On the off chance that you're not trolling, FYI the world is greatly overpopulated. We are NOT going to lower the birth rate to our extinction, but our overpopulation itself may well do so. We are undergoing a mass extinction right now that is entirely due to habitat loss.
Did anyone else find it strange that a page called "Chemical & Engineering News" would need to point out that comets are real and that the moon's gravity is a factor in the cause of tides?
Considering how many people at slashdot think global warming is a hoax, don't know the difference between there, their, and they're, use grocer's apostrophes, don't know that loose is a completely different verb than lose, and are usually the same people, no, I'm not the least surprised and didn't find it strange at all.
A Category Five hurricane, the strongest class on Earth, has winds raging at more than 155 miles per hour, and they usually max out around 200 miles per hour. Jupiter's Little Red Spot could blow them away with winds of about 384 miles per hour, some of the highest wind speeds ever detected on any planet. Nearly the size of Earth, the Little Red Spot (LRS) could easily consume the largest terrestrial hurricane.
I was referring to his "Multivac" in his fiction. In 1964, though, computers were still huge monsters; as I mentioned elsewhere, I was inside a computer in 1972. It was a building full of book racks with circuit boards instead of books. It had to be that big to run a C5-A flight simulator. In 1964 the integrated circuit was only four years old. The military had a 300 bit computer made from them in 1961.
From wikipedia:
In April 1960, Texas Instruments announced multivibrator #502 as the world's first integrated circuit available on the market. The company assured that contrary to the competitors they actually sell their product, at a price of US$450 per unit or US$300 for quantities larger than 100 units.[45] However, the sales began only in the summer of 1961, and the price was higher than announced.[50] The #502 schematic contained two transistors, four diodes, six resistors and two capacitors, and repeated the traditional discrete circuitry.[51] The device contained two Si strips of 5 mm length inside a metal-ceramic housing.[51] One strip contained input capacitors; the other accommodated mesa transistors and diodes, and its grooved body was used as six resistors. Gold wires acted as interconnections.[52]
ICs were primitive and expensive in 1964. I can't fault anyone for not foreseeing pocket computers; I didn't, and I'd read of ICs, being a young curious nerd (I was using my second computer in 1964 -- a slide rule. My first was a pencil). It was really primitive back then.
What's funny is how primitive it is now, which I won't see but you will in fifty years.
If no one had seen evidence that would be rational. If many people spoke of seeing evidence first hand, the only rational position would be to have an open mind.
Your Atheism depends on faith. Agnosticism is the rational answer unless you go through something like this which leaves no doubt.
the transistor was invented in 1908, the fet in 1925.
Bullshit, the triode vacuum tube was invented in 1907. The transistor was indeed patented in 1925, but as wikipedia notes, "However, Lilienfeld did not publish any research articles about his devices nor did his patents cite any specific examples of a working prototype. Because the production of high-quality semiconductor materials was still decades away, Lilienfeld's solid-state amplifier ideas would not have found practical use in the 1920s and 1930s, even if such a device had been built.[6] In 1934, German inventor Oskar Heil patented a similar device.[7]"
"From November 17, 1947 to December 23, 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at AT&T's Bell Labs in the United States, performed experiments and observed that when two gold point contacts were applied to a crystal of germanium, a signal was produced with the output power greater than the input.[8] Solid State Physics Group leader William Shockley saw the potential in this, and over the next few months worked to greatly expand the knowledge of semiconductors. The term transistor was coined by John R. Pierce as a portmanteau of the term "transfer resistor".[9][10] According to Lillian Hoddeson and Vicki Daitch, authors of a biography of John Bardeen, Shockley had proposed that Bell Labs' first patent for a transistor should be based on the field-effect and that he be named as the inventor. Having unearthed Lilienfeldâ(TM)s patents that went into obscurity years earlier, lawyers at Bell Labs advised against Shockley's proposal because the idea of a field-effect transistor that used an electric field as a "grid" was not new. Instead, what Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley invented in 1947 was the first point-contact transistor.[6] In acknowledgement of this accomplishment, Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain were jointly awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics "for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect."[11]"
Most importantly, The first working silicon transistor was developed at Bell Labs on January 26, 1954 by Morris Tanenbaum.[20] The first commercial silicon transistor was produced by Texas Instruments in 1954.
I'm older than transistors. When I was a kid, everything had tubes.
The transistor was well know to anyone who picked up a hobby magazine.
Yes, by the 1960s after Asimov had written dozens of books and hundreds of short stories.
What he didn't foresee was genetic manipulation of food crops.
Of course not, how could anyone have? The first publications describing the successful production and intracellular replication of recombinant DNA appeared in 1972 and 1973. And of course that's not the only thing he missed -- better fertilizers, pesticides, equipment, soil testing and leaf testing in commercial labs at farmers' disposal, GPS, coating seed in beneficial microbes (he SHOULD have seen that, as he was a biochemist, but his field was cancer research, not food production) and a hundred other things.
I live in the middle of Illinois, Monsanto and Bayar's GM are only a tiny part of what has raised production so much. Farmers mostly use non-GM seed, the GM seeds are only financially viable if your weed problem is such that you absolutely NEED glysophate.
- the internet! - computers thousand times stronger than anything in 1964 - the size of your palm - in everybody's pocket
He came close to predicting the internet with "Multivac" (Murray Leinster came a lot closer in 1946), but you have to remember that his "positronic brains" were the size of a large grapefruit and more powerful than any supercomputer that now exists. You also have to remember that the transistor hadn't yet been invented, let alone an I.C. Hell, in 1972 he was 52 with hundreds of books under his belt, and a C-5A flight simulator (at the time the coolest thing I'd ever seen) was controlled by a computer that took an entire building. The computer was rows and rows of bookshelves with circuit boards rather than books.
As to probes exiting the solar system, he has human interstellar travel, way past the Voyagers.
I doubt that religion can be cured pharmaceutically. It isn't a medical condition and the general stupidity usually behind it cannot be cured, although less inbreeding will help.
So over 2/3ds of the world's population and over half of all scientists are stupid and inbred? That's stupid, are your parents siblings?
I'm sick of you idiotic atheist evangelists' offtopic insults. Any time I see this horse shit when metamoderating it gets an automatic flamebait, troll, or offtopic unless the comment isn't, but they usually are.
Asimov wasn't a futurist, he was a science fiction (and nonfiction) writer. One of my favorites (a thank you to the submitter), in fact. And most (although not all) of his sci-fi was set way into the future; Foundation" was 20,000 years from now.
His Sally, (full text here) set in the year 2020, didn't have flying cars but did have self-driving cars using his famous "positronic brains" (computers were often called "electronic brains" back then). He was a little early with it, Sally was an antique so she would have been manufactured before 1995.
Asimov came close to envisioning the internet with his "Multivac", although Murray Leinster almost nailed it in 1946 with A Logic Named Joe(full text here).
As to "futurists", hogwash. In what school can I get a degree in futurism?
IMHO, the single biggest problem in the US is that there are way too many people like you who reduce ALL government activity to a single simple minded complaint; "Waaaa.....they're spending my money...Waaaaa!"
Indeed. Folks like him follow America's #1 religion, the worship of money.
I don't disagree with that. Windows has lagged behind Linux in features and useability for years, at least since 2002 when I became acquainted with Mandrake.
An investment is an investment whether or not it pays off. Just ask those folks whose homes are worth less than they paid for them, or those who bought Facebook stock the first day (although if they held on they're breaking even).
If nothing else, this is investing in human knowledge.
Yes, but it's CO2 that was recently (by geological timescales) taken from the atmosphere. The CO2 problems stem from burning carbon that's been sequestered for millions of years.
I've never had any problems with Flash on Linux, so I don't really know what you're talking about there.
He's talking about authoring tools, not consumption tools.
However, we're still far from the fabled "Year of the Linux Desktop". For example, playing a video or MP3 file is still a hassle on non-Ubuntu systems, you still need the command line to get some of the more difficult programs to work, etc.
Utter bullshit. Mandrake was capable of doing anything you needed except running a server from the desktop over ten years ago. The only time I'm at a command line is if I've forgotten the root password, or running various utilities from USB drive to work on Windows computers (like when they don't remember their XP password).
Yeah, if you're running a server OS like Red Hat you're going to have to use a command line. DUH!
Ten years ago I was at the command line a lot, but from choice rather than necessity -- I wanted to learn the system.
It has been marked flamebait, which is kind of strange considering users are migrating on the Desktop to GNU/Linux(For want of a name) Chrome and Android (seriously!?), the trend is small, but noticeable.
Microsoft fans (or are they all shills? Doubtful...) get mod points, too. More honest moderators have fixed it, he's sitting at 2 as I write this.
Oh, and to keep the MS fans/shills/stockholders/employees with mod points from modding other insightful comments down I'll get them to waste them on me.
Thankfully I won't have to use W8 or W9. Work has been on XP for a decade and just replaced all our computers with W7 boxes, and I retire next year.
I might have to put up with W9 long enough to reformat the drive and install Linux if I buy a new computer. I won't buy a computer that won't run Linux; "Trusted Computing" is not trustworthy.
press the start key on your keyboard, type the first, occasionally second (and possibly third, for lesser-used programs) characters of the name, then hit enter.
Yet you Windows enthusiasts have been ragging the Linux community for years about needing to use a command line (which you don't unless you're running a server).
My main tower runs kubuntu using the TV as a monitor and an infrared keyboard and mouse. I seldom touch the keyboard on it, it's almost always on a shelf across the room.
Kubuntu. You can tweak it to your heart's content if you want, but you don't have to. Plus everything is there in a nice point and click that beats the hell out of Windows Control Panel.
Mandrake and Mandriva were as well when I used them years ago.
I don't think he's shilling, maybe his office runs Linux or Apple and he's a gamer and didn't know how screwed up W7 is in this department, it's one of my biggest gripes (which thankfully I don't have on this notebook, which will have Linux on it if it gets much slower). I can't even change the screen saver on my work computer. That's just crazy.
Well, yes, when you compare it to Linux and probably Apple as well (I don't have an Apple, but I have W7 and kubuntu and XP). Compared to Microsoft's other OSes it's the best they've done.
Slashdot Mirror
On the off chance that you're not trolling, FYI the world is greatly overpopulated. We are NOT going to lower the birth rate to our extinction, but our overpopulation itself may well do so. We are undergoing a mass extinction right now that is entirely due to habitat loss.
Fewer kids need to be born. I stopped at two.
Did anyone else find it strange that a page called "Chemical & Engineering News" would need to point out that comets are real and that the moon's gravity is a factor in the cause of tides?
Considering how many people at slashdot think global warming is a hoax, don't know the difference between there, their, and they're, use grocer's apostrophes, don't know that loose is a completely different verb than lose, and are usually the same people, no, I'm not the least surprised and didn't find it strange at all.
-Goddard Space Center
I was referring to his "Multivac" in his fiction. In 1964, though, computers were still huge monsters; as I mentioned elsewhere, I was inside a computer in 1972. It was a building full of book racks with circuit boards instead of books. It had to be that big to run a C5-A flight simulator. In 1964 the integrated circuit was only four years old. The military had a 300 bit computer made from them in 1961.
From wikipedia:
ICs were primitive and expensive in 1964. I can't fault anyone for not foreseeing pocket computers; I didn't, and I'd read of ICs, being a young curious nerd (I was using my second computer in 1964 -- a slide rule. My first was a pencil). It was really primitive back then.
What's funny is how primitive it is now, which I won't see but you will in fifty years.
If no one had seen evidence that would be rational. If many people spoke of seeing evidence first hand, the only rational position would be to have an open mind.
Your Atheism depends on faith. Agnosticism is the rational answer unless you go through something like this which leaves no doubt.
I don't have to have faith.
the transistor was invented in 1908, the fet in 1925.
Bullshit, the triode vacuum tube was invented in 1907. The transistor was indeed patented in 1925, but as wikipedia notes, "However, Lilienfeld did not publish any research articles about his devices nor did his patents cite any specific examples of a working prototype. Because the production of high-quality semiconductor materials was still decades away, Lilienfeld's solid-state amplifier ideas would not have found practical use in the 1920s and 1930s, even if such a device had been built.[6] In 1934, German inventor Oskar Heil patented a similar device.[7]"
"From November 17, 1947 to December 23, 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at AT&T's Bell Labs in the United States, performed experiments and observed that when two gold point contacts were applied to a crystal of germanium, a signal was produced with the output power greater than the input.[8] Solid State Physics Group leader William Shockley saw the potential in this, and over the next few months worked to greatly expand the knowledge of semiconductors. The term transistor was coined by John R. Pierce as a portmanteau of the term "transfer resistor".[9][10] According to Lillian Hoddeson and Vicki Daitch, authors of a biography of John Bardeen, Shockley had proposed that Bell Labs' first patent for a transistor should be based on the field-effect and that he be named as the inventor. Having unearthed Lilienfeldâ(TM)s patents that went into obscurity years earlier, lawyers at Bell Labs advised against Shockley's proposal because the idea of a field-effect transistor that used an electric field as a "grid" was not new. Instead, what Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley invented in 1947 was the first point-contact transistor.[6] In acknowledgement of this accomplishment, Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain were jointly awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics "for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect."[11]"
Most importantly, The first working silicon transistor was developed at Bell Labs on January 26, 1954 by Morris Tanenbaum.[20] The first commercial silicon transistor was produced by Texas Instruments in 1954.
I'm older than transistors. When I was a kid, everything had tubes.
The transistor was well know to anyone who picked up a hobby magazine.
Yes, by the 1960s after Asimov had written dozens of books and hundreds of short stories.
Your man crush has overridden you brain.
I'll ignore your flamebait, boy.
What he didn't foresee was genetic manipulation of food crops.
Of course not, how could anyone have? The first publications describing the successful production and intracellular replication of recombinant DNA appeared in 1972 and 1973. And of course that's not the only thing he missed -- better fertilizers, pesticides, equipment, soil testing and leaf testing in commercial labs at farmers' disposal, GPS, coating seed in beneficial microbes (he SHOULD have seen that, as he was a biochemist, but his field was cancer research, not food production) and a hundred other things.
I live in the middle of Illinois, Monsanto and Bayar's GM are only a tiny part of what has raised production so much. Farmers mostly use non-GM seed, the GM seeds are only financially viable if your weed problem is such that you absolutely NEED glysophate.
- the internet!
- computers thousand times stronger than anything in 1964 - the size of your palm - in everybody's pocket
He came close to predicting the internet with "Multivac" (Murray Leinster came a lot closer in 1946), but you have to remember that his "positronic brains" were the size of a large grapefruit and more powerful than any supercomputer that now exists. You also have to remember that the transistor hadn't yet been invented, let alone an I.C. Hell, in 1972 he was 52 with hundreds of books under his belt, and a C-5A flight simulator (at the time the coolest thing I'd ever seen) was controlled by a computer that took an entire building. The computer was rows and rows of bookshelves with circuit boards rather than books.
As to probes exiting the solar system, he has human interstellar travel, way past the Voyagers.
You got the last one right, though.
Earth's population over 6.5 billion
But he didn't nail that; in all his stories where the population is 8 billion (which we're pushing now) we all live on yeast.
I doubt that religion can be cured pharmaceutically. It isn't a medical condition and the general stupidity usually behind it cannot be cured, although less inbreeding will help.
So over 2/3ds of the world's population and over half of all scientists are stupid and inbred? That's stupid, are your parents siblings?
I'm sick of you idiotic atheist evangelists' offtopic insults. Any time I see this horse shit when metamoderating it gets an automatic flamebait, troll, or offtopic unless the comment isn't, but they usually are.
Asimov wasn't a futurist, he was a science fiction (and nonfiction) writer. One of my favorites (a thank you to the submitter), in fact. And most (although not all) of his sci-fi was set way into the future; Foundation" was 20,000 years from now.
His Sally, (full text here) set in the year 2020, didn't have flying cars but did have self-driving cars using his famous "positronic brains" (computers were often called "electronic brains" back then). He was a little early with it, Sally was an antique so she would have been manufactured before 1995.
Asimov came close to envisioning the internet with his "Multivac", although Murray Leinster almost nailed it in 1946 with A Logic Named Joe (full text here).
As to "futurists", hogwash. In what school can I get a degree in futurism?
IMHO, the single biggest problem in the US is that there are way too many people like you who reduce ALL government activity to a single simple minded complaint; "Waaaa.....they're spending my money...Waaaaa!"
Indeed. Folks like him follow America's #1 religion, the worship of money.
I don't disagree with that. Windows has lagged behind Linux in features and useability for years, at least since 2002 when I became acquainted with Mandrake.
An investment is an investment whether or not it pays off. Just ask those folks whose homes are worth less than they paid for them, or those who bought Facebook stock the first day (although if they held on they're breaking even).
If nothing else, this is investing in human knowledge.
On the one hand they release CO2
Yes, but it's CO2 that was recently (by geological timescales) taken from the atmosphere. The CO2 problems stem from burning carbon that's been sequestered for millions of years.
I've never had any problems with Flash on Linux, so I don't really know what you're talking about there.
He's talking about authoring tools, not consumption tools.
However, we're still far from the fabled "Year of the Linux Desktop". For example, playing a video or MP3 file is still a hassle on non-Ubuntu systems, you still need the command line to get some of the more difficult programs to work, etc.
Utter bullshit. Mandrake was capable of doing anything you needed except running a server from the desktop over ten years ago. The only time I'm at a command line is if I've forgotten the root password, or running various utilities from USB drive to work on Windows computers (like when they don't remember their XP password).
Yeah, if you're running a server OS like Red Hat you're going to have to use a command line. DUH!
Ten years ago I was at the command line a lot, but from choice rather than necessity -- I wanted to learn the system.
It has been marked flamebait, which is kind of strange considering users are migrating on the Desktop to GNU/Linux(For want of a name) Chrome and Android (seriously!?), the trend is small, but noticeable.
Microsoft fans (or are they all shills? Doubtful...) get mod points, too. More honest moderators have fixed it, he's sitting at 2 as I write this.
Oh, and to keep the MS fans/shills/stockholders/employees with mod points from modding other insightful comments down I'll get them to waste them on me.
Micro$oft SuXXorz!!!"
Shouldn't take long to hit -1.
Thankfully I won't have to use W8 or W9. Work has been on XP for a decade and just replaced all our computers with W7 boxes, and I retire next year.
I might have to put up with W9 long enough to reformat the drive and install Linux if I buy a new computer. I won't buy a computer that won't run Linux; "Trusted Computing" is not trustworthy.
press the start key on your keyboard, type the first, occasionally second (and possibly third, for lesser-used programs) characters of the name, then hit enter.
Yet you Windows enthusiasts have been ragging the Linux community for years about needing to use a command line (which you don't unless you're running a server).
My main tower runs kubuntu using the TV as a monitor and an infrared keyboard and mouse. I seldom touch the keyboard on it, it's almost always on a shelf across the room.
Kubuntu. You can tweak it to your heart's content if you want, but you don't have to. Plus everything is there in a nice point and click that beats the hell out of Windows Control Panel.
Mandrake and Mandriva were as well when I used them years ago.
I don't think he's shilling, maybe his office runs Linux or Apple and he's a gamer and didn't know how screwed up W7 is in this department, it's one of my biggest gripes (which thankfully I don't have on this notebook, which will have Linux on it if it gets much slower). I can't even change the screen saver on my work computer. That's just crazy.
Win 7 was pretty mediocre
Well, yes, when you compare it to Linux and probably Apple as well (I don't have an Apple, but I have W7 and kubuntu and XP). Compared to Microsoft's other OSes it's the best they've done.
Microsoft: removing features and calling it an upgrade.
Some of us don't like being stalked by the government or the corporations that own it.
I'm curious - how much taxpayer funding has this received?
Less than a day's worth of military funding, I'm sure. And this is not an expenditure, it's an investment.