Scott2006
I Love 'Our Scotland'
Joined: 10 Oct 2006
Posts: 305
Location: Outside Glasgow
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 Posted: Fri Jun 29, 2007 9:06 pm Post subject: How will politics be changed by Information and Intelligence |
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Politics and political discussion and debate is going to be changed by the greater and some predict faster, advances in all forms of information in its raw form and intelligence in its applied form.
The Security as a function of a permanent state of insecurity and "International Rogue Elements" as a scare and ever-present reality -has replaced the Cold War fear of annihilation at any moment, most noteably during the Cuban missle crisis, and the Military-Industrial-Complex gets stronger and more knowing.
The great universities which once gave the elites of societies a grounding in all knowledge thought important - from the end of the middle ages to the enlightenment - are now heading at brake neck pace to a future where a specialist knowledge in a very narrow field is constantly informed by distantly related subjects and new 'breakthroughs' launch newer intellectual property thought-grabs.
Ideas of organisation of a greater breadth of ideas are advancing where the top thinkers and best all-round appliers of cutting-edge parcels of information are making connections which like a rolling snowball enlarge at near exponential rates.
The Humanities are having to react to the faster progress in sciences and applied technologies - and the forces of reactionary conservatism are growing with free thinking liberalism being only of interest at the margin of debate.
The liberal thought process is under attack. The need for free thinking is waning. The regimented exploitation of revealed facts gathered in the name of the status quo where human DNA and individuals identities in all spheres of life are recorded in minute detail. The liberal democracies are lapsing into illiberal informing information states.
The great advance to self-awareness is not a journey being undertaken by the great mass of more than 6 thousand million people, at least not knowingly. The educated top layers of North American, European and Eastern Asian with isolated pockets in the rest of the world are producing life-altering awarenesses where why is an unneccesary question, as, when and how will this new knowledge be of use replace it.
The Security conscious facade of the state hides the growing potential for adding an increasing amount of centralised data held in a multitude of host computers or super-computers with rising levels of complexity and yet also accessible by any agent of the state. Processes once set up to start lead on to some predictable places.
The 'revelations' on the road to understanding and controlling humanity and expectations of arriving at a point where "reversed engineered" brain functions are mostly complete - see a time-line from the observations and calculations of Ray Kurzweil among others of from 2023 to about 2045 when sensory capable supercomputers could reach a level of understanding to dwarf all humanity in comprehension.
Will the rich elite need so many seemingly lesser humans? People have 60 trillion cells or do 60 trillion cells come in a handy human form. Just as we can grow skin and regenerate organs where is the means to regulate growing brains in a frankenstein-expected future possibility? Elvis, Hitler or anyone with viable DNA can someday be reborn or regrown??
A calculation perhaps wrong but possibly correct states that in the 100 years of this 21st century - actual advancing in an exponential form converted to a linear representation suggests across all subjects 20,000 equivalent years of advancement.
One thing among many that you can count on is the growth and complexity of supercomputers if todays accepted best is 100,000 times greater than a personal computer or 1 followed by 5 zeros. Then there is coming a time when 1 followed by 25 zeros, 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times at least more powerful will be the acceptable level of many multiples of totally aware self-actualising super-computers. Will we still be masters? Will we? Will we?
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IBM claims new supercomputer hits three petaflops
Thursday 28th June 2007
Big Blue announces new Blue Gene, claiming it's three times faster than its predecessor, the previous world-leader supercomputer.
| Quote: |
IBM claims it has tripled the speed of the world's fastest supercomputer.
The company's last effort, the Blue Gene/L, was named the fastest supercomputer in the world earlier this week for the third year in a row, claiming the number one spot on the Top500 list at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, for a system based in California running at 280 teraflops.
The new Blue Gene/P is designed to operate continuously at one petaflop, but IBM claims it can be configured to top three petaflops.
"Blue Gene/P marks the evolution of the most powerful supercomputing platform the world has ever known," said Dave Turek, vice president of deep computing at IBM, in a statement.
The Blue Gene/P is based on racks which can be added to as necessary to expand its power. Each chip features four IBM 850 MHz processors, capable of 13.6 billion operations per second. Each six-foot rack, which has 32 boards with 32 chips, can run 13.9 trillion operations per second.
In order to get a petaflop, it would require 72 racks on a high-speed network. Increasing the power to three((doesn't she mean petaflops?)) teraflops will take a 216-rack cluster.
IBM isn't just claiming breakthrough speeds for the Blue Gene, but said that the new version is seven times more energy efficient than any other supercomputer. The new Blue Gene will also feature programming and software upgrades.
The advances in energy efficiency and simplified programming means such high performance computing may be of interest to more commercial users, rather than research, Turek said.
"A new group of commercial users will be able to take advantage of its new, simplified programming environment and unrivaled energy efficiency," said Turek. "We see commercial interest in Blue Gene developing now in energy and finance, for example. This is on course with an adoption cycle -- from government labs to leading enterprises - that we've seen before in the high-performance computing market." |
from the Denverpost.com site
| Quote: | IBM's new supercomputer accelerates technology race
By The Denver Post Article Last Updated: 06/26/2007
Armonk, N.Y. - International Business Machines Corp. introduced a new version of its Blue Gene supercomputer Tuesday that is three times faster than the previous model and consumes 20 percent more energy.
The Blue Gene/P, which can do 1 million billion calculations per second, is about 100,000 times more powerful than a home computer, IBM said Monday in an e-mailed statement.
Supercomputers break down complex tasks, such as mapping seismic activity or designing materials, into small calculations that are processed simultaneously. IBM, the world's biggest computer-services company, has built almost half of the 500 fastest supercomputers, and its previous Blue Gene/L computer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is the fastest, according to a list compiled by scientists.
"There's a computational arms race going on," David Turek, a vice president for IBM's Deep Computing group, said Monday. "This technology is a signpost for what the computing future is all about."
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A near identical article with extra info from livemint.com part of the Wall Street Journal
| Quote: | The supercomputer consists of 6ft tall racks of servers and can be expanded. IBM already has one running at its factory in Rochester, Minnesota.
IBM built 236 of the top 500 fastest supercomputers, according to a ranking compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim in Germany, Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
On the anvil
Meanwhile, two Silicon Valley hardware companies, Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) and Sun Microsystems Inc., have unveiled their own supercomputers in Germany. SGI’s $350,000 (Rs1.44 crore) Altix ICE looks like a refrigerator. In fact, its features include a water-cooling system, akin to a car radiator, designed to keep its 1,000 pounds of electronic components from overheating. Several of the units can be combined for greater processing power. The Altix will run on up to 512 Intel Xeon processors. SGI is positioning the Altix as a workhorse that will run with a minimum fuss rather than as a breakthrough machine designed to set supercomputer records. Other selling points include its relatively small size and low electricity consumption, both increasingly important issues in crowded data centres.
Sun’s Constellation will consist of dozens of blinking cabinets containing a total of 3,456 motherboards all wired together through two central units that will coordinate the processing activity of the entire colossus.
Those two central cabinets will function as switches, controlling the thousands upon thousands of constituent elements that will give the Constellation its computing ability. |
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Scotland deserves a First rate Parliament for a First rate People
The Scottish Parliamentarians who voted for Treaty of Union in 1706 and signed away Independence had been voted for by less than 2% of the Scottish population |
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