Considering the difference in size you are very lucky he couldn't compartmentalize the pain and proceed to tear you limb from limb. What a pussy he must have been.
There was one situation in high school when I snapped and beat the crap out of a bully who outweighed me by probably 5-10kg. However, self-preservation would have made me hesitant to attack anyone with that much of a size disparity as 5'4 vs 6'5, unless built like an absolute bean pole.
In any job there is going to be some tedious stuff. During those times, even when away from work, don't you ever get ideas that just pop into your head (e.g. something cool might be possible if I do x,y, and z) and you just have to get the nearest back of an envelope and start designing? Usually that is more fun than doing the routine part of a once interesting job. During those times I think it's good to reward your muse and make a rough design there and then, otherwise you might lose the idea forever.
Note however that I would doubt that it just turns a normal people into a fuckwad, like in the comic strip.
I suspect that the difference is that multiplayer gaming over the internet has been democratized. When I started, it was very much an enthusiast thing. The people who went to Quake LAN parties or played on the internet were future (sometimes current) CS majors, engineers, and other IT people, or at least were going to get a degree somewhere. They were the sorts of people you'd expect to see playing chess during lunch time at school. My experience was that people in general behaved themselves, though in the competitive environment I played in you wouldn't wait to see whether someone was AFK or not, you'd just launch a rocket in their direction. But spawn camping was a no-no, as was any sort of "hacking". I guess part of that went with the whole enthusiast aspect - you are doing something new and groundbreaking, a computer-aided sport, why grief?
Nowadays there are way more blue collar adults, regular kids, and young kids (e.g. 13yos with 13yo levels of maturity) playing these games because computers and net access is cheap, and the games are mainstream. As a consequence, it's a more douche rich environment. That's not to say that the average person from any of these demographics is a dick, or even that there aren't exceptions, but you are going to find higher numbers of douches outside of the nerd/geek set.
They are getting 1 megawatt/4 acres. What does that mean?
That means that rolling that out across the Sahara would yield 57 times the energy needs of the world. That is awesome. If they can make solar power as cheap as coal, the world's energy needs will be solved. Provided of course that we can either make hydrocarbon fuels with that power or improve battery technology and charging infrastructure sufficiently for transport. If that is true then it means that energy probably won't be the limiting factor for economic growth, which has profound implications. Especially if solar can be cheaper than coal.
The other things you mentioned are interesting though I would need a lot more study and expertise to be able to discern whether they are realistic. But on the whole it is very promising. Thanks for the conversation, it has been very interesting.
BTW I was kidding about an intelligent race inhabiting the planet (other than us). But it might be plausible enough to make a movie script.
The idea that "waste not want not" is doable is wrong. The fact is that doing so will lead to an overpopulation catastrophe, and continuing environmental destruction, as is proven. However, proven technologies can solve the problem for at least 1000 years, and near future technologies can solve the problem forever.
I think this needs more fleshing out. Are you referring to the Jevons paradox? It appears as if that would depend on whether there are green taxes in place.
MS has so many problems with FOSS, some of them major.
1. FOSS is free as in beer. And it is eternally free. Software developers, with the possible exception of ($LANGUAGE developers), aren't stupid - there is some IQ floor involved in software development. Even if you give crippleware away, developers know that if they use your stuff it is going to eventually cost them. And if they can get something of near equivalent functionality that is FOSS, they don't have to deal with ever paying the piper. That's more margin for you and yours.
This helps if you are a startup, if you just want to experiment, or if you want to sneak something in at work and not have to ask to spend money. Strange but true - it's orders of magnitude easier to get money from a boss in the form of time to work on something than it is to get authorization to spend equivalent actual dollars on it.
2. FOSS is open source by definition. If you come across some future unanticipated problem, there is potential to hack it until it does if you have the skills.
3. Most FOSS has no vendor lock in (other than stuff like MySQL). Meaning, your development platform can't jerk the rug out from under you by deciding that you are now going to use DAO or ADO, or.NET, or however they've decided to screw you over by obsoleting the work you've done. No vendor lock-in also means they can't dangle you upside down and see how much money falls out.
4. FOSS is often good, and keeps getting better because people keep contributing to it. Once you have used a bit of FOSS, you are often astounded by the quality and that encourages you to use more of it. And that experience leads a person to totally dispense with the "free = crap" heuristic. It's like drinking water from some unspoiled rainforest stream - it is both free and better than the commercial alternative. After a while your own heuristic becomes - "1. Search the FOSS world first. 2. If the best of what you find works well, stop looking."
5. FOSS has a passionate community. If you want help and can google, there is usually a good community around whatever FOSS it is you are interested in. In a genuine community, there is rarely a conflict between the creator of the software and the interests of the community. With a commercial solution, there is always that conflict - users want to pay less money, vendors need money to live.
6. FOSS is hassle free - you want to try it or use it, you just download it. You still have to learn how to use it, but that is no different from a proprietary solution.
7. FOSS OS (and non-MS OS) are renowned for being more stable, secure, powerful and easier to install than Windows once you know how. These attributes suit developers. Running FOSS on top of a FOSS OS is usually easier to install and use, better integrated, and more powerful. There is a virtuous circle going on there.
8. FOSS is trustworthy - you can see the code yourself, and fork it if you want. You may never do this but you know you can, and so do other people.
Why else does MS have a problem? Because university students WILL be exposed to some FOSS software if they do anything related to software. They will use commercial stuff too, but very likely they will learn many of the lessons above. At that point they've already swallowed the red pill. Even if they don't get exposure there their guru friends probably use FOSS.
So maybe an important part the project should be a "lint" utility that reads some form of standardized blueprints and other specs and issues warnings when a "hipster-home" is in violation of local and national building codes, health regulations etc. and maybe even laws of physics?
After spending 6 months diligently searching I finally found a vintage police box from ebay for my replica Tardis and now I have to comply with the laws of physics? WTF!?!
Your first point is actually a good one. The question is how many will be left and is it one or two generations or is it 1000 generations. That remains to be seen.
Knowing how exponential growth works, it doesn't take many generations. Think of applying "trinket culture" as applying antibiotics. The general idea with antibiotics is that you apply a dose that is enough to kill all of the bacteria you want to destroy over time. What you don't want to do is apply just enough that it stops the average pathogen from growing but allows the resistant pathogen to grow nicely, reproducing with other pathogens and spreading resistance to the whole population until your antibiotic no longer works.
The technology exists to solve the oil problem - nuclear, and nuclear gasoline synthesis.
My problem with nuclear energy is that once used you can't make more of it. You can synthesize gasoline. Try synthesizing some uranium, after you have finished with the U235 and U238 that you have used in breeder reactors or shot off into the desert. And thorium and whatever else will work. If humanity needs that sort of extremely dense energy for some sort of future space colonization effort and we've squandered it on flying SUVs, what a contemptible species of idiots we are.
However, I see where you are going with this. I'll answer the following, and continue commenting.
The reality is that the earth gets more solar energy in an hour then we use in a year.
Ok. Let me verify that. Solar radiation entering earth's atmosphere: 174 peta Watts, or 174k tera Watts. World energy consumption = 15 tera Watts. So 174000/15> 265*24. You are right, by 20%. Or more usefully, if we could somehow harvest all this energy it would be 11600 times as much as we currently use.
So, what percentage of the earth could we collect this solar from without covering over something that produces food (e.g. oceans, cropland) or would be impractical due to terrain or covered by forest? I think the only thing that would be practical would be deserts and on top of cities. Deserts cover 1/5 of earth's land surface, which is 148*.2 = 29.6 km^2. Total surface area of earth is 510 km^2. So we have roughly 6% of that area where we can put solar collectors (this is only a ballpark figure as we would have to calculate flux passing through each desert). Now we are down to 673 times as much solar energy as we can harvest. At 19-27% efficiency (wikipedia), (say 20%) that's 134 times as much as we can use. Wow. I'm impressed. I wonder how many other deaths by a thousand cuts that "surplus" will be knocked down by, e.g. impractical terrain, difficulty in storage of the energy, transmission losses, maintenance costs, etc.
But still, the difference in running out of wood, whale oil, ammonia, food compared to the present day is that our actions are having a significant global impact, and potentially a practically irreversible one. As our population grows, we are much closer to being the yeast in the bottle of wine, producing enough pollution to kill ourselves off.
Continuing the comments from before, I see where you are going with this. If you can efficiently use solar power to convert water and carbon dioxide back into a hydrocarbon, you've potentially solved the world's energy problems AND anthropogenic global warming, (if it exists and carbon dioxide is the culprit). Figure out a way to tax the world, and use that tax to build enough excess equipment to produce surplus fuel, which can then be pumped back into the ground. Just dig a big hole in the desert, and pump it in. Perhaps the world's last somewhat intelligent species did that, and all that remains of their civilization is a big heap of oil under a desert somewhere. And because they prioritized building flying SUVs instead of building sustainable off-world colonies, their civilization got completely wiped out by an asteroid/volcanic outbreak/global pandemic/nuc
Wrong. The best way is to develop the world as fast as humanly possible. Why? Because the more resources people consume, the less children they have.
That might work for one or two generations. After the trinket addicts get weeded from the gene pool you will be left with those who forsake trinkets for having children, and higher birthrates as a result. Some sort of legislative solution would be needed long term. Or at least, some compassion shown to those who are responsible enough to self-limit their birthrate instead of to the starving children of irresponsible parents.
More energy then we could ever find a way to use hits the earth from the sun. However, we need to actually use it. Then all 15 billion of us can live in mansions, and drive flying SUVs.
If we have the right to "live our lives to the fullest", why don't future generations have this right? I guess so long as we can hand-wave into existence some vaporware super-efficient solar technology, it's ok to make decisions with irrevocable consequences, such as expending supplies of energy that have been built up over millions of years in the space of a few short decades. Because all hypoethetical technology magically pans out, just like flying cars (or SUVs), affordable hypersonic jet travel, and terahertz CPUs.
The rising cost of helium may make Heliox prohibitively expensive.
Only if you don't recover it. At some price for helium, sucking the exhalations into a compressor, bottling it and selling it back to the gas company for reprocessing becomes cost effective. I don't imagine that recovering the helium would be difficult given the difference in densities between helium and other gases.
Mr. Ebert, I may be far younger than you and I may be far less informed than you but I cannot understand what possesses you to reserve the word art from being applied to games.
The 4,547 comments, of which ~4,200 are disagreeing - I've seen that sort of thing before.
I talked to a guy in Saint Louis once who was a genetic engineer for Monsanto. He didn't believe in evolution.
Not that surprising. Being capable of sustaining epic levels of cognitive dissonance would be needed to be able to work for Monsanto and sleep at night.
Awesome comment. Any tech company with multiple products just has to produce a new product that gets more 5 stars than any other on newegg, Amazon, or the equivalent on $REVIEW_SITE, and the customers will be flocking back again. I'm trying to think of an example of a company that really relies on trust, and that cannot afford to screw up to the same extent. At first I thought - anything that will severely screw over people in the event of failure. Aircraft manufacturers and banks come to mind. NASA. Civil engineers. But then, it all comes back to the Fight Club equation - compare the cost of the screwup to the ability of the company/person to survive the screwup. The only people and organizations who can't afford to screw up are those who will be destroyed by the consequences of the failure. These are individuals, small companies with all their eggs in one basket. If you are a big conglomerate with lots of different products, you can afford to have a dud now and then.
"As long as our hypothetical Blub programmer is looking down the power continuum, he knows he's looking down. Languages less powerful than Blub are obviously less powerful, because they're missing some feature he's used to. But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up. What he sees are merely weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub."
i.e. When a normal or even moderately intelligent person looks at anything a genius does, they see things that are out of the ordinary. Like the hypothetical blub programmer, they see things they don't understand, and those things appear weird to them, even insane. It's different, and therefore eccentric. Well, eccentric is just another word for "deviating from the ordinary". Anyone from moderately intelligent on down has no way to differentiate between an act of superior intelligence and an outright loon.
The only way a non-genius can recognize a genius is through the creation of something that the non-genius can appreciate. e.g. a musical genius creates a song with great hooks, a comic genius makes them laugh harder than anyone else, an engineering genius creates a useful device that no one has thought of before, and that they in turn find useful. A financial genius amasses a hoard of wealth that is obvious to anyone. But everything out of the ordinary that the genius does other than their overt demonstration of genius will appear as nutty to most people, because most people are incapable of understanding the reason for it. And there will be one - pondering things and breaking established convention is just what a genius does.
You can show me all kinds of skelatons in her closet, but can you give me specific examples of her being facist since she took her place at the bench?
Indeed. Just one googling of Sotomayor or Kagan, and it will be immediately obvious that both have waged a lifelong struggle against facism. They will no doubt stand firm lest it once again rear its, err, ugly head.
The only real option available to reduce our carbon footprint, and reduce our dependence on foreign sources of energy, is nuclear power.
There is another option, and that is energy efficiency. Our current profligate rate of energy use will cause us to run out of the stockpiled energy we have in just a few generations. At that point we may need that energy for projects that would have really been useful and not easily doable any other way - infrastructure that has a negligible ongoing energy requirement, exploring and colonizing space, that sort of thing. Instead because energy is so cheap, guys like this (http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1699062&cid=32702164) who are investing in energy reduction measures are laughed at by their friends. Energy is so cheap that the guy I linked to can make an investment in his house that will pay off better than stock market averages, and he is LAUGHED AT by his friends who think he should invest in marble counters and a theater room.
Human civilization managed to grow (and at an exponential rate) well enough without using any fossil fuels. With the engineering knowledge we have now, our standard of living can be vastly higher, without much more in the way of energy use. However, infrastructure has to be designed to conserve energy rather than prioritize convenience or aesthetics. Probably one of the best ways to do that is to gently ramp up energy costs with taxes until the ROI of energy efficient investment becomes a no-brainer. This can be done without causing too much in the way of pain by lowering income and sales taxes in proportion as taxes on energy are raised.
"United States Environmental Protection Agency 2007 certification result reports for all vehicles versus on highway motorcycles (which also includes scooters),[72] the average certified emissions level for 12,327 vehicles tested was 0.734. The average "Nox+Co End-Of-Useful-Life-Emissions" for 3,863 motorcycles tested was 0.8531, for a difference of about 16%, not the claimed 10X factor. Likewise, if one looks at how many of the 2007 motorcycles tested were also catalytic equipped, 54% of them, 2,092, were equipped with a catalytic converter."
Unfortunately, most vehicle registration fees kill the economics of owning something like that. Those fees ought to be eliminated, along with the sales taxes. When compared to a car, every mile traveled in a Supercub is virtually indistinguishable from using a bicycle in terms of fuel consumption and CO2 production. I'd own one, but for the registration fees. With a bit of thought, the safety need not be any worse than a car - wear highly reflective clothing so that other motorists see you, and ride during daylight when it's dry. Otherwise use your car.
Who knows how many people would buy one if they were exempt from registration fees? If gas prices go up 10x, you can still get around. That's good insurance for a couple grand.
Somehow, I think there are more threats to Earth down here than up there..
At least the ones up there might be easily preventable, and immensely catastrophic if not corrected. If we knew an asteroid was on a collision course towards earth, we'd find a way to stop it, given enough time. And it would be worth it.
The threats to earth from down here... most of them are higher probability but less devastating. And doing something to prevent them would mean that people might have to tolerate a bit of discomfort for an (at the time) uncertain result. Their lives would be a little more difficult. Probably not as difficult as any time in history before the 20th century, but difficult enough that the opposition party would be voted in at the next election. Yay for democracy.
So it is highly unlikely that you had a bit flipped on a disk. Would require some amazing circumstances to happen.
Single bit errors happened 10% of the time at CERN. And if we discount a one-off problem with WD drive firmware that caused 80% of errors, this would shoot up to 50%.
Detailed, 3-D simulation of things like nuclear explosions
I've wondered about this for some time. If countries like the USA have enough nukes to nuke the world several times over, and have had that capability for decades now, how are these simulations useful?
The reason it's unacceptable to do the same calculation but have it go 1,000 or 1,000,000 times slower is that these simulations might already take hours, days, weeks, or even longer. Even the longest DoD contract needs an answer to the behavior of a proposed jet fighter wing in less than 1,000,000 days.:)
Going along with what you say... Another thing to consider is that in the process of designing something, you don't just do one simulation and declare it finished. If you knew what the answer would be, you wouldn't be simulating it. In all likelihood, you will experiment by changing variables and see what outputs the simulation gives. Ideally, you will want to iteratively search through combinations of input variables to determine an optimum in terms of output variables. This is a lot better than educated guesswork - you will often be pleasantly surprised by an emergent optimum design that you would never have otherwise considered. If n is the number of input variables and x is the number of divisions in each variable to try, x^n is the number of simulations needed to perform.
Often input variables are actually functions of one another, so you can usually condense n down a bit from your first simulation. But n only condenses down so far. There will still be x^n iterations of the simulation to run, and if each simulation takes a long time, you can see where more computational speed will prove helpful. (time per simulation)*x^n could be very large. And every time you change a variable (e.g. process improvement or mistake fixed), you will have to run the whole thing again. More FLOPS ftw.
Slashdot Mirror
Considering the difference in size you are very lucky he couldn't compartmentalize the pain and proceed to tear you limb from limb. What a pussy he must have been.
There was one situation in high school when I snapped and beat the crap out of a bully who outweighed me by probably 5-10kg. However, self-preservation would have made me hesitant to attack anyone with that much of a size disparity as 5'4 vs 6'5, unless built like an absolute bean pole.
In any job there is going to be some tedious stuff. During those times, even when away from work, don't you ever get ideas that just pop into your head (e.g. something cool might be possible if I do x,y, and z) and you just have to get the nearest back of an envelope and start designing? Usually that is more fun than doing the routine part of a once interesting job. During those times I think it's good to reward your muse and make a rough design there and then, otherwise you might lose the idea forever.
I'd flip Microsoft a gesture but they've probably patented that too.
I suspect that the difference is that multiplayer gaming over the internet has been democratized. When I started, it was very much an enthusiast thing. The people who went to Quake LAN parties or played on the internet were future (sometimes current) CS majors, engineers, and other IT people, or at least were going to get a degree somewhere. They were the sorts of people you'd expect to see playing chess during lunch time at school. My experience was that people in general behaved themselves, though in the competitive environment I played in you wouldn't wait to see whether someone was AFK or not, you'd just launch a rocket in their direction. But spawn camping was a no-no, as was any sort of "hacking". I guess part of that went with the whole enthusiast aspect - you are doing something new and groundbreaking, a computer-aided sport, why grief?
Nowadays there are way more blue collar adults, regular kids, and young kids (e.g. 13yos with 13yo levels of maturity) playing these games because computers and net access is cheap, and the games are mainstream. As a consequence, it's a more douche rich environment. That's not to say that the average person from any of these demographics is a dick, or even that there aren't exceptions, but you are going to find higher numbers of douches outside of the nerd/geek set.
That means that rolling that out across the Sahara would yield 57 times the energy needs of the world. That is awesome. If they can make solar power as cheap as coal, the world's energy needs will be solved. Provided of course that we can either make hydrocarbon fuels with that power or improve battery technology and charging infrastructure sufficiently for transport. If that is true then it means that energy probably won't be the limiting factor for economic growth, which has profound implications. Especially if solar can be cheaper than coal.
The other things you mentioned are interesting though I would need a lot more study and expertise to be able to discern whether they are realistic. But on the whole it is very promising. Thanks for the conversation, it has been very interesting.
BTW I was kidding about an intelligent race inhabiting the planet (other than us). But it might be plausible enough to make a movie script.
I think this needs more fleshing out. Are you referring to the Jevons paradox? It appears as if that would depend on whether there are green taxes in place.
MS has so many problems with FOSS, some of them major.
1. FOSS is free as in beer. And it is eternally free. Software developers, with the possible exception of ($LANGUAGE developers), aren't stupid - there is some IQ floor involved in software development. Even if you give crippleware away, developers know that if they use your stuff it is going to eventually cost them. And if they can get something of near equivalent functionality that is FOSS, they don't have to deal with ever paying the piper. That's more margin for you and yours.
This helps if you are a startup, if you just want to experiment, or if you want to sneak something in at work and not have to ask to spend money. Strange but true - it's orders of magnitude easier to get money from a boss in the form of time to work on something than it is to get authorization to spend equivalent actual dollars on it.
2. FOSS is open source by definition. If you come across some future unanticipated problem, there is potential to hack it until it does if you have the skills.
3. Most FOSS has no vendor lock in (other than stuff like MySQL). Meaning, your development platform can't jerk the rug out from under you by deciding that you are now going to use DAO or ADO, or .NET, or however they've decided to screw you over by obsoleting the work you've done. No vendor lock-in also means they can't dangle you upside down and see how much money falls out.
4. FOSS is often good, and keeps getting better because people keep contributing to it. Once you have used a bit of FOSS, you are often astounded by the quality and that encourages you to use more of it. And that experience leads a person to totally dispense with the "free = crap" heuristic. It's like drinking water from some unspoiled rainforest stream - it is both free and better than the commercial alternative. After a while your own heuristic becomes - "1. Search the FOSS world first. 2. If the best of what you find works well, stop looking."
5. FOSS has a passionate community. If you want help and can google, there is usually a good community around whatever FOSS it is you are interested in. In a genuine community, there is rarely a conflict between the creator of the software and the interests of the community. With a commercial solution, there is always that conflict - users want to pay less money, vendors need money to live.
6. FOSS is hassle free - you want to try it or use it, you just download it. You still have to learn how to use it, but that is no different from a proprietary solution.
7. FOSS OS (and non-MS OS) are renowned for being more stable, secure, powerful and easier to install than Windows once you know how. These attributes suit developers. Running FOSS on top of a FOSS OS is usually easier to install and use, better integrated, and more powerful. There is a virtuous circle going on there.
8. FOSS is trustworthy - you can see the code yourself, and fork it if you want. You may never do this but you know you can, and so do other people.
Why else does MS have a problem? Because university students WILL be exposed to some FOSS software if they do anything related to software. They will use commercial stuff too, but very likely they will learn many of the lessons above. At that point they've already swallowed the red pill. Even if they don't get exposure there their guru friends probably use FOSS.
After spending 6 months diligently searching I finally found a vintage police box from ebay for my replica Tardis and now I have to comply with the laws of physics? WTF!?!
Knowing how exponential growth works, it doesn't take many generations. Think of applying "trinket culture" as applying antibiotics. The general idea with antibiotics is that you apply a dose that is enough to kill all of the bacteria you want to destroy over time. What you don't want to do is apply just enough that it stops the average pathogen from growing but allows the resistant pathogen to grow nicely, reproducing with other pathogens and spreading resistance to the whole population until your antibiotic no longer works.
My problem with nuclear energy is that once used you can't make more of it. You can synthesize gasoline. Try synthesizing some uranium, after you have finished with the U235 and U238 that you have used in breeder reactors or shot off into the desert. And thorium and whatever else will work. If humanity needs that sort of extremely dense energy for some sort of future space colonization effort and we've squandered it on flying SUVs, what a contemptible species of idiots we are.
However, I see where you are going with this. I'll answer the following, and continue commenting.
Ok. Let me verify that. Solar radiation entering earth's atmosphere: 174 peta Watts, or 174k tera Watts. World energy consumption = 15 tera Watts. So 174000/15> 265*24. You are right, by 20%. Or more usefully, if we could somehow harvest all this energy it would be 11600 times as much as we currently use.
So, what percentage of the earth could we collect this solar from without covering over something that produces food (e.g. oceans, cropland) or would be impractical due to terrain or covered by forest? I think the only thing that would be practical would be deserts and on top of cities. Deserts cover 1/5 of earth's land surface, which is 148*.2 = 29.6 km^2. Total surface area of earth is 510 km^2. So we have roughly 6% of that area where we can put solar collectors (this is only a ballpark figure as we would have to calculate flux passing through each desert). Now we are down to 673 times as much solar energy as we can harvest. At 19-27% efficiency (wikipedia), (say 20%) that's 134 times as much as we can use. Wow. I'm impressed. I wonder how many other deaths by a thousand cuts that "surplus" will be knocked down by, e.g. impractical terrain, difficulty in storage of the energy, transmission losses, maintenance costs, etc.
But still, the difference in running out of wood, whale oil, ammonia, food compared to the present day is that our actions are having a significant global impact, and potentially a practically irreversible one. As our population grows, we are much closer to being the yeast in the bottle of wine, producing enough pollution to kill ourselves off.
Continuing the comments from before, I see where you are going with this. If you can efficiently use solar power to convert water and carbon dioxide back into a hydrocarbon, you've potentially solved the world's energy problems AND anthropogenic global warming, (if it exists and carbon dioxide is the culprit). Figure out a way to tax the world, and use that tax to build enough excess equipment to produce surplus fuel, which can then be pumped back into the ground. Just dig a big hole in the desert, and pump it in. Perhaps the world's last somewhat intelligent species did that, and all that remains of their civilization is a big heap of oil under a desert somewhere. And because they prioritized building flying SUVs instead of building sustainable off-world colonies, their civilization got completely wiped out by an asteroid/volcanic outbreak/global pandemic/nuc
That might work for one or two generations. After the trinket addicts get weeded from the gene pool you will be left with those who forsake trinkets for having children, and higher birthrates as a result. Some sort of legislative solution would be needed long term. Or at least, some compassion shown to those who are responsible enough to self-limit their birthrate instead of to the starving children of irresponsible parents.
If we have the right to "live our lives to the fullest", why don't future generations have this right? I guess so long as we can hand-wave into existence some vaporware super-efficient solar technology, it's ok to make decisions with irrevocable consequences, such as expending supplies of energy that have been built up over millions of years in the space of a few short decades. Because all hypoethetical technology magically pans out, just like flying cars (or SUVs), affordable hypersonic jet travel, and terahertz CPUs.
Only if you don't recover it. At some price for helium, sucking the exhalations into a compressor, bottling it and selling it back to the gas company for reprocessing becomes cost effective. I don't imagine that recovering the helium would be difficult given the difference in densities between helium and other gases.
The 4,547 comments, of which ~4,200 are disagreeing - I've seen that sort of thing before.
Sounds like a commercial version of emacs.
Not that surprising. Being capable of sustaining epic levels of cognitive dissonance would be needed to be able to work for Monsanto and sleep at night.
It really depends on your frame of reference.
Awesome comment. Any tech company with multiple products just has to produce a new product that gets more 5 stars than any other on newegg, Amazon, or the equivalent on $REVIEW_SITE, and the customers will be flocking back again. I'm trying to think of an example of a company that really relies on trust, and that cannot afford to screw up to the same extent. At first I thought - anything that will severely screw over people in the event of failure. Aircraft manufacturers and banks come to mind. NASA. Civil engineers. But then, it all comes back to the Fight Club equation - compare the cost of the screwup to the ability of the company/person to survive the screwup. The only people and organizations who can't afford to screw up are those who will be destroyed by the consequences of the failure. These are individuals, small companies with all their eggs in one basket. If you are a big conglomerate with lots of different products, you can afford to have a dud now and then.
Exactly. I'm reminded of the following quote from Beating the Averages.
"As long as our hypothetical Blub programmer is looking down the power continuum, he knows he's looking down. Languages less powerful than Blub are obviously less powerful, because they're missing some feature he's used to. But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up. What he sees are merely weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub."
i.e. When a normal or even moderately intelligent person looks at anything a genius does, they see things that are out of the ordinary. Like the hypothetical blub programmer, they see things they don't understand, and those things appear weird to them, even insane. It's different, and therefore eccentric. Well, eccentric is just another word for "deviating from the ordinary". Anyone from moderately intelligent on down has no way to differentiate between an act of superior intelligence and an outright loon.
The only way a non-genius can recognize a genius is through the creation of something that the non-genius can appreciate. e.g. a musical genius creates a song with great hooks, a comic genius makes them laugh harder than anyone else, an engineering genius creates a useful device that no one has thought of before, and that they in turn find useful. A financial genius amasses a hoard of wealth that is obvious to anyone. But everything out of the ordinary that the genius does other than their overt demonstration of genius will appear as nutty to most people, because most people are incapable of understanding the reason for it. And there will be one - pondering things and breaking established convention is just what a genius does.
Indeed. Just one googling of Sotomayor or Kagan, and it will be immediately obvious that both have waged a lifelong struggle against facism. They will no doubt stand firm lest it once again rear its, err, ugly head.
There is another option, and that is energy efficiency. Our current profligate rate of energy use will cause us to run out of the stockpiled energy we have in just a few generations. At that point we may need that energy for projects that would have really been useful and not easily doable any other way - infrastructure that has a negligible ongoing energy requirement, exploring and colonizing space, that sort of thing. Instead because energy is so cheap, guys like this (http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1699062&cid=32702164) who are investing in energy reduction measures are laughed at by their friends. Energy is so cheap that the guy I linked to can make an investment in his house that will pay off better than stock market averages, and he is LAUGHED AT by his friends who think he should invest in marble counters and a theater room.
Human civilization managed to grow (and at an exponential rate) well enough without using any fossil fuels. With the engineering knowledge we have now, our standard of living can be vastly higher, without much more in the way of energy use. However, infrastructure has to be designed to conserve energy rather than prioritize convenience or aesthetics. Probably one of the best ways to do that is to gently ramp up energy costs with taxes until the ROI of energy efficient investment becomes a no-brainer. This can be done without causing too much in the way of pain by lowering income and sales taxes in proportion as taxes on energy are raised.
To be fair I suspect the GP means something like the 340mpg Supercub:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_Super_Cub
Looks like they are improving their emissions as well:
http://oscarapparel.blogspot.com/2010/01/honda-super-cub.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorcycle
"United States Environmental Protection Agency 2007 certification result reports for all vehicles versus on highway motorcycles (which also includes scooters),[72] the average certified emissions level for 12,327 vehicles tested was 0.734. The average "Nox+Co End-Of-Useful-Life-Emissions" for 3,863 motorcycles tested was 0.8531, for a difference of about 16%, not the claimed 10X factor. Likewise, if one looks at how many of the 2007 motorcycles tested were also catalytic equipped, 54% of them, 2,092, were equipped with a catalytic converter."
Unfortunately, most vehicle registration fees kill the economics of owning something like that. Those fees ought to be eliminated, along with the sales taxes. When compared to a car, every mile traveled in a Supercub is virtually indistinguishable from using a bicycle in terms of fuel consumption and CO2 production. I'd own one, but for the registration fees. With a bit of thought, the safety need not be any worse than a car - wear highly reflective clothing so that other motorists see you, and ride during daylight when it's dry. Otherwise use your car.
Who knows how many people would buy one if they were exempt from registration fees? If gas prices go up 10x, you can still get around. That's good insurance for a couple grand.
...there are at least two people who have made it most of the way through Zardoz!
At least the ones up there might be easily preventable, and immensely catastrophic if not corrected. If we knew an asteroid was on a collision course towards earth, we'd find a way to stop it, given enough time. And it would be worth it.
The threats to earth from down here... most of them are higher probability but less devastating. And doing something to prevent them would mean that people might have to tolerate a bit of discomfort for an (at the time) uncertain result. Their lives would be a little more difficult. Probably not as difficult as any time in history before the 20th century, but difficult enough that the opposition party would be voted in at the next election. Yay for democracy.
Single bit errors happened 10% of the time at CERN. And if we discount a one-off problem with WD drive firmware that caused 80% of errors, this would shoot up to 50%.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/data-corruption-is-worse-than-you-know/191
I think that's more likely. Exponential growth always saturates at some point. The entire GDP of the world will never be spent entirely on Windows.
I've wondered about this for some time. If countries like the USA have enough nukes to nuke the world several times over, and have had that capability for decades now, how are these simulations useful?
Going along with what you say... Another thing to consider is that in the process of designing something, you don't just do one simulation and declare it finished. If you knew what the answer would be, you wouldn't be simulating it. In all likelihood, you will experiment by changing variables and see what outputs the simulation gives. Ideally, you will want to iteratively search through combinations of input variables to determine an optimum in terms of output variables. This is a lot better than educated guesswork - you will often be pleasantly surprised by an emergent optimum design that you would never have otherwise considered. If n is the number of input variables and x is the number of divisions in each variable to try, x^n is the number of simulations needed to perform.
Often input variables are actually functions of one another, so you can usually condense n down a bit from your first simulation. But n only condenses down so far. There will still be x^n iterations of the simulation to run, and if each simulation takes a long time, you can see where more computational speed will prove helpful. (time per simulation)*x^n could be very large. And every time you change a variable (e.g. process improvement or mistake fixed), you will have to run the whole thing again. More FLOPS ftw.