You totally missed GPs point. GP was suggesting that colonizing the moon has benefits on earth. Not only, do we learn how to get people living off the earth, but we glean knowledge which can be used back here to make our planet better.
Throw it in the direction you want not to go, and it's a source of propulsion. So long as you throw junk out "behind" you, everything works spiffy. Better yet, if you are slightly off course due to effects like photons, use the garbage to correct your course.
That's definitely true. But maybe that's not what the adults who are interested in this game are looking for. Perhaps, they're hoping a feeling similar to jumping on the horse and riding through the plains the first time in Ocarina of Time at age 17. Or, maybe they just like to play any game that's good, and this game is likely to be good.
It's sad we live in a world where people feel the need to drag others down. In a world teetering on the edge of a double-dip recession, where most 1st world households are at risk of losing what social status they have, why spend the energy pissing on some people's excitement for a game?
I'm rather fond of space solar with microwave transmission. The science is good, it would provide base power, and it uses technology we already have. It would be an engineering problem to get a system in place, but you can have environmentally responsible base power, without taking up major swaths of land.
It is cheaper only if you consider wasting rare-earth metals on systems with 20% load cheap.
Rare-earth metals are not actually rare. They are plentiful, and can be found in many places. China just happens to have cornered the market recently, by using the popular approach of undercutting other producers until they all go out of business and then raising prices once you control the market.
You don't need proof, it's common-sense that they would have a positive impact.
I know you're being tongue-in-cheek, but even this assertion isn't true. Removing certain regulations would definitely help businesses (E.g. regulations limiting emissions from coal power-plants harm the profits for those plants), but many regulations have been in effect so long that removing them would not necessarily help anyone. For instance, CFCs or asbestos have been so thoroughly eliminated from use, that even if regulations were lifted you probably wouldn't see massive spikes in profit.
This reminds me of that MIT operating system hoax that was going to take current file system ideas and throw them out the window. Face it, how else do you organize bits of information? The concept of a file is simple: an organized arrangement of bits that contains data which can be moved, re-sized or deleted. How do you change that? The only thing that can change is the method in which they are stored on physical media (file system) or cataloged and indexed.
If there were one thing you could do to a file that would actually improve it, I would say it would be adding a file header that defines the format of the contents of the file. Any file with that header could then reasonably be parsed by any application. But, even this idea doesn't change the concept of a file as a collection of bits. It would just create a standards committee to define the header format.
I wish I could mod parent - meh. Essentially all languages consider whitespace. Some use it to denote end of statement or scope.
I personally prefer punctuation to deonote the end of a statement, but I do not understand the animosity some people have for it. I do understand complaints about indentation defining scope, however; since switching between tabs and spaces can cause invisible errors. I bet if Python looked more like this for num in range(0, 10): {
print num }
You ignored the context. The context is, once the machines are good enough to design the machines. You now have a capitalist (one guy) who owns a machine that can build other machines (let's say he bought that builder-bot forty years ago). He goes to his builder-bot and says, make me a machine that produces widgets. The builder-bot produces it, and now the capitalist has the new widget producing robot. The end game is, and always will be, that someone with enough capital (capital meaning equipment and not cash) will not have to buy anything from anyone except for raw materials.
I think you're not acknowledging the GPs legitimate point. There is a great deal of technology that is at risk of being lost. It's not the 1930s kind, it's more like the 1750s kind. Look at what came out of the toaster project. Very simple things, like smelting ore, proved to be nearly impossible for him to discover. He couldn't find it on the internet.
Additionally, the GP is not talking about a world where things are pretty much as now, but somehow technology retreats. He's clearly suggesting a scenario where the entire global trade system essentially topples. If that happened, the fact that you can prepare a chicken is nice but you have to realize that you depend on a lot of other systems in place to do so. You depend on the electrical grid or natural gas deliveries to cook the chicken. Your car, which you can repair yourself, requires gasoline which is transported to you for a ridiculously low price. I don't think such a thing will happen, but to claim that you, or just about anyone else, is prepared because you're handy in a few or even a few dozen ways is hubris.
What is usually left out in this discussion is that there must exist a new sector for displaced workers to go, and that sector must be one those same workers can contribute to.
Assume for a moment, that none of a displaced workers skills are transferable except the most fundamental (literacy, public speaking, physical stamina). When a worker leaves agriculture, they have to find another job. If a manufacturing job screwing pieces together is available, a farm hand can probably transition to that job in only a short period of time with a little training. If the manufacturing job is running a million dollar CNC, more training is required. But, if you are displaced from manufacturing, and the growth industry is medical care, you may not be able to commit the time required to transition to that new job. That's the part most people leave out. Even if there will always be enough work for recent college grads, we seem to be entering an era where older displaced workers or those with insufficient education will not have employment options.
Is it OK to count forcing competitors to hand over proprietary information if they wish to sell within the Chinese market, with that knowledge being then handed over to Chinese corporations who will eventually be their competitor?
China manipulates the business environment in several ways, most of which seem unfair. Unless the economy turns around soon, I won't be surprised if we see an international trade war with China within the next 5 years.
Without any form of programming (even inputting binary codes), a computer is not a computer. If you can't change it's behavior programmatically, you're now talking about finite state machine science. If you want to argue that the field is rich without delving into any specific language, or even a generic higher level language, then I agree. But, try holding an interesting discussion on what a register is without bringing up the fact that a command exists to put a value into that register, or explain the power of an ALU while avoiding explaining that different commands cause it to produce different results.
Agreed. They've completely lost me. Prior to WoW, I bought every single game Blizzard released, and I loved it. Since then...I haven't bought (or even played on a friends computer) a thing, and I don't really forsee that changing any time soon. Blizzard hasn't been the same in years.
These are nice features. Sometimes, they are even useful (as opposed to just another hammer developers can abuse). But the announcement makes it seem, wrongly, that MSFT is doing something really unique here.
Cap and trade is a terrible idea. The right approach is much simpler.
1) Carbon tax. Use the revenue from this to lower other taxes. E.g. we'll add oil/coal/natural gas taxes, but we'll reduce business taxes to alleviate at least some of the economic drag caused by the carbon tax. 2) Carbon tariffs on imports. If something comes from a country that isn't making similar efforts to curb carbon usage, then we put that into the tariff on the good. An ideal tariff would be some value equal to the extra carbon emitted by building the good in a foreign country as opposed to here. Imports from Germany, for instance would have have no tariff (same for imports from Kenya). Imports from China, on the other hand, would have this tariff applied. 3) Tax reimbursement for exports to heavily polluting nations. To help our goods not be artificially expensive in places with less environmental protections, we take the money's collected on tariffs and give it to exporters so they can reduce their own prices and fairly compete in polluting markets.
I wouldn't just use this for carbon, by the way. I'd use the same system for nations that dump heavy metals into the oceans (through rivers) or otherwise harm the general biosphere.
The question you always have to ask is, "what evidence would side X accept as proof they were wrong". If no such proof exists, then that position is one for ideologues and no one else. Currently, there is significant evidence that AGW is real, but people on that side hold onto their position just cause, and many have been wed to it since the early 1990's. Meanwhile, I suspect that all it would take to make almost all AGW "believers" to change their mind is measurements that solar output is constant and measurements that show global temperature to be declining.
I know that would be enough for me to say "what's actually going on here?"
Meh, god of the gaps all over again. So long as any gap still exists, people will try to fit their own ideology into it, regardless of how round the hole and how square their peg.
I think the real threat of climate change is typically ignored for more "dramatic" scenarios. People like Al Gore seem to focus way too much on issues like sea levels rising a couple feet.
Whereas, the real threat of AGW is more mundane: starvation and the wars that food shortages will invariably cause. In Western democracies, it's been so long since we've had food shortages that nobody can really relate to the risk of it. If you are relatively wealthy (by world standards not US) and live in say a flyover state, you'll still be able to afford food even if it goes from 5% of your income to 8%. So, you won't starve directly, and if you live in a farming area, food shortages (assuming your crops are mostly unaffected) may actually increase your earning power.
Keep in mind, it's been literally decades since we as a society have had wide spread crop failures. A few years ago, I went into a Wendy's and ordered a sandwich, and they asked me if I really had to have a tomato on it, because the entire Florida crop had failed due to hurricanes. I said I didn't need it. Other than fruits that are highly seasonal (pomegranates), I've never had that kind of experience before or since. But, that's the kind of everyday experience that most of us will have to get used to if AGW truly ends up being a problem.
- yeah, let's just decide that we want to enslave generations of people to live in a tin can their entire lives without having any choice on the matter whatsoever.
If they don't like it? Well, they can always just commit an interstellar suicide and open the hatches somehow or blow it up to smithereens.
Let me guess, you aren't a big believer in individual human rights, are you?
And...is that terribly different than "just deciding" that some people will live in a favallia their entire lives, or Sudan, or Chinese villages, or Earth for that matter.
If somebody decides to join a generational spaceship heading for some new planet, it's true that they make an irreversible choice for their children and grandchildren. But, the same statement is true for the person who decides to remain on earth. Besides, I highly doubt people will decide to leave on generation ships until they are much nicer than the ISS. Maybe a travelers offspring will be forced to live on that ship for 80 years, but the original traveler is still probably committing to 50 years on the ship. If it was going to be a horrible life, who would commit their entire life to getting say 1/4 of the way from Earth to some other planet.
I highly suspect the first such trips to be highly ideological in nature. E.g. the Scientologists might decide they should be the first to get to someplace, because there aren't thetans on that other planet (only Earth).
Spoken like a crazy person. Trust me, I've tried this very simple experiment. Count your calories (I don't really care what). Now, using a simple online calculator cut them until they are either neutral or maybe a couple hundred calories less per day than your body needs. Now, exercise vigorously for perhaps 2 hours a week. Guess what, I lost 25 lbs and it wasn't hard at all. I'm not the only person who has ever completed this experiment either.
Now, if your plan is to eat 650 calories a day, it will definitely screw you up. But, if you keep things close to what your body needs ELEM is the only smart way to maintain a healthy weight. I mean, unless your strategy of ridiculing reason and proposing nonsensical strawmen arguments is working and the world just hasn't caught on yet.
Slashdot Mirror
You totally missed GPs point. GP was suggesting that colonizing the moon has benefits on earth. Not only, do we learn how to get people living off the earth, but we glean knowledge which can be used back here to make our planet better.
Throw it in the direction you want not to go, and it's a source of propulsion. So long as you throw junk out "behind" you, everything works spiffy. Better yet, if you are slightly off course due to effects like photons, use the garbage to correct your course.
That's definitely true. But maybe that's not what the adults who are interested in this game are looking for. Perhaps, they're hoping a feeling similar to jumping on the horse and riding through the plains the first time in Ocarina of Time at age 17. Or, maybe they just like to play any game that's good, and this game is likely to be good.
It's sad we live in a world where people feel the need to drag others down. In a world teetering on the edge of a double-dip recession, where most 1st world households are at risk of losing what social status they have, why spend the energy pissing on some people's excitement for a game?
I'm rather fond of space solar with microwave transmission. The science is good, it would provide base power, and it uses technology we already have. It would be an engineering problem to get a system in place, but you can have environmentally responsible base power, without taking up major swaths of land.
It is cheaper only if you consider wasting rare-earth metals on systems with 20% load cheap.
Rare-earth metals are not actually rare. They are plentiful, and can be found in many places. China just happens to have cornered the market recently, by using the popular approach of undercutting other producers until they all go out of business and then raising prices once you control the market.
That is all.
You don't need proof, it's common-sense that they would have a positive impact.
I know you're being tongue-in-cheek, but even this assertion isn't true. Removing certain regulations would definitely help businesses (E.g. regulations limiting emissions from coal power-plants harm the profits for those plants), but many regulations have been in effect so long that removing them would not necessarily help anyone. For instance, CFCs or asbestos have been so thoroughly eliminated from use, that even if regulations were lifted you probably wouldn't see massive spikes in profit.
This reminds me of that MIT operating system hoax that was going to take current file system ideas and throw them out the window. Face it, how else do you organize bits of information? The concept of a file is simple: an organized arrangement of bits that contains data which can be moved, re-sized or deleted. How do you change that? The only thing that can change is the method in which they are stored on physical media (file system) or cataloged and indexed.
If there were one thing you could do to a file that would actually improve it, I would say it would be adding a file header that defines the format of the contents of the file. Any file with that header could then reasonably be parsed by any application. But, even this idea doesn't change the concept of a file as a collection of bits. It would just create a standards committee to define the header format.
As my professor once said (more or less), "C++: I like how much power it grants me, but I don't think anyone else should be allowed to use it."
Most languages consider whitespace.
Yes, but it should only be used when tokenizing. The idea of using it to indicate scope is absurd.
Thank you for dictating to the rest of the world how their parser should work. I'm sure your insight will be highly regarded, Mr. Coward.
I wish I could mod parent - meh. Essentially all languages consider whitespace. Some use it to denote end of statement or scope.
I personally prefer punctuation to deonote the end of a statement, but I do not understand the animosity some people have for it. I do understand complaints about indentation defining scope, however; since switching between tabs and spaces can cause invisible errors. I bet if Python looked more like this
for num in range(0, 10):
{
print num
}
than this
for num in range(0, 10):
print num
that people wouldn't really care.
And remove exemptions for salaried employees. Actually, even just making full time 38 hours a week would be a good start.
You ignored the context. The context is, once the machines are good enough to design the machines. You now have a capitalist (one guy) who owns a machine that can build other machines (let's say he bought that builder-bot forty years ago). He goes to his builder-bot and says, make me a machine that produces widgets. The builder-bot produces it, and now the capitalist has the new widget producing robot. The end game is, and always will be, that someone with enough capital (capital meaning equipment and not cash) will not have to buy anything from anyone except for raw materials.
I think you're not acknowledging the GPs legitimate point. There is a great deal of technology that is at risk of being lost. It's not the 1930s kind, it's more like the 1750s kind. Look at what came out of the toaster project. Very simple things, like smelting ore, proved to be nearly impossible for him to discover. He couldn't find it on the internet.
Additionally, the GP is not talking about a world where things are pretty much as now, but somehow technology retreats. He's clearly suggesting a scenario where the entire global trade system essentially topples. If that happened, the fact that you can prepare a chicken is nice but you have to realize that you depend on a lot of other systems in place to do so. You depend on the electrical grid or natural gas deliveries to cook the chicken. Your car, which you can repair yourself, requires gasoline which is transported to you for a ridiculously low price. I don't think such a thing will happen, but to claim that you, or just about anyone else, is prepared because you're handy in a few or even a few dozen ways is hubris.
What is usually left out in this discussion is that there must exist a new sector for displaced workers to go, and that sector must be one those same workers can contribute to.
Assume for a moment, that none of a displaced workers skills are transferable except the most fundamental (literacy, public speaking, physical stamina). When a worker leaves agriculture, they have to find another job. If a manufacturing job screwing pieces together is available, a farm hand can probably transition to that job in only a short period of time with a little training. If the manufacturing job is running a million dollar CNC, more training is required. But, if you are displaced from manufacturing, and the growth industry is medical care, you may not be able to commit the time required to transition to that new job. That's the part most people leave out. Even if there will always be enough work for recent college grads, we seem to be entering an era where older displaced workers or those with insufficient education will not have employment options.
Is it OK to count forcing competitors to hand over proprietary information if they wish to sell within the Chinese market, with that knowledge being then handed over to Chinese corporations who will eventually be their competitor?
China manipulates the business environment in several ways, most of which seem unfair. Unless the economy turns around soon, I won't be surprised if we see an international trade war with China within the next 5 years.
Wrong!
Without any form of programming (even inputting binary codes), a computer is not a computer. If you can't change it's behavior programmatically, you're now talking about finite state machine science. If you want to argue that the field is rich without delving into any specific language, or even a generic higher level language, then I agree. But, try holding an interesting discussion on what a register is without bringing up the fact that a command exists to put a value into that register, or explain the power of an ALU while avoiding explaining that different commands cause it to produce different results.
Agreed. They've completely lost me. Prior to WoW, I bought every single game Blizzard released, and I loved it. Since then...I haven't bought (or even played on a friends computer) a thing, and I don't really forsee that changing any time soon. Blizzard hasn't been the same in years.
I see a lot of other tools that do this, but since C# mostly started off as a ripped off Java, it's also worth pointing out that since Java 1.6, that language also provided public interfaces to compile code at runtime.
These are nice features. Sometimes, they are even useful (as opposed to just another hammer developers can abuse). But the announcement makes it seem, wrongly, that MSFT is doing something really unique here.
Cap and trade is a terrible idea. The right approach is much simpler.
1) Carbon tax. Use the revenue from this to lower other taxes. E.g. we'll add oil/coal/natural gas taxes, but we'll reduce business taxes to alleviate at least some of the economic drag caused by the carbon tax.
2) Carbon tariffs on imports. If something comes from a country that isn't making similar efforts to curb carbon usage, then we put that into the tariff on the good. An ideal tariff would be some value equal to the extra carbon emitted by building the good in a foreign country as opposed to here. Imports from Germany, for instance would have have no tariff (same for imports from Kenya). Imports from China, on the other hand, would have this tariff applied.
3) Tax reimbursement for exports to heavily polluting nations. To help our goods not be artificially expensive in places with less environmental protections, we take the money's collected on tariffs and give it to exporters so they can reduce their own prices and fairly compete in polluting markets.
I wouldn't just use this for carbon, by the way. I'd use the same system for nations that dump heavy metals into the oceans (through rivers) or otherwise harm the general biosphere.
The question you always have to ask is, "what evidence would side X accept as proof they were wrong". If no such proof exists, then that position is one for ideologues and no one else. Currently, there is significant evidence that AGW is real, but people on that side hold onto their position just cause, and many have been wed to it since the early 1990's. Meanwhile, I suspect that all it would take to make almost all AGW "believers" to change their mind is measurements that solar output is constant and measurements that show global temperature to be declining.
I know that would be enough for me to say "what's actually going on here?"
Meh, god of the gaps all over again. So long as any gap still exists, people will try to fit their own ideology into it, regardless of how round the hole and how square their peg.
I think the real threat of climate change is typically ignored for more "dramatic" scenarios. People like Al Gore seem to focus way too much on issues like sea levels rising a couple feet.
Whereas, the real threat of AGW is more mundane: starvation and the wars that food shortages will invariably cause. In Western democracies, it's been so long since we've had food shortages that nobody can really relate to the risk of it. If you are relatively wealthy (by world standards not US) and live in say a flyover state, you'll still be able to afford food even if it goes from 5% of your income to 8%. So, you won't starve directly, and if you live in a farming area, food shortages (assuming your crops are mostly unaffected) may actually increase your earning power.
Keep in mind, it's been literally decades since we as a society have had wide spread crop failures. A few years ago, I went into a Wendy's and ordered a sandwich, and they asked me if I really had to have a tomato on it, because the entire Florida crop had failed due to hurricanes. I said I didn't need it. Other than fruits that are highly seasonal (pomegranates), I've never had that kind of experience before or since. But, that's the kind of everyday experience that most of us will have to get used to if AGW truly ends up being a problem.
Sigh. That federal government intervention was necessary was the GPs point. I hate having to explain sarcasm.
- yeah, let's just decide that we want to enslave generations of people to live in a tin can their entire lives without having any choice on the matter whatsoever.
If they don't like it? Well, they can always just commit an interstellar suicide and open the hatches somehow or blow it up to smithereens.
Let me guess, you aren't a big believer in individual human rights, are you?
And...is that terribly different than "just deciding" that some people will live in a favallia their entire lives, or Sudan, or Chinese villages, or Earth for that matter.
If somebody decides to join a generational spaceship heading for some new planet, it's true that they make an irreversible choice for their children and grandchildren. But, the same statement is true for the person who decides to remain on earth. Besides, I highly doubt people will decide to leave on generation ships until they are much nicer than the ISS. Maybe a travelers offspring will be forced to live on that ship for 80 years, but the original traveler is still probably committing to 50 years on the ship. If it was going to be a horrible life, who would commit their entire life to getting say 1/4 of the way from Earth to some other planet.
I highly suspect the first such trips to be highly ideological in nature. E.g. the Scientologists might decide they should be the first to get to someplace, because there aren't thetans on that other planet (only Earth).
Spoken like a crazy person. Trust me, I've tried this very simple experiment. Count your calories (I don't really care what). Now, using a simple online calculator cut them until they are either neutral or maybe a couple hundred calories less per day than your body needs. Now, exercise vigorously for perhaps 2 hours a week. Guess what, I lost 25 lbs and it wasn't hard at all. I'm not the only person who has ever completed this experiment either.
Now, if your plan is to eat 650 calories a day, it will definitely screw you up. But, if you keep things close to what your body needs ELEM is the only smart way to maintain a healthy weight. I mean, unless your strategy of ridiculing reason and proposing nonsensical strawmen arguments is working and the world just hasn't caught on yet.