LL/SC means load linked/store conditional. I just found this here http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~culler/cs258-s99/slides/lec09/sld012.htm and remember using this on a PowerPC. The hundreds of cycles mentioned sound horrible indeed. The other side to the story is though that you don't want much communication anyway but this issue would put more pressure on the programmer to prevent it. You could also do it yourself via Peterson algorithm or something similar though.
CAS seems to mean compare-and-swap, another atomic primitive. The following might help:
Let me say something controversial and state that SMP is for fearful managers and lazy programmers, i.e. "oh lets rather make little baby steps toward our new iteration of our big serial application that in the future may have some parallel features on the old but now multicore architecture", and "yawn, lets not break anything in our grave of global variables and just add a few threads here and there were the consultant has inserted a piece of nicely modularizable code, no one cares about the exact performance improvement as long it is parallel and faster".
Who would have thought that the next instruction set revolution would come through a puny cell phone to the humble end user. Not to forget fun stuff like ia64 and other VLIW architectures but they don't have that big a market share outside specialty apps. Ok, Apple was there but with negligible market share.
I just read the argument that RISC requires more memory and I would conclude that IBM/Intel was right to choose CISC in the late '70s for the IBMPC/8086 from that point of view. But in the mid '90s I was quite ready to buy the 16MB RAM for my PC, the same the HP workstation (PA-RISC) had, I was using.
It is amazing how sluggish the world can be to change (CISC->RISC), if the resulting improvement isn't blatantly obvious. I think power is the dimension the improvement happened in but I guess RISC is just one part of the story there.
On the other hand you could build a gigantic telescope now and be able to spend less or at most equally as much and be able to watch information that is only 125 years old and that without waiting ~10000 years or more for the probe to arrive.
Anyway, I bet we aren't going to see a Probe mission for a long time. I would rather expect people to travel there and take what they get. This implies that we are actually able to support such a mission with relative ease or that we feel pressured into starting it.
I thought so too. However, biological life gets by with less energy, so there is less to see from afar. All that technological stuff I would call industrial signature of a civilization. Anyone found a Dyson sphere yet?
I'm against trying to specialize search programs too much. The probability of detection will be too low. If there was any civilization capable of building sentient machines they should also be capable of providing a nice show for our primitive detectors. Ultimately we won't have to look for it specifically but we should look for it in the data we are already gathering in other surveys.
I just found the following statement in an article (http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/ali_ettefagh/2008/04/stagnate_wages_for_high_prices_1.html)
"Most significant of all is that Iran has virtually no foreign debt and it can spend its currency reserves on capital goods, rather than import of food."
and also "The difference, however, is that the experiences of war, revolution and naked threats of aggression have pushed Iranians towards an attitude of self-sufficiency and a search for an independent path, as chosen by China and India some 30 - 40 years ago. As such, it is a work in progress and the Iranian economy is growing at Chinese and Indian rates."
I would have to say that Iran is somewhat backwards from a developmental point of view but they do have potential.
The food issue was a problem for Russia for instance and initially also for Germany before the second world war so I wouldn't underestimate it.
I'm wondering for how long Russia and China will be supporting Iran, both have some issues with Muslim populations but obviously the problems aren't big enough to prevent support for Iran, seems like the West is the bigger problem. I wonder how far their support will go.
Besides the support Iran has been getting from Russia and China, Iran is trying to develop its own military hardware. I'm wondering how far along they are in terms of independence, i.e. can they produce their own semiconductors? They seem to have the people but can they produce their own chips? The hardware is obviously flying but by what means?
If Iran is as far along as mentioned, they certainly aren't a real threat just yet, maybe if they were a puppet I would be somewhat concerned.
I guess the current posturing is meant to give Iran some breathing room to develop a credible opposition to the West. With the current involvements in the Middle East I doubt that the West is going to do anything about it.
> If I want to be an asshole that looks at porn, doesn't go to church, and keeps to himself, I have that right.
It would sound much better if you would replace that 'and' with an 'or'.
Also you have to understand those overly religious societies. They are under considerable stress while surviving in a harsh environment by any means possible (if there is no stress you can create some, i.e. with lacking medical insurance). This creates a situation where even the most basic needs of a human being may remain unfulfilled. Also they have devout followers who procreate madly thereby further reducing the value of a human life. So going back to your moral values and those dictatorships, it has to be obvious to you that while all the fulfillment of basic human needs will continue to be lacking, capable politicians will always be able to find something else to justify their existence with, like chasing after social misfits or other odd people who don't really do any harm.
Sane societies have long discovered that they could invest all those resources more wisely, see the following for an example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Locke
Nice! I have long believed, that the main improvement in computer science has been the reduction of transistor sizes. Everything else since the sixties and seventies has been adding layers of abstraction to deal with the increased complexity that has become possible.
I'm being sarcastic of course, but your post adds another anecdote to my suspicion.
> and as travel outside the solar system is impossible
It is hard but why impossible?
> which of course is a self-evidently vacuous and stupid response to my observation about physics and engineering
What exactly did you observe?
You said that it is impossible now and you concluded that it will remain so for all times?
Personally I think that we are progressing on the space exploration front. Some would like it happened faster, but face it, an Apollo like effort is unlikely nowadays. Currently there isn't any need to worry about interstellar travel. What people need to worry about now is exploration of the solar system to increase survivability in places other than earth. I think this is happening now, and given that we have centuries, at an adequate pace.
Once people get out there and establish an industrial base many more raw materials become available and large scale engineering projects become possible. Those projects should lead to more people living in space. Some have proposed the idea that the sun could be altered to prevent it from becoming a red giant, and who knows a large enough civilization may pull it off. You wouldn't even need interstellar travel then.
The problem with your thinking is that you would essentially deny future generations the possibility to find out whether interstellar travel is possible or not were we to fall in line with your thinking. I think however that the opposite should happen, we should plan to enlarge our civilization into space. It would increase the number of people working on interstellar travel and it would also place people in a challenging environment that will lead to discoveries that will be impossible here on earth.
I conclude that to get to interstellar travel and other large scale engineering projects we have to enable future generations to accomplish those with relative ease. Our estimates of what is possible are quite irrelevant. What is important is that we have the goal to let future generations succeed in accomplishing the kind of goals we can only dream of.
Before I entered university I would have never known why to look for finite state machines. Obviously this is an important topic for an electrical engineer. I can see that working through OCW may get me there, but I'm a lazy bum, I need a problem to solve to do some learning. I have to work my way back from the problem, university works the other way.
OCW has helped me though, because I knew enough to know what to look for.
I do think that OCW helps me, on the other hand I remember asking my professors and doing exercises but nobody says that you couldn't find another way to get that kind of interaction. University is probably the best environment to make it all work, but I wouldn't rule out other means.
Living in Germany I'm occasionally pondering the possibility of studying CS through something Wikipedia calls Extramural studies. The German article is the most voluminous one, followed by Russian and then English but somehow I doubt that this is a particularly German idea. This would offer you more interaction with fellow students (if you contact them on your own) and a university but you would study essentially by mail and through exams at a university. HR people don't treat those students any worse than normal students because they have shown possibly more motivation.
Fortunately they don't produce anything important anymore like those Agilent scopes and *analyzers. So it is not like the foundation of electrical engineering would have received any cracks or so. If that would have happened to Agilent nobody would have bothered anyway.
After all, even to HP and its customers it probably won't mean much. Why do i see the same headlines on slashdot as I see on google news again?
I love this kind of conspiracy theory. I think an economic downturn is exactly the right kind of time to break the good news, just think of all the possibilities. Especially since society has already proven that marbles are in short supply anyway, so not many people will be in the position to lose said marbles.
From a linguistic point of view I would debate the use of the word marble, marbles are far more ubiquitous than minds. Here is a better one: crown jewels - well that will take some explaining.
I found the game to be ok. In single player mode you can go and optimize your hardware fixing strategy. I mean this is some low key intellectual challenge if you are looking for it.
I can't really think of anything that doesn't have some realism and gets fiendishly difficult to play/implement real quick. Just look at the ill fated "Outpost 1" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outpost_(video_game) ), I have never seen the Management Ai in it, just to mention one issue.
Personally I would like to see some free form game that dwells on orbital mechanics, there are interesting limitations and it wouldn't have to include pea soup clouds like X3, Freelancer, and assorted ilk in the game. Also it would have some chess like nature since you can essentially see everything but can't necessarily get to it (read some A.C.Clarke stories). Also mechanics is kinda intuitively understandable and you need only finish highschool to get an introduction. Well I'm kidding of course, I went to my favourite university library and found two tomes in a series (~450 pages thick) on celestial mechanics (ISBN 3-540-40749-9), and I'm sure there is more. Coincidentally Poincaré laid the foundation to chaos theory with his work on the three body problem, they never told me that in high-school. Well maybe five generations down the road we will be able to play with it.
Anyway, I expect only a little bit more than NASA has come up with.
So you want to take this illusion of progress away and replace it with some more concrete progress indicator. You could go ahead and get a book like: Comparative Programming Languages (http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/~rgc/cpl/) figure out what kind of language features you were missing, and what new language encompasses the most new features and then learn it by focusing on the new features and using them properly in a project.
The listed languages "ALGOL, FORTRAN, COBOL, and Pascal" unfortunately preclude the asking slashdotter from knowing about object oriented programming and design principles. Which I think is the biggest hole in his resume. I don't know whether functional programming is really all that hot in the industry, but the industry is just purely lowest common denominator, so I think he should just learn the new stuff and he should throw in functional programming too.
Mentioning design principles I would point to "Design Patterns" and UML.
Looking at the industry, it appears to me that the industry is at fault for this poor man's choice of languages. He could have picked up OO stuff by learning an OO language like Simula as early as the seventies, or he could have learned LISP and have had CommonLoops since 1986.
His biggest issue may have been that all those other languages weren't available to him like they are to us now as free software, but only through an industry or research project.
Seeing how ARM processors support Jazelle, I'm convinced people have taken Java serious enough to even bother with improving its virtual machine performance. So Java doesn't even just give you freedom but also a well developed ecosystem.
>Exactly so. To the extent that this technology actually works, it will be circumventable.
But the need to circumvent it will make whatever action more costly. This can certainly prevent lousy amateurs like the guy with the shoe or the guy with the hot pants.
I spend my last vacation in Western Australia and had similar worries. I was on my own and had a rental car. Annoyingly enough I couldn't rent a sat phone, buy an EPIRB/PLB, or buy a shortwave radio. I cut all my trips into the outback short and didn't do anything crazy, it worked out ok.
I remember getting about 10km with my CB radio at 4W. This is not enough for Australia. Somebody here was talking about the 100W range for what you want to do, this sounds much better. Don't forget though that you have to carry batteries and a short wave radio with antenna. I also remember some HAM radio friends talking about their pricey equipment so I would say that even with a ~AU$3000 sat phone contract you may be better off than with 10kg of HAM gear at similar or at least half the price. If you can rent the thing you will also not have to deal with a 24 month contract.
I'm wondering whether there are any drilling robots that could just go there and drill the required tunnels and caverns. I have always been wondering whether water is a required ingredient for any drilling operation. But lately I heard that it is mainly meant for cooling and to prevent silicosis in miners. This should be true for small drilling equipment if you want to do any blasting, i.e. where the transport of dirt out of the hole is not the issue. But more modern mines are build without much blasting I heard, I would be glad to find some example.
I didn't go down the natural route because I think that this won't be good enough in the long term. Even if natural caverns are used some drilling will have to be done. So the question remains - How to drill in a lunar environment.
I'm also wondering whether the lower gravity causes softer minerals to form.
Re:United States Government Accountability Office?
on
Top Secret America
·
· Score: 1
Well if you wanted to become like the GDR you would need 3 million inofficial operatives (assuming the us would need 1% of it citizens to be spies). Also you would need secure borders with walls, fences, mines, patrols and then some. Also you would get national id cards.
The Una bomber wouldn't have existed because he would have found bigger problems to worry about.
Interestingly I can't remember cases of terrorism in the GDR. If there had been any, they would have been kept under wraps. Terrorism wouldn't have made sense, since the cooperation of the media wouldn't have existed. As a terrorist you would have had to fear that the state media would have used a terrorist attack against the west instead of working nicely along by propagating your message. Nothing short of revolution would have made a difference. I heard in school that to be a successful revolutionary you have to get the media under control real quick, I mean everyone knew what would have to happen.
Finally let me remind you that in the end the GDR was on the verge of bankruptcy (some argue otherwise but it sure felt like it). No clue whether the MfS sucked us dry but it must have helped.
We should better look for industrial uses of RF like microwave ovens and such. At least we will know how long it takes the other guys to warm up yesterdays dinner.
Its about the division of labour, but essentially he describes the same thing. It is just logical to continue on with this specialization thing if it is so great.
Slashdot Mirror
LL/SC means load linked/store conditional. I just found this here http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~culler/cs258-s99/slides/lec09/sld012.htm and remember using this on a PowerPC. The hundreds of cycles mentioned sound horrible indeed. The other side to the story is though that you don't want much communication anyway but this issue would put more pressure on the programmer to prevent it. You could also do it yourself via Peterson algorithm or something similar though.
CAS seems to mean compare-and-swap, another atomic primitive. The following might help:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-blocking_algorithm
Notice that the Peterson algorithm is blocking.
Let me say something controversial and state that SMP is for fearful managers and lazy programmers, i.e. "oh lets rather make little baby steps toward our new iteration of our big serial application that in the future may have some parallel features on the old but now multicore architecture", and "yawn, lets not break anything in our grave of global variables and just add a few threads here and there were the consultant has inserted a piece of nicely modularizable code, no one cares about the exact performance improvement as long it is parallel and faster".
Who would have thought that the next instruction set revolution would come through a puny cell phone to the humble end user. Not to forget fun stuff like ia64 and other VLIW architectures but they don't have that big a market share outside specialty apps. Ok, Apple was there but with negligible market share.
I just read the argument that RISC requires more memory and I would conclude that IBM/Intel was right to choose CISC in the late '70s for the IBMPC/8086 from that point of view. But in the mid '90s I was quite ready to buy the 16MB RAM for my PC, the same the HP workstation (PA-RISC) had, I was using.
It is amazing how sluggish the world can be to change (CISC->RISC), if the resulting improvement isn't blatantly obvious. I think power is the dimension the improvement happened in but I guess RISC is just one part of the story there.
They should have thought of that in the seventies.
Or how about security eye for the promiscuous guy.
On the other hand you could build a gigantic telescope now and be able to spend less or at most equally as much and be able to watch information that is only 125 years old and that without waiting ~10000 years or more for the probe to arrive.
Anyway, I bet we aren't going to see a Probe mission for a long time. I would rather expect people to travel there and take what they get. This implies that we are actually able to support such a mission with relative ease or that we feel pressured into starting it.
I thought so too. However, biological life gets by with less energy, so there is less to see from afar. All that technological stuff I would call industrial signature of a civilization. Anyone found a Dyson sphere yet?
I'm against trying to specialize search programs too much. The probability of detection will be too low. If there was any civilization capable of building sentient machines they should also be capable of providing a nice show for our primitive detectors. Ultimately we won't have to look for it specifically but we should look for it in the data we are already gathering in other surveys.
I just found the following statement in an article (http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/ali_ettefagh/2008/04/stagnate_wages_for_high_prices_1.html)
"Most significant of all is that Iran has virtually no foreign debt and it can spend its currency reserves on capital goods, rather than import of food."
and also "The difference, however, is that the experiences of war, revolution and naked threats of aggression have pushed Iranians towards an attitude of self-sufficiency and a search for an independent path, as chosen by China and India some 30 - 40 years ago. As such, it is a work in progress and the Iranian economy is growing at Chinese and Indian rates."
I would have to say that Iran is somewhat backwards from a developmental point of view but they do have potential.
The food issue was a problem for Russia for instance and initially also for Germany before the second world war so I wouldn't underestimate it.
I'm wondering for how long Russia and China will be supporting Iran, both have some issues with Muslim populations but obviously the problems aren't big enough to prevent support for Iran, seems like the West is the bigger problem. I wonder how far their support will go.
Besides the support Iran has been getting from Russia and China, Iran is trying to develop its own military hardware. I'm wondering how far along they are in terms of independence, i.e. can they produce their own semiconductors? They seem to have the people but can they produce their own chips? The hardware is obviously flying but by what means?
If Iran is as far along as mentioned, they certainly aren't a real threat just yet, maybe if they were a puppet I would be somewhat concerned.
I guess the current posturing is meant to give Iran some breathing room to develop a credible opposition to the West. With the current involvements in the Middle East I doubt that the West is going to do anything about it.
> If I want to be an asshole that looks at porn, doesn't go to church, and keeps to himself, I have that right.
It would sound much better if you would replace that 'and' with an 'or'.
Also you have to understand those overly religious societies. They are under considerable stress while surviving in a harsh environment by any means possible (if there is no stress you can create some, i.e. with lacking medical insurance). This creates a situation where even the most basic needs of a human being may remain unfulfilled. Also they have devout followers who procreate madly thereby further reducing the value of a human life. So going back to your moral values and those dictatorships, it has to be obvious to you that while all the fulfillment of basic human needs will continue to be lacking, capable politicians will always be able to find something else to justify their existence with, like chasing after social misfits or other odd people who don't really do any harm.
Sane societies have long discovered that they could invest all those resources more wisely, see the following for an example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Locke
Precisely, your suggestion is similar to the Orion project of waste treatment.
Nice! I have long believed, that the main improvement in computer science has been the reduction of transistor sizes. Everything else since the sixties and seventies has been adding layers of abstraction to deal with the increased complexity that has become possible.
I'm being sarcastic of course, but your post adds another anecdote to my suspicion.
> and as travel outside the solar system is impossible
It is hard but why impossible?
> which of course is a self-evidently vacuous and stupid response to my observation about physics and engineering
What exactly did you observe?
You said that it is impossible now and you concluded that it will remain so for all times?
Personally I think that we are progressing on the space exploration front. Some would like it happened faster, but face it, an Apollo like effort is unlikely nowadays.
Currently there isn't any need to worry about interstellar travel. What people need to worry about now is exploration of the solar system to increase survivability in places other than earth.
I think this is happening now, and given that we have centuries, at an adequate pace.
Once people get out there and establish an industrial base many more raw materials become available and large scale engineering projects become possible. Those projects should lead to more people living in space. Some have proposed the idea that the sun could be altered to prevent it from becoming a red giant, and who knows a large enough civilization may pull it off. You wouldn't even need interstellar travel then.
The problem with your thinking is that you would essentially deny future generations the possibility to find out whether interstellar travel is possible or not were we to fall in line with your thinking. I think however that the opposite should happen, we should plan to enlarge our civilization into space. It would increase the number of people working on interstellar travel and it would also place people in a challenging environment that will lead to discoveries that will be impossible here on earth.
I conclude that to get to interstellar travel and other large scale engineering projects we have to enable future generations to accomplish those with relative ease. Our estimates of what is possible are quite irrelevant. What is important is that we have the goal to let future generations succeed in accomplishing the kind of goals we can only dream of.
Before I entered university I would have never known why to look for finite state machines. Obviously this is an important topic for an electrical engineer. I can see that working through OCW may get me there, but I'm a lazy bum, I need a problem to solve to do some learning. I have to work my way back from the problem, university works the other way.
OCW has helped me though, because I knew enough to know what to look for.
I do think that OCW helps me, on the other hand I remember asking my professors and doing exercises but nobody says that you couldn't find another way to get that kind of interaction. University is probably the best environment to make it all work, but I wouldn't rule out other means.
Living in Germany I'm occasionally pondering the possibility of studying CS through something Wikipedia calls Extramural studies. The German article is the most voluminous one, followed by Russian and then English but somehow I doubt that this is a particularly German idea. This would offer you more interaction with fellow students (if you contact them on your own) and a university but you would study essentially by mail and through exams at a university. HR people don't treat those students any worse than normal students because they have shown possibly more motivation.
Fortunately they don't produce anything important anymore like those Agilent scopes and *analyzers. So it is not like the foundation of electrical engineering would have received any cracks or so. If that would have happened to Agilent nobody would have bothered anyway.
After all, even to HP and its customers it probably won't mean much. Why do i see the same headlines on slashdot as I see on google news again?
I love this kind of conspiracy theory. I think an economic downturn is exactly the right kind of time to break the good news, just think of all the possibilities. Especially since society has already proven that marbles are in short supply anyway, so not many people will be in the position to lose said marbles.
From a linguistic point of view I would debate the use of the word marble, marbles are far more ubiquitous than minds. Here is a better one: crown jewels - well that will take some explaining.
I found the game to be ok. In single player mode you can go and optimize your hardware fixing strategy. I mean this is some low key intellectual challenge if you are looking for it.
I can't really think of anything that doesn't have some realism and gets fiendishly difficult to play/implement real quick. Just look at the ill fated "Outpost 1" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outpost_(video_game) ), I have never seen the Management Ai in it, just to mention one issue.
Personally I would like to see some free form game that dwells on orbital mechanics, there are interesting limitations and it wouldn't have to include pea soup clouds like X3, Freelancer, and assorted ilk in the game. Also it would have some chess like nature since you can essentially see everything but can't necessarily get to it (read some A.C.Clarke stories). Also mechanics is kinda intuitively understandable and you need only finish highschool to get an introduction. Well I'm kidding of course, I went to my favourite university library and found two tomes in a series (~450 pages thick) on celestial mechanics (ISBN 3-540-40749-9), and I'm sure there is more. Coincidentally Poincaré laid the foundation to chaos theory with his work on the three body problem, they never told me that in high-school. Well maybe five generations down the road we will be able to play with it.
Anyway, I expect only a little bit more than NASA has come up with.
So you want to take this illusion of progress away and replace it with some more concrete progress indicator. You could go ahead and get a book like:
Comparative Programming Languages (http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/~rgc/cpl/) figure out what kind of language features you were missing, and what new language
encompasses the most new features and then learn it by focusing on the new features and using them properly in a project.
The listed languages "ALGOL, FORTRAN, COBOL, and Pascal" unfortunately preclude the asking slashdotter from knowing about object oriented programming and design principles. Which I think is the biggest hole in his resume. I don't know whether functional programming is really all that hot in the industry, but the industry is just purely lowest common denominator, so I think he should just learn the new stuff and he should throw in functional programming too.
Mentioning design principles I would point to "Design Patterns" and UML.
Looking at the industry, it appears to me that the industry is at fault for this poor man's choice of languages. He could have picked up OO stuff by learning an OO language like Simula as early as the seventies, or he could have learned LISP and have had CommonLoops since 1986.
His biggest issue may have been that all those other languages weren't available to him like they are to us now as free software, but only through an industry or research project.
Seeing how ARM processors support Jazelle, I'm convinced people have taken Java serious enough to even bother with improving its virtual machine performance. So Java doesn't even just give you freedom but also a well developed ecosystem.
>Exactly so. To the extent that this technology actually works, it will be circumventable.
But the need to circumvent it will make whatever action more costly. This can certainly prevent lousy amateurs like the guy with the shoe or the guy with the hot pants.
I spend my last vacation in Western Australia and had similar worries. I was on my own and had a rental car. Annoyingly enough I couldn't rent a sat phone, buy an EPIRB/PLB, or buy a shortwave radio. I cut all my trips into the outback short and didn't do anything crazy, it worked out ok.
I remember getting about 10km with my CB radio at 4W. This is not enough for Australia. Somebody here was talking about the 100W range for what you want to do, this sounds much better. Don't forget though that you have to carry batteries and a short wave radio with antenna. I also remember some HAM radio friends talking about their pricey equipment so I would say that even with a ~AU$3000 sat phone contract you may be better off than with 10kg of HAM gear at similar or at least half the price. If you can rent the thing you will also not have to deal with a 24 month contract.
With a car and a HAM license short wave radio may make sense, but I would probably still try to get one of the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distress_radiobeacon .
>perhaps hiring pensioners/vets would be a better option
You can have both:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_use_of_children
I suppose there are worse things that happen to young people than watching junk on the internet. Somehow I hope the screeners were warned at least.
Given that he castrated a sheep by biting off its balls, ... well I suppose that is different. I wouldn't expect excessive reactions anyway though.
Let me answer my own post.
I found this thing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_boring_machine
also notice the nuclear version of it.
I'm wondering whether there are any drilling robots that could just go there and drill the required tunnels and caverns. I have always been wondering whether water is a required ingredient for any drilling operation. But lately I heard that it is mainly meant for cooling and to prevent silicosis in miners. This should be true for small drilling equipment if you want to do any blasting, i.e. where the transport of dirt out of the hole is not the issue. But more modern mines are build without much blasting I heard, I would be glad to find some example.
I didn't go down the natural route because I think that this won't be good enough in the long term. Even if natural caverns are used some drilling will have to be done. So the question remains - How to drill in a lunar environment.
I'm also wondering whether the lower gravity causes softer minerals to form.
Well if you wanted to become like the GDR you would need 3 million inofficial operatives (assuming the us would need 1% of it citizens to be spies). Also you would need secure borders with walls, fences, mines, patrols and then some. Also you would get national id cards.
The Una bomber wouldn't have existed because he would have found bigger problems to worry about.
Interestingly I can't remember cases of terrorism in the GDR. If there had been any, they would have been kept under wraps. Terrorism wouldn't have made sense, since the cooperation of the media wouldn't have existed. As a terrorist you would have had to fear that the state media would have used a terrorist attack against the west instead of working nicely along by propagating your message. Nothing short of revolution would have made a difference. I heard in school that to be a successful revolutionary you have to get the media under control real quick, I mean everyone knew what would have to happen.
Finally let me remind you that in the end the GDR was on the verge of bankruptcy (some argue otherwise but it sure felt like it). No clue whether the MfS sucked us dry but it must have helped.
We should better look for industrial uses of RF like microwave ovens and such. At least we will know how long it takes the other guys to warm up yesterdays dinner.
You can find a remark about specialization in "The Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith
http://econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN1.html#B.I,%20Ch.1,%20Of%20the%20Division%20of%20Labor
Its about the division of labour, but essentially he describes the same thing. It is just logical to continue on with this specialization thing if it is so great.