Please provide some metrics. It is expectable that better hardware leads to better software, and I lean to believe software follows a similar exponential curve unless proven otherwise. Remember that humans are notoriously poor at naturally spotting exponential curves.

We can now model plastics much better than before, and that leads to all kinds of new materials in use. Software. Car engines had tremendous evolution in efficiency in the last decades, mostly because we can now model with increasing accuracy the chemical process of fuel ignition in the confined chamber of the cylinder. That's software (the physics theory is over 50 years old). We have finer resolution MRI scans, using lower and lower radiation, due to better software.

Are these advances caused by better hardware or better software? Both, but don't discount software here.

If you are referring to our ability to model the transformation process between DNA and cells, there's a lot of legwork to be done, yes. However, this legwork is to be helped by an increasing amount of tech. Heck, if MRI scans get another resolution jump we'll be able to spot firing of individual neural units -- now, that'd help understanding how brains work!

Test your theory against US data. Infant mortality rate in '80 was 13 per thousand births. In '06 was 6 per thousand births. In a thousand people set, you had seven datapoints that lived zero years (worst scenario case) and now show up as living 80 years (again, worst case scenario). The effect of better infant mortality rates comes down to 80*7/1000 years=7 months (average scenarios produce 5 months). Meanwhile, in the same period, life expectancy went from 74 to 78 years.

Better infant mortality rates explain 14% of the increase in life expectancy. Where does the rest come from? Better car safety? Perhaps, but certainly with lower effect than infant mortality. The rest? Medical technology.

It hasn't happened decades later because the singularity date isn't past yet. You may criticize Kurzweil, which I do, but you should read what he says before criticizing vaguely. As it is, you sound like a misinformed radicalist. Just so you gain something from this post: a) I think he predicts the singularity to happen near 2030; b) He predicts humans will 'fuse' with machines, not that machines will replace humans.

Moore's law, the base of his argument that technology is evolving exponentially is pretty much on schedule. We are now on the Petaflop (10^15) range, with the transistor count following the predicted exponential.

Cost of DNA sequencing, another of his examples, is today at 0.000008(USD) per base pair. Fits the curve.

RAM cost is now at 28000kB/USD, also fitting the curve

GDP per capita also is within schedule (note that the scale is logarithmic), even with the wealth transfer east (which is bound to be limited in time to ten more years give or take)

And, lastly, the core of all atacks on Kurzweil, so is life expectancy on track.

You may still believe these exponentials will hit some kind of ceiling somehow. That might be true. The numbers, however, support Kurzweil's theory. And predicting from the number of times Moore's law depletion was announced in the last twenty years, I'd wager my bets on Kurzweil.

Untrue. The genome gives you the instructions for a self-modifying program that eventually produces a human brain. All biology experiments so far seem to point to the fact that the DNA chain indeed contains all the information needed to build an organism.

Bah. Portugal is indeed below 2.1, much as most western countries. What most people seem to forget is that Portugal had 5 million people in the XIX century, and has 10 million today. We can shrink to half, and then pickup the slack. Growth isn't good by itself. Heck, we colonized the world when we were 2.5 million strong...

These numbers are probably similar all over Europe.

You're way ahead of me. I'd miss some US states if I tried to list them all (I'm from Europe). Although I can point them on a map if someone names them. Heck, I have some trouble listing all European countries, with all the independence calls of eastern states in the last couple decades...

Looking at GDP, yes. But you need to read it in a different light. Portugal is a temperate climate country, with a socialist government, where people live reasonably well:

• Medical services are free, with great quality (everyone bitches about it here, but we do hold world top-ranks in quality measures like newborn survival rate or cancer survival years).
• Education is free up to Msc levels. Top students easily get state-paid Phd tuition fees.
• Everyone is entitled to a minimum subsidy of 250eur/month, even if you do absolutely nothing. If you are, say, a single parent with two children, you may get 750eur/month from state subsidies. This in a country with minimum wage of a bit over 410eur
• Retirement pension is state-managed and covers the entire population. Again, even if you haven't worked a day in your life

All of this greatly reduces incentives to entrepreneurship, with obvious results in economic evolution. On the flipside, it means that a salary of 1500eur/month buys you a good home, a nice car and two weeks vacation in the tropics, because you don't have to save for health, education or harsh times.

Further, Portugal suffers from low education levels when compared to the rest of Europe and namely when compared to former USSR countries. It's an effect of our dictatorship (ended in '74) that will take a generation to fix (and is indeed being fixed). The result is that industry uses little capital, uses more manpower than machinery and suffers naturally from the consequent low productivity.

Nevertheless, it's a really nice country to live in, with economic parameters difficult to explain to a Northern American.

True. That's why Portugal signed deals to be the prototype territory for Nissan and Renault to test their electric cars. The country is covering the territory with electric recharging stations and will be subsidizing electric cars in the next years. The strategic plan seems to be to actually reduce oil consumption.

The grid of recharging stations will be ready by year-end. The Nissan Leaf will start selling in 2011, together with the Opel Ampera (Chevrolet Volt Mark II). The Renault lineup is to appear between 2011 and 2013. The electric Ferrari has been promised, but no ETA yet ;-)

You have to note that the geography of the country greatly helps. The country has about 1000km top to bottom, with 90% of the population near the sea, on a strip of no more than 100km. It's rather easy to cover that with recharging stations.

Very much true. Great comment. Just to clarify, we have about 50% installed capacity in gas/coal plants, with the other 50% in hydroelectric dams. Wind is just extra. Solar is minimal. If there is wind, then it's free energy, if not, fire up the gas plant. From what I recall, most of the year compensation is done by hydroelectric dams. The critical period is mid to late summer, when A/C power ramps up consumption and when dams hit their low levels. During this period, compensation is done by gas/coal plants.

Anyhow, if there is a lesson to be learned by the US here, it's not about renewable energy. It's about the power grid. The article doesn't mention it, but upgrading the power grid, which happened in the late 80s is the key to this project. The electric grid here is incredibly efficient and a feat of engineering EDP should be proud of. It is fully automatic, balances out production from a myriad of extremely unreliable sources, prioritizing renewable sources and using dams and gas/coal plants to compensate whenever needed (be it by storing energy or ramping up production). A brownout is unheard of, while ground shunting losses are minimal. It is indeed a smart grid, as all should be.

If you have a good electric grid, then whenever renewables hit the economic sweet spot they will get built. It's just that for us, the sweet spot is higher because we have no oil, no gas and limited coal in the territory.

We built lots of hydroelectric dams in the 70s and 80s, so we use that as energy stores. We built secondary dams downriver, pool water there and pump up when wind overgenerates energy. It's not incredibly efficient, but it's better than shunting the energy into the ground or stopping the wind farms.

Answering you: No, they are not self-sufficient in the sense that they are independent from the main grid. They are self-sufficient because they produce more than they consume. Doing a piece of electric network isolated wouldn't cross our mind. The country's electric grid is what North-Americans call a 'smart-grid' and is something every country in the world should have. It easily balances load accross the country, starting and stopping hydro plants and in the limit starting and stopping natural gas plants in peak season (typically late summer: depleted dams, lots of A/C running). It even automatically manages importing and exporting energy from/into Spain and France.

Your whole argument hinges on high transmission losses, which don't exist. Electric energy transmission is very efficient. For short distances (100km) it's about 98% efficiency, and even for extreme distances you won't dip below 90%. Portugal used to import electricity from France. Electricity traveled 2000km between the nuclear power plant and the grid connect point in Sines, and it's not a remarkable feat. I doubt you can't feed boston from anywhere on a 3000km radius. You can get into flyover-state territory with 3000km...

You managed to read the article with a large bias. It *does* explain how to deal with the issues of fragmentation: a) guarantee APIs are forward compatible; b) have apps declare their hardware needs; c) minimize bugs/incompatible APIs using extensive testing.

Google does assume fragmentation is inevitable. That seems to be under discussion by some people here on /. Personally, I can't fathom how is fragmentation avoidable, unless by stagnation. Stagnation is quite the opposite of the Android ecosystem, which is evolving at a very fast pace (fast hardware and software release cycles).

If indeed fragmentation is inevitable, Google has seemingly defined the problem correctly and it looks like the solution is good.

It's not like there's no other option. Basically, as a developer, you must choose between a large user base now with an unknown probability of being kicked off with no warning, or a smaller user base (in the Android market) with clear acceptance rules. It's not an easy choice. Risk has rewards. Risk also causes shit to hit the fan. Just don't complain if/when it happens.

Fragmentation is needed for a competitive environment. It's an added problem, partly for developers but mainly for google, and they are handling it quite well. Properly accounting for different hardware targets in both the hardware development and in the software development kits is a daunting task. However, and I feel everyone is repeating the fragmentation mantra without giving proper credit to Google, Android handles fragmentation quite well. Apps are always forward-compatible (write for 1.5 and you get ~100% compatibility with existing handsets), and they announce the hardware they need.

Do you need a camera? Declare it on your manifest, and the app appears on the market only to devices sporting a camera. Do you absolutely need multitouch? Declare it. Do you need an SD card? Declare it. The only drawback is that every requirement you add narrows down the range of devices your app appears in.

Would it be better if there were fewer devices all alike? It'd be like the narrowing decision would have already been made for you. Oh, right. That's the Apple way: Users are too stupid, let's decide for them.

In the end, it's different. It's not worse. It's more complicated for the developer, in exchange for a larger user base. Before anyone mentions there are more iPhones than Android devices, please first consider that: a) there are more Android devices than iPhones being sold today and; b) Android covers a much wider range of price-points, and is thus in reach of a much larger user base, so this tendency is likely here to stay (think how Nokia is still king of mobile handsets).