853 karma · joined March 9, 2010
Of course you need to transmit electricity and re-emit the light efficiently. You will still end up with acres of solar panels, as I said. Before you jump on someone for getting their science wrong, make sure YOURS IS RIGHT!
If this is the case, than we may be able to grow crops more efficiently indoors than out. But we will be replacing acres of crops with acres of solar panels. And it's unclear to me why we would want these buildings to be skyscrapers, which are much more expensive per square foot than large warehouses in the middle of nowhere.
However, I think the larger objection goes something like this:
Gravitational attraction contains information about the location of an object (say, for the purposes of argument, a singularity). Information may not travel faster than the speed of light, by relativity. Information may not escape the event horizon of a black hole, because to do so would require it to travel faster than the speed of light (or to use some funny quantum teleportation that Hawking describes as the mechanism behind Hawking radiation), but which is not described by relativity.
Therefore it follows that the information about the location of a singularity behind the event horizon of a black hole is somehow travelling "faster than light". This is of course impossible if relativity is correct, which leads to a big WTF?
My guess, and I am most emphatically not a physicist, is that you get some funny macroscopic quantum effects near a black hole, which allows Hawking radiation (and therefore also the encoded information about the objects that fell into the black hole) out, and also lets out the information about the location of the singularity itself, so that objects outside the event horizon can be attracted to it.
Perhaps studying black holes in sufficient depth (pardon the pun) will allow us to finally unify QM and relativity.
It therefore follows that as the pace of change increases, the length of time before an education becomes out of date or stale decreases. There is some percentage of the population today who would rather be poor than retrain. It stands to reason that as the rate of change increases, that percentage of the population will also increase.
Therefore, we as a society have two choices. 1) Let people be poor. 2) Pay for them to live like human beings not because they deserve it, but because they are alive. This is the crux of the choice. Will the haves (people with relevant education, who are disproportionately represented here of HN) give some of what they have to the have-nots just because they are human?
There was the recession of 1802, the depression of 1807, the recession of 1812, the depression of 1815, the recessions of 1822, 1825, 1828, 1833, then a couple of depressions in 1836, and 1839... I could go on, but you can read the wikipedia page yourself. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unite...
These weren't small either. Many of them saw decreases in business activity of over 15%. Contrast this with the postwar growth period of the late 1940s through the late 1990s, where you see inflation and strong steady economic growth (there were recessions, but they were all under 4%, and they were quickly erased by the growth that followed).
So without trying to start an economic flame war, whatever they were doing in the 19th century for the most part clearly didn't work, and whatever they were doing from the great depression to the late 1990s early 2000s clearly did, if what you are optimizing for is steady growth and to moderate boom / bust cycles.
I think in many ways the "Italian" sleep schedule (up at 7, awake till 2, sleep till 5, awake till 2) is very natural. It's no less sleep, but it feels more refreshing somehow.
The problem is that many Americans (I don't know as much about Europe) aren't actually that wealthy. Without food subsidies, our food quality would probably increase, but so would our costs. Poor Americans are overweight today because the distorted food costs make it cheaper to eat processed food (that is more expensive to make overall) than to eat basic fruits and veggies and grains. Without subsidies, they would be starving, or at least calorie deficient.
Nixon put in our current system of subsidies because "food should never be an issue in a presidential race". And since then, it hasn't. America may be wealthy, but the wealth is very unevenly distributed. Without social programs, many of our people would be starving as well.
It doesn't need doing as often as on my old G1, but it needs it. I don't know if that is because I am running cyanogen mod (5.0.8, which is based on 2.1) or what, but you can pry adk out of my cold dead hands. Maybe I have some buggy apps. But adk makes my phone usable.
Android doesn't seem as smart as it supposed to be, but I still like it.
Basically, you have 3 choices for currency. You can have debt-money (most modern economies). This has the advantage that money is effectively created by the market based upon the mutual agreement of a lender and a borrower, which means that money is created and destroyed by the invisible hand. This is a good thing. It is problematic, however, in that you get problems if large sections of the economy ever start paying off their debts through very large productivity gains because that destroys the money supply. Also, it tends to support a "banker class", who does nothing but loan money and gets paid for very little work (capital allocation isn't THAT hard compared to how much you make doing it).
You can have commodity money, which is great because you don't get runaway inflation. But because of deflationary spirals, you can get runaway deflation. Also, people tend to hoard whatever commodities you are using, which are typically useful for industrial or other uses.
You can have fiat money, but that only works if you have an incorruptible central bank. Otherwise you end up like Nigeria.
Personally, I think we should use the Joule as a basic unit of currency. Although energy supplies can fluctuate, they tend to grow and shrink with the economy, which prevents either inflation or deflation. Different banks could offer different baskets of energy types (wind farm or solar farm output futures, barrels of oil, coal, etc.), and you don't end up with a banker class living off of everyone else, but you don't end up with hyperinflation or deflation. 500 MJ today would tend to buy a similar amount of things 10 years from now as today (maybe a little more because of efficiency gains, but not a lot more).
If that is true, it explains, for example, why gay marriage is a hot button issue for baby-boomers and older, but largely less of an issue for people under 30 (http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2009...).
I'll bet racism data looked pretty similar a few decades ago, but now expressing racist views publicly will get you in trouble even if you are extremely conservative (that Republican politician from the south a couple years ago who got extreme negative publicity for calling blacks "monkeys").
If it is necessary for one generation to die for political views to move forward, that doesn't bode well for progress if Aubrey de Grey and Ray Kurzweil prove prophetic. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgLRhxvRlKg) and (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzwei...)
Anyone who has used iPad or iPhone or an Android device can tell that devices like these, not Symbian or WAP or Brew or whatever, are the future. Those other platforms might catch up, but for now they lag abysmally behind in terms of user experience. And so while they might outnumber iOS and Android for now, that numerical advantage can not last.
Walk around a Y-Combinator event (or CES, or E3, or anywhere else where leading edge alpha geeks congregate) and count phones. I'd be willing to wager a lot of money you'd see a bunch of iOS and Android devices, a few blackberries, and a smattering of ancient nokia and samsung free phones held by users who "just want to make calls" (and thus aren't going to be reachable by any apps at all, WAP or Java or otherwise).
So, yes, a company developing an app today for iOS or Android isn't going to make their money back on the platform as it stands in any reasonable amount of time. But a company or developer who positions themselves to be on top of a platform that is rising meteorically (and will displace literally billions of feature phones over the next decade and a half as moore's law drops silicon costs by a factor of 1000) is going to do well.
Hype is about future expectations. When expectations rise above exponential growth in our industry, those expectations usually turn out wrong. But the mobile market has a current penetration of over 3 billion people and I'll wager practically every phone on the planet will be a "smartphone" in under 15 years. That's a lot of headroom for growth.
It doesn't always work, and but it's especially handy when you turn it around and get someone else to tell you exactly why what you are doing is wrong.
Has anyone else thought what, say a nexus one (with my handy hp-48 emulator, plus shell scripting) would do to say, ww2? I'm pretty sure whichever side got their hands on it would just win.
Instant artillery calculations, speeding up the nuclear program by about a factor of 1000, and some serious encryption capabilities. All in the palm of my hand. I'm not even talking about bringing the cell phone network or the internet with me. Just perhaps a few cached wikipedia articles.
For example, while the science is still up in the air on this as far as I know, it may turn out that Vitamin D supplements are healthier than getting Vitamin D from sunshine, because that same sunshine causes skin cancer.
On the other hand, because of selection bias, there is a pretty good chance that something that has been around for several thousand or million years as part of a natural process is well adapted to the ecology of our planet. The natural processes that disrupted things wildly were either incorporated into a new dynamic equilibrium (oxygen producing cyanobacteria) or died off a long time ago. Oil wells that go miles into the planet's crust underneath miles of deep water are neither of these things.
super high res screen (960x640)
front facing camera with open standards for video calling
high def video camera and 5 megapixel still camera.
It may be argued that some or all of these features were available on other phones, but Apple's massive weight in this industry will force other players to step up their game or fall behind. Who knew the Nexus One would lose its luster so quickly?
One thing still to be answered: Is the open standard around video calling really open? Or is it an embrace and extend standard that will be impossible for anyone else to get behind? If Android can / does adopt this standard, between the two of them they will finally put to bed voice calling (it's served us well for 100+ years, and good riddance) as the default within a couple decades.
TFA suggests that google is pushing people towards results that cause people to worry about the health concerns associated with nanotech, rather than the possibilities. Why would google jeopardize all their goodwill over such a relatively obscure topic? I don't buy it. (It later admits that it might be the mainstream media that is skewing the availability of evenhanded article and sites, and google is just transparently passing along that bias).
Sadly, since we've explored domains with sane timescales and mass / energy levels pretty thoroughly, it's unlikely that new physics will result in anti-gravity hovercars or vacuum energy devices or starships or time machines any time soon. But it might make something we haven't thought of yet, like understanding of time dialation and the speed of light gave us GPS!
The reason to work for a startup as an early employee is the fun (if you like working 12-14 hour days on cool stuff) and the experience. I'm guessing having a successful startup under your belt makes it a LOT easier to get your own company funded down the line. Also, people can end up much higher in a large organization earlier than they could have without some serious corporate climbing.
On the one hand, I don't have to use facebook. On the other hand, I worry about the immense asymmetry of information that facebook has about me even if I don't join. If I'm a hole in the social graph (because all my friends use it regularly to post pictures, etc. of me), it doesn't take much effort for them to fill in the data on me.
I look forward to the day when instead of car companies and other large manufacturers holding us hostage for pennies in injection molded plastic, it's standard practice for the mechanic to download and print out a part off the internet. I'm joining http://techshop.ws/ next month. I'm a software engineer, but I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty. Viva la industrial revolution!