Re: too much information!

From: Uncle Al (UncleAl0_at_hate.spam.net)
Date: 01/15/05 

Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2005 16:00:58 -0800

Brad Guth wrote:
>
> For this argument I've estimated there's at most 1% of humanity having
> operational computers,

6.5 billion -> 65 million. I peg it closer to 15% in terms of access
rather than individual ownership. Businesses, governments at all
levels, and schools/universities have an awful lot of hardware.
Upscale cell phones are bottom-feeding computers. Every car/bus/truck
is a network.

> and perhaps as many as 10% of those individual
> PCs are on-line at any one time.

6 million on-line. OK. Probably more given education, government,
and commerce.
 
> 6.5e7 potentially active computers at 100 watts each = 6.5e9 watts, 6.5
> gigawatts

At least double with CRTs, maybe 50% more with LCDs. A Pentium cooks
70 W scratching its ***.
 
> 10% of those PCs being on-line at 10 w/circuit requires another 65e6
> watts, 65 megawatts
>
> 1:1000 internet/intranet servers and mainframes somewhat insures there's
> another 65 megawatts
>
> Avg. lighting, HVAC and transport related considerations should be worth
> another 6.5 gigawatts

After all the pushing and shoving, not unreasonable as conservative
Fermi estimates.
 
> Thus far we've arrived at 13.130 gigawatts without involving printers,
> scanners or copies of documents being reprinted and/or burned onto CDs
> and DVDs. I believe global hardcopy publishing and distribution will
> remain as yet another 10 fold over whatever digital aspects, thus we've
> arrived at 133 gigawatts and climbing. That's 133/6.5 = 20.5 watts per
> every soul upon Earth.

  1) We need more civilian power reactors if we wish to think and
play. A rational civilian fuel recycling plan, too.

  2) Heat emitted from computers and support is approaching heat
emitted from brains and support. We're outsourcing the scut work of
intellect.
 
> Of all that's being stored, transferred, shared, added to, converted
> from hardcopy to digital format, of how much of all that is actually
> necessary isn't 0.0001%.

Sure - consider e-mail and spam alone. I would say 30% of everything
transmitted - not counting spam - is garbage beyond argument. Another
30% is marginally garbage. If you count music and video, 99% is
garbage without argument.

> At least of what's on all my computers amounts
> to perhaps 10 gigabytes, whereas I'd have to honestly say 100 megabytes
> represents what truly matters out of all of what I've got to work with.
> Unfortunately, I know a good number of folks that can't even manage
> their PCs on less than 100 GB hard-drives, whereas the 200GB along with
> another stash of 100+ DVDs and CDs to boot is becoming the current
> minimum standard.

A world bursting with crap. I agree. Vital programming and data
maybe 100 MB on my 20 GB drive. I just ordered a tricked out AMD
Athlon 55-FX 2.6 GHz with 120 GB HDD and 2 GB Corsair extreme DDR
RAM. Windows is a pig. Less the OS, maybe 4 GB of stuff total right
now. I'm assuming the future will be improved means to deteriorated
ends.

You can have my WordStar when you pry it from my cold dead hands.
Give it good hardware and it handles 90,000-line datafiles no
problem. Don't try that with anything from Microcrap unless you have
a copy of "War and Peace" to pass the time.
 
> Going by the internet overdose of graphics, spam, smut, audio and video
> sharing that's almost entirely bogus and/or unrequested, at least I've
> never requested nor intentionally downloaded music or movies, and my
> idea of whatever's smut would be certified by a Nun. I'd have to suggest
> that perhaps at most 0.1% of the average internet traffic load is usable
> and/or generally necessary for humanity to advance upon whatever's being
> shared. The remainder is intellectual crapolla, disinformation or simply
> bogus individuals and their governments taking every possible advantage
> of snookering humanity by way of selectively sharing whatever needs to
> be perpetrated, of whatever is not even theirs to share, much less
> entitled.

Makes one fondly pine for Sturgeon's Law. Sturgeon was an optimist.
Smut is good. It diverts social breakdown. Sex, drugs, hunt, or
homicide.
 
[snip]

> BTW; It takes absolute loads of energy in order to obtain, store,
> transfer, share and to continually upgrade the standards by which newer
> and newer computers and of everything associated (such a massive digital
> displays, theater class screens and eventually millions more of various
> HDTVs) must follow suit, or else you're out of the technological loop.
> Thus soon the global energy demand as for creating such and sustaining
> this primarily luxury growth (most of which the lower 99.9% of humanity
> doesn't require) will become the primary drain upon our limited global
> energy resources. These days, no one fixes anything, they trash whatever
> they have and upgrade.

Quantum limits are being approached. Multiple core CPU's and 64-bit
OS next. To do what, surf 7-bit Usenet? To type a multimedia memo?
To help Uncle Al calculate parity divergence of crystal lattices!
Screw NASA and its 10,000+ Itanium "Columbia" (being upgraded to
Itanium-2 - the original spec was crap). Should have used Opteron
800-series. Uncle Al has been afforded access to a very small piece
of CERN for number crunching. Nice folks - and it wasn't doing
anything anyway.

The working part of society amazes me. I submitted 60 lines of
executable processes, 5-8 hrs/line estimated. As the e-mail sends
another one comes in. Benchmarks from an overachiever who diddled the
executable dropped the time estimates by 8%. Output remained exact to
18 decimal places. If we cleaned up the world there would be mobs
demanding their right to squalor.
 
> I believe there's a breaking point of roughly 2 kw/soul. Surpassing 2
> kw/soul is insuring the demise of the existing energy resources
> sustaining life as we know it, and even that's based upon no further
> aircraft smashing into tall buildings, and of our insane warlords going
> after more of those stealth WMD. Perhaps they should have been going
> after lunar He3 instead of WMD.

When China comes fully on-line the world implodes. We cannot sustain
the US gorging on 40% of the planet's resources and China gorging on
another 100%. I expect the US will lose and the Third World will
end. Call it a push. Europe and russia will be interesting.
 
> Digital files need to be drastically reduced, duplications need to
> become minimized and/or at least centralized via some global intranet
> data bank that's accessed via a Skyship optical network of extremely
> energy efficient and thereby least polluting alternative to any surface
> and/or satellite alternatives.

Who watches the watchers? Those with wealth and power will not
sacrifice for the unwashed mob, nor should they. Death to the unable
by their own hands.

> The average computer and accessory loads
> (including whatever personal environment aspects) will eventually need
> to become limited to 100 watts/unit (with damn few exceptions),

No way. That won't even run the motherboard. Will you create a
computational underclass of users? Those who would benefit most would
be the first to be denied access. Management does not seek genius, it
hunts it to destruction in the name of Korporate Kulture
(self-survival).

> especially if eventually (within a decade from now) 10% of humanity
> becomes PC interfaced with 10% of those being on-line somewhere
> throughout the global net. Thereby less graphical and more raw text
> based data, whereas if the end-user desires to take each and every 100k
> file of perfectly usable information and dress each of those up to
> 100mb, then so be it, but just don't share that sort of meaningless
> garnishment over your intranet, much less over the internet.
>
> Sorry this contribution became such a wall-of-words. Perhaps this
> argument explains as to why our cold-war has refocused upon global
> energy domination.

We are here to conquer not to survive. War is economics spurred on by
birthrate. Absent a new open frontier it will make little difference
what we do. By 2050 First World civilization will be abolished,
smothered within its socialist Ponzi schemes and overrun by
reproductive warriors who value life beneath all else.

Uncle Al says, "Ownership in the 21st century is the ability to
destroy." 

-- 
Uncle Al
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/
 (Toxic URL! Unsafe for children and most mammals)
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/qz.pdf