I would encourage people to have more children. We need more people so we'll have more great thinkers and doers to solve the big problems and lead into the future. That means it would be a very good idea to encourage breeding. The planet can easily sustainably support 50 billion humans. The key is not to over use. It's not hard. And you don't have to go vegetarian either.
I've done both conventional construction and the type of ultra efficient construction I did for my butcher shop and my home. The conventional construction came out more expensive. I built my home for $7,000 in materials. It is a small house at 252 sq-ft plus a loft in the front and back. At that price it is highly affordable. An added benefit is that maintenance on this type of structure is also far lower than with conventional construction by more than an order of magnitude.
First of all active heating (e.g., burning wood, oil, natural gas, etc) isn't really necessary even in cold climates if the buildings are properly designed and you're willing to live in a slightly cool building which is better for your health as well.
Second, burning wood when properly done is very efficient and produces less pollution than burning petroleum.
Third of all the wood is a renewable resource.
Fourth of all the wood is a tight carbon cycle as opposed to the millions of years long carbon cycle of burning petroleum - that makes wood a better heating fuel.
Heating with oil is a poor use of resources. It is far better to design the buildings to work with the climate. This is how I designed and built both my home and my butcher shop. Neither one requires heating or cooling to stay comfortable. Neither one is actually earth bermed either which would boost performance even more - both are strong enough to be earth bermed though.
I live in a climate quite similar to Norway - I'm in the central mountains of northern Vermont. It regularly gets to -25ÃF in the winter and it has gotten as low as -45ÃF many years. We also have high winds. By proper siting and the use of insulated high mass masonry construction my buildings act as giant thermal flywheels storing summer's warmth to use during the winter and winter's coolth to use during the summer.
I do burn about 0.75 cord of wood (a very small amount) in the house for cooking and for my wife's pleasure but the house will stay at reasonable temperatures even without that wood burning - the wood is sustainable dead wood from our forest.
It works. It's not expensive to build and it uses no petroleum for eating.
Heating with oil is a poor use of resources. It is far better to design the buildings to work with the climate. This is how I designed and built both my home and my butcher shop. Neither one requires heating or cooling to stay comfortable. Neither one is actually earth bermed either which would boost performance even more - both are strong enough to be earth bermed though.
I live in a climate quite similar to Norway - I'm in the central mountains of northern Vermont. It regularly gets to -25ÂF in the winter and it has gotten as low as -45ÂF many years. We also have high winds. By proper siting and the use of insulated high mass masonry construction my buildings act as giant thermal flywheels storing summer's warmth to use during the winter and winter's coolth to use during the summer.
It works. It's not expensive to build and it uses no petroleum for eating. I do burn about 0.75 cord of wood (a very small amount) in the house for cooking and for my wife's pleasure but the house will stay at reasonable temperatures even without that wood burning - the wood is sustainable dead wood from our forest.
This is a bad solution. It would be much better to build a long ramp that the eels can go up rather than depending on human intervention. The eels are quite willing to travel the extra distance.
The simpler and better solution is for Google to temporarily delete Canada from it's search results for one week (but don't tell Canada when it will be reinstated). The economic loss to Canada will be so great the current administration will crumble. Cooler heads will rise from the rubble. Other countries will take heed and stop this nonsense of trying to apply their domestic laws internationally.
The problem with putting farms in urban areas and even worse in stores is that is VERY expensive real estate. Almost all farming is done out in rural areas where the real estate prices and taxes are lower. If you farm in a high cost area you end up having to pass on both of these costs (buying land, ongoing real estate taxes each year) to your consumers. That means either your prices must be higher or your profits lower.
I'm a farmer. I bought land outside where my markets are so that I can farm on lower cost land paying less taxes to help keep my costs down. This is basic economic market forces.
Putting farms inside stores is a very expensive proposition which means the product produced must be expensive enough to justify this higher cost of production.
I notice you're so insecure that you post anonymously. Perhaps you're the one who really needs to start talking to a shrink. Believe it or not, they can talk back to you too.
This is a perfectly reasonable statement. I talk _with_ animals. I farm and have a large pack of livestock guardian herding dogs. We communicate with about 300 words and phrases. It is two way communications. Some of it is vocal. Some of it is body language. Some of it is sign language. I can tell the dogs things and they can tell me things and they talk to each other - no surprises there. People have been doing it for thousands of years.
What is unfortunate is that urban people have lost this connection to the natural world. Dogs raised as singles don't typically get the cultural knowledge passed down generation to generation like dogs in a farming pack. Pet dogs typically are all alone much of the day and when you get home you greet them and then ignore them in all too many cases. This results in both you and the dog losing the ability to communicate with each other.
Oh, and it isn't just dogs. Pigs have about 30 words they use, sheep use about ten words and chickens use about six words. Learn their words and you can understand what they're talking about as well as talking to them. When we're herding livestock we typically use a couple of the target animal's words to help with the herding. I say we as in both we humans and the dogs. The dogs are multilingual. They pickup the words we use to tell pigs to move forward and they use them too to get the pigs to do the same thing.
And what portion lived in places like that in the past? Similarly high no doubt since it is the hotter zones that humans came from and followed as much as possible.
For some people. For others verbal is far harder. I would much rather read than listen. Reading is 10x faster and easier to remember and reference, for me. Verbal memory is far slower, very linear and inefficient, for me.
"I've found over my career that it's been very difficult to predict the future," Thacker said in a guest lecture in 2013. "People who tried to do it generally wind up being wrong."
Oh, come now. Predicting the future is easy. The future will be just like the present but different. See, easy-peasy.
"Can you prove that it would produce a greater return on investment for Apple Inc. shareholders than not doing so?"
That isn't necessary. Apple does a lot of things that aren't proven to produce a return for shareholders. That is part of what makes Apple great. Basic research.
But you're missing the point. Jobs promised users they would continue to have access to their digital lives into the future. To do that requires legacy support.
It is entirely possible you're to young to remember.
"Even car companies aren't held to that standard."
What apple should do is automatically cross recompile the old apps to work on the new hardware. There are a lot of old apps that are excellent but will never get updated, a great many for small business, games and a huge inventory of educational applications. Nobody else will bother to write a replacement but cause the original creator was inspired and it is a small market in many cases. Yet, they are still great apps. Apple is doing this again on both iOS and MacOS. This same problem has happened before when Apple abandoned earlier MacOS versions. They are nearly a trillion dollar company. They could easily put forth the effort to bring the old apps, all the way back to the Lisa, onto the modern operating systems with recompiling. Shame on Apple for creating deadwood.
For those who think it's too hard a problem, you're wrong. I'm a programmer and have written both compilers and cross compilers. You don't need the source code. If you have the final program you can run it through a cross compiler, a just-in-time compiler or just emulate to run it on different hardware. That list is in order of efficiency and preference. This is not a hard task. Apple has done it before.
Apple should be interested in doing this is it adds value for their customers because the software you use today will run tomorrow and because it maximizes the Apple application ecosystem which Apple likes to crow about in their marketing materials, ads, etc.
With the extraordinary computing power of todays devices this is all very easy and even emulated software can run faster than it did on the original hardware.
Imagine a world where all your old books, music, photos and other documents are no longer accessible because Apple and other companies drop support.
It is time for two pieces of legislation: 1) If a company or an individual wants to release a program they must also accept that their copyright and patents end within two years of their stopping supporting the software. Same thing for hardware. In other words, shorten the protection time dramatically. This will make it so other people can pickup the product and support it if they want to as fans or as another vendor.
2) If a company is above a certain threshold, which should be very low, then they must also release the supporting documentations for source code, maintenance, etc so that other people can pick it up.
3) If a company is at the high level of Google, Microsoft, Sun, Apple and the like then they must continue to offer legacy support for a minimum of 50 years in addition to #1 and #2 above.
"I do the same with my truck. It costs a little more to buy a full size fuel tanker truck, but I never need to stop for gas. And when the tank is dry, I can just sell it and buy a new one, in a slightly different color for the same price as the old one."
Wow. Did you now that RAM memory is rewritable. You can use it, erase it and save something new in the same spot. It's a great innovation! But Anon Cowards may have missed that news.
I used to feel this way too but have concluded that I prefer the more integrated approach. I simply buy a computer with the maximum storage, RAM and other capabilities now and then use it to get my work done. In the past it made sense but now the maximum configuration isn't really all that much more expensive and I would prefer to have the more efficient, sleeker and rugged design that the loss of expandability gives. Added storage is external over very fast busses. Internal storage is enormous now a days. I'm speaking as both a user and a computer designer who's been in the field since the 1970's which gives quite a bit of perspective. Apple's choice does make sense.
The automation will help. I trust an AI more than most humans to do the driving - not now but in the future. Unfortunately until we have anti-gravity or something like that the energy issue remains. Unless you like gliding. I do.
What Learless Feeders like the EU totally fail to comprehend is that we don't all agree with them. On person's hate speech is another person's free speech. Just because they don't like something on the internet doesn't mean they need to, or can, ban it. One would think the EU would know history better.
I love flying. The public loves the idea of flying cars. But flying cars are not a particularly good idea. They are energy intensive, far more than rolling cars. In addition to be wasteful of energy they're also noisy, dangerous and not particularly practical.
In the movies we all love, or hate, the flying cars are held up by wires or arms so they seem to be silently gliding along. Real flying cars have to do a lot of work to fight gravity and stay up. This ends up being noisy because they're wind effect machines. They're not silently surfing gravity or mysterious force fields. They're pushing air down hard enough to stay up. It is really not sexy and certainly not silent.
A lot of drivers are unable to navigate in 2D on the ground. Adding another dimension up in the air makes it that much harder for your typical Joe Blowshotair to drive. Expect a lot more accidents.
What gets more exciting is those accidents are going to be up above your head.
If you thought people flying camera drones over your house was bad, or ATVs & snowmobiles, then just wait until you have to deal with loud, dangerous, invasive flying cars zipping over your back yard and home.
Slashdot Mirror
We need consumers to buy our products. That means the masses will never become redundant or unneeded. They are our market.
I would encourage people to have more children. We need more people so we'll have more great thinkers and doers to solve the big problems and lead into the future. That means it would be a very good idea to encourage breeding. The planet can easily sustainably support 50 billion humans. The key is not to over use. It's not hard. And you don't have to go vegetarian either.
I've done both conventional construction and the type of ultra efficient construction I did for my butcher shop and my home. The conventional construction came out more expensive. I built my home for $7,000 in materials. It is a small house at 252 sq-ft plus a loft in the front and back. At that price it is highly affordable. An added benefit is that maintenance on this type of structure is also far lower than with conventional construction by more than an order of magnitude.
First of all active heating (e.g., burning wood, oil, natural gas, etc) isn't really necessary even in cold climates if the buildings are properly designed and you're willing to live in a slightly cool building which is better for your health as well.
Second, burning wood when properly done is very efficient and produces less pollution than burning petroleum.
Third of all the wood is a renewable resource.
Fourth of all the wood is a tight carbon cycle as opposed to the millions of years long carbon cycle of burning petroleum - that makes wood a better heating fuel.
Heating with oil is a poor use of resources. It is far better to design the buildings to work with the climate. This is how I designed and built both my home and my butcher shop. Neither one requires heating or cooling to stay comfortable. Neither one is actually earth bermed either which would boost performance even more - both are strong enough to be earth bermed though.
I live in a climate quite similar to Norway - I'm in the central mountains of northern Vermont. It regularly gets to -25ÃF in the winter and it has gotten as low as -45ÃF many years. We also have high winds. By proper siting and the use of insulated high mass masonry construction my buildings act as giant thermal flywheels storing summer's warmth to use during the winter and winter's coolth to use during the summer.
I do burn about 0.75 cord of wood (a very small amount) in the house for cooking and for my wife's pleasure but the house will stay at reasonable temperatures even without that wood burning - the wood is sustainable dead wood from our forest.
It works. It's not expensive to build and it uses no petroleum for eating.
Heating with oil is a poor use of resources. It is far better to design the buildings to work with the climate. This is how I designed and built both my home and my butcher shop. Neither one requires heating or cooling to stay comfortable. Neither one is actually earth bermed either which would boost performance even more - both are strong enough to be earth bermed though.
I live in a climate quite similar to Norway - I'm in the central mountains of northern Vermont. It regularly gets to -25ÂF in the winter and it has gotten as low as -45ÂF many years. We also have high winds. By proper siting and the use of insulated high mass masonry construction my buildings act as giant thermal flywheels storing summer's warmth to use during the winter and winter's coolth to use during the summer.
It works. It's not expensive to build and it uses no petroleum for eating. I do burn about 0.75 cord of wood (a very small amount) in the house for cooking and for my wife's pleasure but the house will stay at reasonable temperatures even without that wood burning - the wood is sustainable dead wood from our forest.
This is a bad solution. It would be much better to build a long ramp that the eels can go up rather than depending on human intervention. The eels are quite willing to travel the extra distance.
The simpler and better solution is for Google to temporarily delete Canada from it's search results for one week (but don't tell Canada when it will be reinstated). The economic loss to Canada will be so great the current administration will crumble. Cooler heads will rise from the rubble. Other countries will take heed and stop this nonsense of trying to apply their domestic laws internationally.
So vegans want to promote centralized big corporate industrial production at the expense of local sustainable economies. Not a wise choice.
I can produce tons of meat on pasture locally without the need for industrial or petroleum inputs.
Stick with the real meat.
The problem with putting farms in urban areas and even worse in stores is that is VERY expensive real estate. Almost all farming is done out in rural areas where the real estate prices and taxes are lower. If you farm in a high cost area you end up having to pass on both of these costs (buying land, ongoing real estate taxes each year) to your consumers. That means either your prices must be higher or your profits lower.
I'm a farmer. I bought land outside where my markets are so that I can farm on lower cost land paying less taxes to help keep my costs down. This is basic economic market forces.
Putting farms inside stores is a very expensive proposition which means the product produced must be expensive enough to justify this higher cost of production.
I notice you're so insecure that you post anonymously. Perhaps you're the one who really needs to start talking to a shrink. Believe it or not, they can talk back to you too.
This is a perfectly reasonable statement. I talk _with_ animals. I farm and have a large pack of livestock guardian herding dogs. We communicate with about 300 words and phrases. It is two way communications. Some of it is vocal. Some of it is body language. Some of it is sign language. I can tell the dogs things and they can tell me things and they talk to each other - no surprises there. People have been doing it for thousands of years.
What is unfortunate is that urban people have lost this connection to the natural world. Dogs raised as singles don't typically get the cultural knowledge passed down generation to generation like dogs in a farming pack. Pet dogs typically are all alone much of the day and when you get home you greet them and then ignore them in all too many cases. This results in both you and the dog losing the ability to communicate with each other.
Oh, and it isn't just dogs. Pigs have about 30 words they use, sheep use about ten words and chickens use about six words. Learn their words and you can understand what they're talking about as well as talking to them. When we're herding livestock we typically use a couple of the target animal's words to help with the herding. I say we as in both we humans and the dogs. The dogs are multilingual. They pickup the words we use to tell pigs to move forward and they use them too to get the pigs to do the same thing.
My soldering iron uses electricity but does not need to be connected to the internet.
My drill uses electricity but does not need to be connected to the internet.
My power saw uses electricity but does not need to be connected to the internet.
My welder uses electricity but does not need to be connected to the internet.
My flashlight uses electricity but does not need to be connected to the internet.
My blender uses electricity but does not need to be connected to the internet.
There are a _LOT_ of devices that don't benefit from internet connectivity and are find just the way they are now, dumb.
K.I.S.S.
And what portion lived in places like that in the past? Similarly high no doubt since it is the hotter zones that humans came from and followed as much as possible.
Makes sense since other animals and animals were domesticated in multiple places and times too. Good ideas keep happening.
For some people. For others verbal is far harder. I would much rather read than listen. Reading is 10x faster and easier to remember and reference, for me. Verbal memory is far slower, very linear and inefficient, for me.
"I've found over my career that it's been very difficult to predict the future," Thacker said in a guest lecture in 2013. "People who tried to do it generally wind up being wrong."
Oh, come now. Predicting the future is easy. The future will be just like the present but different. See, easy-peasy.
Yes, that was my point. This could make hijacking a thing of the past.
I wonder how AIs react to hijacker demands?
"Can you prove that it would produce a greater return on investment for Apple Inc. shareholders than not doing so?"
That isn't necessary. Apple does a lot of things that aren't proven to produce a return for shareholders. That is part of what makes Apple great. Basic research.
But you're missing the point. Jobs promised users they would continue to have access to their digital lives into the future. To do that requires legacy support.
It is entirely possible you're to young to remember.
"Even car companies aren't held to that standard."
Time to start.
What apple should do is automatically cross recompile the old apps to work on the new hardware. There are a lot of old apps that are excellent but will never get updated, a great many for small business, games and a huge inventory of educational applications. Nobody else will bother to write a replacement but cause the original creator was inspired and it is a small market in many cases. Yet, they are still great apps. Apple is doing this again on both iOS and MacOS. This same problem has happened before when Apple abandoned earlier MacOS versions. They are nearly a trillion dollar company. They could easily put forth the effort to bring the old apps, all the way back to the Lisa, onto the modern operating systems with recompiling. Shame on Apple for creating deadwood.
For those who think it's too hard a problem, you're wrong. I'm a programmer and have written both compilers and cross compilers. You don't need the source code. If you have the final program you can run it through a cross compiler, a just-in-time compiler or just emulate to run it on different hardware. That list is in order of efficiency and preference. This is not a hard task. Apple has done it before.
Apple should be interested in doing this is it adds value for their customers because the software you use today will run tomorrow and because it maximizes the Apple application ecosystem which Apple likes to crow about in their marketing materials, ads, etc.
With the extraordinary computing power of todays devices this is all very easy and even emulated software can run faster than it did on the original hardware.
Imagine a world where all your old books, music, photos and other documents are no longer accessible because Apple and other companies drop support.
It is time for two pieces of legislation:
1) If a company or an individual wants to release a program they must also accept that their copyright and patents end within two years of their stopping supporting the software. Same thing for hardware. In other words, shorten the protection time dramatically. This will make it so other people can pickup the product and support it if they want to as fans or as another vendor.
2) If a company is above a certain threshold, which should be very low, then they must also release the supporting documentations for source code, maintenance, etc so that other people can pick it up.
3) If a company is at the high level of Google, Microsoft, Sun, Apple and the like then they must continue to offer legacy support for a minimum of 50 years in addition to #1 and #2 above.
"I do the same with my truck. It costs a little more to buy a full size fuel tanker truck, but I never need to stop for gas. And when the tank is dry, I can just sell it and buy a new one, in a slightly different color for the same price as the old one."
Wow. Did you now that RAM memory is rewritable. You can use it, erase it and save something new in the same spot. It's a great innovation! But Anon Cowards may have missed that news.
I used to feel this way too but have concluded that I prefer the more integrated approach. I simply buy a computer with the maximum storage, RAM and other capabilities now and then use it to get my work done. In the past it made sense but now the maximum configuration isn't really all that much more expensive and I would prefer to have the more efficient, sleeker and rugged design that the loss of expandability gives. Added storage is external over very fast busses. Internal storage is enormous now a days. I'm speaking as both a user and a computer designer who's been in the field since the 1970's which gives quite a bit of perspective. Apple's choice does make sense.
The automation will help. I trust an AI more than most humans to do the driving - not now but in the future. Unfortunately until we have anti-gravity or something like that the energy issue remains. Unless you like gliding. I do.
What Learless Feeders like the EU totally fail to comprehend is that we don't all agree with them. On person's hate speech is another person's free speech. Just because they don't like something on the internet doesn't mean they need to, or can, ban it. One would think the EU would know history better.
I love flying. The public loves the idea of flying cars. But flying cars are not a particularly good idea. They are energy intensive, far more than rolling cars. In addition to be wasteful of energy they're also noisy, dangerous and not particularly practical.
In the movies we all love, or hate, the flying cars are held up by wires or arms so they seem to be silently gliding along. Real flying cars have to do a lot of work to fight gravity and stay up. This ends up being noisy because they're wind effect machines. They're not silently surfing gravity or mysterious force fields. They're pushing air down hard enough to stay up. It is really not sexy and certainly not silent.
A lot of drivers are unable to navigate in 2D on the ground. Adding another dimension up in the air makes it that much harder for your typical Joe Blowshotair to drive. Expect a lot more accidents.
What gets more exciting is those accidents are going to be up above your head.
If you thought people flying camera drones over your house was bad, or ATVs & snowmobiles, then just wait until you have to deal with loud, dangerous, invasive flying cars zipping over your back yard and home.
Flying cars are a really bad idea.