Wars and space exploration, together with outsourcing and privatization, are a great pretext for corporate welfare and pork.
That's harsh. Apparently corruption managed to land us on the moon, send dozens of probes out into the solar system, and built an International Space Station complete with the capability to take routine space trips every 4 months. If NASA did all of what it has done while being nothing more than a tool for corporations to steal government money, then shit, sign me up to be a congressional lobbyist- I might cure world hunger.
I'd prefer to see the space program killed altogether and NASA disbanded instead of having taxpayer money wasted on moon colonies and manned trips to Mars.
This is definitely not a waste of money. Once this industry gets started, the possibilities are enormous. First think of the political implications of having a thriving off world colony. What if we could move UN headquarters to Lunar City, the first truly international city? What would it mean for world unity, for peace and human progress? You're worried about the cash? Well the first thing they told me in economics is that technological innovation drives the economy- we were an agricultural planet until technology came along and forged the industrial economy. The technologies developed to build a moon base would filter down, as they always have, and invigorate the economy. Then think about the industry that would follow, that would benefit Earth: off world manufacturing that would get pollution out of our fragile ecosystem, off world (solar) energy generation, off world disposal of hazardous waste. Did you know that on earth, Iron, the most commonly used metal, is mined from Iron Oxide- rust? Did you know that rust is literally covering the surface of mars? It might even get cheaper to extract Iron from Mars than on earth if we keep up this exploration nonsense.
And best of all, think about the scientific opportunities space bases would allow us. A perfect, undisturbed view of the heavens. Super ideal experiment conditions in the form of vacuum and free fall. Greater access to natural resources for particle physics- research stations on mercury interacting with the sun, or on pluto interacting with nothing. Advances in bio-chemistry that would come from vastly improved understanding of planetary/atmosphere physics and chemistry, and study of asteroids and comets, as well as above mentioned 0 g and vacuum. All these opportunities are only accessible if we make a serious, money losing push at first.
I get your cynicism as to the intentions of the politicians but realize, it's not the politicians or the people who are interested in huge profits who are doing this (there are vastly better industries to make money in than space). It's the people who are passionate about such things. And while it may just be another project for the politicians, for the people who choose to devote their lives to its pursuit, space is much more- and it is something worth going about correctly and responsibly. People willingly sacrifice their lives in return for the chance to explore space. To say that NASA is a waste of taxpayer money and no better than waging a war...
You obviously aren't familiar with the AP tests. No PDAs allowed, only graphing calculators.
Personally, I think the TI-89 is the best graphing calculator you can get. It's got very helpful algebraic functions that solve equations, factor polynomials, etc. It even does indefinite integration and differentiation of functions (very useful for checking your work when you take calculus, the TI-83 does no such thing). Everything looks nice and shows up just like you would write the algebra, so data entry is much easier. Previous calculations are stored in memory and you can just scroll up and select an answer or the calculation, and it will show up in the entry line. Very useful for complex calculations. It has the capability to display exact values, ie for cos(30) most calculators will give you.866, but the TI-89 can also give you rad(3)/2. It also has standard stuff like constants, unit conversions, and ability to write your own programs which may or may not be useful to you. On the whole it's very useful and I can't think of anything more that I would want from my graphing calculator. These days they have some silver/platinum crap which draws graphs faster and has more memory for programs; I'd go with that.
To be honest, you only really need a calculator until you leave high school. Getting anything fancier than a TI-89 is a waste of money. In college, a simple scientific calculator will suffice for lower division classes. If you go into engineering you will be doing serious math by hand and serious calculations by computer (MATLAB or FORTRAN). No more "graphing" in the sense of the primitive capabilities of graphing calculators. Once you've learned about all the things they can do, you move onto more complex functions and calculations, more complex data sets, and you just don't need to use a calculator to figure out what y = x^2 looks like. I imagine science and mathematics is the same, except maybe with Maple or something.
I bet the NSA has spent immense resources figuring out how to break its own encryption schemes, if it didn't know from the start. You don't become the biggest employer of mathematicians in the world without figuring out a thing or two about encryption.
Without the ability to break things like SHA-1 and RSA encryption, NSA's tremendous rate of information gathering is pointless, because most of the useful stuff is encrypted.
The continued existence and even growth of the NSA is proof that they have ways to break open all that encrypted information they're gathering.
I don't know which industry you work in, but real engineering is nothing like that. New systems are being designed every day, in every industry. You need bright, innovative thinkers to design them quickly, cheaply, and reliably. Just think about all the new technologies that are in the pipeline- alternate fuels for transportation, better microprocessors, higher bandwidth data processing/transmission, better weapons of all kinds, bio-mechanical systems, optics, sturdier structures, more advanced AI- the list is endless. Every modern problem has many competing companies and requires hundreds or even thousands of engineers in research and development. Not to mention the many thousands more that take the fundamental solutions to these problems then optimize them and integrate them into bigger systems for sale to the consumer.
Engineers who are doing rote jobs like checking valves obviously aren't very useful as thinkers, so they're stuck doing mindless things.
No, no, no, NO! You don't get a CS degree to program! If you have a degree in Computer Science from a University and you are spending your days writing application code, you are the idiot! At my university the Engineering College handbook explicitly states that a MINOR in computer science is enough if you just want to write code. A major in computer science is expected to go on and do significant research in the field working on problems, like Artificial Intelligence, that a code monkey could never be expected to solve. If you are not using what you learned in college, you didn't choose the right major. Colleges DO teach practical skills, but graduates only really care about getting jobs; never mind that research universities exist to train researchers.
It sounds like you would have been better off majoring in Business or Economics and minoring in CS, or going to a lower level school (not a Research University). In any of those cases you would have learned what you needed for a job programming and nothing more. As it is, if you feel like you aren't using what you learned in college perhaps you should consider looking for a more relevant job?
Uh, well, in a lot of scientific and engineering applications, outliers can be attributed to random errors in the equipment taking the measurements, in which case they ought to be ignored because including them will just throw off your measurements.
An education minister that's taking serious steps to increase the quality of education in his country instead of just throwing money at useless projects? How do we get him appointed to the US cabinet?
Well at least you backed up your claims this time. I'm not apologizing for calling bullshit when someone makes a claim with no explanation of the logic behind it.
Read my response to the guy who responded to my original comment, where I go into greater detail, and tell me what you think about it in regard to your "fundamental limits."
If you'd like an example contrary to what you just claimed- that the upper limit of data you can store on a physical medium directly corresponds to the number of available physical sites- try this: an Nx1 matrix multiplied by a 1xN matrix gives you an NxN matrix. Through matrix multiplication you only consume 2N spaces (maybe 2N+2 to denote orientation of each matrix) but you have N^2 data points after decoding. If N is 1,000,000, ratio of spaces used to number of data points actually represented equals 500,000.
True my example only works if the data conforms to a particular pattern in the first place, but it disproves your claim about fundamental limits. With a few layers of abstraction, good processing algorithms, and the added geometric variables you can easily hit the 250GB range, and maybe even higher.
Yes, but that's assuming the data is only encoded by the color of the dot. And this is also assuming you have no encoding schemes- you are directly encoding bits on the page, no layers of abstraction. When you throw in shapes, you further increase the amount of data that you can hold. I'm no encoding algorithm specialist. As a matter of fact I have no idea how compression algorithms work, having never seen any code or read anything on the subject. But I can guess at what it might look like.
Say a shape acts like a key. A red dot in a circle means something different than a red dot in a triangle. Say the encompassing shape denotes a specific key that should be used to decode the dot colors. Let's use the 3 basic shapes: triangle, circle, square. Each shape points to a unique set of 2^24 combinations. This way, a single dot, instead of only representing 1 out of a possible 2^24 sequences (24 bits each), represents 1 out of a possible 3*2^24 sequences (not necessarily 24 bits long, because by now we can expand into 25 bit sequences or even higher). And of course there are more than 3 possible shapes. Circles of different radii, triangles and rectangles with different side ratios. Using ellipses (2 radii) you add 2 variables to circles. Rectangles have another 3 variables (ratio of side lengths, radius to corner, rotation), triangles have another 4 (2 angles, mean radius, orientation with respect to vertical axis). Using my scheme you could have thousands of keys, each pointing to a different set of 2^24 bit sequences.
There are tremendous possibilities to store data when you are no longer bound by the 2 bit world. My scheme of course has huge limitations, like needing to encode across keys (what if two consecutive sequences (dots) need to be in different shapes?). Maybe you could get around that by encoding a unique formula or a table of contents somewhere in the document. The point is, I only spent 5 minutes to come up with a fairly high density geometric and color encoding scheme that could work. If the raw number of encodable bits for a given algorithm was high enough, you could even have space for error correction and redundancy. Imagine if someone thought about this problem for 1 or 2 years. It's very possible.
I think you are stupid. You don't understand the specifics of the technology, so you're assuming it's a scam.
Obviously the data storage scheme is far more complex than anything you have experience with. How stupid do you have to be to think the color of the dot on paper directly determines an individual bit? This isn't about storing bits directly on paper- there are only 2 possibilities in binary, why would you need 256++ colors to store binary bits? The LEAST complex algorithm I can think of (assuming no shapes, just dots of various colors) is that each color represents a certain binary sequence, say of length 8 (2^8 = 256). That means that with 256 colors (256 unique states) you can store 8 bits per dot. Assuming a 300x300 dot per inch printer, we've got 90,000 dots per square inch, each being 1 of 256 uniquely identifiable 8 bit sequences. 90,000 x 8 = 720,000 bits per square inch, or 90KB per square inch.
Try a 1200x1200 dpi printer: 1,440,000 dots per square inch = 1.44 MB/in^2
Of course, this is assuming 8-bit color. In reality, a photograph in 256 colors is, well, not a photograph. Say we have a 24 bit printer and scanner (24 bit is regarded as life-like, and the standard for printers and scanners), thus 2^24 = (approximately) 16.8 million uniquely identifiable colors. This means we can encode unique sequences of length 24 bits per dot. At 1200x1200 dpi, we're talking 1,440,000 x 24 = 34,560,000 bits per square inch or 4.32 MB/in^2.
Using only colored dots.
Throw in printers with even higher resolutions like these from HP at 1200x4800 dpi, the even higher density of data storage available from the use of shapes (adding even more uniquely identifiable states through shape, size, order, orientation, special characteristics, and relative positioning), and some clever compression and encoding algorithms... and you can easily build pretty high density storage.
Hope your high-paying highly skilled salaried job becomes over crowded with qualified applicants so you can call it blue collar... and thus qualify you for overtime pay.
The whole thing is just a stupid idea. Spend $100 Billion a year launching disks into space? Wtf... there are tons of cheaper ways, like creating artificial lakes full of plankton and nutrients that will process CO2 by the millions of tons per day.
Several trillion dollars is much better spent developing models to better understand climate through simulations (especially developing computing power and deploying world-wide atmospheric temperature and pressure sensors). Once we have an accurate computer model of the immensely complex environment/ecosystem, we can simulate solutions and see how they will play out. At the same time, we can invest in research into alternative energy and build absolutely massive infrastructure changes that can dramatically reduce CO2 emissions. Shit, with $100 Billion _a year_ to play around with, we can do anything... like build effective public transit in big cities where it is currently impossible, like LA, because of the size of the city. We can even make it all magnetically levitated, and thus faster than cars. In half a year's budget we could entirely develop and deploy a sizable space-based solar energy generation system. We could tap into geothermal power, wind power, solar power- all on unprecedented scales. Hell, with that kind of budget we could even dig new river extensions to maximize the number of times we can dam a single flow of water for hydroelectric generation.
That guy may be a good optical scientist, but he would make a worthless engineer.
Could automakers make the million mile car that was super reliable, got good mileage, had decent power, and because of that, actually be cost effective for the consumer in the long run? I bet they could, but there wouldn't be much incentive for them to remain in the car making business, as sales would dreop off severely eventually. The fixit shops would hate it. The oil companies would hate it. Stockholders would hate it.
wow, you don't give engineers much credit, do you? Believe me, if such as thing as a "million mile car" were even remotely physically possible on paper, people would be trying to build it. If not in the auto-industry, then in any of the hundreds, if not thousands, of research universities all over the world that have a Mechanical Engineering department. And sure, a perfect car wouldn't be profitable for Ford or Toyota in the long run, but they'd sell it anyway because if they didn't do it, someone else would, someone without the same stake as them, and thus with nothing to lose should the market go sour after being saturated with perfection. Capitalism isn't the evil force you make it out to be. It's a force for good, if there is proper competition.
Of course, a million mile car is NOT possible as long as you are using a heat engine (internal combustion engine) because the maximum possible efficiency of such an engine is limited by 1 minus the ratio of the operating temperatures (Carnot efficiency). To fully utilize the energy of gasoline you'd need an efficiency close to 1, meaning you'd have to operate your engine at maybe 100,000 degrees C or have a liquid helium cooling system for the exhaust gas...
Needless to say, there are countless other problems that researchers are working on that fundamentally limit the mileage, power (per dollar), pollution, and durability of a car. If (and when) we know how to build a fundamentally better car, it WILL be built and sold. This law holds for almost any other market you can think of. Will an HIV vaccine put drug makers out of business? Sure, but that's not stopping private philanthropy foundations and small startups from pouring billions of dollars into research. Will a better Windows kernel put Symantec and MacAfee out of business? Sure, but that didn't stop Microsoft from building dramatically stronger protections into Vista.
I can get my girlfriend (or wife or mom) to nag me about doing the laundry. I can set alarms on my phone, PDA, computer, digital watch, even involve some loudspeakers without much difficulty. None of that means I'll actually DO the laundry. Where's the invention that will collect and automatically DO my laundry? That's what I'm waiting for. Something useful.
Slashdot Mirror
Wars and space exploration, together with outsourcing and privatization, are a great pretext for corporate welfare and pork.
That's harsh. Apparently corruption managed to land us on the moon, send dozens of probes out into the solar system, and built an International Space Station complete with the capability to take routine space trips every 4 months. If NASA did all of what it has done while being nothing more than a tool for corporations to steal government money, then shit, sign me up to be a congressional lobbyist- I might cure world hunger.
I'd prefer to see the space program killed altogether and NASA disbanded instead of having taxpayer money wasted on moon colonies and manned trips to Mars.
This is definitely not a waste of money. Once this industry gets started, the possibilities are enormous. First think of the political implications of having a thriving off world colony. What if we could move UN headquarters to Lunar City, the first truly international city? What would it mean for world unity, for peace and human progress? You're worried about the cash? Well the first thing they told me in economics is that technological innovation drives the economy- we were an agricultural planet until technology came along and forged the industrial economy. The technologies developed to build a moon base would filter down, as they always have, and invigorate the economy. Then think about the industry that would follow, that would benefit Earth: off world manufacturing that would get pollution out of our fragile ecosystem, off world (solar) energy generation, off world disposal of hazardous waste. Did you know that on earth, Iron, the most commonly used metal, is mined from Iron Oxide- rust? Did you know that rust is literally covering the surface of mars? It might even get cheaper to extract Iron from Mars than on earth if we keep up this exploration nonsense.
And best of all, think about the scientific opportunities space bases would allow us. A perfect, undisturbed view of the heavens. Super ideal experiment conditions in the form of vacuum and free fall. Greater access to natural resources for particle physics- research stations on mercury interacting with the sun, or on pluto interacting with nothing. Advances in bio-chemistry that would come from vastly improved understanding of planetary/atmosphere physics and chemistry, and study of asteroids and comets, as well as above mentioned 0 g and vacuum. All these opportunities are only accessible if we make a serious, money losing push at first.
I get your cynicism as to the intentions of the politicians but realize, it's not the politicians or the people who are interested in huge profits who are doing this (there are vastly better industries to make money in than space). It's the people who are passionate about such things. And while it may just be another project for the politicians, for the people who choose to devote their lives to its pursuit, space is much more- and it is something worth going about correctly and responsibly. People willingly sacrifice their lives in return for the chance to explore space. To say that NASA is a waste of taxpayer money and no better than waging a war...
It worked for Apple, didn't it...?
You obviously aren't familiar with the AP tests. No PDAs allowed, only graphing calculators.
.866, but the TI-89 can also give you rad(3)/2. It also has standard stuff like constants, unit conversions, and ability to write your own programs which may or may not be useful to you. On the whole it's very useful and I can't think of anything more that I would want from my graphing calculator. These days they have some silver/platinum crap which draws graphs faster and has more memory for programs; I'd go with that.
Personally, I think the TI-89 is the best graphing calculator you can get. It's got very helpful algebraic functions that solve equations, factor polynomials, etc. It even does indefinite integration and differentiation of functions (very useful for checking your work when you take calculus, the TI-83 does no such thing). Everything looks nice and shows up just like you would write the algebra, so data entry is much easier. Previous calculations are stored in memory and you can just scroll up and select an answer or the calculation, and it will show up in the entry line. Very useful for complex calculations. It has the capability to display exact values, ie for cos(30) most calculators will give you
To be honest, you only really need a calculator until you leave high school. Getting anything fancier than a TI-89 is a waste of money. In college, a simple scientific calculator will suffice for lower division classes. If you go into engineering you will be doing serious math by hand and serious calculations by computer (MATLAB or FORTRAN). No more "graphing" in the sense of the primitive capabilities of graphing calculators. Once you've learned about all the things they can do, you move onto more complex functions and calculations, more complex data sets, and you just don't need to use a calculator to figure out what y = x^2 looks like. I imagine science and mathematics is the same, except maybe with Maple or something.
I bet the NSA has spent immense resources figuring out how to break its own encryption schemes, if it didn't know from the start. You don't become the biggest employer of mathematicians in the world without figuring out a thing or two about encryption.
Without the ability to break things like SHA-1 and RSA encryption, NSA's tremendous rate of information gathering is pointless, because most of the useful stuff is encrypted.
The continued existence and even growth of the NSA is proof that they have ways to break open all that encrypted information they're gathering.
Who the hell snipes at night?
I don't know which industry you work in, but real engineering is nothing like that. New systems are being designed every day, in every industry. You need bright, innovative thinkers to design them quickly, cheaply, and reliably. Just think about all the new technologies that are in the pipeline- alternate fuels for transportation, better microprocessors, higher bandwidth data processing/transmission, better weapons of all kinds, bio-mechanical systems, optics, sturdier structures, more advanced AI- the list is endless. Every modern problem has many competing companies and requires hundreds or even thousands of engineers in research and development. Not to mention the many thousands more that take the fundamental solutions to these problems then optimize them and integrate them into bigger systems for sale to the consumer.
Engineers who are doing rote jobs like checking valves obviously aren't very useful as thinkers, so they're stuck doing mindless things.
So the sum of angles in a triangle should be an irrational number. Yea, that's smart.
And 1.57 is a corner is not as intuitive as 90 is a corner. Why work with decimals when you don't have to?
Has anyone ever wondered if any companies modify Wikipedia articles about themselves, their products, or their competitors?
No, no, no, NO! You don't get a CS degree to program! If you have a degree in Computer Science from a University and you are spending your days writing application code, you are the idiot! At my university the Engineering College handbook explicitly states that a MINOR in computer science is enough if you just want to write code. A major in computer science is expected to go on and do significant research in the field working on problems, like Artificial Intelligence, that a code monkey could never be expected to solve. If you are not using what you learned in college, you didn't choose the right major. Colleges DO teach practical skills, but graduates only really care about getting jobs; never mind that research universities exist to train researchers.
It sounds like you would have been better off majoring in Business or Economics and minoring in CS, or going to a lower level school (not a Research University). In any of those cases you would have learned what you needed for a job programming and nothing more. As it is, if you feel like you aren't using what you learned in college perhaps you should consider looking for a more relevant job?
Uh, well, in a lot of scientific and engineering applications, outliers can be attributed to random errors in the equipment taking the measurements, in which case they ought to be ignored because including them will just throw off your measurements.
An education minister that's taking serious steps to increase the quality of education in his country instead of just throwing money at useless projects? How do we get him appointed to the US cabinet?
Well at least you backed up your claims this time. I'm not apologizing for calling bullshit when someone makes a claim with no explanation of the logic behind it.
Read my response to the guy who responded to my original comment, where I go into greater detail, and tell me what you think about it in regard to your "fundamental limits."
If you'd like an example contrary to what you just claimed- that the upper limit of data you can store on a physical medium directly corresponds to the number of available physical sites- try this: an Nx1 matrix multiplied by a 1xN matrix gives you an NxN matrix. Through matrix multiplication you only consume 2N spaces (maybe 2N+2 to denote orientation of each matrix) but you have N^2 data points after decoding. If N is 1,000,000, ratio of spaces used to number of data points actually represented equals 500,000.
True my example only works if the data conforms to a particular pattern in the first place, but it disproves your claim about fundamental limits. With a few layers of abstraction, good processing algorithms, and the added geometric variables you can easily hit the 250GB range, and maybe even higher.
Yes, but that's assuming the data is only encoded by the color of the dot. And this is also assuming you have no encoding schemes- you are directly encoding bits on the page, no layers of abstraction. When you throw in shapes, you further increase the amount of data that you can hold. I'm no encoding algorithm specialist. As a matter of fact I have no idea how compression algorithms work, having never seen any code or read anything on the subject. But I can guess at what it might look like.
Say a shape acts like a key. A red dot in a circle means something different than a red dot in a triangle. Say the encompassing shape denotes a specific key that should be used to decode the dot colors. Let's use the 3 basic shapes: triangle, circle, square. Each shape points to a unique set of 2^24 combinations. This way, a single dot, instead of only representing 1 out of a possible 2^24 sequences (24 bits each), represents 1 out of a possible 3*2^24 sequences (not necessarily 24 bits long, because by now we can expand into 25 bit sequences or even higher). And of course there are more than 3 possible shapes. Circles of different radii, triangles and rectangles with different side ratios. Using ellipses (2 radii) you add 2 variables to circles. Rectangles have another 3 variables (ratio of side lengths, radius to corner, rotation), triangles have another 4 (2 angles, mean radius, orientation with respect to vertical axis). Using my scheme you could have thousands of keys, each pointing to a different set of 2^24 bit sequences.
There are tremendous possibilities to store data when you are no longer bound by the 2 bit world. My scheme of course has huge limitations, like needing to encode across keys (what if two consecutive sequences (dots) need to be in different shapes?). Maybe you could get around that by encoding a unique formula or a table of contents somewhere in the document. The point is, I only spent 5 minutes to come up with a fairly high density geometric and color encoding scheme that could work. If the raw number of encodable bits for a given algorithm was high enough, you could even have space for error correction and redundancy. Imagine if someone thought about this problem for 1 or 2 years. It's very possible.
I think you are stupid. You don't understand the specifics of the technology, so you're assuming it's a scam.
Obviously the data storage scheme is far more complex than anything you have experience with. How stupid do you have to be to think the color of the dot on paper directly determines an individual bit? This isn't about storing bits directly on paper- there are only 2 possibilities in binary, why would you need 256++ colors to store binary bits? The LEAST complex algorithm I can think of (assuming no shapes, just dots of various colors) is that each color represents a certain binary sequence, say of length 8 (2^8 = 256). That means that with 256 colors (256 unique states) you can store 8 bits per dot. Assuming a 300x300 dot per inch printer, we've got 90,000 dots per square inch, each being 1 of 256 uniquely identifiable 8 bit sequences. 90,000 x 8 = 720,000 bits per square inch, or 90KB per square inch.
Try a 1200x1200 dpi printer: 1,440,000 dots per square inch = 1.44 MB/in^2
Of course, this is assuming 8-bit color. In reality, a photograph in 256 colors is, well, not a photograph. Say we have a 24 bit printer and scanner (24 bit is regarded as life-like, and the standard for printers and scanners), thus 2^24 = (approximately) 16.8 million uniquely identifiable colors. This means we can encode unique sequences of length 24 bits per dot. At 1200x1200 dpi, we're talking 1,440,000 x 24 = 34,560,000 bits per square inch or 4.32 MB/in^2.
Using only colored dots. Throw in printers with even higher resolutions like these from HP at 1200x4800 dpi, the even higher density of data storage available from the use of shapes (adding even more uniquely identifiable states through shape, size, order, orientation, special characteristics, and relative positioning), and some clever compression and encoding algorithms... and you can easily build pretty high density storage.
Hope your high-paying highly skilled salaried job becomes over crowded with qualified applicants so you can call it blue collar... and thus qualify you for overtime pay.
Ugobe? What an ugly name. I say they change it to "Sirius Cybernetics Corporation."
Finally, we can sleep at night knowing that the 15 people who play WoW on Linux can once again have their freedom.
The whole thing is just a stupid idea. Spend $100 Billion a year launching disks into space? Wtf... there are tons of cheaper ways, like creating artificial lakes full of plankton and nutrients that will process CO2 by the millions of tons per day.
Several trillion dollars is much better spent developing models to better understand climate through simulations (especially developing computing power and deploying world-wide atmospheric temperature and pressure sensors). Once we have an accurate computer model of the immensely complex environment/ecosystem, we can simulate solutions and see how they will play out. At the same time, we can invest in research into alternative energy and build absolutely massive infrastructure changes that can dramatically reduce CO2 emissions. Shit, with $100 Billion _a year_ to play around with, we can do anything... like build effective public transit in big cities where it is currently impossible, like LA, because of the size of the city. We can even make it all magnetically levitated, and thus faster than cars. In half a year's budget we could entirely develop and deploy a sizable space-based solar energy generation system. We could tap into geothermal power, wind power, solar power- all on unprecedented scales. Hell, with that kind of budget we could even dig new river extensions to maximize the number of times we can dam a single flow of water for hydroelectric generation.
That guy may be a good optical scientist, but he would make a worthless engineer.
Could automakers make the million mile car that was super reliable, got good mileage, had decent power, and because of that, actually be cost effective for the consumer in the long run? I bet they could, but there wouldn't be much incentive for them to remain in the car making business, as sales would dreop off severely eventually. The fixit shops would hate it. The oil companies would hate it. Stockholders would hate it.
wow, you don't give engineers much credit, do you? Believe me, if such as thing as a "million mile car" were even remotely physically possible on paper, people would be trying to build it. If not in the auto-industry, then in any of the hundreds, if not thousands, of research universities all over the world that have a Mechanical Engineering department. And sure, a perfect car wouldn't be profitable for Ford or Toyota in the long run, but they'd sell it anyway because if they didn't do it, someone else would, someone without the same stake as them, and thus with nothing to lose should the market go sour after being saturated with perfection. Capitalism isn't the evil force you make it out to be. It's a force for good, if there is proper competition.
Of course, a million mile car is NOT possible as long as you are using a heat engine (internal combustion engine) because the maximum possible efficiency of such an engine is limited by 1 minus the ratio of the operating temperatures (Carnot efficiency). To fully utilize the energy of gasoline you'd need an efficiency close to 1, meaning you'd have to operate your engine at maybe 100,000 degrees C or have a liquid helium cooling system for the exhaust gas...
Needless to say, there are countless other problems that researchers are working on that fundamentally limit the mileage, power (per dollar), pollution, and durability of a car. If (and when) we know how to build a fundamentally better car, it WILL be built and sold. This law holds for almost any other market you can think of. Will an HIV vaccine put drug makers out of business? Sure, but that's not stopping private philanthropy foundations and small startups from pouring billions of dollars into research. Will a better Windows kernel put Symantec and MacAfee out of business? Sure, but that didn't stop Microsoft from building dramatically stronger protections into Vista.
I'm just waiting for Microsoft to release a virus that'll force everyone to run Automatic Update. Think of how many problems it would solve!
I can get my girlfriend (or wife or mom) to nag me about doing the laundry. I can set alarms on my phone, PDA, computer, digital watch, even involve some loudspeakers without much difficulty. None of that means I'll actually DO the laundry. Where's the invention that will collect and automatically DO my laundry? That's what I'm waiting for. Something useful.
What's the point of an iPod case that can stand a mortar round? The owner will get blown to shreds but AT LEAST THE IPOD WILL BE OK!
Just replace the .wav file with anything you want, or even no sound.