...and kill the shuttle too. Seriously. The international space station is useless pile of orbiting pork. It represents how the US subsidizes industry. No real science gets done up there. The last few years it had only a skeleton crew, barely sufficient for maintenance work.
Kill it. Kill it now. It will free up tens of billions. The shuttle flights alone are $500-800 million a pop. Put the money into real space science and development of cheap launch systems.
Oh wait! Looks like http://www.spacex.com/ is already doing the latter. With private money. Why not go with them? Well, cause that robs the US of an instrument of industrial policy: order way-too-expensive space systems from Boeing and blame the Europeans for subsidizing Airbus.
I mean why is it at something like bignum math or compiling a half clockrate AMD or PentiumM can get equal or better wall-time per operation when compared to a Northwood or Prescott P4?
Until recently it was thought the long pipelines were at fault. But the boys at X-bit labs took a closer look at Intel patents and did some detailed performance measurements.
Turns out that it goes further. The long P4 pipes require "replay buffers" to reissue instructions with unresolved dependencies. These buffers more often than not end up causing further performance losses and power dissipation in case of common patterns of instruction dependency.
However, if you replace everything at once, there is no longer any 'previous self' for the new peices to be integrated into, and continuity is lost.
The relevant continuity is continuity of state, not continuity in time or form. If you suspend your laptop to disk and restart it later, the running processes will continue as of the point of suspension. Would you claim that those are no longer the same processes because they were suspended for some time with the DRAM cells discharged?
Yes, but, I hear you say, that's not the same because the processes are resumed on the same hardware. So that's akin to sleep or narcosis, not a wholesale transfer.
So what about transferring the disk to a different laptop and resuming that? Or transferring the disk image to a software emulation of the laptop's hardware and resuming that?
But how would you download the chemical state? [...] And once you have the chemical composition and the electrical composition, you ALSO need to know the wiring - the wiring between the neurons is unique to an individual, and isn't going to be easy to determine.
There is a shortcut around the problems you mention: freeze the brain and scan it in destructively, sub-micron layer by sub-micron layer. For this to work two problems need to be solved:
1. Freezing the brain without destroying its microscopic structure to the extent that the connectivity and thresholds of neurons can no longer be inferred. A simple freezing regimen will not work because of ice crystal formation.
2. Making the scanning and required storage economical. With current tools (AFM, STM, electron microscopy) you'd do well to accurately map a single neuron, never mind 100e9 neurons.
The good news is that #1 is pretty low tech and might be made feasible with current technology while #2 need only become practical eventually, because while frozen you've got all the time in the world.
Those companies and governments that are strapped for cash want a rocket they know will work because this is likely to be the only satellite they have and can't afford to rebuild. In both cases they will spend the extra money if it gets them a rocket that has flown 100 consecutive successful missions, they aren't going to gamble. What is SpaceX's appeal then?
Aside from low cost SpaceX's appeal is exactly that you COULD NOT get a rocket that has flown multiple consecutive missions, since none of the other commercial players have reusable stages.
SpaceX, on the other has a fully reusable first stage. No bits falling off, as with the shuttle. This means that, after a couple of successful launches, the statistical reliability will far exceed that of any non-reusable vehicle since there are always variations in production quality, no matter how well you standardize the production process.
Sure, the second stage is not reusable. But it is the first stage that has the most failure prone flight regime.
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...and kill the shuttle too. Seriously. The international space station is useless pile of orbiting pork. It represents how the US subsidizes industry. No real science gets done up there. The last few years it had only a skeleton crew, barely sufficient for maintenance work.
Kill it. Kill it now. It will free up tens of billions. The shuttle flights alone are $500-800 million a pop. Put the money into real space science and development of cheap launch systems.
Oh wait! Looks like http://www.spacex.com/ is already doing the latter. With private money. Why not go with them? Well, cause that robs the US of an instrument of industrial policy: order way-too-expensive space systems from Boeing and blame the Europeans for subsidizing Airbus.
Until recently it was thought the long pipelines were at fault. But the boys at X-bit labs took a closer look at Intel patents and did some detailed performance measurements.
Turns out that it goes further. The long P4 pipes require "replay buffers" to reissue instructions with unresolved dependencies. These buffers more often than not end up causing further performance losses and power dissipation in case of common patterns of instruction dependency.
See http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/replAMD has got a webcast of the event, and the presentations in PDF format here: http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/InvestorRelatio ns/0,,51_306_10383,00.html
...have a look at these slides of a technology presentation given last friday http://epscontest.com/presentations/05q2_analyst-d ay.htm?slide=1&a
Impressive. If they execute on all that, Intel will have to keep on playing catch up for the forseeable future.
The relevant continuity is continuity of state, not continuity in time or form. If you suspend your laptop to disk and restart it later, the running processes will continue as of the point of suspension. Would you claim that those are no longer the same processes because they were suspended for some time with the DRAM cells discharged?
Yes, but, I hear you say, that's not the same because the processes are resumed on the same hardware. So that's akin to sleep or narcosis, not a wholesale transfer.
So what about transferring the disk to a different laptop and resuming that? Or transferring the disk image to a software emulation of the laptop's hardware and resuming that?
There is a shortcut around the problems you mention: freeze the brain and scan it in destructively, sub-micron layer by sub-micron layer. For this to work two problems need to be solved:
1. Freezing the brain without destroying its microscopic structure to the extent that the connectivity and thresholds of neurons can no longer be inferred. A simple freezing regimen will not work because of ice crystal formation.
2. Making the scanning and required storage economical. With current tools (AFM, STM, electron microscopy) you'd do well to accurately map a single neuron, never mind 100e9 neurons.
The good news is that #1 is pretty low tech and might be made feasible with current technology while #2 need only become practical eventually, because while frozen you've got all the time in the world.