-pixel symbols that represent words or ideas, not dissimilar from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics
I'm going to assume that these guys did next to no actual research before making this statement. Egyptian hieroglyphs were mostly consonantal symbols with the occasional ideogram appended to words to clarify the ambiguity stemming from the lack of written vowels. There were a very few cases where an entire word was represented with a single symbol; in the overwhelming majority of cases, words were spelled out with multiple symbols just as they were in the truly alphabetic scripts that arose later.
Oh, and hieroglyphic is an adjective; the noun is hieroglyph. You can talk about hieroglyphic writing or about hieroglyphs, but talking about hieroglyphics shrieks the same degree of ignorance that one sees in people who think "orientate" and "administrate" are actual words.
The problem with portable computing devices -- at least the ones that aren't tied to an expensive cell plan -- is that they are such narrow margin markets that few manufacturers are interested in them. Let's say that you want a lightweight, long battery life, portable computer with a full-sized keyboard to do actual work on: word processor, spreadsheet, or for the more technically inclined, a text editor and a copy of gcc, and you don't give a shit about watching video or browsing Flash-heavy sites.
Good luck with that.
It's not that there's any technical barrier involved here. You could do all of that just fine on a 90MHz Pentium fifteen years ago, or even a 50MHz 80486 twenty years ago. Odds are that the processor and memory in a third-rate cell phone could blow those specs away. Add a real screen and a keyboard, and you've got a device that could retail under $100. Of course, that means that it would probably wholesale for around $40, and the manufacturer's profit would likely be a couple of bucks, but only for the month or two it would take every factory in Taiwan to rush out clones. And that's provided it wasn't stillborn because every clueless tech "journalist" started bitching about how you couldn't watch video or play the latest games on it. Frankly, you can't really blame the manufacturers for not wanting to jump on that wagon.
So instead, we get the overpriced toys of the netbook world which, while capable computing platforms in the abstract, are so crippled by their toy keyboards that they're basically DVD viewers with built-in web browsers. It's like the final, terrifying revenge of WebTV.
I suspect that if you want something else, you're going to have to find an otherwise suitable netbook and substantially modify the hardware yourself. Personally, I've been giving serious thought to stuffing the guts of a netbook inside of a vintage IBM Model M keyboard and building a custom cover for it.
Can we just make a rule that any image you post on the internet doesn't belong to you anymore? Anyone with any sense already figured that out a decade ago anyway.
Only if you want to see all of the professional and most of the amateur content on the internet yanked overnight. While the current "intellectual property" laws are absurd, reasonable, limited term copyrights do actually benefit both the creators and the common good.
Try this thought experiment: In the absence of copyright and also the absence of net neutrality -- we're 50% there already -- then everyone's creative work ends up being copied by a few large media corporations and made available only through their sites. Forget direct access; the handful of megacorporate ISPs won't provide it for sites that don't pay their fees. Forget about any payment or even credit to the creators. Independent creators are essentially frozen out, and the general public just gets the same kind of bland, focus group tested crap that ends up on television.
Thanks, but I'll pass. Comcast and Verizon are bad enough as they are. I don't want to find out what they'd be like with a monopoly on all networked content.
They'll be the first to connect to the internet directly through the brain.
They already have. Where do you think all those duplicate stories come from?
The worlds moves on, and one either moves or gets run over. And just look at the unemployment rate in the US to see what happens to those that get run over. Sure you can hold rallies and complain about taxes and blame the immigrants, but you are still run over.
The difference in scale and significance here is awe-inspiring, though it pales beside the energy you've put into swallowing Apple's marketing BS. No one, and I mean absolutely no one is going to be "run over" for ignoring the iPad. It's a goddamn toy, for fuck's sake, not globalism and mass migration. All the iPad does is provide Apple fans with another expensive trinket to feel superior over. Yay for you. At the end of the day, you are not the vanguard of the future, you're just a bunch of middle to upper-middle class consumers buying this season's luxury toy. Apple's current product line has and will have no more broad societal impact than that of their nearest competitors: The Sharper Image and Brookstone.
But this doesn't really change anything in the computer world.
Exactly. As much as I find him personally obnoxious, I do have to admire the way that Jobs has very skilfully turned his niche into a popular fashion item like designer jeans and sports cars. And he's making money hand over fist as a result. Good for him.
But all of this makes about as much difference to the overall computer industry as designer jeans and sports cars, too. Or, to be fair, the Blackberry: there were relatively minor shifts in corporate computing to accommodate it, and then life went on pretty much as before. Except, of course, that as with designer jeans and sports cars, people who bought Blackberries put on airs about being hipper than people who didn't. So it is with the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.
Whatever.
A lot of things that seem like interesting but irrelevant phenomena at the outset turn out to be tremendously important later; that's why pure science is so important, yet so hard to justify to short-sighted "results-oriented" people like your average congresscritter. Whether it's the integrated circuit or, for that matter, electricity itself, fundamental discoveries and inventions tend to precede their applications, often by decades. Later, when someone attempts to solve a particular practical problem, some previously unused discovery is picked up and used as part of the solution, and only then does its significance become apparent.
It's a safe bet that fifty years from now, someone with a ten-digit Slashdot user ID will post a story about how clueless we were in 2010 about the earth-shattering importance of something few of us have heard of today except as a scientific curiosity. (And, no doubt, some of us who are still alive then will post thoughtful replies about obsolete technologies that will be immediately tagged "getoffmylawn" by younger folks.)
It seems quite likely to me that normal geological processes in the last few billion years must have opened up much larger sudden releases of oil (even under the ocean) many many times.
Probably so. There's also a major impact event on the Chicxulub scale every 30-60 million years or so, and life goes on. However, unless you live on geological time scales and not the ~75 years the rest of us do, none of that matters. A species can endure lots of population collapses without the species becoming extinct, but that's precious little comfort to the individuals like you and me who comprise that collapse.
Exactly how bad this is going to be remains to be seen. It is, however, already very bad and certain to have some pretty severe ecological and economic consequences whether they rise to the level of an "Earth extinction event" or not. And for you and me and everyone else who lives in a blink of an eye of geological time, the fact that everything will probably be okay in the long run could not possibly matter less.
We haven't had a decent manned space plan. Galileo, Cassini, Spirit & Opportunity, and plenty others worked out very well.
This is really the crucial point. We have done some first rate science without having any meat on board, and in most cases, we couldn't have done it with meat on board because meat is just not tough enough to do the job, and launching the necessary equipment to keep meat alive in space for years at a time is prohibitively expensive, and meat wouldn't serve any actual practical purpose in most cases.
Mind you, I am an enthusiastic supporter of manned spaceflight, but let's be reasonable and make sure we're putting people into space because we need them to do specific jobs that machines can't do, not just because it's cool to put people in space. All of the proposals for manned spaceflight I've seen in recent years start with the unquestioned and unsupported assumption that putting meat in space is a good thing. Seldom ever does anyone start by saying that accomplishing X would be a good and useful thing, and X requires a human presence in space, which probably shouldn't be surprising, since there isn't actually much of anything we need a human presence to accomplish right now.
The bottom line is that there is no end of productive scientific projects we could pursue with robots for a fraction of the cost of a handful of much less productive manned projects. Moreover, the more we learn about the solar system through robotic probes, the more likely we are to discover actual reasons for a manned presence in space.
The vasectomy fright is so overblown.
Agreed. I didn't quite have the nerve to ask my doctor to let me sit me upright so I could watch the procedure like one of my friends did, but the procedure itself was quite painless, and I was just a little sore for a few days afterward. The worst part was the conversation between my neocortex and my brainstem, where my brainstem was shrieking, "That old guy is cutting open my scrotum!" and my neocortex kept coming up with irreverent jokes about making leather wallets at summer camp.
But hey, you know what? Ten years later, I still have to worry about contracting STDs, but I don't have to worry about getting anyone pregnant. And quite frankly, if the procedure had involved banging on my nuts with a rubber mallet instead of a quick and painless outpatient procedure, it would have been totally worth it. Though granted, there might have been more screaming at first.
Take a math text book for example. How many of those are tedious and boring to read because of over complication.
Most of them that I've seen are tedious and boring because of oversimplification, endless examples explaining the same simple crap over and over again for the benefit of people who weren't interested in the first place, flashy and largely irrelevant sidebars and callouts, and reduction of complex but coherent mathematical structures into simple but disconnected parts. There is a danger of over-complication, of course, but this usually arises from writers and teachers who either lack communication skills or a sufficiently complete grasp of the subject to be able to communicate it clearly in the first place.
The problem with thinking that reducing everything into simple parts is sufficient is that the interrelation of those parts is anything but simple. All mathematics, for example, can be reduced to set theory, and set theory is itself composed of very simple parts. But going the other way around -- starting with set theory and ending up at, let's say, integral calculus -- is neither easy nor simple. You can use mathematics without a deep understanding, but in so doing you make it all but certain that you will eventually (and possibly frequently) run into situations where your math is impeccably correct but your application of it is in error because you don't fully understand the context the math was designed to work in or the implications of extending it beyond that context.
Granted, most people get through life just fine by half-assing their way through it, but I can't help but think that half-assing one's way through life is not a very worthwhile goal.
[...] intelligently designed 'serious games' could allow complex situations to be presented in a simple way.
The problem is that, eventually, you have to present complex situations in a complex way. As an introduction, simulations are a great way to provide a high-level view. They're also often good ways to hone skills. The danger -- as with television "science" programs -- is that people often walk away with them thinking they've learned a great deal from something with the informational content of an index card. Personally, I find the trend toward oversimplification alarming. The universe is a complex place, and if all of our problems were amenable to simple solutions, simpletons would have ushered in a utopian age long ago.
All that said, as part of a more complete educational system, this sort of thing could be quite useful.
You just have to redefine a basic property of your system as "calculation"
Isn't this what we do with conventional computers? All any electronic computer does is open and close logic gates and send and receive signals in such a way that those operations conceptually map to logical and arithmetical operations in the minds of humans. The collection of colored dots you're looking at right now are only "text" because you have been trained to interpret them that way. Whether any event in the universe is a "calculation" ultimately represents a judgment on the part of a human mind about that event. There is no inherent calculation-ness out there.
The sooner we get rid of mechanical storage the better. Solids are more robust, more energy efficient, quicker, denser, lighter. Cost and longevity issues are coming along. Yes, lets ditch the antiques already!
We have quite a way to go before that's practical for high-capacity write-intensive applications. And, as always, we won't know how much longevity to expect until we get there: the manufacturers will make wildly optimistic guesses early on, switching to bald-faced lies later, the same as they've done with every other storage medium. If you want to ditch your antiques, I'll be happy to put them to use biding my time while the bleeding edge bleeds. ;)