News for trolls, pageviews that matter.

Because each time we overcome a monumental challenge for the first time, we expand the frontier of human knowledge and endeavor.

As our frontier expands, that which was undone becomes possible; that which was possible, replicable; that which was replicable, automatable; that which was automatable, trivial; that which was trivial, obsolete.

Just over a century ago, tinkers managed to propel a glorified kite a few feet through the air. The tangible benefit of this flight of fancy is that today, we complain about the comfort of the seats in mass-produced aircraft that can send us around the globe for a historically infinitesimal cost in time and money.

Seventy years ago, the US government was one year into the construction of ENIAC, one of the first general-purpose digital computers ever created. Upon its completion two years later, it would occupy 680 square feet, require the power of roughly six modern households, process up to 500 operations per second, and spend roughly half its time being repaired. The tangible benefit of this monstrosity is that today you likely carry, on your person, roughly 25 million times more computing power than ENIAC. It is quite likely that use the bulk of this computing power primarily for your own personal entertainment.

45 years ago, after years of research and significant government funding, ARPANET was launched. Not many people expected it to be of any significant practical value; in fact, the first message ever sent over ARPANET only managed to deliver two characters before crashing the entire network for an hour. The tangible benefit of this boondoggle is that today, we have the Internet, the direct descendant of ARPANET.

I don't need more computing power, or cheaper computing. What I have is enough, what I need is software that's more efficient. Heck even MS Office 97sp2 is more efficient than all the office version starting from Office 2002 they throw at me today, has better features, it's faster and less bloated and smaller in size. My real issues, when I look at my costs are: housing and transportation. Healthcare I try not to mess with, and it's a fight against constant deliberate infection. So to drop the housing cost, please build rotating space stations that can fit a trillion people, because if you justify the high demand and low supply of housing because we have 7 billion people, that's not my fault, I'm not contributing to overpopulation, so don't torture me over it please. And as far as gas goes, create safe nuclear power plants that make a lot of ammonia, and fuel cell cars based on that. Ban all nuclear bombs on the planet, and build nuclear power plants for cheap energy. You can also cut the natural gas and water bills with cheap energy. I don't want yet another tax, like carbon tax, and yet another expense, like mandatory Obamacare, if anything I want less tax, such as no local income tax, and very low property tax, and no mandatory insurance for driving. I already lost the battle on how much I deserve for the work I do, I'm not special, and minimum wage is an extreme luxury, when you look at what kind of miracles it can buy, like a 320 GB portable hard disk for $30. Minimum wage is extreme luxury. What's bullshit is the sky high mandatory existence-fee like expenses. Please don't destroy my house because you think it's not luxurious enough to my needs, based on your building code luxury standards. My definition of luxury is dough sitting in the bank, and high income to basic, mandatory expense ratio, of at least 10-20 (which is achievable with minimum wage if you can get a CAUV tax of $22/year on a small farm, which comes out to $1.83/month housing cost that's mandatory, plus the mobile home property tax if it has the wheels removed and it becomes a fixture, not a movable item, so you can avoid even the $60/year mobile home tax, an then housing cost items that you can do yourself, like maintenance, such as tarp over a leaky roof. So now from focusing on housing sucking the living life out of everybody, they try to flip it to health care, and I'm fighting tooth and nail not to go to the hospital again, and I know the hospital won't help me, because they don't do what you ask as a customer, please help me with a throat infection, they shine a flashlight in your throat and say I can't see anything, you must be hallucinating, and send you to the nut house. That's bullshit, that's like I take my car in for an oil change, and they say the oil is fine, but we replaced the transmission for you, against your will, and here is the bill. Like we knock your house down, against your will, so you can't live in it, and here is the bill, and if you don't pay it, we'll put a foreclosure on your credit, and no, the land bank don't accept donations of lots without a house on it, we want to first send you to foreclosure over it and the land bank gets it anyway, because nobody's bidding at the sheriff sale. And as far as justifying the high cost of lawnmowing, don't fucking do it. Even if you paid me $20 to have me let you cut my grass, I'd say no, because I love weed and bugs that much. If you offered 2000 each time, I'd say sorry bugs, you gotta find another place to live. But I prefer my grass uncut, let alone wasting money I don't have in the first place on it. Beauty is a natural flower, a rough weed that can exist on its own, without external help like welfare support, and there is a bug on its petals, living the same way, wild, free, unlike the artificial plants that require constant welfare support to make it. And a green lot without any flowers is a green desert to me. What happened to the bugs, these marvelous little creatures? Yeah, some of them, like mosquitos, I slap, if I catch them, but most of them I have no problem with coexisting with me. I am happier in a world full of butterflies and beautiful bugs, than in a green desert suburban environment deprived of it.)

Dude, they are getting impulse, momentum, mv, from the mass contained in the energy, mc2, which is pure light's mass. You could use that same energy to accelerate any particle, even an electron, to near speed of light velocities via a cyclotron first, then as relativistic mass takes over and cyclotron speeds get out of synch, so you take over with a coiled linear accelerator with correctly placed spacings along its path, a few miles long, then shoot it out into open space as a propulsion kickback conservation of impulse kind of thing, and get better bang, better kickback per energy invested, all you need is a simple piece of matter, like an electron to blow up in mass relativistically and generate a lot of impulse or momentum from this mass increase. As you invest into relativistic mass, you start wasting energy as mass, so there is probably some optimum point of say 0.8c or 0.9c, where the economic scarcity of matter mass dictates wasting energy as relativistic mass. The question is how difficult is it to come up with an electron from outer space, and shoot it back there. Or carry the electron fuel - bound to things like atomic nuclei, and then you can strip the nuclei completely of all electrons, or if that's too expensive energetically, of only a few electrons and the real kick and impulse you get then is of course from these much heavier ions, or stripped atoms, not the light weight electrons. In intergalactic travel you may not be able to filter enough hydrogen atoms or helium atoms (like a whale filters plankton) from the vacuum of space if the vacuum is too close to zero pressure, so then your economic option is using just light, or pure energy, gathered from starlight through massive solar panels, as a propulsion. Accelerating a very scarce electron to very close to speed of light, where the ratio of relativistic mass to rest mass is say, 100, that means 99 grams of 100 grams of stuff ejected as propulsion is energy-mass, then, then you might as well do 100 percent energy-mass, if the operation is simpler, and you don't need a funky cyclotron.

I for one, love my little HP Mini 210 Laptop with a 5 W Intel Atom chipset and 9 hr battery life, and way more than sufficient computing power as far as I'm concerned, and all the recent creations on the web, such as semi-infinite-loop javascript webpages trying to tell me to upgrade, they can go stick their javascript where the Sun don't shine, because I think I have way too much computing power as it is, not too little, more than sufficient for my needs, only it's used incorrectly by shitty software, and we have a clash of mentality on this topic, and I beg to differ with them.

Then there'll be these secret places where people or monkeys with a lot of terraflops are bred in a dish, without having any fathers and mothers, are born and get eyes and ears excised so they don't develop normal sensory processing and world awareness (or they can even be genetic engineered and propagated like that, not to have eyes and ears, or even skin touch and taste and smell senses), so their whole brain capacity is available for some non-sensory, non-world-around-you-awareness-and-modeling computing task, and some fiber optic interconnect links like a hundred of them in a room, all being hooked up like hospital coma patients to a perfusion feed, and some automated excrement system that sucks the poop out of their butt automatically, and this "Beowulf cluster" of monkey brains (or human brains if they are sure not to get caught, because they get better bang per buck out of a human brain, per calorie of food invested - not necessarily, and chimp short term memory is proven to be better than a human's, so it depends on the task at hand) would be able to mine a whole lot of bitcoins very cheaply. Why worry about miniaturization, dust-free atmosphere chip foundries that cost near a trillion dollars, when life can miniaturize and create a supercomputing brain, in the middle of a dusty, putrefied swampy mud. The far future of computing, and even AI is biotech, or biotech-like miniaturizing self automation machines, and whether this bio-computer is a DNA based organic brain, or a silicon-chip based self constructing metal/silicon machine, only the future will tell.

I think we still got at least another 50-200 years to go before we match the computing power of a cheap human cranium, which has got to be way more than a terraflop. Next wonder of biotechnology: reworking a human brain - or more like a monkey brain that has no ethical issues - to efficiently compute floating point results that can be directly displayed on an LCD, instead of analyze visual signals.

Anybody in charge of handling nukes, or launching them knows the extreme danger they are tinkering with. I don't think the AI researchers minds are permeated by the same mindset, and if anything, handling a nuke or a nuke launch system is comparatively a piece of cake, a whole lot less dangerous than handling one of these supercomputer machines. They should mandate by law for every person that works with it to watch that movie "Screamers," just so that they are aware, and whoever works with it needs total psychological and security clearance, just like the people that work with nukes. You wouldn't want some egomaniac or one with charged with an agenda (such as greenpeace, vegetarian, any kinds of rights activist, i.e. anybody off the standard beaten path,) to tinker with one of these things, and in fact there is no guarantee that even people who seem completely sane, live normal lives, have families, 30 year careers, go to church, don't turn up like that bank president who after like 30 years he walked out with a few million dollars from his bank, in plain view in front of the camera, not even trying to disguise himself, left a wife, kids, and a community behind, and who knows what he did with that money, go to some Caribbean island and have fun watching young women in bikinis stroll before him on a beach sipping champagne? Some people's idea of fun is distorted like that, but it is usually an issue of ego, and in that, self interest, as opposed to religious people, who learned how to beat their self interest down, and aim for the collective self interest, but even that can turn into some racist stuff, like the God of my people vs. the God of your people, I'm a jealous God, say my God, and I'll blow you up over my God, my externalized ego, of my people, being greater than yours. Of course there has to be a balance between self interest and collective interest, as represented by the case of a cuckold fetish dude, at which everyone with common sense laughs at. On the other hand, male lions, when taking over a pride after a victorious fight, the first thing they do is kill all the pups that they can smell are not theirs, to bring the females into heat and have their own off-springs. That's what happens, speciest, racist, clanist stuff. Male lions are definitely not cuckolds, but they understand the concept of a social hierarchy too. So in all this, we humans have religion to help, to balance things out. So to speak. But even the Holy Quran complains how "they" (as in Allah speaks in the plural a lot in it) have never told the Christians to become monks, nuns and virgins, that was a human invention, not a divine one, as reproduction and propagation of life "they" consider holy. Yet all great religions in the world created monks, or monk-like off the social chart people, as a social , non-self-interest but community-interest driven individuals.