Yes and no. While there is a popular trend back towards vectorisation there are other things going on that have just as big if not a bigger effect on architecture choice. Registers are a lot cheaper. Caches are cheaper, and multi-level caches are ubiquitous. Main memory is an order of magnitude slower than the processor which is a problem early supercomputers didn't quite have. A large part of the problem for modern processors has become the prediction and scheduling of the instructions which vectorisation helps alleviate, as opposed to the original Cray design where vectorisation was mainly used to reduce code size and keep the pipeline populated with current instructions as opposed to all the architecture behind speculative execution you now get. But yes agreed although it does scare me that the upshot of this is that everything the supercomputer industry is doing (10s of thousands of cores) will be needed on my Nephew's sub-dermal implant. How bad will the software have to be to use up all that compute power if we currently need a Cray to make a phone call...
I realised I wasn't being clear about why they can't define the standard now and wait for the technology to catch up. A standard like this is always a trade off based on the currently available technology, How fast are your analogue transistors, how much processing power do you have to do forward error correction. How fast are your ADCs/DACs to do signal shaping? This determines things like which coding schemes can you use. Also what market needs this and what costs are acceptable, for example DWDM and all the associated costs is perfectly acceptable if fibre is comparatively expensive, however even though in the 90s that would have been the only way to do 10G now we have the capability to do it electrically; designing the spec too soon and guessing is a really bad idea. We don't know how 20nm and lower process nodes are going to behave well enough to predict what their characteristics will be when this technology reaches maturity, to get that wrong is to end up with a standard that either under performs or is over expensive.
Put it another way, the processor architecture you would choose to achieve 80MFLOPS in 1976 is very different from the architecture you would choose in 2006. Telecomms has exactly the same concerns.
You know my 5 year old nephew keeps confusing need and want too. How much are you prepared to pay for this desire? If it will cost say 4 times greater per bit to implement Terabit with current technology do you still want it?
They're missing the point. The idea is that no matter what the kids do to it it's trivial to fix. Just re-write the sdcard image. No matter what they do they won't break the lab machines for the next person. This means they can get their hands dirty and experiment. This encourages playing at the bare metal which is how the Pi was originally envisioned. As opposed to the PCs they currently have and the home machines where care must be taken not to break them. A novice might experiment by tidying up some unused files and delete the windows directory. That's a few hours to fix on a PC, a few minutes on a Pi.
The other point is that it can be a controlled environment. You could do that for a PC but it would be a little trickier.
That and these reactors need molten sodium. You know that stuff that if it touches air it combusts, or if it contacts water it combusts. Oh and it's at about 400 degrees. And highly corrosive(so very very hard to completely contain and pump). Then you're making it radioactive. A better definition of liquid death would be hard to come up with. (actually the thought occurs that for space based reactors most of these problems go away. Hummm.....) That said I'm all for the use of this technology but it's disingenuous to imply that it is either a solved problem or easy. Especially when there are easier and cheaper solutions available. When the cost of fuel becomes significant then it's much more interesting.
If we can fundamentally change the material to be more active, such that it decays in an exponentially shorter period of time
This is already the case. If it's highly radioactive and therefore dangerous then it decays in a short amount of time. Conversely if it's going to hang around for thousands of years then it cannot be very dangerous. The problem is that the dangerous stuff is mixed up with the safe stuff. If re-processing were legal/economical then there would be no problem.
Actually with current launch tech if you had asteroid mining (and refinement, everyone always forgets that step) then the resources to get to Mars are easy. Getting to Mars and surviving there is easy if you can build a big enough ship. Note: You could build all the complex stuff like engines and control systems on Earth, for food as long as you have the resources to build big then it's easy.
How I would do it: Get water: LOTS of water - easy just find a passing comet/asteroid and steer it into a handy earth orbit. Get a nuke plant (possibly fuelled from resources got from an asteroid) and use the heat to melt the water in the centre of the comet. Tailor the power output of the nuke so that a thin layer of ice keeps the liquid water in the centre. Any small leaks will self heal anyway. Introduce some algae, shrimp, a few fish. Wait for stable eco-system to form, introducing new species as they are needed. You now have a food and oxygen source that is your moving spaceship. It would be a long trip to Mars but a comfortable one.
Or maybe it's a crazy idea and it's a good job I'm not one of the 1%
If you can build self sufficient space habitats why are you even bothering to go down to Mars and colonise there? It seems like getting yourself stuck in a gravity well is counter productive if you are self sufficient in orbit. (That said I can see how colonising some of the Jupiter of Saturnian moons would be useful, but Mars is a wasteland I really don't get the attraction.)
Not always. Technology can be a force multiplier. Consider how the invention of the combine harvester could bring down the costs of grain without enslaving anyone. True it made many people redundant but you can't lower costs without making someone redundant - that's kind of the definition of reduced costs. Look at it this way would you rather be an average guy in 18th Century America, or an average guy in 21st Century America? Who do you think has the higher standard of living? And before you say slave labour in China, it is my understanding (please correct me) that they have the choice to work in factories or on the farms. So while still deplorable that it's like this, it is still an improvement on the last hundred years.
So not perfect, but a lot better than it was and getting better all the time thanks to technology.
What are you talking about? My hot water tank is set to 60 degrees, and is heated between 3am and 6am. at 11am (when I often shower at weekend) it's still hot enough to burn yourself so can't have lost much, and stays warm enough to be washing things right up until I go to bed. And it's not like I use some magic, it's just got an extra layer of insulation over the standard (giving about 6" of insulation in total). No thermostat needed just an extra £8 cylinder jacket.
We would need to record the quantum state (spin, polarization, momentum, position) of every particle of matter in the thing being 'teleported' and then reproduce that state at the other end.
Really? I've heard this many times, but I don't buy it. For example why is it not sufficient to simply record that the muscle tissue has a water molecule at location x, why do you need the full quantum state of that. As long as you get the muscle tissue in the right place does it actually matter that it's quantum state perfect? Hell even if you got the molecules in slightly the wrong place as long as there was intelligence in the re-constructor so that it built functioning muscle tissue would it really even have to be molecule accurate? The only thing I can think of that might matter is the brain state, but even then I thought the brain stored information by neural connections and electrical charge, neither of which require a full quantum state measurement.
Okay easy example, shorting is not gambling if I have insider knowledge that company X is about to announce that it is late to market with its new product. The degree of gambling depends upon my knowledge (legal or otherwise) and intelligence to analyse that knowledge. Going long is obviously gambling because I think company X will win against their competitor company Y, but I could be wrong. Investing in any company is gambling, so how do you suggest we run an economy without investment/gambling?
No, no theft required. Let's keep this simple and have two actors. Let's suppose that the company in question is about to release its quarterly results. Rumours are that it will be a poor quarter. Actor A is going long on the stock, he thinks that over time (in the long run) the company will go up in value. He represents the long term investors in the stock market, the pension funds, the banks etc. Actor B (for whatever reason) thinks the price will go down in the short term. They represent the analysts/trading houses/whoever. Both are gambling. Actor A realises that the price of the stock goes up and down on a frequent basis, but he doesn't care, he believes that the company has solid foundations and even if they are poor results he is sticking with it. Actor B doesn't care he's convinced that it will be poor results when they are announced and wants to make money. Actor B borrows Actor A's stock and sells it before the results are announced. After the results are announced he has to buy the stock back at whatever price it currently is. If Actor A is right and in the long term the company is a good company then he has gained the fee Actor B paid him. Any short term fluctuations don't matter to him, he cares about the long term. If Actor B is right he made money from taking a gamble on the short term. Long term doesn't matter to him he is paying close attention to day by day news. I don't see the problem here, no theft, no fraud, just people with different motives and information profiting from each other; or more accuratly profiting from the less informed people.
And maybe actor B isn't taking a gamble maybe he just did better analysis of the current customer situation and therefore deserves to be rewarded for predicting the price crash. Maybe Actor A is an idiot for putting his money into Facebook and deserves to lose his money because "it's always grown in the past". Maybe Actor A is right to keep his money in Apple even when people predict "they must have a bad quarter one day". This is a good thing that people are looking at these things and being rewarded/punished for it.
No there are both child-ed and and child-less couples on the list. Child-ed get priority (funny that), there are not enough houses to go around (again who'd have thought that), so guess what happens? Those without children then either stay with their parents or end up having to buy/rent for themselves. I don't understand why you think this is bollocks, what about it fails your (harsh) reality filter?
You are mixing up cause and effect. Poor people do not set out to get pregnant, that is how they end up poor.
My personal experience says otherwise, but anecdote is not evidence so: Let us assume we have a system that gives an allowance to a parent for each child they have. Society has decided that this is a good idea because we don't want children to starve/be sent to work houses. The payment is set such that it is cost of child's food & clothing + 10% (for other sundries)*
The parent discovers that they are slightly better off than they were before having children as long as they under feed the child and get all their clothing from relatives/charity shops. In fact (they reason) the more children they have the better off they will be. Once your children reach about 4 years old they can look after each other for and you have a rock solid income stream.
Now would you believe the above situation can occur?** Would you believe in the UK the only way to get a council house (usually a low quality house but still paid for by the local council) is to have a kid. Would you also believe that they allocate the size of house based upon the number of children you have? Therefore the more children you have the bigger/better house you get.
Now you don't need many people to exploit a system set up like this before after two or three generations you have quite a large population that natural selection has encouraged to grow. And I can only speak for the UK but the situation I saw this kind of thing happening in was not only white but also a staunchly BNP area too(for the Americans the BNP is the British National Party, "England for the English", all that rubbish. Fully aware of the connotations of National party and who else used those two words...)
* Now you could come up other changes here to the specifics of the formula, + 0% or even -10% but that is something we need to argue about separately, the point is a payment is made to parents to allow for the cost of children, and that if you don't do this then what do you allow to happen to the children of these parents? Most other solutions end up either at child labour, child starvation or crime. ** I don't see how it can't happen because a bureaucracy will never be able to set a payment such that no abuse of the system occurs. Once there are ways to exploit the system then evolutionary principles apply.
No he said screwing Germany over at the end of WWI caused a lot of resentment that lead to the conditions that started WWII. At the end of WWII therefore the powers that be made sure to help re-build Germany so as the conditions for another WW would not be re-created. The OP made no reference to the current crisis.
remember this is archive.org an organisation that frequently* snapshots the entire** internet. Their IT infrastructure is something quite impressive.
*okay sites that are updated frequently get more refreshes - you can watch back in time and see how news sites react to world events, but blogs less so. ** okay only really websites that are static and don't have a robots.txt
Let's assume I pirate everything I can. Let's then count how many ways the media industry makes money off me. Let's say I go out on a date to the moves. *check* Perhaps I realise the cinema AV system is better than my home one, so for movies that are quite AV intensive I make sure I see them there *check* I listen to music on the radio *check* I still buy books because I prefer the dead tree format *check* Still go to the theatre Still go to concerts Still watch TV (with adverts) etc
Even if I did pirate rampantly there is still a healthy income stream there, I see no reason why this would kill off the entertainment industry. Remember "Home taping is killing music"
Then anything built of plastic becomes "free". As long as you can recycle the material locally. A bit of heat and you melt down your old stuff yourself. As soon as technology to make plastics from plants matures you can grow new supplies in your back garden. So we see period where even more and more things are made from plastic (plastic houses may come back on the menu). You can have the latest fashion at zero cost.
But anything made from metal or silicon still needs to be manufactured. Until metal 3D printers become more populous. So we just need silicon, well I can see that 99% of what we do in electronics now could be done in a general purpose processor and an FPGA, as long as the software is reasonably well written (an Ipod you pay for or the free equivalent - most people choose the free one with it's dodgy UI and sharp edges...). So it's just solar panels needed, and the motors and sensors for your 3D printers; but I could see those being made on a small scale, nothing too high tech there.
All of which is almost utopian, you can entirely do away with the modern economy and still live in a life of fashion and luxury, but this leaves us with a question of who pays the farmers? Who waits tables and who polices the streets?
You've got me thinking, could we somehow apply market forces to laws. Only the fittest survive. I've heard it suggested that there should be a maximum number of laws allowed (and if you want to pass a new one you have to repeal old ones). How can you have law when it is not possible for even a specialist in the subject to know all the laws and how to apply them correctly. Does not the fact that a lawyer can be a specialist in one area but yet still not know if a law applies to someone not ring that something is fundamentally wrong with the system? The fact that I am subject to laws that I cannot reasonably be expected to know about sickens me. I can be legitimately expected to be doing illegal things through no fault of my own. How does that not remove respect for the law?
without banning the technology outright, which would be like banning home computers in the 1970s
And as long as not every country bans it then the technology can still advance and leave the Luddites in what will eventually be an economic dead end. This is another reason why things like SOPA and other international laws are such a bad and scary thing. The idea of diversity is that we are all free to pursue different philosophies. But that's another argument...
The problem there is that after a few rounds you're producing virii which are immune to the treatment, which rapidly becomes worthless.
Would this not be like evolving a virus that is immune to bleach or autoclaves? i.e. because it is attacking the RNA itself you would just alter the code that the marker is searching for?
But these techniques are unproven, possibly unsafe
Right so we need to apply science. i.e. do some maths, come up with some models, possibly run some trials, possibly look for money to run bigger trials. That way we can prove them and see if they're safe.
really nothing more than a band aid to cover the real problem
One could argue that farming is nothing more than a band aid to cover the problem of unreliable animal migration. It's what humans do though. Covering yourself in animal skins is a band aid against bad weather.
In fact they aren't even that, they're a useful distraction to allow the powers that be to continue with business as usual while leading idiots to believe there's a simple geoengineering solution.
How are they a distraction if they work? If for a comparatively small investment they do sequester CO2 then what's the problem? I'm not certain that they will, in fact the current evidence I see seems to say it won't but this is why we have science to find these sorts of things out. Let's face it anyway we only need a temporary solution, we will run out of fossil fuel to burn soon enough so we only need a temporary solution until that happens. As long as that temporary solution doesn't break anything else (that we can't also fix) then I don't see the problem with a temporary solution.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes and no. While there is a popular trend back towards vectorisation there are other things going on that have just as big if not a bigger effect on architecture choice.
Registers are a lot cheaper. Caches are cheaper, and multi-level caches are ubiquitous. Main memory is an order of magnitude slower than the processor which is a problem early supercomputers didn't quite have.
A large part of the problem for modern processors has become the prediction and scheduling of the instructions which vectorisation helps alleviate, as opposed to the original Cray design where vectorisation was mainly used to reduce code size and keep the pipeline populated with current instructions as opposed to all the architecture behind speculative execution you now get.
But yes agreed although it does scare me that the upshot of this is that everything the supercomputer industry is doing (10s of thousands of cores) will be needed on my Nephew's sub-dermal implant. How bad will the software have to be to use up all that compute power if we currently need a Cray to make a phone call...
I realised I wasn't being clear about why they can't define the standard now and wait for the technology to catch up.
A standard like this is always a trade off based on the currently available technology, How fast are your analogue transistors, how much processing power do you have to do forward error correction. How fast are your ADCs/DACs to do signal shaping? This determines things like which coding schemes can you use. Also what market needs this and what costs are acceptable, for example DWDM and all the associated costs is perfectly acceptable if fibre is comparatively expensive, however even though in the 90s that would have been the only way to do 10G now we have the capability to do it electrically; designing the spec too soon and guessing is a really bad idea. We don't know how 20nm and lower process nodes are going to behave well enough to predict what their characteristics will be when this technology reaches maturity, to get that wrong is to end up with a standard that either under performs or is over expensive.
Put it another way, the processor architecture you would choose to achieve 80MFLOPS in 1976 is very different from the architecture you would choose in 2006. Telecomms has exactly the same concerns.
We need terabit Ethernet NOW, not in a decade.
You know my 5 year old nephew keeps confusing need and want too.
How much are you prepared to pay for this desire? If it will cost say 4 times greater per bit to implement Terabit with current technology do you still want it?
So why would you ever officially declare war again then?
They're missing the point.
The idea is that no matter what the kids do to it it's trivial to fix. Just re-write the sdcard image. No matter what they do they won't break the lab machines for the next person. This means they can get their hands dirty and experiment. This encourages playing at the bare metal which is how the Pi was originally envisioned.
As opposed to the PCs they currently have and the home machines where care must be taken not to break them. A novice might experiment by tidying up some unused files and delete the windows directory. That's a few hours to fix on a PC, a few minutes on a Pi.
The other point is that it can be a controlled environment. You could do that for a PC but it would be a little trickier.
That and these reactors need molten sodium.
You know that stuff that if it touches air it combusts, or if it contacts water it combusts. Oh and it's at about 400 degrees. And highly corrosive(so very very hard to completely contain and pump). Then you're making it radioactive. A better definition of liquid death would be hard to come up with. (actually the thought occurs that for space based reactors most of these problems go away. Hummm.....)
That said I'm all for the use of this technology but it's disingenuous to imply that it is either a solved problem or easy. Especially when there are easier and cheaper solutions available. When the cost of fuel becomes significant then it's much more interesting.
If we can fundamentally change the material to be more active, such that it decays in an exponentially shorter period of time
This is already the case. If it's highly radioactive and therefore dangerous then it decays in a short amount of time. Conversely if it's going to hang around for thousands of years then it cannot be very dangerous.
The problem is that the dangerous stuff is mixed up with the safe stuff. If re-processing were legal/economical then there would be no problem.
Actually with current launch tech if you had asteroid mining (and refinement, everyone always forgets that step) then the resources to get to Mars are easy. Getting to Mars and surviving there is easy if you can build a big enough ship.
Note: You could build all the complex stuff like engines and control systems on Earth, for food as long as you have the resources to build big then it's easy.
How I would do it:
Get water: LOTS of water - easy just find a passing comet/asteroid and steer it into a handy earth orbit. Get a nuke plant (possibly fuelled from resources got from an asteroid) and use the heat to melt the water in the centre of the comet. Tailor the power output of the nuke so that a thin layer of ice keeps the liquid water in the centre. Any small leaks will self heal anyway. Introduce some algae, shrimp, a few fish.
Wait for stable eco-system to form, introducing new species as they are needed.
You now have a food and oxygen source that is your moving spaceship. It would be a long trip to Mars but a comfortable one.
Or maybe it's a crazy idea and it's a good job I'm not one of the 1%
If you can build self sufficient space habitats why are you even bothering to go down to Mars and colonise there? It seems like getting yourself stuck in a gravity well is counter productive if you are self sufficient in orbit.
(That said I can see how colonising some of the Jupiter of Saturnian moons would be useful, but Mars is a wasteland I really don't get the attraction.)
Not always.
Technology can be a force multiplier. Consider how the invention of the combine harvester could bring down the costs of grain without enslaving anyone. True it made many people redundant but you can't lower costs without making someone redundant - that's kind of the definition of reduced costs.
Look at it this way would you rather be an average guy in 18th Century America, or an average guy in 21st Century America? Who do you think has the higher standard of living?
And before you say slave labour in China, it is my understanding (please correct me) that they have the choice to work in factories or on the farms. So while still deplorable that it's like this, it is still an improvement on the last hundred years.
So not perfect, but a lot better than it was and getting better all the time thanks to technology.
What are you talking about?
My hot water tank is set to 60 degrees, and is heated between 3am and 6am. at 11am (when I often shower at weekend) it's still hot enough to burn yourself so can't have lost much, and stays warm enough to be washing things right up until I go to bed.
And it's not like I use some magic, it's just got an extra layer of insulation over the standard (giving about 6" of insulation in total). No thermostat needed just an extra £8 cylinder jacket.
We would need to record the quantum state (spin, polarization, momentum, position) of every particle of matter in the thing being 'teleported' and then reproduce that state at the other end.
Really? I've heard this many times, but I don't buy it. For example why is it not sufficient to simply record that the muscle tissue has a water molecule at location x, why do you need the full quantum state of that. As long as you get the muscle tissue in the right place does it actually matter that it's quantum state perfect? Hell even if you got the molecules in slightly the wrong place as long as there was intelligence in the re-constructor so that it built functioning muscle tissue would it really even have to be molecule accurate?
The only thing I can think of that might matter is the brain state, but even then I thought the brain stored information by neural connections and electrical charge, neither of which require a full quantum state measurement.
Or am I missing something?
Okay easy example, shorting is not gambling if I have insider knowledge that company X is about to announce that it is late to market with its new product. The degree of gambling depends upon my knowledge (legal or otherwise) and intelligence to analyse that knowledge.
Going long is obviously gambling because I think company X will win against their competitor company Y, but I could be wrong.
Investing in any company is gambling, so how do you suggest we run an economy without investment/gambling?
No, no theft required. Let's keep this simple and have two actors.
Let's suppose that the company in question is about to release its quarterly results. Rumours are that it will be a poor quarter.
Actor A is going long on the stock, he thinks that over time (in the long run) the company will go up in value. He represents the long term investors in the stock market, the pension funds, the banks etc.
Actor B (for whatever reason) thinks the price will go down in the short term. They represent the analysts/trading houses/whoever.
Both are gambling. Actor A realises that the price of the stock goes up and down on a frequent basis, but he doesn't care, he believes that the company has solid foundations and even if they are poor results he is sticking with it. Actor B doesn't care he's convinced that it will be poor results when they are announced and wants to make money.
Actor B borrows Actor A's stock and sells it before the results are announced. After the results are announced he has to buy the stock back at whatever price it currently is.
If Actor A is right and in the long term the company is a good company then he has gained the fee Actor B paid him. Any short term fluctuations don't matter to him, he cares about the long term.
If Actor B is right he made money from taking a gamble on the short term. Long term doesn't matter to him he is paying close attention to day by day news.
I don't see the problem here, no theft, no fraud, just people with different motives and information profiting from each other; or more accuratly profiting from the less informed people.
And maybe actor B isn't taking a gamble maybe he just did better analysis of the current customer situation and therefore deserves to be rewarded for predicting the price crash. Maybe Actor A is an idiot for putting his money into Facebook and deserves to lose his money because "it's always grown in the past". Maybe Actor A is right to keep his money in Apple even when people predict "they must have a bad quarter one day". This is a good thing that people are looking at these things and being rewarded/punished for it.
No there are both child-ed and and child-less couples on the list. Child-ed get priority (funny that), there are not enough houses to go around (again who'd have thought that), so guess what happens? Those without children then either stay with their parents or end up having to buy/rent for themselves.
I don't understand why you think this is bollocks, what about it fails your (harsh) reality filter?
You are mixing up cause and effect. Poor people do not set out to get pregnant, that is how they end up poor.
My personal experience says otherwise, but anecdote is not evidence so:
Let us assume we have a system that gives an allowance to a parent for each child they have. Society has decided that this is a good idea because we don't want children to starve/be sent to work houses. The payment is set such that it is cost of child's food & clothing + 10% (for other sundries)*
The parent discovers that they are slightly better off than they were before having children as long as they under feed the child and get all their clothing from relatives/charity shops.
In fact (they reason) the more children they have the better off they will be. Once your children reach about 4 years old they can look after each other for and you have a rock solid income stream.
Now would you believe the above situation can occur?**
Would you believe in the UK the only way to get a council house (usually a low quality house but still paid for by the local council) is to have a kid. Would you also believe that they allocate the size of house based upon the number of children you have? Therefore the more children you have the bigger/better house you get.
Now you don't need many people to exploit a system set up like this before after two or three generations you have quite a large population that natural selection has encouraged to grow.
And I can only speak for the UK but the situation I saw this kind of thing happening in was not only white but also a staunchly BNP area too(for the Americans the BNP is the British National Party, "England for the English", all that rubbish. Fully aware of the connotations of National party and who else used those two words...)
* Now you could come up other changes here to the specifics of the formula, + 0% or even -10% but that is something we need to argue about separately, the point is a payment is made to parents to allow for the cost of children, and that if you don't do this then what do you allow to happen to the children of these parents? Most other solutions end up either at child labour, child starvation or crime.
** I don't see how it can't happen because a bureaucracy will never be able to set a payment such that no abuse of the system occurs. Once there are ways to exploit the system then evolutionary principles apply.
No he said screwing Germany over at the end of WWI caused a lot of resentment that lead to the conditions that started WWII. At the end of WWII therefore the powers that be made sure to help re-build Germany so as the conditions for another WW would not be re-created.
The OP made no reference to the current crisis.
remember this is archive.org an organisation that frequently* snapshots the entire** internet. Their IT infrastructure is something quite impressive.
*okay sites that are updated frequently get more refreshes - you can watch back in time and see how news sites react to world events, but blogs less so.
** okay only really websites that are static and don't have a robots.txt
Let's assume I pirate everything I can. Let's then count how many ways the media industry makes money off me.
Let's say I go out on a date to the moves. *check*
Perhaps I realise the cinema AV system is better than my home one, so for movies that are quite AV intensive I make sure I see them there *check*
I listen to music on the radio *check*
I still buy books because I prefer the dead tree format *check*
Still go to the theatre
Still go to concerts
Still watch TV (with adverts)
etc
Even if I did pirate rampantly there is still a healthy income stream there, I see no reason why this would kill off the entertainment industry. Remember "Home taping is killing music"
At least you're on the science park exchange, try being on either the Bar Hill exchange or the Cottenham one.
3Mb on a good day...
Once I can scan and print them myself, well ...
Then anything built of plastic becomes "free".
As long as you can recycle the material locally. A bit of heat and you melt down your old stuff yourself. As soon as technology to make plastics from plants matures you can grow new supplies in your back garden.
So we see period where even more and more things are made from plastic (plastic houses may come back on the menu). You can have the latest fashion at zero cost.
But anything made from metal or silicon still needs to be manufactured. Until metal 3D printers become more populous.
So we just need silicon, well I can see that 99% of what we do in electronics now could be done in a general purpose processor and an FPGA, as long as the software is reasonably well written (an Ipod you pay for or the free equivalent - most people choose the free one with it's dodgy UI and sharp edges...).
So it's just solar panels needed, and the motors and sensors for your 3D printers; but I could see those being made on a small scale, nothing too high tech there.
All of which is almost utopian, you can entirely do away with the modern economy and still live in a life of fashion and luxury, but this leaves us with a question of who pays the farmers? Who waits tables and who polices the streets?
You've got me thinking, could we somehow apply market forces to laws. Only the fittest survive.
I've heard it suggested that there should be a maximum number of laws allowed (and if you want to pass a new one you have to repeal old ones).
How can you have law when it is not possible for even a specialist in the subject to know all the laws and how to apply them correctly. Does not the fact that a lawyer can be a specialist in one area but yet still not know if a law applies to someone not ring that something is fundamentally wrong with the system?
The fact that I am subject to laws that I cannot reasonably be expected to know about sickens me. I can be legitimately expected to be doing illegal things through no fault of my own.
How does that not remove respect for the law?
without banning the technology outright, which would be like banning home computers in the 1970s
And as long as not every country bans it then the technology can still advance and leave the Luddites in what will eventually be an economic dead end.
This is another reason why things like SOPA and other international laws are such a bad and scary thing. The idea of diversity is that we are all free to pursue different philosophies. But that's another argument...
The problem there is that after a few rounds you're producing virii which are immune to the treatment, which rapidly becomes worthless.
Would this not be like evolving a virus that is immune to bleach or autoclaves?
i.e. because it is attacking the RNA itself you would just alter the code that the marker is searching for?
But these techniques are unproven, possibly unsafe
Right so we need to apply science. i.e. do some maths, come up with some models, possibly run some trials, possibly look for money to run bigger trials.
That way we can prove them and see if they're safe.
really nothing more than a band aid to cover the real problem
One could argue that farming is nothing more than a band aid to cover the problem of unreliable animal migration. It's what humans do though.
Covering yourself in animal skins is a band aid against bad weather.
In fact they aren't even that, they're a useful distraction to allow the powers that be to continue with business as usual while leading idiots to believe there's a simple geoengineering solution.
How are they a distraction if they work? If for a comparatively small investment they do sequester CO2 then what's the problem?
I'm not certain that they will, in fact the current evidence I see seems to say it won't but this is why we have science to find these sorts of things out.
Let's face it anyway we only need a temporary solution, we will run out of fossil fuel to burn soon enough so we only need a temporary solution until that happens. As long as that temporary solution doesn't break anything else (that we can't also fix) then I don't see the problem with a temporary solution.