So basically we're talking about Peak Water instead of Peak Oil..... the point where we use more of the substance than is being replaced (or discovered).
Oil isn't ever going to be replenished. Water is replenished all the time, and is a closed-cycle. In addition, we aren't effectively using the current quantities of water we extract, and spending a little more money on water will open up a huge range of sources of water, like recycling sewer water (whether to grey water or directly to drinking water), trapping more runoff rather than letting it flow to the sea, or desalination.
Water doesn't have a peak. The prices will rise rather smoothly as demand outstrips supply, and may simply fall again, later, once the more efficient infrastructure is done being developed and constructed. This is all very, very different from the situation with oil.
And people who have legacy apps who use Motif. This is a good move for those, and the people who need to support them.
"Legacy apps"!?! Hey bud, XPDF switched from gtk+, TO MOTIF a few years back. XPDF is hardly a legacy app, and the developer believed that Motif was the superior toolkit, entirely despite the licensing issue.
Re:Hooray! More life for old systems! And new!
on
CDE Open Sourced
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· Score: 1
CDE and Dillo would be great for the DSL/Puppy crowd.
Why bother? XFce v3.x was a much-improved CDE panel clone that was much easier to configure and use.
It would be a great addition to pdksh, and is hands-down better than bash.
pdksh isn't used for anything... OpenBSD's enhanced version (better than bash) has been repackaged as "mksh". I'd be happy if we just started seeing mksh everywhere, rather than clunky old pdsh still hanging around for some reason.
The point at which eliminating your wait time for whatever slow application (usually Firefox...), is worth the sale price of new hardware, plus the time and effort to setup that new system.
Power is cheap, and old hardware is much lower power than people expect, due to being single-core and having low-power GPUs and North/Southbridges. I still have a 2.4GHz P4 system up and running in an office... It draws all of 40w at idle, which means operating costs are just a few cents a day at worst, and probably less than the monitor it's hooked up to.
Setup issues can be more significant than price. Upgrading from 32 to 64-bit can be a much, much bigger hassle than just transferring your data over, and dealing with issues like the new system not handling Suspend / Resume properly can mean your NEW system is suddenly the power-hog.
Another great example would be the B-2, which can't fly a useful number of sorties because it has to be based on the other side of the world from its targets because of its finicky maintenance demands. We were better served in Iraq by the B-52 flying 18-wheeler from the 50s, which can haul twice the payload of the B-2 and was operated from in-theater bases as well as from US bases.
The B-52 may as well be a Zeppelin... It's huge, slow, obvious, and incredibly easy to shoot down. You use it ONLY after you've both taken out all the ground-based anti-aircraft installations, and also established complete air superiority, knocking every single enemy fighter out of the sky (which is what the F-22 would be great at).
Meanwhile, the B-2 is designed to fly into hostile territory, right past those enemy fighter jets and ground-based anti-aircraft installations, undetected; drop their payload on target, and get out alive. The B-52 doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of accomplishing the same missions the B-2s have flow, and in-fact the B-2s are what pave the way for the horde of B-52s to go in, without astronomical losses.
Suggesting replacing the B-2s with B-52s just reeks of absolutely obscene amounts of ignorance on the topic you're pretending you know ANYTHING about, when you clearly don't know the very basics.
I agree that the Model I was nobody's idea of an awesome hardware design, but for $595, could anyone else have done better, at either a hobbyist or professional/corporate level?
Commodore could, and did... At first with the PET, then with the Commodore 64, which debuted in Jan 1982 with 64K memory for $595.
The amount of high quality vandalism, for lack of a better term, is apparently, in percentage terms, about the same as other encyclopedias
I didn't suggest WP has tons of widespread inaccuracy, I said it will eventually collapse due to vandalism which is being grossly ineffectively dealt with by WP's policies.
Other encyclopedias don't depend on a dedicated horde of free editors, each offering up a Sisyphean effort to combat all of the downsides of WP's horrible policies. WP has alienated many, many people. Eventually they'll alienate the bulk of the intelligent, English-speaking populace, capable of maintaining the articles.
This redirects to Sega Genesis, even though it was only known as this in North America.
However, a vote took place on what to call it and as a result of this vote, it's referred to as the Genesis, which is wrong.
How is the name "Genesis" "wrong" in any sense at all? One sentence up you said it was the correct name used in "North America".
So the article is filed under "Genesis", there's a working redirect from "Megadrive", and the article correctly mentions the dual-naming issue at the very top.
There is nothing factually incorrect about any of that. Furthermore, I'm not aware of any Wikipedia policy that has any opinion on which of the two names should be preferred for the article title.
If you want a REAL example of Wikipedia's problems, try the Fractal Antenna article, which has been jealously guarded by employees of "Fractal Antenna Systems" run by "Nathan Cohen" for YEARS and YEARS. Do a geoIP lookup of the anonymous editors, or read some of the crap that's gone on in the talk page of that article, and you'll see a flood of damming evidence. References that dispute the effectiveness of fractal antennas over conventional antennas, and links to competitors like Fractus, have been repeatedly removed by same said editors.
Admins have stepped-in and blocked anonymous edits from time to time, but once the ban is lifted, bias-pushing continues. Admins generally refuse to step-in for anything other than the most flagrant vandalism, which isn't the case here, and reclassify it as a content dispute, which has a remediation process that will kill you of old age before anything is accomplished, and that's for EACH INCIDENT, and each different editor.
So what do we do with Wikipedia? Try to get competitors to have their own shill compete with FAS? Balance it out with mutual combat, or will the one willing to spend the most money just win, and turn it permanently to his POV?
WIkipedia's policies are an unbelievably ineffective, bureaucratic mess, that will never handle POV-pushing such as this. Instead, the "good" articles on wikipedia just happen to have WP admins interested in them, and willing to completely ignore WP policies to block such subtle vandalism. This is an incredibly inefficient process, and one doomed to ultimately fail under it's own weight.
They're already a government-granted monopolies... That's why they're one of 2, or perhaps the only options for high-speed Internet service in any given area. Can't prop them up much more than that!
If too many people are dropping cable TV, the cable companies will just raise the prices on internet service, in the sneakiest ways possible. I know in my area, Verizon has introduced FIOS, eliminating DSL, and making the lowest-cost internet service from a mere $65/month... My local cable company is either ignorant of this fact, or benevolent, and offers almost the same service for just $20/month... Because of this, if said cableco should decide to raise their prices, there is absolutely no alternative that'll allow me to continue streaming TV shows.
Cable and Satellite TV have been massively overpriced for many years, and the ballooning channel count is making quality worse, not better. DishNetwork is ahead of the curve and offers a $15/mo "Welcome Pack" that has local channels plus a minimal contingent of basic cable channels. DirecTV has been the higher-priced option for a long time, and is likely to resist offering such an option.
Personally, I don't see why people are so adversed to OTA HDTV. The vast majority of decent-quality original content is on the OTA broadcast networks, and with the switch to digital, the picture quality from an antenna is superior to any pay service. Besides, our tax dollars paid for the current network of broadcast TV transmitters that criss-cross the nation, ensuring that damn near all of us can receive a television signal with just a modest TV antenna, and the switch to digital has improved things significantly. Even out here on the fringes, I only needed to spend about $100 in antenna equipment to solidly pickup OTA HDTV signals... a one-time expense less than 2 months worth of pay TV, and I like the Free-TV channel selection (missing on almost all cable/satellite packages) much better anyhow... MeTV, ThisTV, AntennaTV, MHz, numerous PBS sub-channels, etc.
For example, it seems that many more photos on facebook involves clothing, and I am sure many of the people on facebook do not intend to have sex with everyone who friends them.
When you make it easier to steal a product than purchase a product what exactly do you expect to happen?
I would expect fewer people to buy the product, and very little theft.
I'm pretty sure it's a lot easier to steal a car than buy a car... I don't expect most people to go around stealing cars, though.
Quit with the rationalization of copyright infringement... If you don't like the MPAA, the best thing you can do is get your entertainment somewhere else. It not only starves them of money, it also breaks the network effects of lots of people having seen the crappy nondescript zombie movie number 973.
amazon is $80 a year and includes free shipping and book borrowing
Amazon is a huge fan of loss-leader pricing when they're trying to grow new services.
Remember all the super-cheap MP3s when they were ramping-up their service? All gone now, and they're as expensive as everyone else... Now their special deal is some random 10 year-old album from some nobody for ONLY $5, rotating every week.
Enjoy the service while you can, but expect that Amazon is 100% certain to pull the rug out from under you at any moment... Maybe ramping up the price, maybe most of the benefits disappearing, or maybe a combination of the two.
Lamenting the decline of Do-it-Yourselfers (DIY) is about on-par with lamenting the decline of horse-drawn plows, and saying it is some sort of American cultural underpinning is idiotic. Do you really think folks in the "roaring '20s" were all interested in working with their hands? Hell no, they were getting suddenly rich off the stock market boom, and bootlegging, and expected it would always be that way.
DIY was basically invented during the great depression. Man-hours were nearly free, so it made all the sense in the world to spend hours fixing your existing items, rather than calling in an expert, or buying a replacement. It went as far as folks partially or almost completely building their own houses. With the 2008 recession, there's been an upswing in DIY as well, but it'll just continue to decline as things get better.
These days, going nuts with DIY is insanity. If my $20 weed-wacker breaks, it will be replaced, as it's not worth the effort to fix it. The same is true for just about all electronics these days... it's only worth fixing if you know some school kid who can solder, and whose time is basically free.
People still need some mechanical know-how, or at least have someone in the family who does... Being able to fix simple issues with your own car (battery, alternator, power window motors, etc) is still profitable and convenient, as well as issues with your home and appliances (those $10 thermocouples go out every few years). But with car manufacturers having 10-year warranties that REQUIRE all maintenance and repairs be done by professionals, anyhow, and more and more people RENTING their homes, which have their own maintenance people, there are ever-fewer places where DIY knowledge is useful, nevermind necessary.
And I say all of this as a very capable handyman, who buys and fixes-up old houses, and maintains classic old cars...
Imagine he was, instead, saying that every American should be able to replace the bad capacitors on their PC's motherboard, and tell me if you'd agree... It's a nice skill if you've got it, but not a very profitable one, and happens to be increasingly impractical as prices fall.
We could sure use a lot more power over USB, and 100w sounds nice, as that's enough for laptops, but I bet it's too big of a jump.
How many USB ports does your computer have? 6? 8? Now your PSU not only needs to be big enough to handle your PC's power draw, it needs to be able to supply another 800watts in addition to it.
And USB wall-warts? They're $3 a piece because it's only a single voltage, doesn't need to have any smarts, and the power draw is so low. Once it needs to supply 100W at various voltages, it'll cost MORE than your laptop power supply, even if you're only planning on buying 5 of them to charge your cell phone in various locations... And people are going to be mighty unhappy when they buy a laptop or other device, and find it doesn't have any power supply included, so I'm not sure this will really be a gain.
And if we have a disparity between $5 low-power USB4 wall warts and $50 full-spec USB4 wall-warts, it'll be a mighty tricky situation. USB caught-on because it was cheap... Firewire supplied much more power, but wasn't nearly as cheap, and failed in the mass market.
This is economics 101. First, products are manufactured less expensively, giving everyone a higher standard of living for less money. Second, there's now a number of higher-paying jobs, programming, servicing, and also BUILDING these robots, and also often there remain a number of human jobs in certain portions of the assembly line for tasks which the robots aren't good at, which get filled with more people to keep up with the new robots. Third, with lower manufacturing costs, there's more money available to pay the skilled labor, like the product designers, engineers, etc.
Continually improving efficiency is why there are ANY jobs in the US, today. With such a large wage disparity between US workers and other countries, US workers need to be several times as productive, usually assisted by robots and other machines, to be competitive on the world market. We certainly shouldn't be striving for lots of jobs at any price... we should be striving for more HIGH-PAYING jobs.
it's common to limit quantities of the first shipment so you can tell the world you "sold out" a few days later.
Indeed. And there are a lot of other similar practices in other areas. The one I find the most surreal is movies about WWII. Indeed, the goal of marketing is to make sure the world knows your movie made old men cry... Disney is particularly heavy-handed in it's marketing efforts, so upon the release of Pearl Harbor, there was a flood of blunt and un-artful news blurbs about the fact that lots of old men who saw the movie had cried... Considering how bad and inaccurate the movie was, I can only assume they were crying for reasons the complete opposite of what Disney wished everyone to assume.
I don't know how attentive the average person is, but if I picked-up a power strip and it weighed twice as much as others, I'd be very suspiscious that something was off with it (maybe something fell in?)
It would strike me as much more effective to use a device that already has a lot more heft to it, so the weight difference wouldn't be noticed.
I know the Soviets discovered several CIA bugs because things like their copiers were just a few ounces heavier than a stock model.
And where do these city dwellers get their food, paper plates, hardwood furniture? Where does their trash go?
You're just making a fool of yourself, here. Paper and most wood is rather sustainably harvested, and has been for a long time. We certainly aren't going to run out of space for landfills for centuries to come, the issues with them are always local political nonsense.
We are consuming, destroying, and polluting our natural resources far above a sustainable rate.
First off, there are some externalities, but in general, the market is very good at handling this. Remember $1/gallon gasoline? Me neither. Even with this most inelastic of resource, price spikes resulted in significantly reduced demand.
And secondly: PROVE IT! I'm tired of this emotional, baseless fear-mongering bullshit. I've provided real facts and sources. You and the GP haven't provided a damn thing to support any of your claims, so get some facts to support your position, or go away and shut the hell up while the grown-ups are speaking.
Why do people seem to think that climate scientists advocate deindustrialisation? I have never heard a serious case arguing for it.
It's generally the environmentalists yelling about global warming the loudest, and shortly thereafter telling everyone that the solution is to go back to living in caves (quite literally).
But it's not a complete misconception... Scientists don't quite say it, but it's clearly implied, because seriously reduced consumption and activity is currently the only way to make as big of a dent in CO2 production as they advocate.
There are major things like cement production, which alone emits about 6% of total man-made greenhouse gases, for which there seems to be absolutely no possible option to significantly reduce the CO2 emissions, other than simply stopping cement production. With cement being one of the most important construction materials, this directly translates into stopping most large building construction, and a severe economic crash.
For every person we put on this earth, there's less space for the natural world and its forests and oceans which renew our air and water.
Actually, higher population generally results in higher population density in cities. We don't go plow a forest to built more suburban houses, we stop building houses, and start building condos, high-rise apartments, etc., etc.
And in the US, at least, the population is steadily moving southwest every year... The point being, we're generally destroying shrub desert, which previously had thin populations of plants and animals, which contributed almost nothing to renewing "our air and water."
At some point, we will have used up enough land so that pollution, species loss and loss of renewable resources makes us get a Darwin award as a species.
Absolutely, and long ago the exact date of this population crash was predicted. It is going to be... 1890. So said Thomas Malthus. Glad to hear your tremendous intellect has given you the insight to see the truth. Maybe you should form a group, and go climb up to a mountain-top somewhere, and wait for a sign that the population is about to crash.
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Oil isn't ever going to be replenished. Water is replenished all the time, and is a closed-cycle. In addition, we aren't effectively using the current quantities of water we extract, and spending a little more money on water will open up a huge range of sources of water, like recycling sewer water (whether to grey water or directly to drinking water), trapping more runoff rather than letting it flow to the sea, or desalination.
Water doesn't have a peak. The prices will rise rather smoothly as demand outstrips supply, and may simply fall again, later, once the more efficient infrastructure is done being developed and constructed. This is all very, very different from the situation with oil.
"Legacy apps"!?! Hey bud, XPDF switched from gtk+, TO MOTIF a few years back. XPDF is hardly a legacy app, and the developer believed that Motif was the superior toolkit, entirely despite the licensing issue.
Why bother? XFce v3.x was a much-improved CDE panel clone that was much easier to configure and use.
pdksh isn't used for anything... OpenBSD's enhanced version (better than bash) has been repackaged as "mksh". I'd be happy if we just started seeing mksh everywhere, rather than clunky old pdsh still hanging around for some reason.
The point at which eliminating your wait time for whatever slow application (usually Firefox...), is worth the sale price of new hardware, plus the time and effort to setup that new system.
Power is cheap, and old hardware is much lower power than people expect, due to being single-core and having low-power GPUs and North/Southbridges. I still have a 2.4GHz P4 system up and running in an office... It draws all of 40w at idle, which means operating costs are just a few cents a day at worst, and probably less than the monitor it's hooked up to.
Setup issues can be more significant than price. Upgrading from 32 to 64-bit can be a much, much bigger hassle than just transferring your data over, and dealing with issues like the new system not handling Suspend / Resume properly can mean your NEW system is suddenly the power-hog.
" we can take out the air defenses of anyone save a modern first-world army in a matter of days."
Yes we can, in no small part thanks to the B-2.
The B-52 may as well be a Zeppelin... It's huge, slow, obvious, and incredibly easy to shoot down. You use it ONLY after you've both taken out all the ground-based anti-aircraft installations, and also established complete air superiority, knocking every single enemy fighter out of the sky (which is what the F-22 would be great at).
Meanwhile, the B-2 is designed to fly into hostile territory, right past those enemy fighter jets and ground-based anti-aircraft installations, undetected; drop their payload on target, and get out alive. The B-52 doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of accomplishing the same missions the B-2s have flow, and in-fact the B-2s are what pave the way for the horde of B-52s to go in, without astronomical losses.
Suggesting replacing the B-2s with B-52s just reeks of absolutely obscene amounts of ignorance on the topic you're pretending you know ANYTHING about, when you clearly don't know the very basics.
You don't know what you are talking about.
Commodore could, and did... At first with the PET, then with the Commodore 64, which debuted in Jan 1982 with 64K memory for $595.
I didn't suggest WP has tons of widespread inaccuracy, I said it will eventually collapse due to vandalism which is being grossly ineffectively dealt with by WP's policies.
Other encyclopedias don't depend on a dedicated horde of free editors, each offering up a Sisyphean effort to combat all of the downsides of WP's horrible policies. WP has alienated many, many people. Eventually they'll alienate the bulk of the intelligent, English-speaking populace, capable of maintaining the articles.
How is the name "Genesis" "wrong" in any sense at all? One sentence up you said it was the correct name used in "North America".
So the article is filed under "Genesis", there's a working redirect from "Megadrive", and the article correctly mentions the dual-naming issue at the very top.
There is nothing factually incorrect about any of that. Furthermore, I'm not aware of any Wikipedia policy that has any opinion on which of the two names should be preferred for the article title.
If you want a REAL example of Wikipedia's problems, try the Fractal Antenna article, which has been jealously guarded by employees of "Fractal Antenna Systems" run by "Nathan Cohen" for YEARS and YEARS. Do a geoIP lookup of the anonymous editors, or read some of the crap that's gone on in the talk page of that article, and you'll see a flood of damming evidence. References that dispute the effectiveness of fractal antennas over conventional antennas, and links to competitors like Fractus, have been repeatedly removed by same said editors.
Admins have stepped-in and blocked anonymous edits from time to time, but once the ban is lifted, bias-pushing continues. Admins generally refuse to step-in for anything other than the most flagrant vandalism, which isn't the case here, and reclassify it as a content dispute, which has a remediation process that will kill you of old age before anything is accomplished, and that's for EACH INCIDENT, and each different editor.
So what do we do with Wikipedia? Try to get competitors to have their own shill compete with FAS? Balance it out with mutual combat, or will the one willing to spend the most money just win, and turn it permanently to his POV?
WIkipedia's policies are an unbelievably ineffective, bureaucratic mess, that will never handle POV-pushing such as this. Instead, the "good" articles on wikipedia just happen to have WP admins interested in them, and willing to completely ignore WP policies to block such subtle vandalism. This is an incredibly inefficient process, and one doomed to ultimately fail under it's own weight.
Under a few inches of salty sea-water, I think it's unlikely that any saliva-born diseases would be transmitted by a bite, successfully.
They're already a government-granted monopolies... That's why they're one of 2, or perhaps the only options for high-speed Internet service in any given area. Can't prop them up much more than that!
If too many people are dropping cable TV, the cable companies will just raise the prices on internet service, in the sneakiest ways possible. I know in my area, Verizon has introduced FIOS, eliminating DSL, and making the lowest-cost internet service from a mere $65/month... My local cable company is either ignorant of this fact, or benevolent, and offers almost the same service for just $20/month... Because of this, if said cableco should decide to raise their prices, there is absolutely no alternative that'll allow me to continue streaming TV shows.
Cable and Satellite TV have been massively overpriced for many years, and the ballooning channel count is making quality worse, not better. DishNetwork is ahead of the curve and offers a $15/mo "Welcome Pack" that has local channels plus a minimal contingent of basic cable channels. DirecTV has been the higher-priced option for a long time, and is likely to resist offering such an option.
Personally, I don't see why people are so adversed to OTA HDTV. The vast majority of decent-quality original content is on the OTA broadcast networks, and with the switch to digital, the picture quality from an antenna is superior to any pay service. Besides, our tax dollars paid for the current network of broadcast TV transmitters that criss-cross the nation, ensuring that damn near all of us can receive a television signal with just a modest TV antenna, and the switch to digital has improved things significantly. Even out here on the fringes, I only needed to spend about $100 in antenna equipment to solidly pickup OTA HDTV signals... a one-time expense less than 2 months worth of pay TV, and I like the Free-TV channel selection (missing on almost all cable/satellite packages) much better anyhow... MeTV, ThisTV, AntennaTV, MHz, numerous PBS sub-channels, etc.
By god you're right! There ARE women on facebook.
I would expect fewer people to buy the product, and very little theft.
I'm pretty sure it's a lot easier to steal a car than buy a car... I don't expect most people to go around stealing cars, though.
Quit with the rationalization of copyright infringement... If you don't like the MPAA, the best thing you can do is get your entertainment somewhere else. It not only starves them of money, it also breaks the network effects of lots of people having seen the crappy nondescript zombie movie number 973.
Amazon is a huge fan of loss-leader pricing when they're trying to grow new services.
Remember all the super-cheap MP3s when they were ramping-up their service? All gone now, and they're as expensive as everyone else... Now their special deal is some random 10 year-old album from some nobody for ONLY $5, rotating every week.
Enjoy the service while you can, but expect that Amazon is 100% certain to pull the rug out from under you at any moment... Maybe ramping up the price, maybe most of the benefits disappearing, or maybe a combination of the two.
Lamenting the decline of Do-it-Yourselfers (DIY) is about on-par with lamenting the decline of horse-drawn plows, and saying it is some sort of American cultural underpinning is idiotic. Do you really think folks in the "roaring '20s" were all interested in working with their hands? Hell no, they were getting suddenly rich off the stock market boom, and bootlegging, and expected it would always be that way.
DIY was basically invented during the great depression. Man-hours were nearly free, so it made all the sense in the world to spend hours fixing your existing items, rather than calling in an expert, or buying a replacement. It went as far as folks partially or almost completely building their own houses. With the 2008 recession, there's been an upswing in DIY as well, but it'll just continue to decline as things get better.
These days, going nuts with DIY is insanity. If my $20 weed-wacker breaks, it will be replaced, as it's not worth the effort to fix it. The same is true for just about all electronics these days... it's only worth fixing if you know some school kid who can solder, and whose time is basically free.
People still need some mechanical know-how, or at least have someone in the family who does... Being able to fix simple issues with your own car (battery, alternator, power window motors, etc) is still profitable and convenient, as well as issues with your home and appliances (those $10 thermocouples go out every few years). But with car manufacturers having 10-year warranties that REQUIRE all maintenance and repairs be done by professionals, anyhow, and more and more people RENTING their homes, which have their own maintenance people, there are ever-fewer places where DIY knowledge is useful, nevermind necessary.
And I say all of this as a very capable handyman, who buys and fixes-up old houses, and maintains classic old cars...
Imagine he was, instead, saying that every American should be able to replace the bad capacitors on their PC's motherboard, and tell me if you'd agree... It's a nice skill if you've got it, but not a very profitable one, and happens to be increasingly impractical as prices fall.
We could sure use a lot more power over USB, and 100w sounds nice, as that's enough for laptops, but I bet it's too big of a jump.
How many USB ports does your computer have? 6? 8? Now your PSU not only needs to be big enough to handle your PC's power draw, it needs to be able to supply another 800watts in addition to it.
And USB wall-warts? They're $3 a piece because it's only a single voltage, doesn't need to have any smarts, and the power draw is so low. Once it needs to supply 100W at various voltages, it'll cost MORE than your laptop power supply, even if you're only planning on buying 5 of them to charge your cell phone in various locations... And people are going to be mighty unhappy when they buy a laptop or other device, and find it doesn't have any power supply included, so I'm not sure this will really be a gain.
And if we have a disparity between $5 low-power USB4 wall warts and $50 full-spec USB4 wall-warts, it'll be a mighty tricky situation. USB caught-on because it was cheap... Firewire supplied much more power, but wasn't nearly as cheap, and failed in the mass market.
This is economics 101. First, products are manufactured less expensively, giving everyone a higher standard of living for less money. Second, there's now a number of higher-paying jobs, programming, servicing, and also BUILDING these robots, and also often there remain a number of human jobs in certain portions of the assembly line for tasks which the robots aren't good at, which get filled with more people to keep up with the new robots. Third, with lower manufacturing costs, there's more money available to pay the skilled labor, like the product designers, engineers, etc.
Continually improving efficiency is why there are ANY jobs in the US, today. With such a large wage disparity between US workers and other countries, US workers need to be several times as productive, usually assisted by robots and other machines, to be competitive on the world market. We certainly shouldn't be striving for lots of jobs at any price... we should be striving for more HIGH-PAYING jobs.
Indeed. And there are a lot of other similar practices in other areas. The one I find the most surreal is movies about WWII. Indeed, the goal of marketing is to make sure the world knows your movie made old men cry... Disney is particularly heavy-handed in it's marketing efforts, so upon the release of Pearl Harbor, there was a flood of blunt and un-artful news blurbs about the fact that lots of old men who saw the movie had cried... Considering how bad and inaccurate the movie was, I can only assume they were crying for reasons the complete opposite of what Disney wished everyone to assume.
I don't know how attentive the average person is, but if I picked-up a power strip and it weighed twice as much as others, I'd be very suspiscious that something was off with it (maybe something fell in?)
It would strike me as much more effective to use a device that already has a lot more heft to it, so the weight difference wouldn't be noticed.
I know the Soviets discovered several CIA bugs because things like their copiers were just a few ounces heavier than a stock model.
You're just making a fool of yourself, here. Paper and most wood is rather sustainably harvested, and has been for a long time. We certainly aren't going to run out of space for landfills for centuries to come, the issues with them are always local political nonsense.
First off, there are some externalities, but in general, the market is very good at handling this. Remember $1/gallon gasoline? Me neither. Even with this most inelastic of resource, price spikes resulted in significantly reduced demand.
And secondly: PROVE IT! I'm tired of this emotional, baseless fear-mongering bullshit. I've provided real facts and sources. You and the GP haven't provided a damn thing to support any of your claims, so get some facts to support your position, or go away and shut the hell up while the grown-ups are speaking.
It's generally the environmentalists yelling about global warming the loudest, and shortly thereafter telling everyone that the solution is to go back to living in caves (quite literally).
But it's not a complete misconception... Scientists don't quite say it, but it's clearly implied, because seriously reduced consumption and activity is currently the only way to make as big of a dent in CO2 production as they advocate.
There are major things like cement production, which alone emits about 6% of total man-made greenhouse gases, for which there seems to be absolutely no possible option to significantly reduce the CO2 emissions, other than simply stopping cement production. With cement being one of the most important construction materials, this directly translates into stopping most large building construction, and a severe economic crash.
Actually, higher population generally results in higher population density in cities. We don't go plow a forest to built more suburban houses, we stop building houses, and start building condos, high-rise apartments, etc., etc.
And in the US, at least, the population is steadily moving southwest every year... The point being, we're generally destroying shrub desert, which previously had thin populations of plants and animals, which contributed almost nothing to renewing "our air and water."
Absolutely, and long ago the exact date of this population crash was predicted. It is going to be... 1890. So said Thomas Malthus. Glad to hear your tremendous intellect has given you the insight to see the truth. Maybe you should form a group, and go climb up to a mountain-top somewhere, and wait for a sign that the population is about to crash.
In the mean time, try this video:
http://overpopulationisamyth.com/overpopulation-the-making-of-a-myth
I don't know where you get your information from. MIPS processors have had a much higher DMIPS/MHz than ARM CPUs for as long as I can remember.
Right, a couple degrees difference makes the older product worthless... Good thinking.