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Originally posted by MaskedAvatar
Not only composure, kukla, but you will immediately observe my keen and critical eye with respect to time travel.
I record that the same warp is observable now in the space-time continuum, and while Overlord William will no doubt return with a similar technical hitch explanation, the plot has thickened as to how this has been able to occur twice, and also there would need to be some attempt to correlate this with the activities of WITD Mark II for the purposes of investigative dismissal.
Of course, with the publication of the Nature article, its the hypodermic effect all over agian. You have to admit that JT's ghost writer got awfully lucky with that article's timing. It propagated far and wide, in both websites and publications. I would also remind everyone that submitted articles in academic journals can easily take a year to be approved. *hint*
Having now read his postings in some detail he is definitely:
a) A Heinlein fan.
b) A physics groupie, maybe even a real physicist although I doubt it. As in physics classes definitely, physics major possibly, I doubt a Ph.D.
c) NOT a real computer geek. Going back to get an IBM 5100 "because it can read old IBM languages"? To deal with the "Unix year 2038 problem"? And at the same time, uh, "computers have made tremendous strides" and "people now are amazingly tolerant of bad/unreliable hardware". Finally, his info-life isn't even a creatively enhanced version of what we have now -- it IS what we have now. The web. His GPS even works (hey, show me pictures of your GPS that works -- THAT would be interesting, as would a car from the future or ANY future techno toy:-). I on the other hand fully expect there to be MAJOR information processing revolutions -- full paradigm shifts -- between now and the 2030's, and expect quite a lot of the most interesting ones to concern the development of global electronic culture.
And no no no, there is no way anybody could POSSIBLY care enough about "old IBM languages" for which the 5100 is a presumed portable bridge to send somebody back with a very expensive toy at high risk to retrieve one. I mean, what critical program or information could POSSIBLY exist at that time? Programs -- give me something to program -- anything to program -- and I'll cut programs that supercede the entire code base accessible to pre-1975 computers in six months. Programming is goddamn easy, and the world abounds in good programmers and truly superior programming environments NOW. By 2036, if they've done nothing else they will have created five or sixfold improved programming environments, possibly integrated with at least rudimentary AI.
Lessee, following Moore's Law and being VERY CONSERVATIVE with full TWO YEAR doubling time, we expect 16 doublings in constant-cost power between now and then. That is, an el cheapo personal computer of 2036 ought to be roughly 64000 times more powerful than an el cheapo PC today, just as today's are amazingly some twenty or thirty thousand times more powerful than that good old IBM 5100. With a laptop running at the power equivalency of a few hundred TERAHertz, with local disk storage capable of holding a few petabytes of data (that would be 10^15 bytes), with network capacity to the household reasonably expected to be easily into the gigabyte per second range if not the terabyte per second range, the guy describes "the web" of that time as if it is more or less the same as it is now. No automated realtime videoconferencing. No voice activated, high bandwidth wireless connected PDA's with far more compute, storage, and network capacity than a system currently sitting directly on the T3 cloud. No mention of megalibraries, collation of world-data, AI at all. Bo-ring. Wrong. This guy may be from the future, but not MY future. In my future, war or not, nobody will give a rodent's furry behind about antique IBM code "readable only by an IBM 5100".
What, people suddenly became very, very stupid and couldn't write a decompiler or disassembler for a system that had a literal handful of machine instructions (mind you, I >>learned