There is a raytracing extension to Vulkan and OpenGL which allows an optimized kd-tree to be stored in a buffer and interrogated using custom instructions.

It's quite simple. You take your scene, slice and dice it into triangles, even parametric surfaces like NURBS, subdivision surfaces used by Pixar, 3D models from 3Dmax, Maya, Blender. All of that gets converted into textures, material shaders and geometry mesh. The geometry mesh gets chopped up into a hierarchical bounding volume like a kd-tree. All of this can be stored in a data format loaded straight into the GPU or CPU cache. It's all vectors, matrices and parametric coordinates. Separate processors are assigned to process each pixel and do thing like supersampling, ambient occlusion, global illumination, caustics and radiosity. Nvidia have their Optix ray-tracing library. Intel have Embree.

Our jobs have already been robotized many times. Email replaced printing out documents and dropping them into someone else IN tray. Compilers replaced hand-coding assembly. Washing machines replaced hand-washing.

Those jets of charged particles would generate magnetic fields and pull the quasars or black holes together, or maybe line them up in neat little rows.

If you were to take 100 ball bearings, scatter them one by one on the classic rubber sheet example, they would each just have a small gravity well. If you let them all fall to the center, then the sheet would be deformed way more.

If that were a Children's petting zoo, and they were feeding the critters live baby chicks, then the devil enclosure would be quite appropriate.

Unfortunately, many of those patents for performance enhancing features using out-of-order execution were based on a single research paper. That was implemented in one CPU vendor design, then cross-patented to other CPU vendors. RISC-V has the advantage that it doesn't have those vulnerabilities baked in and built upon.

That would be insane - an SSD disk drive with a built in GPU / compute engine. That would get close to the "take the CPU to the data" approach for big data processing.

Given that massively heavy objects in space stretch space time, then it seems logical that a quasar could actually create it's own massive gravity well. From our perspective, looking straight at that gravity well, the quasar would appear to be billions of light-years away than it really it. If for any reason, it suddenly disintegrated into lots of smaller objects in the same way of a cloud of a sparks created by a magicians disappearing trick, then that gravity well would suddenly disappear and be replace with the stars of a a galaxy. Then that galaxy of stars would appear to be way closer than the quasar.

It was discussed in the past on slashdot. The price an energy provider can charge depends on two prices. When supply exceeds demand, it's the cheapest provider who dictates the price. Everyone will trying undercutting each other to their minimum profit margin. When demand exceeds supply is the most expensive provider who dictates the price. Everyone else can charge up to that price. The costs depend on spin up time to heat up the systems: renewable > gas > nuclear > coal

They had vertical windmills - an S shaped sail that sat on top of a millstone. Using just wind power alone, the natives could ease themselves from the tedious task of milling grain by hand.

You use the surplus energy generated from your renewal systems to push water uphill (potential energy), or to charge up batteries (electrical energy), spin up flywheels (kinetic energy), compress gas (kinetic energy), charge up hydrogen fuel cells (chemical energy). Then you release energy from these sources when you need it.

Some mobile phones from ZTE would do the same. The memory of the phone became a virtual disk drive, and it would even reroute your PC's routing tables to go through the mobile network.

Plus telemetry to send back to the mothership, backdoors for law enforcement, with gaming adverts popping up whenever you want to change settings.

That would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

He was the person who designed the Atari home computer SIO bus. For many peripherals, the device driver was actually contained within the device itself. Upon connection by the interface cable, the device driver would be uploaded. When the interface cable was removed, the device driver was removed.