My oldest 'in use' system is an old P133MHz/96MB RAM system that happily runs eCS(repackaging of OS/2 v4.0), but I also have a 386/25MHz I'm prepping for use.
(It has 2 x high-speed UARTs, so I want to use it for serial logging, and I also happen to own this card: http://www.jschoenfeld.com/products/catweasel_e.htm which really needs a good home...)
Being a science reporter today seems to mean 'was able to switch on the GPS and use it to travel to the tech show'... And if it's a 'fuzzy, huggy' show(green tech, school fairs, maker faires and so on), it seems that sending out an intern is 'good enough' for most... You know, they have to save the 'real' journalists for the important news, such as who is sleeping with who, got divorced, is using drugs, or the fact that yet another Homeland Security droid screwed up at an airport and nicked an iPod or groped a woman.
Journalists or wannabees that cover these things never have the articles checked for correct science, only spelling, grammar and readability.
(It's a test to see if they can be trusted with more serious cases like firemen rescuing cats out of trees and such.)
I never understood why firemen don't get cats out of trees with a quick blast of a fire hose.
That would probably discourage cats from doing it again but OMG the uproar from cat lovers would give the nitwit news brigades several field days worth of reporting.
I never understood why firemen don't get cats out of trees with a quick blast of a fire hose.
I suspect it has to do with the time and effort to put the hose away. I did a few quick experiments and fought almost any hose that will reach will move just about any cat out of just about any location, and quickly.
In the course of which I tested the myth about cats "always landing on their feet"; with the proper english or sidespin they can be made to land in just about any orientation.
Also below a minimum height, cats CANNOT land on their feet, and get very annoyed and run away after only several dozen repetitions.
Unfortunately I was unable to test the British technique for measuring rooms by swinging cats, as in "big enough to swing a cat in", as they had all run away by that time.
Also below a minimum height, cats CANNOT land on their feet, and get very annoyed and run away after only several dozen repetitions.
I believe that is slightly under 3' in height?
(Yes, someone actually researched it, and even used high-speed cameras to film what the cat did... Science.. don't you just love it... ;-)
And the show Brainica that ran on Discovery Channel once tested the 'room enough to swing a cat', but the pansies used a plushy instead of a real cat, so their results can't be trusted.
(The weight was wrong, which affects how you pivot your body during the swing. Possibly, the cat is able to bend its body, too, if it's swung at a low speed?)
No study on the mysterious processor frequency rate reduction for the past 10 years?
1980-8088 = 2mhz.
1990-pentium = 75mhz.
2000-pentium4 = 3ghz
2010-Core i7 = 3ghz ****STAGNANT PROCESSOR DEVELOPMENT SINCE 2000*****
Uhh, we did NOT hit mores law wall yet. nor will we.
In case anyone's wondering the internal speeds _are_ increasing, its just that a chip/system wide clock speed is limited by the speed of light (half a clock cycle at 3GHz on a PCB is about an inch). Modern processors use transistors with switching times of a few ps IIRC - a local clock of 100GHz would be possible but could only remain coherent over a fraction of a square mm. Clock-skew across the chip is a major issue in VLSI design now.
Anyway back to the subject: its an indication of the poor state of science journalism - and in particular the lack of any fact-checking by news agencies who propagate 'interesting sounding' stories world-wide in hours. According to a recent article on the BBC news website on rare earths they claimed that a major use of the element lanthanum is hybrid car engines. In fact its the major consistuent of NiMH batteries (its the commonest choice for the metal M)... Even 1 minute check on wikipedia would have put them straight but 'news consumers' aren't apparently worth that much effort...
I sympathise for the poor guy at the centre of this story because he's been let down by a succession of people who could and should have spotted the error and nipped this media frenzy in the bud.
"...tested the myth about cats "always landing on their feet"
As a young lad I had to do those experiments in "feline dynamics" as well.
It just bugged me that supposedly "for every action there is an equal and
opposite reaction". So how could they do it? What were they pushing against?.
Experiment made it all clear and I also found they need a minimum height drop in
order to pull it off.
Hmm...wonder if we could build a catbot that can do that...
"...measuring rooms by swinging cats, as in "big enough to swing a cat in""
and Erco:
"My favorite unwritten children's book: "Some Kittens Can Fly".
Cat based measuring systems and cat ballistics were strictly disallowed after my
parents witnessed the first experiments.
P.S. I actually like cats. What makes my stomach churn is all those millions of
supposedly cute and humorous cat photos on the net with dumb captions added.
It's disrespectful of cats. Why do we insist on belittling these superior
beings?
"feline dynamics" ... a catbot that can do that...
Cat based measuring systems and cat ballistics
... cute and humorous cat photos on the net with dumb captions added.
NOW yer talkin'!
Certain research, using a red laser pointer, indicates that cats can accelerate to two to three meters per second on a level surface, but cannot make 90 degree turn in either direction left or right, and end up skidding on the smooth tile surface and smashing into the wall. Repeatedly.
However, the SAME set of cats were capable making a 90 degree turn STRAIGHT UP at the same wall. Sometimes they could two, maybe three meters. Unfortunately the batteries ran out before accurate measurements could be recorded.
A green laser pointer did not yield the same results. I wonder if the green laser pointer is not as visible to the cats' black and white vision?
What parts of the cat need to be simulated in a catbot? I think the "meow" is necessary, as the Doppler shift is useful in determining velocity, distance, and rate of rotation.
Every couple of months I get a call from some patent (busting) attorney looking to find prior art for a patent they're defending against. Old books are a gold mine for them, because books have a verifiable availability date, and they fill the PO's requirement for a widely published resource. If the "invention" is described in enough detail in the book, and the dates of publication and patent filing fall into place, the idea becomes prior art. The patent is effectively invalidated.
In a 1988 book I briefly mention using small lasers to -- among other things -- entertain and exercise animals (it works with most dogs, too). I was hardly the first to think of the idea. If this "method of exercising a cat" patent had ever gone to litigation it might have been disallowed, based on previously published disclosure. They did not reference my book in their patent, which had been out in wide circulation for at least five years before their initial filing.
It's not clear that the patent was filed as a serious contender. Sometimes these types of patents are filed to fill out a portfolio, or simply to prevent someone else from doing it, and disrupting their business (was this filer an importer of penlight lasers, for example?). In some cases the filer has no intention of enforcing the patent.
As a point of interest, this particular (and now well known) patent expired four years ago. Apparently its filers lost interest and didn't pay the maintenance fee.
I think some patents are filed just to demonstrate how out-of-control the patent process is.[..]
Yep. In 2001 an Australian lawyer patented the wheel just to show how broken the system is (easily found by A Famous Web Search Engine). Afterwards (after the publicity) the patent office complained about the lawyer not having been truthful about the originality of the invention.
In case anyone's wondering the internal speeds _are_ increasing, its just that a chip/system wide clock speed is limited by the speed of light (half a clock cycle at 3GHz on a PCB is about an inch).
Oh no, don't even start this up. For the sake of letting this thread die, im just going to say that most signals don't travel over an inch. Do you have ANY idea the REAL size of a i7 DIE? You will find all the moron speak you want, because its out there in abundance, afterall they must explain their lack of progress with the billions of dollars with which they research.
Moron speak, which will reinforce the excuse for a lack of progress, add that to the fact that intel is continually increasing DIE size to compensate for a lack of following mores law... and you have most people happily satisfied that all is ok.
You CAN make it look like you are following mores law, by increasing the DIE size.
Most electrons that propagate through a chip, rarely go long distances before they reach the slowdown in the semiconductor(even this could be made into a speed UP), let alone any odd long distance traces, even the memory controller is being cpu integrated.
And you are seriously accepting this info as excuse? What about laser interconnects, (which intel has had that tech for decades) inter cpu radio transmission, etc. We have many avenues of eliminating the many barriers that our BILLION DOLLAR COMPANIES LIKE INTEL have no problem with researching AT ALL.
PERIOD.
But morons will repeat morons into eternity, to make themselves feel better about the lack of progress that is going on, all around them. So they can be happy about the 3ghz cpu they just overpaid for.
Clock Loop,
You should look up what Moore's Law actual is, because it really has nothing to do with performance or clock rates. It's all about transistor density. Also, the Quad Core i7 die is about 263mm on a side (so just over an inch by just over an inch).
Also, I hope you don't think I am a moron, because I don't agree with you at all on this topic.
I didn't realize Moore's was a mandate of what semiconductor businesses had to do. I thought they were in it to make money.
In my opinion using terms like "moron speak" weakens your argument (as does most name calling in a debate).
Do they need an excuse not to follow Moore's law? I don't understand why they have to explain their lack of progress. (They probably have to explain lots of things to shareholders but I image shareholders care more about how much profit they make than how fast the processors are.)
I'm also disappointed processors haven't been getting faster. I personally don't know how to solve the problem. I don't know the reasons semiconductor businesses haven't been able to make faster processors but I bet their decisions are financially motivated. I doubt they worry much about Moore's law.
"But morons will repeat morons into eternity"
If one of us quotes a semiconductor business, does that make us a moron?
Duane,
Processors have been getting faster. Just not higher in clock rates. Today's Core i7 CPUs run circles around old school Northwood/Prescott Pentium 4's even though their clock rates are lower by default.
The speed of light is an important issue today. In 1ns light only manages to crawl about 1ft. That is going to limit your computer to 6Ghz if your memory is one inch away from your CPU. In most computers the memory is further away than that.
Having optical or whatever connection does not help with that fundamental limit.
"Moores Law" is no such thing. It was just an observation at the time.
Clock Loop,
You should look up what Moore's Law actual is, because it really has nothing to do with performance or clock rates. It's all about transistor density. Also, the Quad Core i7 die is about 263mm on a side (so just over an inch by just over an inch).
I assume you meant 26.3mm each side? as 263mm on each side would be larger than some motherboards?
If so, then 26.3mm is EXACTLY one inch... One Norwegian inch, but still an inch.
The Swedish 'Working inch' was 24.74mm(small hands on the Swedes, it seems) until they went for a 'metric inch' of 29.69mm...
I remember seeing a picture of a DIGITAL Alpha chip once, and the clock alone took up around a quarter of the die. That's what was needed to 'push' the signal around the die and to all parts without distortion.
I think some marketing drones once noticed that their competitors all sold computers with 64KB RAM/ROM, and looked at the specifications of their own product and noticed 'Hey, we've got a whopping 65 Thousand of them litle thingies and the others only have 64, let's use that!'
(This was back in the days of the 8bit)
I think the entire home computing press (and thousands upon thousands of proto-geeks, too... ) laughed themselves silly over it. And that's probably who and why there so much push to bring 'metric' standards into the computing industry...
It was still in the textbooks when I learnt carpentry back in 84... Gosh, maybe I'm obsolete?
Not you, I think, but maybe your textbooks.. the old Norwegian inch was 26.14mm or 26.15mm (before or after ~1870), 26.3 was much older. As far as I know the official Norwegian inch changed to the SI inch when it was introduced, somewhere around 1959. All my old carpenter rulers ("tomstokk") that I checked used 25.4mm, but a colleague owns one from the seventies which uses 26.15mm. It could be one specially made for boat builders - if you want to build an old wooden boat you'll want one with 26.15mm inches. He told me though that in construction (building) it wasn't unusual to use the 26.15mm definition way into the 1990's.
I for one wish most of the old non-metric measurements good riddance, we don't need another Mars lander incident. I can even stomach the new SI definition of MB, I can manage to write MiB when I want to use the value we computer folks need. :-)
It wouldn't surprise me if the boatbuilders used the old Norwegian inches a while after the change, so yeah...
I really should know about it as my father was a boatbuilder, and his father after him.
(My father learned the craft at Skorgenes, later 'Tresfjord Boats' back before the advent of plastic. He even exported a fair few but had to stop when fibreglass boats started flooding the market. Of course, most of his boats still floats, but the fibreglass boats from that time have mostly rotted away. My grandfather took over after that as he 'needed something to do' and his eyesight wasn't good enough for him to continue as a tailor. I doubt he ever used a decent ruler, though... )
But unless you're using some very special formers(templates made of wood placed along the keel to help the boat hold its shape, when building a wooden hull, it probably doesn't matter all that much which inch you use as long as it's consistent.
MiB? That acronym always makes me think of a movie...
My apologies, the Quad Core i7 die is really closer to one inch by half inch in size (not one inch by one inch. Of course, it varies in size based on the amount of cache and that doesn't count the variant that has the GPU built in (those are larger).
The size of one core on that die is in about 1/4 inch by 1/4 inch, but they do all have interconnects that run the length of the chip.
There is a finite speed depending on the design process that determines the ultimate clock speed. BUT that's only for 1 clock stage. What I mean is... for example:
A 180nm process might have a maximum clock speed of around 300MHz ... this is due more to parasitic capacitance in the layout itself. So how do you get clocks above that? It's possible, and it's done all the time.
The trick is to setup what's called a ring oscillator with various 'taps' ... each tap represents a slightly different amount of Phase delay from the 300MHz clock. Each tap is buffered and OR'd into a single output or 'master clock'... for example a 300MHz clock with three taps placed so that the propagation delay between them was about 1.1ns would effectively yield a 900MHz clock ,,, 4 taps placed 833ps would yield 1.2GHz
So now that you have a clock from essentially a singular source, what you have to consider now is the 'time of flight' it takes that clock signal to propagate from point A to point B.
Think about fiber optics.... with todays speeds you can quite literally have the 'optic cable' act as a memory device. What I mean is that when you send data over a fiber optic line. As soon as it leaves your computer, the data is in transit propagating through the line before it ever reaches it's destination.
In a way the clock signal or the data becomes a FIFO (First In First Out) the 'speed' at the beginning is the same 'speed' as it is at the end, however there is an initial propagation delay... the same sort of thing happens over a fiber optic line and even within the IC from one side of the chip to the other usually just causing an error in Phase delay. ... but it's the propagation delay due to parasitic capacitance and IR drop (<--current drop over distance due to resistance). Dealing with the speed of light at the moment is the least of our concerns.
Comments
(It has 2 x high-speed UARTs, so I want to use it for serial logging, and I also happen to own this card: http://www.jschoenfeld.com/products/catweasel_e.htm which really needs a good home...)
Being a science reporter today seems to mean 'was able to switch on the GPS and use it to travel to the tech show'... And if it's a 'fuzzy, huggy' show(green tech, school fairs, maker faires and so on), it seems that sending out an intern is 'good enough' for most... You know, they have to save the 'real' journalists for the important news, such as who is sleeping with who, got divorced, is using drugs, or the fact that yet another Homeland Security droid screwed up at an airport and nicked an iPod or groped a woman.
Journalists or wannabees that cover these things never have the articles checked for correct science, only spelling, grammar and readability.
(It's a test to see if they can be trusted with more serious cases like firemen rescuing cats out of trees and such.)
That would probably discourage cats from doing it again but OMG the uproar from cat lovers would give the nitwit news brigades several field days worth of reporting.
I suspect it has to do with the time and effort to put the hose away. I did a few quick experiments and fought almost any hose that will reach will move just about any cat out of just about any location, and quickly.
In the course of which I tested the myth about cats "always landing on their feet"; with the proper english or sidespin they can be made to land in just about any orientation.
Also below a minimum height, cats CANNOT land on their feet, and get very annoyed and run away after only several dozen repetitions.
Unfortunately I was unable to test the British technique for measuring rooms by swinging cats, as in "big enough to swing a cat in", as they had all run away by that time.
I believe that is slightly under 3' in height?
(Yes, someone actually researched it, and even used high-speed cameras to film what the cat did... Science.. don't you just love it... ;-)
And the show Brainica that ran on Discovery Channel once tested the 'room enough to swing a cat', but the pansies used a plushy instead of a real cat, so their results can't be trusted.
(The weight was wrong, which affects how you pivot your body during the swing. Possibly, the cat is able to bend its body, too, if it's swung at a low speed?)
-browz
Don't make the climb if you can't do the time.
In case anyone's wondering the internal speeds _are_ increasing, its just that a chip/system wide clock speed is limited by the speed of light (half a clock cycle at 3GHz on a PCB is about an inch). Modern processors use transistors with switching times of a few ps IIRC - a local clock of 100GHz would be possible but could only remain coherent over a fraction of a square mm. Clock-skew across the chip is a major issue in VLSI design now.
Anyway back to the subject: its an indication of the poor state of science journalism - and in particular the lack of any fact-checking by news agencies who propagate 'interesting sounding' stories world-wide in hours. According to a recent article on the BBC news website on rare earths they claimed that a major use of the element lanthanum is hybrid car engines. In fact its the major consistuent of NiMH batteries (its the commonest choice for the metal M)... Even 1 minute check on wikipedia would have put them straight but 'news consumers' aren't apparently worth that much effort...
I sympathise for the poor guy at the centre of this story because he's been let down by a succession of people who could and should have spotted the error and nipped this media frenzy in the bud.
As a young lad I had to do those experiments in "feline dynamics" as well.
It just bugged me that supposedly "for every action there is an equal and
opposite reaction". So how could they do it? What were they pushing against?.
Experiment made it all clear and I also found they need a minimum height drop in
order to pull it off.
Hmm...wonder if we could build a catbot that can do that...
"...measuring rooms by swinging cats, as in "big enough to swing a cat in""
and Erco:
"My favorite unwritten children's book: "Some Kittens Can Fly".
Cat based measuring systems and cat ballistics were strictly disallowed after my
parents witnessed the first experiments.
P.S. I actually like cats. What makes my stomach churn is all those millions of
supposedly cute and humorous cat photos on the net with dumb captions added.
It's disrespectful of cats. Why do we insist on belittling these superior
beings?
NOW yer talkin'!
Certain research, using a red laser pointer, indicates that cats can accelerate to two to three meters per second on a level surface, but cannot make 90 degree turn in either direction left or right, and end up skidding on the smooth tile surface and smashing into the wall. Repeatedly.
However, the SAME set of cats were capable making a 90 degree turn STRAIGHT UP at the same wall. Sometimes they could two, maybe three meters. Unfortunately the batteries ran out before accurate measurements could be recorded.
A green laser pointer did not yield the same results. I wonder if the green laser pointer is not as visible to the cats' black and white vision?
What parts of the cat need to be simulated in a catbot? I think the "meow" is necessary, as the Doppler shift is useful in determining velocity, distance, and rate of rotation.
-Tor
Yet another example of the utter stupidity of the people running the U.S. Patent system. But that is another discussion for another day...
Bean
In a 1988 book I briefly mention using small lasers to -- among other things -- entertain and exercise animals (it works with most dogs, too). I was hardly the first to think of the idea. If this "method of exercising a cat" patent had ever gone to litigation it might have been disallowed, based on previously published disclosure. They did not reference my book in their patent, which had been out in wide circulation for at least five years before their initial filing.
It's not clear that the patent was filed as a serious contender. Sometimes these types of patents are filed to fill out a portfolio, or simply to prevent someone else from doing it, and disrupting their business (was this filer an importer of penlight lasers, for example?). In some cases the filer has no intention of enforcing the patent.
As a point of interest, this particular (and now well known) patent expired four years ago. Apparently its filers lost interest and didn't pay the maintenance fee.
-- Gordon
I assume the patent trolls will now be monitoring playgrounds around the country for infringing behavior.
-Phil
-Tor
Oh no, don't even start this up. For the sake of letting this thread die, im just going to say that most signals don't travel over an inch. Do you have ANY idea the REAL size of a i7 DIE? You will find all the moron speak you want, because its out there in abundance, afterall they must explain their lack of progress with the billions of dollars with which they research.
Moron speak, which will reinforce the excuse for a lack of progress, add that to the fact that intel is continually increasing DIE size to compensate for a lack of following mores law... and you have most people happily satisfied that all is ok.
You CAN make it look like you are following mores law, by increasing the DIE size.
Most electrons that propagate through a chip, rarely go long distances before they reach the slowdown in the semiconductor(even this could be made into a speed UP), let alone any odd long distance traces, even the memory controller is being cpu integrated.
And you are seriously accepting this info as excuse? What about laser interconnects, (which intel has had that tech for decades) inter cpu radio transmission, etc. We have many avenues of eliminating the many barriers that our BILLION DOLLAR COMPANIES LIKE INTEL have no problem with researching AT ALL.
PERIOD.
But morons will repeat morons into eternity, to make themselves feel better about the lack of progress that is going on, all around them. So they can be happy about the 3ghz cpu they just overpaid for.
You should look up what Moore's Law actual is, because it really has nothing to do with performance or clock rates. It's all about transistor density. Also, the Quad Core i7 die is about 263mm on a side (so just over an inch by just over an inch).
Also, I hope you don't think I am a moron, because I don't agree with you at all on this topic.
In my opinion using terms like "moron speak" weakens your argument (as does most name calling in a debate).
Do they need an excuse not to follow Moore's law? I don't understand why they have to explain their lack of progress. (They probably have to explain lots of things to shareholders but I image shareholders care more about how much profit they make than how fast the processors are.)
I'm also disappointed processors haven't been getting faster. I personally don't know how to solve the problem. I don't know the reasons semiconductor businesses haven't been able to make faster processors but I bet their decisions are financially motivated. I doubt they worry much about Moore's law.
"But morons will repeat morons into eternity"
If one of us quotes a semiconductor business, does that make us a moron?
Duane
Processors have been getting faster. Just not higher in clock rates. Today's Core i7 CPUs run circles around old school Northwood/Prescott Pentium 4's even though their clock rates are lower by default.
Having optical or whatever connection does not help with that fundamental limit.
"Moores Law" is no such thing. It was just an observation at the time.
I assume you meant 26.3mm each side? as 263mm on each side would be larger than some motherboards?
If so, then 26.3mm is EXACTLY one inch... One Norwegian inch, but still an inch.
The Swedish 'Working inch' was 24.74mm(small hands on the Swedes, it seems) until they went for a 'metric inch' of 29.69mm...
I remember seeing a picture of a DIGITAL Alpha chip once, and the clock alone took up around a quarter of the die. That's what was needed to 'push' the signal around the die and to all parts without distortion.
The official SI inch is 25.4 mm
-Tor
Besides, SI,don't they define a KiloByte as '1000', too?
http://xkcd.com/394/
I think some marketing drones once noticed that their competitors all sold computers with 64KB RAM/ROM, and looked at the specifications of their own product and noticed 'Hey, we've got a whopping 65 Thousand of them litle thingies and the others only have 64, let's use that!'
(This was back in the days of the 8bit)
I think the entire home computing press (and thousands upon thousands of proto-geeks, too... ) laughed themselves silly over it. And that's probably who and why there so much push to bring 'metric' standards into the computing industry...
I for one wish most of the old non-metric measurements good riddance, we don't need another Mars lander incident. I can even stomach the new SI definition of MB, I can manage to write MiB when I want to use the value we computer folks need. :-)
-Tor
I really should know about it as my father was a boatbuilder, and his father after him.
(My father learned the craft at Skorgenes, later 'Tresfjord Boats' back before the advent of plastic. He even exported a fair few but had to stop when fibreglass boats started flooding the market. Of course, most of his boats still floats, but the fibreglass boats from that time have mostly rotted away. My grandfather took over after that as he 'needed something to do' and his eyesight wasn't good enough for him to continue as a tailor. I doubt he ever used a decent ruler, though... )
But unless you're using some very special formers(templates made of wood placed along the keel to help the boat hold its shape, when building a wooden hull, it probably doesn't matter all that much which inch you use as long as it's consistent.
MiB? That acronym always makes me think of a movie...
The size of one core on that die is in about 1/4 inch by 1/4 inch, but they do all have interconnects that run the length of the chip.
There is a finite speed depending on the design process that determines the ultimate clock speed. BUT that's only for 1 clock stage. What I mean is... for example:
A 180nm process might have a maximum clock speed of around 300MHz ... this is due more to parasitic capacitance in the layout itself. So how do you get clocks above that? It's possible, and it's done all the time.
The trick is to setup what's called a ring oscillator with various 'taps' ... each tap represents a slightly different amount of Phase delay from the 300MHz clock. Each tap is buffered and OR'd into a single output or 'master clock'... for example a 300MHz clock with three taps placed so that the propagation delay between them was about 1.1ns would effectively yield a 900MHz clock ,,, 4 taps placed 833ps would yield 1.2GHz
So now that you have a clock from essentially a singular source, what you have to consider now is the 'time of flight' it takes that clock signal to propagate from point A to point B.
Think about fiber optics.... with todays speeds you can quite literally have the 'optic cable' act as a memory device. What I mean is that when you send data over a fiber optic line. As soon as it leaves your computer, the data is in transit propagating through the line before it ever reaches it's destination.
In a way the clock signal or the data becomes a FIFO (First In First Out) the 'speed' at the beginning is the same 'speed' as it is at the end, however there is an initial propagation delay... the same sort of thing happens over a fiber optic line and even within the IC from one side of the chip to the other usually just causing an error in Phase delay. ... but it's the propagation delay due to parasitic capacitance and IR drop (<--current drop over distance due to resistance). Dealing with the speed of light at the moment is the least of our concerns.