GayPatriot

The Internet home for American gay conservatives.

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  1. Just the past decade? More like the past century.

    Computers in the 1960’s took up entire buildings, cost millions of dollars, and did less than a hand calculator does today.

    Computers in the late 70’s took up entire rooms, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and did less than an mp3 player today.

    Computers in the 80’s toke up desktops, with their monitors, cost close to ten thousand dollars, And did less than a boom box does today.

    Every decade has seen a quadrupling of power, a reduction in size, and a reduction in cost.

    There was a time when it was said that ‘The Computer you want costs $5,000″, back when the optimal computer for personal use cost about that from year to year.

    Today, that same $5,000 gets the computer, a large flat screen monitor, an inkjet printer with scanner, a high fidelity stereo system, a webcam and microphone, plus three high end pieces of software.

  2. While talking about the history of the computer keep in mind the Greeks considered Archimedes math to be state secretes. Along Craig’s timeline was when computing power became more compact than the Anitkythera device.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism

    The problem is moors law of computing power doubling will hit physical limits. We hit the physical limits for computing power possible in space due to shielding limits during the space shuttle age. Also current computers except for medical grade and military grade are designed to fail due to tin whiskers thanks to “green” practices used with soldering.

  4. The American economy after WWII was fueled by the “age of mobility” when people discovered that life was not spent within five miles of where they lived.

    Then the NASA economy introduced the computer age technology which ditched the primitive mercury switches and unleashed tiny solid state “thinking” chips capable of contemplating profound variables in micro-seconds. The effects on the expectations of our living standards range from cochlear hearing implants to instant messaging.

    We are now stumbling around in the pioneer days of personal mobility. Autonomous, self-guiding, individual transportation is on every technologist’s drawing board with the Segway looking like a Flintstone’s hangover. Only the super heroes seem to have figured it out.

    Charles Krauthammer said to Hugh Hewitt in an interview:

    Enrico Fermi was a physicist, one of the great physicists of the 20th Century who posed a question. And it was very simple. We know there are thousands, millions of habitable planets out there. And that means there are thousands, millions of civilizations. How is it possible that we have not received a signal, heard a word, a whisper, from any one of them? And I go through the calculations that the physicists have made about how probable it is. And you come out with a very high number. And the question is why haven’t we heard? Well, the most plausible explanation, and it was offered by Carl Sagan, was that the lifetime of a civilization once it achieves consciousness and the ability of its science to actually send signals, the lifetime of such an advanced civilization is extremely short.

    Admittedly, that is a dire prediction, but it is an eye to the enigma of where we go from here.

    Someone just hacked into Sony and stole a fist full of films which have already been thoroughly spread across the black market. Such sophisticated theft for instant riches is probably the greatest super virus known to economic collapse. It is akin to the rioters of Ferguson burning down their own local stores and then coming up with nowhere buy essentials for feeding their subversive selves.

    We are, in my mind, on the threshold of the age of amorality guided by the self-sustaining opportunity of the moment. The further we drift toward consensus ethics the more likely we become to replicate the tribalism of the dark ages.

    I fear libertarians because they never seem to have an explanation of exactly what separates them from nihilism. Orwell, Golding, and Huxley all battled with the differences between Utopia and Dystopia in the context of the search for an ideal society.

    Christianity teaches that we must live in a realistic world and that we must recognize our own strengths and weaknesses and simply strive to be as good a person and we can be.

    Meddling with perfection is a fool’s errand and the source of power for the demigod coupled with the avid support of the naive.

    We can not going to unite the nations in peace. We are competitive by nature and we only go along to get along because it is the easier path. Modern liberalism is a sham because it fails to examine itself or be truthful about its motives and its end goals.

    Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations can not be understood without recognizing that it is the extension of his seminal work The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

    Look at what has happened to our presumptions concerning privacy in the computer age. Just how much more about you does Google know than you have figured out about yourself? Are we really ready to trade in the Golden Rule (ethic reciprocity) for political consensus?

    Our future is either guided by foundational principles which we cherish or just follow the money guided by a system of transitory domination. Robert Heinlein noted:

    The 3-legged stool of understanding is held up by history, languages, and mathematics. Equipped with these three you can learn anything you want to learn. But if you lack any one of them you are just another ignorant peasant with dung on your boots.

    Democracy can’t work. Mathematicians, peasants, and animals, that’s all there is — so democracy, a theory based on the assumption that mathematicians and peasants are equal, can never work. Wisdom is not additive; its maximum is that of the wisest man in a given group.

    We do not build on the wisdom of the ages, we try to out think it.

  5. As much as I like Heliotrope’s post, I have always had a problem with Fermi’s formula, the biggest being it is based on an assumption, compounded by an assumption, compounded by an assumption, compounded by an assumption, etc. to the 12th degree or so.

    We see such assumptions occurring every day. Just as an example, There are an infinite number of rational numbers. Between any two rational numbers there are an infinite number more. It therefore stands to reason that there must exist a rational number to represent the diagonal of a square. This thinking is very similar to Pythagorus. However, a student of Pythagorus presented a logical argument that indicated that no such rational number exists. So, which prevailed? They both did. Greeks simply accepted it as a paradox. It was many years later before Pythagorus was shown conclusively to be wrong because he made the assumption that an infinite number meant that every conceivable number exists.

    The biggest assumption that Fermi makes, I think, is that sapiency is a function of intelligence and brain capacity. This has not been conclusively show by any means.

    Another nobel prize winning astrophysicist, Stephen Hawking, has postulated that we could be alone in the universe, not because of Sagan, but because Fermi’s assumptions were wrong.

  6. I believe that the Fermi postulation is a valuable platform from which to digress in casting an eye toward the enigma of where we go from here.

    We have the highest standard of living for the poverty class in the world and we flog ourselves aimlessly for still having poverty. We pay mightily for indolence and various degrees of depravity as we shrink the opportunity to escape poverty and enter the marketplace through responsibility and entrepreneurship.

    Adam Smith noted that; “The man of system…is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it… He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it.”

    Smith is speaking to the conceit of the mathematician or cosmologist when he busies himself making assumptions and postulations based upon his ability to speak mystical babble and then defend it with additional mystical babble piled higher and deeper.

    The world does not spin on an axis of supreme intellectualism. It is populated with a much more basic form of human creature whose “common sense” is informed far outside of the academy.

    Probable-Possible, my black hen,
    She lays eggs in the Relative When.
    She doesn’t lay eggs in the Positive Now
    Because she’s unable to postulate how. – Frederick Winsor

    We have begun to approach the limits of absurdity by believing we can positively manipulate our posterity by employing ever increasing government prognostications and the consequent regulations that result.

  9. @3: I remember the PDP 11/70… and the IBM /360 and the IBM 1130. I’ve used keypunch machines and paper tape. I think I’m old.

    I built a little test fixture at work using an Arduino board with a 32-bit ARM processor, 96K RAM, and 512K of FLASH. Coding is done in C++ and the board costs just over $40. I can remember when a box of floppy disks could cost $40.

    It would be interesting to ponder at what point computing progress no longer relied on government projects. Early on, computing was too expensive for anyone other than government, universities, and big companies. Now it seems that much progress is driven by competition for consumer dollars.

  12. @ Heliotrope: There is a difference between natural rights libertarianism and utilitarian liberalism. The former are more along the lines of the Founders: personal liberty is the will of God. The latter is along the lines of Ayn Rand: personal liberty is the most efficient arrangement we know of.

    I, too, have grave reservations about some libertarian goals: the vision of a borderless world, for instance, is insane to me.

    I believe that liberty is a divine mandate: Man is meant to be free. Is it any coincidence that Christianity gained most of its members from the salves of the Romans? Still, mankind is fragile, and there is always temptation to use freedom to better ourselves at the wrongful expense of others. Mankind needs some limits, but freedom to move within those limits as we please. And those limits need to be as spacious as possible.

  13. But in terms of borders, Sean, couldn’t it also be argued that borders are artificially-drawn lines?

    I mean, let’s say I walk in a very sandy desert in Southern Arizona, and there’s no border fence. I suddenly end up in Mexico…does it make that sand any less sandy just because it’s now “Mexican” sand as opposed to “American” sand?

  14. Mankind needs some limits, but freedom to move within those limits as we please. And those limits need to be as spacious as possible.

    But only where the limits of those boundaries are enforced absolutely, with zero tolerance for their violation.

  15. @ Paul: Ok, let’s say that we did not have borders between Mexico and the U.S., and the U.S. and Canada.

    Congratulations, you now have free access into three countries. Three countries that have undefined physical boundaries, and thus difficult to define as “countries.”

    You can now go back and forth between these three countries without the hassle of going through customs or a border checkpoint. Your comings and goings are now anonymous to the governments of all three countries. No one will take note of when you arrive and leave, what (and who) you enter and leave these countries with. No one to stop you if you break one country’s laws and decide to escape their jurisdiction.

    Do you see why some people may be more than a little hesitant to embrace a borderless world?

  18. I have a pic somewhere of a receipt in 1905 for a brand-new, state-of-the-art Underwood Model-5 typewriter; it was $100 in-cash. That’s approx. 5-oz. of Gold back then. In today’s US Dollar that’s nearly $7000 in current-dollars or $7500 in Gold — for a standard desk-top typewriter that today you can buy at the yard-sale or flea market for $10.

    In 1992, I paid nearly $4000. for a Compaq laptop that ran at 25Mhz with a grayscale screen and 209Mb hard-drive…with an accessory 5-1/2″ floppy-drive.

    I have a Kaypro-10 “portable computer” from the late 1980s’ that’s the size and weight of a sewing-machine and has a 6-inch screen, monochrome and text-only. It has a 10Mb harddrive that at the time we bought it we wondered what we could possibly need 10Mb of memory for….

  19. Anyone else remember the Lotus floppy disk swapping?

    Bought a Packard Bell 888 in 1988 for $888. I thought I was a computer god when I was able to ‘unlock’ the upper registers of the 1 MB of RAM! I still have that machine, the boxes, the original floppies and the documentation. I wonder if it is worth any money now.

  20. Borders wouldn’t matter as much if there was not welfare/dole, but standards and property rights existed.

    The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money. The problem with open borders is that eventually the Third World runs out of First World countries to flee to.

  21. One aspect of “borders” which really bothers me are the great differences between reciprocity equality on either side. So far as I am concerned, any Canadian, Mexican, Saudi, etc. in the US should be extended no courtesy of law more lenient than an American would receive in the home country of the visitor.

    On the reverse side, no visitor should be granted the privileges and immunities of a citizen of the United States. They are not a part of We the People covered by the Constitution.

    Refugee status should be an important hallmark in the land of the free and the home of the brave, but it should be carefully monitored, transparent and easily reversed based on cause.