Energy. That's what. All of what you describe CAN be done, but only with the expenditure of a tremendous amount of energy.
Oh, and if the words "Soil erosion" don't mean anything to you now, just look surprised when you try to grow crops year round.
Fertile topsoil is actually living material. There are certain fungi that when heathy and plentiful give soil it's texture and "clumpiness". Good growing soil is limited to the conditions that are favorable to those fungi.
And before you whip out the "hydroponics" card, realize that it too is a very energy intensive operation.
To perform all these high tech cultivation techniques we would require nuclear power on a wide scale, and cooperation and resource sharing unseen to the history of man. It will work in pockets, but it is too expensive to set up and consumes too much energy under operation to do much good where its needed most.
(Disclosure: I'm an Electrical Engineer who actually STUDIED computer architecture and chip design.)
Intel chips are bloated monstrosities. And single chips DO have that much capacity today. The trick is manufacturing them small enough, and efficient enough that they don't require liquid nitrogen to cool them. (Ala the Cray.)
And the speed of electricty is slightly less than the speed of light: 3e8 m/s^2. That's a 3 with 8 zeros, or 186,000 miles per hour. An electron could travel from the sun to the earth in 8 minutes. An electron would circle the globe 8 times in a second.
The distances in a microchip (micro, read the small) are on the order of nanometers. That's 1/1,000,000,000 (1 billionth) of a meter.
In addition to the other comments posted, you should know that OS X is derived from a lot of work done for the NeXT operating system, which ran on x86. The Kernel and base operating system for OS X is actually NetBSD, arguably the most portable unix out there.
And Apple is all about locking down designs with proprietary hardware. Yes, it uses PCI ports, Power PC procesors, and off-the-shelf ATA and Scsi drives. But sewing all that together is a chipset of their own design.
No amount of "tweaking" is going to make wheat grow in sand or mud. You can't build a greenhouse that's going to cover millions of square miles of land. And you can't irrigate where you have no water.
Oh hell no. I ride to work in a big diesel swilling, particulate belching public bus.
Not because I care about the environment, because I can't stand driving and parking is terrible in the chunk of town I work at.
Frankly, the only beef I have with SUV's are they chew up too many parking space downtown, I can't see around them in traffic, and they are gas guzzlers and widespread use if them for commuting is driving up everyone's fuel prices. But frankly, if driving one really floats your boat, more power to you.
No, the scary part is the it could just as easily cause starvation in "First World" countries just as easily. Third world nations are simply more vulnerable, but there are still people alive today who remember "the dustbowl".
The fossils we find were buried under extreme conditions, generally massive landslides, floods, or sandstorms. They are also not the original material from the living organism, they are stone that has assumed the shape of the flesh and bone.
We have a hard enough time finding buildings made 2000 years ago. Structure tend to look awfully rock-like after a only few centuries of neglect and erosion. Metal corrodes into oxides, wood rots, and even the hardiest plastic is eventually broken down by bacteria or disintegrated by UV rays. And that's assuming the entire area hasn't subsided back into the mantle and made into fresh rock.
Another thing to remember is that much of what was land millions of years ago is no underwater, and what was underwater is now land.
Ok. Let me put it to you simply. Our food requires certain growing conditions to produce enough crops to stuff your piehole. Too wet, too dry, too hot, or too cold and we have famine on a wide scale.
Now it's bad enough when we get local pertebations in weather that screw up the growing season. With global warming we start wandering into realms where the entire WORLD's growing patterns change. When you have millions of people starving in one country, while a previously uninhabited place starts being able to grow food like crazy, you get global wars as we all pile onto the new places like toddlers fighting over a cookie.
And if that weren't bad enough, where you have millions of starving people with compromised immune systems, epidemics aren't far behind.
Simple. Ice Floe is a term the Norwegians used to descibe thick chunks of ice. That's just their word for it, and it was so helpful we used it verbatim.
Actually no. Your metabolism slows down to the point that you can't maintain body temperature. While lack of oxygen doesn't help with decision making, most people die of the cold WAY before oxygen debt kicks in at altitude. (The blood of people who live at altitude actually develops a high concentration of hemoglobin to compensate, but there are upward limits of what this adapation can adjust for.)
The other thing to remember is that tweaking the partial pressure of oxygen effects how well oxygen is absorbed through the cell walls in the lung. Breathing 20% O2 at 4/5 STP is not the same as breathing 16% O2 at STP.
I'm not a biologist either, but I do Scuba dive, and my training went in-depth into how the body handles gasses at different pressures.
Frankly, if the big day comes in my lifetime, I just hope for enough time to relax and enjoy a good beer while I heckle the morans trying to evacuate the city by car.
He, according to these creeps every piece of equipment should repell bullets, and the failure to survive an indirect nuclear blast is a sign of negligence... or worse... WEAKNESS.
Ignore 'em.
Don't drive to work, personally. Trashed too many cars commuting. I take the bus.
Like I'm one to talk... I used to write databases to track images by who was on top and cup size. I eventually figured out that I had more fun collecting and organizing porn than actually looking at it.
Of course there are still those sleepless nights sometimes where I rip out the old "systematically rape this site for anything that vaguely resembles a jpg." But I just get bored sloggin through it and throw it all away in the morning.
You seem to be proving the granparent poster's point more than arguing against it.
Each of these cases are filed under the same chapter of "Engineering Disasters" as Galloping Gertie, and the Hyatt Regency balcony collapse.
For the record the THERAC-25 was more about stripping out hardware safety devices in favor an all-digital system, to save costs. It's predicessor worked just fine with the same 2 bugs, because the mechanical safetys would kick in.
Well actually, I used to do software testing. You simply simulate the special conditions when things are supposed to happen. That's generally why satellites cost so damn much. Yes, there are some exotic materials that go into them, but the chief expense is testing.
Perfect security is perfect paranoia. Perfect paranoia is perfect security. If it's not worth being paranoid about, it's not worth securing.
And no, you don't want to secure everything. Part of what allowed the British to crack the Enigma machine was the fact that the Germans used it for everything, including weather reports and repetitive status updates.
If someone is really interested in my google searches, bully for them. If I whip out the credit card, you bet I use one with no other transactions on it, that isn't attached to my bank account, and it doesn't even come out of my wallet until I've verified the SSL information. And I watch the thing like a hawk to make sure nothing else shows up on it.
This doesn't cover SSL or VPN or any kind of uber wulu sophisticated attack. This is someone setting up a piece of equipment to steal poeple's logon to a wireless network.
Everything else you touched on is a problem regardless of how you connect to the net. A hostile party could easily obtain this information, and more, with a copy of tcpdump and a promiscuous wifi card.
Slashdot Mirror
Just 'cause it sounds similar doesn't mean it belongs.
Oh, and if the words "Soil erosion" don't mean anything to you now, just look surprised when you try to grow crops year round.
Fertile topsoil is actually living material. There are certain fungi that when heathy and plentiful give soil it's texture and "clumpiness". Good growing soil is limited to the conditions that are favorable to those fungi.
And before you whip out the "hydroponics" card, realize that it too is a very energy intensive operation.
To perform all these high tech cultivation techniques we would require nuclear power on a wide scale, and cooperation and resource sharing unseen to the history of man. It will work in pockets, but it is too expensive to set up and consumes too much energy under operation to do much good where its needed most.
A Dell with a Cell is a swell sell.
Intel chips are bloated monstrosities. And single chips DO have that much capacity today. The trick is manufacturing them small enough, and efficient enough that they don't require liquid nitrogen to cool them. (Ala the Cray.)
And the speed of electricty is slightly less than the speed of light: 3e8 m/s^2. That's a 3 with 8 zeros, or 186,000 miles per hour. An electron could travel from the sun to the earth in 8 minutes. An electron would circle the globe 8 times in a second.
The distances in a microchip (micro, read the small) are on the order of nanometers. That's 1/1,000,000,000 (1 billionth) of a meter.
You do the math.
And Apple is all about locking down designs with proprietary hardware. Yes, it uses PCI ports, Power PC procesors, and off-the-shelf ATA and Scsi drives. But sewing all that together is a chipset of their own design.
No amount of "tweaking" is going to make wheat grow in sand or mud. You can't build a greenhouse that's going to cover millions of square miles of land. And you can't irrigate where you have no water.
Not because I care about the environment, because I can't stand driving and parking is terrible in the chunk of town I work at.
Frankly, the only beef I have with SUV's are they chew up too many parking space downtown, I can't see around them in traffic, and they are gas guzzlers and widespread use if them for commuting is driving up everyone's fuel prices. But frankly, if driving one really floats your boat, more power to you.
No, the scary part is the it could just as easily cause starvation in "First World" countries just as easily. Third world nations are simply more vulnerable, but there are still people alive today who remember "the dustbowl".
We have a hard enough time finding buildings made 2000 years ago. Structure tend to look awfully rock-like after a only few centuries of neglect and erosion. Metal corrodes into oxides, wood rots, and even the hardiest plastic is eventually broken down by bacteria or disintegrated by UV rays. And that's assuming the entire area hasn't subsided back into the mantle and made into fresh rock.
Another thing to remember is that much of what was land millions of years ago is no underwater, and what was underwater is now land.
It needs more sex.
Now it's bad enough when we get local pertebations in weather that screw up the growing season. With global warming we start wandering into realms where the entire WORLD's growing patterns change. When you have millions of people starving in one country, while a previously uninhabited place starts being able to grow food like crazy, you get global wars as we all pile onto the new places like toddlers fighting over a cookie.
And if that weren't bad enough, where you have millions of starving people with compromised immune systems, epidemics aren't far behind.
Linq
The other thing to remember is that tweaking the partial pressure of oxygen effects how well oxygen is absorbed through the cell walls in the lung. Breathing 20% O2 at 4/5 STP is not the same as breathing 16% O2 at STP.
I'm not a biologist either, but I do Scuba dive, and my training went in-depth into how the body handles gasses at different pressures.
Frankly, if the big day comes in my lifetime, I just hope for enough time to relax and enjoy a good beer while I heckle the morans trying to evacuate the city by car.
Discuss.
Ignore 'em.
Don't drive to work, personally. Trashed too many cars commuting. I take the bus.
The funny part is, it happens more often than one would think.
I dunno, I think they would be putting the beatdown on every bug in sight at that meeting...
Like I'm one to talk... I used to write databases to track images by who was on top and cup size. I eventually figured out that I had more fun collecting and organizing porn than actually looking at it.
Of course there are still those sleepless nights sometimes where I rip out the old "systematically rape this site for anything that vaguely resembles a jpg." But I just get bored sloggin through it and throw it all away in the morning.
Ok. I'm just a sick puppy.
Each of these cases are filed under the same chapter of "Engineering Disasters" as Galloping Gertie, and the Hyatt Regency balcony collapse.
For the record the THERAC-25 was more about stripping out hardware safety devices in favor an all-digital system, to save costs. It's predicessor worked just fine with the same 2 bugs, because the mechanical safetys would kick in.
You pay to do it right, or you pay to do it wrong, pay to clean it up, and THEN pay to do it right.
Test scripts are your friend. If you haven't been introduced to TCL (Tool Command Language) yet, you should seriously think about it.
Well actually, I used to do software testing. You simply simulate the special conditions when things are supposed to happen. That's generally why satellites cost so damn much. Yes, there are some exotic materials that go into them, but the chief expense is testing.
Namely, do you know any tricks like that for miscreants in Romania?
>:)
Perfect security is perfect paranoia. Perfect paranoia is perfect security. If it's not worth being paranoid about, it's not worth securing.
And no, you don't want to secure everything. Part of what allowed the British to crack the Enigma machine was the fact that the Germans used it for everything, including weather reports and repetitive status updates.
If someone is really interested in my google searches, bully for them. If I whip out the credit card, you bet I use one with no other transactions on it, that isn't attached to my bank account, and it doesn't even come out of my wallet until I've verified the SSL information. And I watch the thing like a hawk to make sure nothing else shows up on it.
Everything else you touched on is a problem regardless of how you connect to the net. A hostile party could easily obtain this information, and more, with a copy of tcpdump and a promiscuous wifi card.