Police work. Talk to people. Adopt policies that encourage assimilation and understanding instead of radicalization and separation (on both sides). Teach people to believe they are British first and Muslim second. Show people that when they attack Britain they are only attacking themselves. Even then it's impossible to catch all of them, but that's the trade off you have to make if you want to live in a free state. You're still more likely to die by getting hit by a plane while walking down your street than getting killed by a terrorist, whether they are a Muslim terrorist, an Irish extremist, or a psychotic Pastafarian trying to strangle you with a wet noodle.
What's this intelligent and coherent post doing on Slashdot? Did you post on the wrong forum by mistake?
An FTL "hack" would be altering spacetime, e.g. wormholes, such that the distance was shorter. There are enough different expert ideas about the possibility of wormholes to leave it at "experts disagree", but we don't even really know what space is. More and more though, it seems to be "a thing, not a place".
They just discovered another 2 billion barrels today under Texas.
Off by an order of magnitude.
The USGS says "An estimated average of 20 billion barrels of oil and 1.6 billion barrels of natural gas liquids are available for the taking in the Wolfcamp shale, which is in the Midland Basin portion of Texas' Permian Basin."
Uhmmm... no. Do the math here... it takes only moments to burn what can take many tens of thousands of years to form
Proven oil reserves have grown every decade since we started burning the stuff. The tech to find and extract oil grows as fast as it needs to to keep us in oil. The global push to cut CO2 emissions will leave us with plenty of oil in the ground when technology eventually, inevitably, leaves oil behind.
The only thing that will keep us from literally running out is that the costs of obtaining it are going to continue to rise
Well, that was the argument before the whole global warming kerfuffle. But that's just it - we were never going to run out. "The cure for high commodity prices is high commodity prices." Eventually some alternative becomes cheaper and oil becomes a historical oddity. That's just how technology works.
With the exception of maybe rare metals or something, the resource we most lack on Earth is energy
There's lots of energy in the form of solar power. We just suck at consuming it. 10 billion people consuming power at the rate Americans do today would push the limits of terrestrial solar (at some point covering more land with solar panels is its own environmental problem) without tech advances, but of course there will be tech advances. And maybe fusion will stop being "just 20 years away" one day.
Your general point is quite sound though. In fact, it's the best argument for why it's worth the cost to try to colonize Mars and Venus - that's mostly about how to do better on Earth.
Today, we understand the global impact of the human population increasing 3x - 30x. We can measure resources and use computer models to understand the impact, so yes, I do believe we can have meaningful predictions.
Unfortunately, due to humans consuming more and more finite resources
You seem to be stuck 100 years in the past (better than 1000). Human population is rounding over. Right now, the high-tech areas of the world all have negative population growth (net of immigration).
Also, WTF is a finite resource? I keep hearing that term, and it's nonsense. When we make something out of iron, there's still just as much iron. The problem with fossil fuels is now that they're too plentiful, not too scarce, but even if we ran out solar power will keep working for quite some time. I mean, sure there's technically a finite amount of, say, palladium in the Earth's crust, but how exactly does that matter? We don't "use it up".
I also wonder when people think that we can somehow figure out a way to travel at light speeds to get to another planet.
The door isn't quite closed on that yet. There's still a lot we don't know about the fundamental physics of space-time, with interesting work ongoing to understand just what exactly space is. However, it seems a safe bet that any sort of FTL "hack" will take a lot of energy - far beyond what we could do as a civilization today.
So, while I wouldn't say FTL is a "never", it's not in any of our lifetimes. Basically, it's far enough out that it's beyond the "prediction horizon" for technology. We should plan on being effectively trapped in our system for centuries. Plenty of space and plenty of resources out there, though, if we can make space travel cheap enough, and solve the (rather more difficult IMO) medical issues.
If the calamity involves resource depletion, we will have run out of sufficient resources to create a self-sustaining colony somewhere else.
You're "not even wrong". There is no meaningful form of "resource depletion" that we face - the concept doesn't even make sense, unless we're talking post-SciFi-apocalypse.
When we build something out of iron, we don't change the amount of iron. We're not likely to run out of fossil fuels, since we keep discovering them faster than we burn them - the problem with fossil fuels is that they're too plentiful, not the other way around - but even if we did, we're not going to run out of solar power in the lifetime of the species. "Resources" simply aren't something we "deplete".
We're you thinking of pollution (in the classic, non-CO2 sense)? We seem to be growing out of that phase as well, as each nation makes its way through the industrial revolution to the other side.
Clinton wasn't going to do anything about climate change and her starting WW3 with Russia to appease the defence contractors that own her definitely wouldn't have helped the situation.
Now that's just not true! Nuclear winter would have set back global warming by decades, if not centuries. She was the only candidate willing to actually do something about global warming!
WIn7 is here for many years to come, since MS has obviously given up on making a home OS people actually want to use. It's silly to use anything else for gaming. And that means IE is here for many years to come. It's not like IE11 is IE6 or anything - works just fine if the only extension you need is an ad blocker.
They will pretty soon. What do you think the big names will need as a back end? How many Android phones are there? How many smart TVs are there? There will be 10x as many "things" in a few years, given it's a much cheaper market. Heck, Amazons goofy "dash button" is moving like crazy just for the novelty value.
AWS and Azure are building out at massive scale now, trying to land contracts with the big names already. And security is definitely part of the pitch - the future liability risk is being taken seriously, though no one has a clear answer yet.
The point is there's a real difference between a button to re-order Tide and a general purpose Linux computer.
Just throwing some servers up doesn't scale to a billion devices. A secure connection is a very difficult process on a low-end "thing". There's lots of specialist problems still being solved.
Why? UL isn't, and fire is a more serious problem than the IoT running amok. Liability for manufacturers would sort this out, just as it did for fire safety.
The choice isn't between government involvement and no government involvement. It's between good government involvement and stupid government involvement.
The people have spoken. The desire for stupid government is strong. Stupid government involvement is the only allowable course.
The right answer here is a non-governmental agency like UL. That can have greater reach (and, frankly, more credibility) than anything US government-specific. This would have to be coupled with a firm stance from the sever side of IOT (like AWS) requiring the certification.
Naturally, the slashvertizement for Google cloud doesn't mention that AWS has had GPU instances for years. Azure seems to have had it for a year now. Google is really playing catch-up in cloud services (though they aren't a joke like Oracle).
I hope Whipslash got a check for this slashvertizement - be good to see some advertizement flowing out of Goggle for once (and anything that keeps/. afloat).
Slashdot Mirror
If you keep calling everyone who disagrees with you those kinds of names you're going to lose again in 2020.
#ThatsHowYouGotTrump
You'd have thought this was clear after Bush's re-election. At this rate it won't be clear after Trump's re-election.
Police work. Talk to people. Adopt policies that encourage assimilation and understanding instead of radicalization and separation (on both sides). Teach people to believe they are British first and Muslim second. Show people that when they attack Britain they are only attacking themselves. Even then it's impossible to catch all of them, but that's the trade off you have to make if you want to live in a free state. You're still more likely to die by getting hit by a plane while walking down your street than getting killed by a terrorist, whether they are a Muslim terrorist, an Irish extremist, or a psychotic Pastafarian trying to strangle you with a wet noodle.
What's this intelligent and coherent post doing on Slashdot? Did you post on the wrong forum by mistake?
An FTL "hack" would be altering spacetime, e.g. wormholes, such that the distance was shorter. There are enough different expert ideas about the possibility of wormholes to leave it at "experts disagree", but we don't even really know what space is. More and more though, it seems to be "a thing, not a place".
If Trump wants to take a pro-citizen stance on the NSA, he should pardon Snowden on his first day in office. It would make me a believer.
They just discovered another 2 billion barrels today under Texas.
Off by an order of magnitude.
The USGS says "An estimated average of 20 billion barrels of oil and 1.6 billion barrels of natural gas liquids are available for the taking in the Wolfcamp shale, which is in the Midland Basin portion of Texas' Permian Basin."
Uhmmm... no. Do the math here... it takes only moments to burn what can take many tens of thousands of years to form
Proven oil reserves have grown every decade since we started burning the stuff. The tech to find and extract oil grows as fast as it needs to to keep us in oil. The global push to cut CO2 emissions will leave us with plenty of oil in the ground when technology eventually, inevitably, leaves oil behind.
The only thing that will keep us from literally running out is that the costs of obtaining it are going to continue to rise
Well, that was the argument before the whole global warming kerfuffle. But that's just it - we were never going to run out. "The cure for high commodity prices is high commodity prices." Eventually some alternative becomes cheaper and oil becomes a historical oddity. That's just how technology works.
With the exception of maybe rare metals or something, the resource we most lack on Earth is energy
There's lots of energy in the form of solar power. We just suck at consuming it. 10 billion people consuming power at the rate Americans do today would push the limits of terrestrial solar (at some point covering more land with solar panels is its own environmental problem) without tech advances, but of course there will be tech advances. And maybe fusion will stop being "just 20 years away" one day.
Your general point is quite sound though. In fact, it's the best argument for why it's worth the cost to try to colonize Mars and Venus - that's mostly about how to do better on Earth.
Today, we understand the global impact of the human population increasing 3x - 30x. We can measure resources and use computer models to understand the impact, so yes, I do believe we can have meaningful predictions.
Unfortunately, due to humans consuming more and more finite resources
You seem to be stuck 100 years in the past (better than 1000). Human population is rounding over. Right now, the high-tech areas of the world all have negative population growth (net of immigration).
Also, WTF is a finite resource? I keep hearing that term, and it's nonsense. When we make something out of iron, there's still just as much iron. The problem with fossil fuels is now that they're too plentiful, not too scarce, but even if we ran out solar power will keep working for quite some time. I mean, sure there's technically a finite amount of, say, palladium in the Earth's crust, but how exactly does that matter? We don't "use it up".
I also wonder when people think that we can somehow figure out a way to travel at light speeds to get to another planet.
The door isn't quite closed on that yet. There's still a lot we don't know about the fundamental physics of space-time, with interesting work ongoing to understand just what exactly space is. However, it seems a safe bet that any sort of FTL "hack" will take a lot of energy - far beyond what we could do as a civilization today.
So, while I wouldn't say FTL is a "never", it's not in any of our lifetimes. Basically, it's far enough out that it's beyond the "prediction horizon" for technology. We should plan on being effectively trapped in our system for centuries. Plenty of space and plenty of resources out there, though, if we can make space travel cheap enough, and solve the (rather more difficult IMO) medical issues.
If the calamity involves resource depletion, we will have run out of sufficient resources to create a self-sustaining colony somewhere else.
You're "not even wrong". There is no meaningful form of "resource depletion" that we face - the concept doesn't even make sense, unless we're talking post-SciFi-apocalypse.
When we build something out of iron, we don't change the amount of iron. We're not likely to run out of fossil fuels, since we keep discovering them faster than we burn them - the problem with fossil fuels is that they're too plentiful, not the other way around - but even if we did, we're not going to run out of solar power in the lifetime of the species. "Resources" simply aren't something we "deplete".
We're you thinking of pollution (in the classic, non-CO2 sense)? We seem to be growing out of that phase as well, as each nation makes its way through the industrial revolution to the other side.
Clinton wasn't going to do anything about climate change and her starting WW3 with Russia to appease the defence contractors that own her definitely wouldn't have helped the situation.
Now that's just not true! Nuclear winter would have set back global warming by decades, if not centuries. She was the only candidate willing to actually do something about global warming!
WIn7 is here for many years to come, since MS has obviously given up on making a home OS people actually want to use. It's silly to use anything else for gaming. And that means IE is here for many years to come. It's not like IE11 is IE6 or anything - works just fine if the only extension you need is an ad blocker.
They will pretty soon. What do you think the big names will need as a back end? How many Android phones are there? How many smart TVs are there? There will be 10x as many "things" in a few years, given it's a much cheaper market. Heck, Amazons goofy "dash button" is moving like crazy just for the novelty value.
AWS and Azure are building out at massive scale now, trying to land contracts with the big names already. And security is definitely part of the pitch - the future liability risk is being taken seriously, though no one has a clear answer yet.
The point is there's a real difference between a button to re-order Tide and a general purpose Linux computer.
Yep - it's there. https://slashdot.org///slashdo...
You're scaring me. Where's my safe space?
Seriously, Edge blows goats.
Yes, there really are. https://aws.amazon.com/iot/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-u...
Just throwing some servers up doesn't scale to a billion devices. A secure connection is a very difficult process on a low-end "thing". There's lots of specialist problems still being solved.
Hey, whipslash, how about fixing the annoying IE bug?
It all depends on where it's enforced. My suggestion was for the IoT cloud backends to enforce this. IoT-specific that way.
Speaking of non-sequiturs.
Why? UL isn't, and fire is a more serious problem than the IoT running amok. Liability for manufacturers would sort this out, just as it did for fire safety.
The bar is very low for a car you build yourself though.
Pwnt IoT devices are a problem because of scale. I'm not sure there will ever be enough hand-built "things" to matter.
The choice isn't between government involvement and no government involvement. It's between good government involvement and stupid government involvement.
The people have spoken. The desire for stupid government is strong. Stupid government involvement is the only allowable course.
The right answer here is a non-governmental agency like UL. That can have greater reach (and, frankly, more credibility) than anything US government-specific. This would have to be coupled with a firm stance from the sever side of IOT (like AWS) requiring the certification.
/thread
Psst, fix the /. IE bug. It's annoying, and likely a 1-line fix.
Naturally, the slashvertizement for Google cloud doesn't mention that AWS has had GPU instances for years. Azure seems to have had it for a year now. Google is really playing catch-up in cloud services (though they aren't a joke like Oracle).
I hope Whipslash got a check for this slashvertizement - be good to see some advertizement flowing out of Goggle for once (and anything that keeps /. afloat).