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Written by Administrator
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Tuesday, 04 March 2008 |
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Filed under: Storage  Oh sure, there's a million and one ways to rightfully cram an SD card into an ExpressCard slot, but does your current multicard reader provide continuous backups out-of-the-box? SanDisk is certainly hoping not, as it's waving its nifty FlashBack Adapter around at CeBIT and boasting of its ability to "automatically and continuously back up and encrypt critical data onto an SD flash memory card." Put simply, this device enables you to access the recent copies of your most important files should your system crash or become doused with any number of liquids while working. On a positive note, this thing will indeed play nice with SDHC cards; unfortunately, it's made to work seamlessly with Windows only. Still, you suits out there can snap one up in Q2 for $29.99 and simultaneously vaporize any hope of using computer failure as an excuse for not doing work. Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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Written by Administrator
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Tuesday, 04 March 2008 |
Science fiction writer and mathematician Rudy Rucker takes a running swing at the idea of the Singularity, the moment in human history when we disassemble raw matter, turn it into "computronium" and upload ourselves to it, inhabiting a simulation of reality rather than real reality. It's a fine and provocative turn from our Mr Rucker, who has a fine and provocative and deeply weird and wonderful mind.
Although it's a cute idea, I think computronium is a fundamentally spurious concept, an unnecessary detour. Matter, just as it is, carries out outlandishly complex chaotic quantum computations just by sitting around. Matter isn't dumb. Every particle everywhere everywhen is computing at the maximum possible rate. I think we tend to very seriously undervalue quotidian reality...
This would be like filling in wetlands to make a multiplex theater showing nature movies, clear-cutting a rainforest to make a destination eco-resort, or killing an elephant to whittle its teeth into religious icons of an elephant god.
This is because there are no shortcuts for nature's computations. Due to a property of the natural world that I call the "principle of natural unpredictability," fully simulating a bunch of particles for a certain period of time requires a system using about the same number of particles for about the same length of time. Naturally occurring systems don't allow for drastic shortcuts.
Link
(via Futurismic)
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Blog 
Here's a nice bit of gamer humor from Kim Plowright: Warcraft is "crack you ingest through your fingers." There's an accompanyng needlepoint pattern, suitable for framing.
