And to look around the GHz barrier *was* pretty damned insurmountable. Sure, it wasn't at exactly 1000MHz, but that particular number was always a "magical thinking" artifact of how the human brain regards numbers. We hit 1GHz back in 2000, and here we are, 15 years later and we haven't managed even managed a single order of magnitude increase in clock speed. Lets put that in proper context: 15 years earlier, in 1985, Intel had just released the 12MHz 386 with optional floating point module.

So, from '85 to '00 we got roughly 100x faster clock speeds, plus vectored floating-point instruction sets and radically improved pipelining. Then over the next 15 years we managed to push the clock-speed boundary up another, what 3-4x? That looks an awful lot like hitting a brick wall to me.

>You cant seriously compare a neural network operating at 100Hz or less to modern CPU-s.

You can when that network involves roughly 100 billion idependent processing units, each equipped with local memory and ~7000 dedicated network connections. Make no mistake - an actual neuron is a far more sophisticated thing than the glorified switches in so-called "neural network" software. Assuming an average firing rate of 100hz, and an average processing unit of 1 flop (a gross oversimplification I'm sure), that's 10 trillion flops - I don't think any modern CPU is even remotely close to the Teraflops range.

Ah, the good old days. I miss having real competition in the CPU market.

What on Earth makes you think "has massive market share" is in any way related to "good quality"? And "gets the job done"? That's a pretty low bar there, I've heard it used far more often to describe bailing-wire repair jobs than as an actual recommendation of any sort.

I'll offer you up the old betamax versus VHS, 8-track versus cassette, or bluray versus hd-rom comparisons as counterexamples. Or how about mp3s? A nasty, artifact-laden music format despised by anyone with good ears or who can hear outside the "normal" frequency range, and yet if you want your music to be compatible with whatever random hardware you come across it's really your only option.

It all comes down to network effects - who was first to market, or perhaps who as cheaper in the early days. Once there's a clear market winner nobody want to use or produce the "fringe" technology and deal with a constant stream of incompatibilities with the majority. The actual quality of the technology doesn't even factor into the decision - unless you're dealing with niche products or can deliver an order of magnitude improvement, compatibility carries the day.

>people who, make no mistake, want to destroy our way of life.

Don't be melodramatic - for the most part they don't even know what our way of life is, except for the part that involves spending the better part of a century manipulating their domestic politics for our own ends - overthrowing legitimate democracies, installing sadistic dictators, selling them powerful weapons, etc. And honestly I'd rather like to destroy that part of our way of life myself, I just don't think it can be done via militant action.

For the most part they just want to drive out the foreign devils that are slaughtering civilians and raining death from above, whereas the warlords calling the shots probably secretly love having the foreign devils around giving them legitimacy and bolstering recruitment numbers to leverage in their domestic power struggles. Anything they know about our "way of life" is going to be the same sort of racist caricatures that pervaded US media during WWI and II - propaganda designed to dehumanize the enemy to bolster support for the domestic warmongers.

There is no doubt the occasional extremist who actually would like to destroy our way of life, but without a vast support structure they're just another random terrorist - maybe they manage to take out a few hundred people, maybe even a few thousand - tragic, but statistically insignificant - you chances of dieing in a car crash are much better. And if they do have the vast support structure, then it becomes a business, and like any institution its primary goal becomes self-perpetuation - not something usually furthered by picking fights with opponents that have you vastly outmatched. Though admittedly occasionally you get an Al Qaeda situation, where a crumbling institution deliberately provokes a dragon in order to give themselves a new patina of relevancy rather than fade gracefully into obscurity.

Meanwhile, virtually every "terrorist plot" interrupted in the last decade plus has been initiated by agent provocateurs working for the FBI, etc. *Maybe* you could argue that they're trying to "weed out the bad apples", but the available evidence looks a lot more like they're creating the very threat they're using to justify their ever-expanding authority.

It won't solve the problem, no, but it's a start. And we *really* need to get people starting on a large scale. Short of someone pulling a cold-fusion reactor out of their nethers there won't be any magic bullets to this problem, and white roofs are cheap step we could take today, one that's absolutely cost effective anywhere that employs significant air conditioning: return on investment of *you* painting *your* roof white is probably a few years, tops. And done on a large scale in cities it would also reduce the heat island effect by at least several degrees, lowering cooling costs even further.

And all that lowered cost translates directly to lowered CO2 emissions. Not by much, but it's one of the few things that can be done without massive government intervention. And as people actually start taking a measure of personal responsibility for climate change, even if largely symbolic, then we can start to hope to gather the sort of popular momentum necessary for more sweeping changes. Or would you rather wait for the puppet masters to decide that business as usual is causing things to get bad enough even their obscene profits won't protect them? Because personally I don't think they're far-sighted enough to recognize that point, and even if they are, the rest of us will still be screwed.

If there are clouds then the sunlight mostly wouldn't make it to ground level to begin with - on sunny days the reflected sunlight will mostly make it back out of the atmosphere, especially on roofs and other fairly horizontal surfaces. Whitewashing vertical surfaces is more relevant to cooling the individual structure, but a cooler structure is also one that likely runs less air conditioning, which until we get off fossil fuels will make an even bigger difference than whitewashing on solar thermal retention.

The problem is that at present we have lots of dark surfaces absorbing that sunlight and re-emitting it as thermal infrared - most of which gets reflected even by clear skies.

I have never heard such a claim before - which symmetries are you referring to, and how do they change things? Better yet, is there a good easily-comprehensible discussion of the topic you can point me at?

Judging by the sort of people who make it into national-scale politics, I suspect there's not a one of them that doesn't have at least a handful of blackmailable secrets, and that its so well understood to be happening that the only real threat is character assassination among the constituency. Which is of course a real threat, but primarily to those who campaign on hypocritical values.

The infinite number of monkeys thanks you for covering for them, they'll be back at the end of the shift to collect their paychecks.

Nah, that's why you also need an infinite number of scavengers in the room to clean up the mess (any why not, you're already assuming an infinite number of molds to cause decay). In fact you'll probably want a whole infinite ecology to support the monkeys and recycle their various exhausts back into inputs, otherwise the monkey-chow bill is going to get ridiculous.

And you conclusively know what these rules are, and that they prohibit the creation of works of literature, how exactly?

Not just possible - inevitable. Any finite probability, no matter how small, multiplied by an infinite number of attempts, becomes unity.

Of course that makes the assumption that the universe is in fact infinite, whereas currently accepted theory states that it is impossibly large but still finite, and of an order such that even such comparatively simple things as having an apple spontaneously appear full-formed anywhere in the universe are still incredibly unlikely.

The problem is that we have no way to tell what the entangled photons "should have been", making it difficult if not impossible to tell if or how they have been modified. It's also very difficult, maybe impossible, to modify a particle without breaking entanglement.

Many years ago I actually designed a FTL "radio" based on just such an idea - unfortunately it relied on being able to measure a particle's spin without breaking entanglement, something I've since been informed is impossible.

Well, given a FTL radio and a collaboratior in a very different reference frame, SR says that it's possible to send a message into your own past, which most assuredly breaks the commonly held simplistic view of causality. Of course it could just be that our current understanding of causality only covers the degenerate linear case.