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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

In your phone you have a million times the computing power these guys used to launch rockets into space. You use it to launch birds at pigs.

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Not a downvoter, but your observation is (a) false, and (b) irrelevant, if it were true.

To fill in the gap in what I wrote: Even if the physics and the roadmap were known, the infrastructure and background engineering expertise needed to go from vacuum tubes to fabs making cheap ICs at nanoscale in volume would take longer than a decade to build.

Moore's law has been in operation since about 1958. That's 36 density doublings, at one per 18 months. You don't get 36 doublings in 10 years, because that would be one doubling every 3 months.

The only reason I bothered to comment is that I tire of the outlandish claims and "everything you know is wrong" posturing of UR. It was really only worth the original two-word rebuttal.

You're talking about people who went from a standing start (almost) to nuclear weapons and satellites in orbit in a similar timescale.

Do you really think that people have become that much stupider? Moore's Law has been going for decades. Multiple Nobel prizes have been awarded for discoveries that made its continued existence possible. The fact that you don't understand the accomplishment does not make it less significant.

I am typing on a small device whose internal electronics exceed in complexity all electronic devices that existed in 1940. Combined. Yet this is a commodity item.

Stop and think about that. And then you might recognize the absurdity of claiming that a few tips and a can do attitude would have created the results of decades of modern technological progress in 10 years.

Ask the same question to a university professor teaching students for 30 years. You may be surprised by their answer.

I agree. It would certainly take decades for them to master the technology. It might even take them 50 years. A lot of the knowledge required is implicit in the industry taken as a whole. Put me in the stone age with a manual for making bronze. I would be proud of myself If I managed to forge something useful inside of a lifetimes work. Where does the ore come from? How do I extract it? Precisely how do I get the fire hot enough? Similarly, if I knew how to create a warp drive, there is absolutely no guarantee that I could actually build one with current day tech. It might take a decade just to produce one of the required components.

Just to add to your point, think about how these electronics are actually designed and developed. You need lots of CAD and CAM to get working chips out the door, and you don't get those without already having working chips. Essentially you need earlier iterations of electronics to even build the next iteration. A single iPad isn't going to help much, unless it's loaded with schematics and data for entire generations of electronics leading up to it.

A funny thing: a decade ago, people said technology was wasted beating Bowser in Mario.

http://www.mariowiki.com/List_of_Mario_references_in_live-ac...

I concur with this point of view. I very much doubt most smartphones are used to access the wealth of knowledge on the Internetz. They are used to play games. Source: my time on the NYC subway system.

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