What you and the other numbnut are referring to is the infinitesimal percentage of people who actually know how to make large amounts of money, and use it wisely.
What little information we have on the subject of wealth distribution states that infinitesimal percentage (5%) owns over 71% of all wealth in the country. Care to revise your statement, sir?
Wealth is not finite. There is more wealth in the world right now than there was 500 years ago. Wealth is a concept.
It really depends on your notion of wealth, and whether you consider the average distribution or the total value as the most relevant point. 500 years ago the world still had about the same amount of land as it does today, the difference is that today a far greater percentage of that land is owned; It has been converted from a natural resource into an asset. If you consider the natural resources that have been converted into assets over the last 500 years then unquestionably there is more wealth (as wealth = assets - liabilities). However, the world population was far, far, far less than it is today. If you take the total amount of assets (converted to a monentary value) and divide by the estimated world population, you're in for a shock: That number hasn't really changed in the last 500 years.
The real point of contention isn't the amount of wealth per se, but its distribution. This advance, if it occurs, will likely significantly impact wealth redistribution in first-world countries. Translated to english: The middle class is going to shrink even more.
You are under the impression that as people gain wealth most of them will horde it. While the truth is that they will try to spend it.
There are many economists, researchers, and liberal arts majors, along with about 200 million working poor, that very much disagree with you. But you can ignore the liberal arts majors.
I'm honestly scared of the day that they do figure out how to cure aging, because it will lead to an even greater stratification of social status and class. Most of the wealth in this country (and indeed most of the world) is concentrated with men who are over the age of 50-60 years. When they die, that wealth is then redistributed. Those people will be amongst the first to benefit from any such medical process; And if history has been any judge, that medical process will be expensive and there'll be little incentive to make it cheaper. The end result will be people who are born and work their entire lives, then die, never having had the opportunity to aquire wealth, because those who still have it aren't dying anymore.
This won't be something for humanity to celebrate. If and when the day comes, then we'll have to answer the question of what happens when numbers increase but resources decrease? And the answer will be in what kind of life is possible in that world. It won't be as good as the one you have now, I assure you.
The volume (and mass) of waste per kilowatt hour of power is orders of magnitude lower for nuclear than for fossil fuels.
Yes, but nobody's going to die from inhaling an equivalent mass of CO2 versus, say, a radioactive isotope of cesium. And if somebody releases a thousand pounds of CO2 over a populated city, I doubt anyone would notice... A thousand pounds of any radioactive compound and you're talking major ecological disaster. (and yes, everything is radioactive, for those in the peanut gallery... you know what we're talking about here though)
The bulk of nuclear wastes can be cost effectively reprocessed to make more fuel,
The bulk of nuclear fuel can only be reprocessed if and only if the plant was designed with that in mind. Most currently in production aren't breeder plants because they can be used for weapons programs. To say it in laymans terms... They've been neutered. They break the uranium down into isotopes that don't necessarily lend themselves to reprocessing in several common configurations. As well, breeder reactors are more expensive to operate.
Much of the remaining nuclear waste material has a short half-life
Much of it does, but enough of it doesn't and the stuff that doesn't lasts millions of years.
The remainder of the nuclear waste material is long-half life solids which, due to the very nature of half lives, aren't very radioactive
...and when you pack enough of it into a confined area, which is what we're doing when we store it... It's still lethal. The Chernobyl disaster area is covered in these "not very" radioactive isotopes. Do you want to live there?
Do you happen to have a source on this? I'm unaware of any major coal plants that are performing sequestration at this time.
here. It's technology that's currently being piloted. You are correct that there are no base load power stations currently doing this.
what do you use to absorb the CO2?', the production of most substances that do this involve the release of CO2.
Hell if I know... Most people don't care enough about the full industrial cycle to document that. They just care about "CO2". I doubt these people would see a problem in releasing CO instead, because that would "solve half the problem".:\
I think people may be missing the human side of the problem. Let's say your an engineer and your manager comes to you and says "zomg! piratez! they r eatin ma soupz!" And being that you're the guy they're paying the big bucks to impliment features, it falls to you to stop people from "pirating". Now, being an engineer you know that there's no way to keep a game from being copied, but your boss is frothing at the mouth and pseudo-geek talk is coming out of his mouth while he runs through the office with a stack of trade magazines -- so you have to do something. So you call up Xyzzy company and tell your boss to pay them a lot of money and the problem goes away. Your boss collapes on his desk in a deep sigh of relief, signs away several million dollars, and -- blammo, SecuROM.
It's called "feel good security". It's the same kind of security you run into in large corporations. You know, you have to use a randomly generated 18 character alphanumeric password and it changes every 90 days... which is great except that when you go to do your timesheets you have to enter your LAN password... which goes over the wire plaintext encapsulated in an HTTP POST query. Oops. Also, because not everybody's memory is so great, it becomes common practice to keep the 18 character passwords written on sticky notes.
This is the true genesis of DRM... Ignorance and management fretting over money. It will be viewed as good as long as they "save" more money than it "costs" them.
Well, I'm +5 and you didn't even have the decency to post using your real nick.:) Sometimes you gotta break some eggs to make an omelette and anyone who's worked in this industry knows that management can be ignorant, paranoid, and unwilling to change. Much of our technology works because the people who make it work take a less draconian view than you would. And having a sense of humor about it saves on aspirin. I care about keeping the business running... Let management care about... well, whatever it is these guys were up to.
You compress it the same way dry ice is made. And what keeps it in a solid state is the intense pressure (not the temperature). Getting it to that depth, however, can't be done in bulk because there's no equipment to do so. It is feasible, however it's more economical to chemically bind the CO2 to something solid at room temperature, brick it, then throw it in a landfill, which is what they're doing now at some newer coal burning plants.
And the $16 trillion figure -- could not find a cite for it, sorry. Also, I goofed on the per year GDP generation -- it's about 14 trillion per year, not 4. Sorry, I missed a digit. The CIA world factbook has some general economic data; which is my usual source.
Yes, you should. Just do so in good taste. I once put The Story of Mordac(tm) into a script that I made and distributed around the office, which described in a humorous and epic way the reason for its invention: All it did was send F5 to a window with a specified name.
We were running HP Service Desk and the admins, in their infinite idiocy, disabled the auto-refresh of the views. This was because they seriously under-spec'd the server and were looking for any way possible to cut the load down. It crashed every few hours; Which is what you get for using Citrix for over five thousand workstations in six different countries for "security" purposes. And then using RAID10 on the database... oh god, the write times, they buuuurnses us. *snickers* In either event, after distributing it to our techs and letting it bounce around the working grunts in our various offices for awhile, I let it slip to a few friends about the story of Mordac, Preventer of Information Services (thank you Dilbert), who I credited with the debacle.
Two weeks later, the auto-refresh got turned back on. Many queries were made and security operations attempted to track down who had made the "unauthorized script". To this day, whenever a feature gets turned off on a server that the users liked, or some dumb "security" policy goes into place... People chalk it up to Mordac. Many of them aren't familiar enough with the strip to know of the little-known Dilbert character.;)
Easter egg away my friend, but remember thy audience!
Predicting whether something was created by an "intelligence" first requires a definition of intelligence, and then (apparently) some way of discriminating between different "levels" of it. Unfortunately, the only "intelligence" we have to base any of this on is our own, so it fails the empirical test. And of course, there's the bias of seeing ourselves -- that is, our human intelligence -- as the best or most refined kind.
Lastly, here's an example of just how innane this line of thinking is: Cars are created by robots, that run on logic chips, which is a certain kind of intelligence. Of course, cars can also be built by people. It will still be a car regardless of who made it. An examination of the end product won't necessarily reveal who or what created it.
We're not building nuclear power stations for one simple reason: We don't know what to do with the waste byproduct yet. There are very few places on this planet that we can store it, and even then there's doubts. While I'm fairly certain that future generations will solve the problem of how to make it safe, that logic has not worked well for us in the past (hence the cause of any number of current social issues) so I will certainly respect if someone disagrees with my position here.
If you're that worried about CO2, use a scrubber to compress it into blocks and then bury it at the bottom of the ocean. Which is where most of the world's CO2 is anyway; Compressed at the bottom of the ocean. There's practical solutions that work on today's infrastructure that are being ignored because today's infrastructure is suddenly seen as eating children and devouring our precious [noun].
And why should the government be spending money replacing infrastructure just to pander to the latest political fashion statement -- ie, "green"? Whenever a slightly faster computer comes out, do all the old ones get swapped out right then and there? No. We hold on to things that are old and out of date because they still serve a useful function and because it costs less to maintain what we have than to use something new. It's great that research dollars are being poured into alternative energy, and I fully encourage it. And when the technology is proven, practical, and economical, I see no reason why we shouldn't then start migrating our infrastructure towards it. Which is indeed what is slowly happening as we speak.
Be patient. You're talking about over $16 trillion in infrastructure in this country alone. We only make a fourth that in GDP a year, and only a small fraction of that can go to upgrades.
They assume intelligent life on other worlds would be trying to reduce chaos. I wonder how they arrive at this conclusion, since the only known intelligent life we've found so far seems to rather enjoy creating it in great quantity.
I haven't RTFA, per usual, but I'm sure the study concludes that it's a great idea to search the Internet to see if you have a terrible disease using Windows Live Search.
Hello there! I see you're looking for information on WHY DOES IT BURN WHEN I PEE?
Would you like to: ( ) Schedule a visit to Planned Parenthood ( ) Swear you'll use a condom from now on ( ) Order some monostat ( ) Call mom while crying on the toilet.
You see, I can't even begin to help you until you concede that if a tool gets the job done, it's a good tool.
So you don't mind if I use a butter knife instead of a screwdriver? That's a relief. I haven't found a man yet who doesn't cringe at the prospect.
What you misunderstand about this change of direction is that microarchitectures and new hybrids of old design patterns are arising to meet the needs of web developers.
Perhaps in the same way that poor solutions arise to placate poor decisions. Some people have advocated mass-execution of cows to help halt global warming.
If you write a C++ program and compile it down to one architecture, how many users do you have?
About the same as the number of people who find that application useful.
If you write a browser, OS, architecture neutral application and make it available to everyone online, your user base skyrockets dramatically.
Okay, you can go play Kings of Chaos, while I go play World of Warcraft, since World of Warcraft has fewer players and I like the "small town" feel of it.
I seem to recall sometime in about 2000 there was a report that a computer program had been designed that asked a series of questions and provided a most likely diagnosis. It was apparently better at doing this than the doctors were by a small margin. The project was axed though after a huge outcry that it would put doctors out of business, couldn't be trusted because it couldn't be medically licensed, liability issues, etc. Has anything changed since then?
It seems like a good idea -- people punching in their symptoms and getting an answer about whether to take a trip to the ER (perhaps printout in hand) or not, and with people spending hours in waiting rooms only to find out they have the common cold or just bad menstral cramps, doesn't it make sense to give people the option of entering all their data into a computer first? If we tied such a database into the admissions system, they could show up with all their insurance, contact information, and symptoms list already available for the triage nurse. I'm not advocating taking a person and their clinical experience out of the loop, but certainly there's ways to use medical data to do better targeting. I've felt the same way about pharmaceuticals and wondered why there isn't a database to track adverse reactions to drugs on a per-patient basis... If someone's tried three different anti-depressants and had a poor response to them, maybe that particular reaction projects that Drug X would be 60% more likely to be effective than Drug Y. As it is, it's often drug rhoulette(sp?) until you find one that works.
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What you and the other numbnut are referring to is the infinitesimal percentage of people who actually know how to make large amounts of money, and use it wisely.
What little information we have on the subject of wealth distribution states that infinitesimal percentage (5%) owns over 71% of all wealth in the country. Care to revise your statement, sir?
Provided the interest rate remains at or below the inflation rate for the next 400 years, and they do not invest.
Wealth is not finite. There is more wealth in the world right now than there was 500 years ago. Wealth is a concept.
It really depends on your notion of wealth, and whether you consider the average distribution or the total value as the most relevant point. 500 years ago the world still had about the same amount of land as it does today, the difference is that today a far greater percentage of that land is owned; It has been converted from a natural resource into an asset. If you consider the natural resources that have been converted into assets over the last 500 years then unquestionably there is more wealth (as wealth = assets - liabilities). However, the world population was far, far, far less than it is today. If you take the total amount of assets (converted to a monentary value) and divide by the estimated world population, you're in for a shock: That number hasn't really changed in the last 500 years.
The real point of contention isn't the amount of wealth per se, but its distribution. This advance, if it occurs, will likely significantly impact wealth redistribution in first-world countries. Translated to english: The middle class is going to shrink even more.
You are under the impression that as people gain wealth most of them will horde it. While the truth is that they will try to spend it.
There are many economists, researchers, and liberal arts majors, along with about 200 million working poor, that very much disagree with you. But you can ignore the liberal arts majors.
Leonidas, is that you?
I'm honestly scared of the day that they do figure out how to cure aging, because it will lead to an even greater stratification of social status and class. Most of the wealth in this country (and indeed most of the world) is concentrated with men who are over the age of 50-60 years. When they die, that wealth is then redistributed. Those people will be amongst the first to benefit from any such medical process; And if history has been any judge, that medical process will be expensive and there'll be little incentive to make it cheaper. The end result will be people who are born and work their entire lives, then die, never having had the opportunity to aquire wealth, because those who still have it aren't dying anymore.
This won't be something for humanity to celebrate. If and when the day comes, then we'll have to answer the question of what happens when numbers increase but resources decrease? And the answer will be in what kind of life is possible in that world. It won't be as good as the one you have now, I assure you.
Hmm. You're right, thanks. :) But don't worry-- Others have taken up the cause.
The volume (and mass) of waste per kilowatt hour of power is orders of magnitude lower for nuclear than for fossil fuels.
Yes, but nobody's going to die from inhaling an equivalent mass of CO2 versus, say, a radioactive isotope of cesium. And if somebody releases a thousand pounds of CO2 over a populated city, I doubt anyone would notice... A thousand pounds of any radioactive compound and you're talking major ecological disaster. (and yes, everything is radioactive, for those in the peanut gallery... you know what we're talking about here though)
The bulk of nuclear wastes can be cost effectively reprocessed to make more fuel,
The bulk of nuclear fuel can only be reprocessed if and only if the plant was designed with that in mind. Most currently in production aren't breeder plants because they can be used for weapons programs. To say it in laymans terms... They've been neutered. They break the uranium down into isotopes that don't necessarily lend themselves to reprocessing in several common configurations. As well, breeder reactors are more expensive to operate.
Much of the remaining nuclear waste material has a short half-life
Much of it does, but enough of it doesn't and the stuff that doesn't lasts millions of years.
The remainder of the nuclear waste material is long-half life solids which, due to the very nature of half lives, aren't very radioactive
...and when you pack enough of it into a confined area, which is what we're doing when we store it... It's still lethal. The Chernobyl disaster area is covered in these "not very" radioactive isotopes. Do you want to live there?
Oh noes! Someone's caught me on a technicality! I guess I'll just curl up and die now in shame because I'm the first geek who's ever done that.
Do you happen to have a source on this? I'm unaware of any major coal plants that are performing sequestration at this time.
here. It's technology that's currently being piloted. You are correct that there are no base load power stations currently doing this.
what do you use to absorb the CO2?', the production of most substances that do this involve the release of CO2.
Hell if I know... Most people don't care enough about the full industrial cycle to document that. They just care about "CO2". I doubt these people would see a problem in releasing CO instead, because that would "solve half the problem". :\
Obviously.
I think people may be missing the human side of the problem. Let's say your an engineer and your manager comes to you and says "zomg! piratez! they r eatin ma soupz!" And being that you're the guy they're paying the big bucks to impliment features, it falls to you to stop people from "pirating". Now, being an engineer you know that there's no way to keep a game from being copied, but your boss is frothing at the mouth and pseudo-geek talk is coming out of his mouth while he runs through the office with a stack of trade magazines -- so you have to do something. So you call up Xyzzy company and tell your boss to pay them a lot of money and the problem goes away. Your boss collapes on his desk in a deep sigh of relief, signs away several million dollars, and -- blammo, SecuROM.
It's called "feel good security". It's the same kind of security you run into in large corporations. You know, you have to use a randomly generated 18 character alphanumeric password and it changes every 90 days... which is great except that when you go to do your timesheets you have to enter your LAN password... which goes over the wire plaintext encapsulated in an HTTP POST query. Oops. Also, because not everybody's memory is so great, it becomes common practice to keep the 18 character passwords written on sticky notes.
This is the true genesis of DRM... Ignorance and management fretting over money. It will be viewed as good as long as they "save" more money than it "costs" them.
Well, I'm +5 and you didn't even have the decency to post using your real nick. :) Sometimes you gotta break some eggs to make an omelette and anyone who's worked in this industry knows that management can be ignorant, paranoid, and unwilling to change. Much of our technology works because the people who make it work take a less draconian view than you would. And having a sense of humor about it saves on aspirin. I care about keeping the business running... Let management care about... well, whatever it is these guys were up to.
No, I mean they have a RAID5 mirrored to another RAID5 to make even slower than slow.
You compress it the same way dry ice is made. And what keeps it in a solid state is the intense pressure (not the temperature). Getting it to that depth, however, can't be done in bulk because there's no equipment to do so. It is feasible, however it's more economical to chemically bind the CO2 to something solid at room temperature, brick it, then throw it in a landfill, which is what they're doing now at some newer coal burning plants.
And the $16 trillion figure -- could not find a cite for it, sorry. Also, I goofed on the per year GDP generation -- it's about 14 trillion per year, not 4. Sorry, I missed a digit. The CIA world factbook has some general economic data; which is my usual source.
It was bacterial otitis media, not viral, hence the pus discharge. Antibiotics are entirely appropriate you clod.
Yes, you should. Just do so in good taste. I once put The Story of Mordac(tm) into a script that I made and distributed around the office, which described in a humorous and epic way the reason for its invention: All it did was send F5 to a window with a specified name.
We were running HP Service Desk and the admins, in their infinite idiocy, disabled the auto-refresh of the views. This was because they seriously under-spec'd the server and were looking for any way possible to cut the load down. It crashed every few hours; Which is what you get for using Citrix for over five thousand workstations in six different countries for "security" purposes. And then using RAID10 on the database... oh god, the write times, they buuuurnses us. *snickers* In either event, after distributing it to our techs and letting it bounce around the working grunts in our various offices for awhile, I let it slip to a few friends about the story of Mordac, Preventer of Information Services (thank you Dilbert), who I credited with the debacle.
Two weeks later, the auto-refresh got turned back on. Many queries were made and security operations attempted to track down who had made the "unauthorized script". To this day, whenever a feature gets turned off on a server that the users liked, or some dumb "security" policy goes into place... People chalk it up to Mordac. Many of them aren't familiar enough with the strip to know of the little-known Dilbert character. ;)
Easter egg away my friend, but remember thy audience!
Predicting whether something was created by an "intelligence" first requires a definition of intelligence, and then (apparently) some way of discriminating between different "levels" of it. Unfortunately, the only "intelligence" we have to base any of this on is our own, so it fails the empirical test. And of course, there's the bias of seeing ourselves -- that is, our human intelligence -- as the best or most refined kind.
Lastly, here's an example of just how innane this line of thinking is: Cars are created by robots, that run on logic chips, which is a certain kind of intelligence. Of course, cars can also be built by people. It will still be a car regardless of who made it. An examination of the end product won't necessarily reveal who or what created it.
We're not building nuclear power stations for one simple reason: We don't know what to do with the waste byproduct yet. There are very few places on this planet that we can store it, and even then there's doubts. While I'm fairly certain that future generations will solve the problem of how to make it safe, that logic has not worked well for us in the past (hence the cause of any number of current social issues) so I will certainly respect if someone disagrees with my position here.
If you're that worried about CO2, use a scrubber to compress it into blocks and then bury it at the bottom of the ocean. Which is where most of the world's CO2 is anyway; Compressed at the bottom of the ocean. There's practical solutions that work on today's infrastructure that are being ignored because today's infrastructure is suddenly seen as eating children and devouring our precious [noun].
And why should the government be spending money replacing infrastructure just to pander to the latest political fashion statement -- ie, "green"? Whenever a slightly faster computer comes out, do all the old ones get swapped out right then and there? No. We hold on to things that are old and out of date because they still serve a useful function and because it costs less to maintain what we have than to use something new. It's great that research dollars are being poured into alternative energy, and I fully encourage it. And when the technology is proven, practical, and economical, I see no reason why we shouldn't then start migrating our infrastructure towards it. Which is indeed what is slowly happening as we speak.
Be patient. You're talking about over $16 trillion in infrastructure in this country alone. We only make a fourth that in GDP a year, and only a small fraction of that can go to upgrades.
What makes you think this is an unintended consequence?
Good point. :( Perhaps "negative consequence" would have been better phrasing.
They assume intelligent life on other worlds would be trying to reduce chaos. I wonder how they arrive at this conclusion, since the only known intelligent life we've found so far seems to rather enjoy creating it in great quantity.
I haven't RTFA, per usual, but I'm sure the study concludes that it's a great idea to search the Internet to see if you have a terrible disease using Windows Live Search.
Hello there! I see you're looking for information on WHY DOES IT BURN WHEN I PEE?
Would you like to:
( ) Schedule a visit to Planned Parenthood
( ) Swear you'll use a condom from now on
( ) Order some monostat
( ) Call mom while crying on the toilet.
I imagine that having a cat crawl out of one's ear would be quite painful.
Yes, however that'ss not anatomically possssible. A more likely explanation might be a ssticky key.
You see, I can't even begin to help you until you concede that if a tool gets the job done, it's a good tool.
So you don't mind if I use a butter knife instead of a screwdriver? That's a relief. I haven't found a man yet who doesn't cringe at the prospect.
What you misunderstand about this change of direction is that microarchitectures and new hybrids of old design patterns are arising to meet the needs of web developers.
Perhaps in the same way that poor solutions arise to placate poor decisions. Some people have advocated mass-execution of cows to help halt global warming.
If you write a C++ program and compile it down to one architecture, how many users do you have?
About the same as the number of people who find that application useful.
If you write a browser, OS, architecture neutral application and make it available to everyone online, your user base skyrockets dramatically.
Okay, you can go play Kings of Chaos, while I go play World of Warcraft, since World of Warcraft has fewer players and I like the "small town" feel of it.
I seem to recall sometime in about 2000 there was a report that a computer program had been designed that asked a series of questions and provided a most likely diagnosis. It was apparently better at doing this than the doctors were by a small margin. The project was axed though after a huge outcry that it would put doctors out of business, couldn't be trusted because it couldn't be medically licensed, liability issues, etc. Has anything changed since then?
It seems like a good idea -- people punching in their symptoms and getting an answer about whether to take a trip to the ER (perhaps printout in hand) or not, and with people spending hours in waiting rooms only to find out they have the common cold or just bad menstral cramps, doesn't it make sense to give people the option of entering all their data into a computer first? If we tied such a database into the admissions system, they could show up with all their insurance, contact information, and symptoms list already available for the triage nurse. I'm not advocating taking a person and their clinical experience out of the loop, but certainly there's ways to use medical data to do better targeting. I've felt the same way about pharmaceuticals and wondered why there isn't a database to track adverse reactions to drugs on a per-patient basis... If someone's tried three different anti-depressants and had a poor response to them, maybe that particular reaction projects that Drug X would be 60% more likely to be effective than Drug Y. As it is, it's often drug rhoulette(sp?) until you find one that works.