And banning them will do exactly nothing to address that problem.

A person who would make a gun with the intention of committing murder with it isn't likely to be deterred by a law banning his gun. Actually, that law already exists... the Defense Distributed guy was careful to epoxy a six ounce block of metal to his before fully assembling it into an operable gun, because it's a federal felony to manufacture an undetectable gun.

Is that irresponsible? Depends on the kid. There are many examples of kids using guns to defend themselves and their siblings against home intruders.

All of the commentary here completely misunderstands what Page said.

He wasn't suggesting that we ought to give up on medical privacy. He was saying that we'd be better off if we could do so -- if we chose to -- without fear of repercussions. He said that in some cases being more open might be beneficial... but he clearly chose to keep his condition secret for quite a long time, even though it was obvious to everyone that something was wrong, and he didn't say anything to imply that we shouldn't have the right to privacy.

Google doesn't sell user information.

Sounds like a bug. I'm sure it will get fixed.

Yes, Google has bugs.

Yep. And there comes a point when you're scaling up that quantitative differences become qualitative differences that demand completely different solutions to the old problems.

No, firmware is static, and the code it contains must fit in limited capacity storage devices and run on low-end CPUs, unless you want to pay big money for your switches. Much better to make the switch firmware simple and the switches cheap, and put your logic in a few much more powerful machines with visibility into the bigger picture.

I think that would depend who you ask.

On the range.... give it a few years. The Tesla already has a 200+-mile range (though not when racing, obviously), but it'll get better. It's also worth pointing out that the Tesla Model S in that video is not a sports car. It's a nearly 5000-pound luxury road sedan. The fact that it's even remotely competitive with a Viper which weighs 2000 pounds less, and has a monstrous engine, is very impressive.

As for sound... in the real world I really like the utter silence of my LEAF.

Sissy? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLCdP6sMN9k

:=)

+1

It's certainly not in his management style.

You were probably going for funny, but if I had mod points I'd call this insightful. It really is shoulders all the way down; no one accomplishes anything of significance without relying on many, many others.

That's fascinating. Thanks.

Looking at his presentation, that seems to be his point. He concludes that power efficiency is going to become the limiting factor driving design decisions, and that since the power cost of increasing FLOPS has been so much lower than the power cost of moving larger quantities of data we're heading into an era where connectivity costs will so dominate the cost of cycles that cycles will be essentially free.

Hes's then basically arguing that it won't be cost-effective to build data transmission architectures that can effectively utilize exaflops, so no one will bother to build an exaflop machine.

He didn't state it, but if the rest of his arguments are correct, perhaps we're going to see the definition of a new metric for HPC, one that somehow captures the ability of a machine to distribute data to its computation nodes.

I'm interested, and I learned of it here.

We don't have an ever-growing population. Worldwide, we're already basically at replacement level reproduction, and the industrialized world is at less than replacement level when you remove immigration. Europe's population is declining, period. In Hans Rosling's terms, we have reached and passed "peak child"; there are just shy of 2B children in the world and that number is not increasing and -- based on current trends -- not going to increase.

Assuming we maintain a constant level of 2B children, that means that there will be 2B people in each living generation, putting us at a steady-state population of about 10B. Actually, barring significant changes in current trends, that won't be a steady state, it will be a high water mark. As wealth and -- more importantly -- female education levels continue to rise around the world, the birthrate in what we now call the developing world will also drop below replacement and the population will gradually decline.

Rosling explains it well: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies.html