Their currency was still fiat, and still could be printed by their central bank (they just shared a central bank with several other countries).
When you get right down to it, the Eurozone is not much different to the USA (or "Dollarzone", if you like); 17 semi-autonomous member states (50 in the US), population of 330 million (310 million in the US), etc.. If the Eurozone could collapse (and if enough of its member states faced default it certainly could happen), so could the US.
And my point still stands as far as Iceland in particular (advanced modern country with full control over its economy and its own fiat currency), and Zimbabwe and North Korea to a lesser extent (their economies were brought down by non-monetary forces; not terrorism obviously, but especially in North Korea's case it's "external enemies" on a grander scale). Could add inter-war Germany or the Soviet Union (both crippled by their economy, despite being able to "print money"), and dozens of smaller states that defaulted on their debts (Google "countries that have defaulted" for more).
I'm not suggesting for even a moment that the US economy is going to collapse, and even less so that terrorists could bring down a country's economy; only pointing out that fiscally independent countries with fiat currencies can bankrupt, and being able to print your own money is no guarantee of staving bankruptcy or default away, as the GGP suggested.
The usual place I see Macs is when I head down to the graphics studio or Marketing departments at work- those guys use Macs as their all-purpose computers to make use of their (I'm told) top-quality or industry standard graphics and media editing software.
I can't really imagine those guys (or our procurement) switching to a form factor other than big-screen desktop machine or high-end laptop. That means the only way Mac could be "phased out" for them would be if iOS could work as a drop-in replacement, with no loss of features or software suite. Seeing as iOS is just Mac optimised for a different form factor and with a different software suite, I'm not sure I can really see the point in doing that. It would be an awful lot of leg-work just to end up where they already are.
Stability is relative. If we could create a very heavy element with a half-life of 10 years then that would be fascinating (and perhaps very useful)- but you won't find much of it floating around in space; all elements created "naturally" are created in the fusion reactions of stars, generally dispersed by supernova; anything created in most known supernovae would be gone long before it reaches us. And that's even assuming the fusion reactions in stars would be capable of producing such a very heavy element.
(IANAAstrophysicist, please do reply to this if you are and want to correct me).
The only different between a mugging and a revolution is scale. You beat up one normal person and it's a mugging. You beat up 10,000 really rich and powerful people, that's probably a revolution.
Not necessarily a revolution with any sensible ideology behind it (pick any real-world military coup you like and you'll find ideology is more or less optional).
Say what you like, defend it or condemn it, one of the world's largest multinational corporations getting hacked and harassed is a bigger deal than when Joe Average gets hacked. And being a revenge attack (rather than a theft) puts it more in the "ideology" camp than not.
I'd like to know what his reasons for thinking that are, as it just sounds like hand-waving. If all he did was arrogantly assume that scientists weren't as capable as engineers at improving a process, without any good reason for thinking it, I'm inclined not to pay much attention.
Scientists have a huge vested interest in creating more anti-matter to play with. It isn't like they aren't trying.
If agents of the state (i.e., anyone doing things at the request of the government) do something wrong and are not punished in the same way you'd expect anyone else to be punished, that's wrong.
If I pointed a gun at someone, threatened him, stole his phone and destroyed it, I'd expect a little visit from the law and my due time sat in front of a judge (and beyond). These police officers should expect the same thing. If they don't, just because they're paid by the government, then that's a bad thing.
I thought we were talking about a handful of uniformed goons destroying a camera to hide their rule breaking, not a massive conspiracy. A handful of thugs can smash a camera phone easily enough, but I'd like to see them remove a video from YouTube or delete an email to yourself at Hotmail.
If anything your home computer is more vulnerable (since a sufficiently determined goon can smash that up as well). And I'm not sure automatically creating a torrent would help, seeing as it won't go anywhere unless somebody else actually downloads it from you (and how you're going to get them to do that without at least a little more manual leg-work I don't know).
If you're trying to make something public in the face of a single furious copper, emailing to yourself or uploading to a hosting site seem like the most effective options.
Worship of the uniformed services and allowing authority figures to be above the law are pretty much the key features of fascism, so this is probably a rare instance of the term being used correctly. About the only other key features are ultra-nationalism and the demonising of minority ethnic or cultural-groups.
Traditional fascist states (Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and Japan, Franco's Spain, etc.) usually idealise the military rather than the police (note how many of the leaders of those countries wore military uniforms regardless of military experience), but the principal is much the same.
Some "limits" to freedom of speech are common (and desirable).
In the UK, TV news is legally obliged to be as politically impartial as possible, and politically partisan programmes aren't allowed to advertise themselves as "news". In most countries, it is also (either intentionally or as an effect of a variety of different laws) illegal to present lies or malicious ungrounded facts as the truth (meaning TV news can't just make stuff up). Product placement is also heavily regulated in many countries- in UK TV broadcasts you are not allowed to endorse or advertise a product or brand without explicitly warning the viewers first. All good things in my books.
Different games appeal in different ways. I like "realistic" games; Operation Flashpoint was excellent back in the day, and STALKER (while not exactly strict realism, being sci-fi) has all the usual realistic feature (weight limits on equipment, bleeding wounds, etc.), and so forth. But I also really like "arcade" style games; the Quake's and Unreal's of this world. Sam goes for other genres- Europa Universalis and Total War are both great series; Mario Cart and Gran Turismo both have spots on my shelf. Sometimes you're in the mood for some zany high-pace action, other times you really want to put your geek-hat on and pretend you're a Medieval economic administrator or commercial airline pilot.
The problem is when developers muck with their own formulae. If the Gran Turismo had cars with heat-seeking rockets, you'd be pissed. That's why things like GTA are so irritating- GTA4 is trying to be something that GTA1-3 wasn't. It's better now that Rock Star are feeling more free to make similar-but-different games (like LA Noire) to get the experimenting out of their system, but it's a shame that they had to mess with GTA before that.
If anything, it's the opposite of MS-hate- the inclination not to buy one of their current (non-MS) phones as they are already out-of-date (even their own company has disowned them) and instead wait for the Nokia+MS phones (which could be a year or more away yet). Or buy an Android/Apple/WinMo phone that's already on the market (from a non-Nokia company).
No-one has any reason to buy a Symbian or MeeGo phone now. And it's a long wait until Nokia has something to replace it.
And "desktop" is just another way of saying "icon based GUI metaphor", and "mouse" is just another name for "hand-operated top-down trackball input device".
Giving computer things fluffy consumer-friendly names is par for the course. "Cloud" rolls off the tongue (and off the TV advert) easier than "network-based distributed computing". In a few decades it will either have faded into non-existence or become an inoffensive part of the lexicon.
Unless I'm misreading him, GP didn't say anything about abiogenic oil production. He said that oil is produced by archaea, which I thought was more or less the standard theory of oil production (plus or minus bacteria).
If we switch from cars to mass transit, all turn vegan, cut back on electric gadgets for entertainment, etc.- civilization will still be here, even if you don't enjoy it quite as much as you do now. A potential alien explorer would still be pretty thrilled to find us, regardless of whether we use cars or buses.
Nukes are mature, developed, and here (France relies on it for about 80% of their power). Coal is plentiful too. Just because oil is going to get more expensive, the lights aren't necessarily going to go out.
2. Every single intelligent civilization self destructs. This also seems ludicrous...even if it happens some times, there should at least be remnants.
We've had already two dozen civilizations on earth that self-destructed, so this seems like a likely scenario. The remnants are likely too hard to detect. Our current civilization is pretty much undetectable beyond the orbit of Pluto, and is probably already past its peak.
Depends on your definition of civilization. If you take "Rome" as a civilization, sure it collapsed. But if you take "Humanity" as the civilization, it has never collapsed- just gone from strength to strength, occasionally with a new guy on top.
If we found an alien civilization, I doubt you'd hear anyone saying "Wow, we've found the planet of the Gilgargiangan civilization; it's a real shame that the Flofringian civilization already died out due to barbarian invasion, that would have been way better".
And I'm not sure why you think our civilization is past its peak. Maybe the USA is past its peak, or Europe; but there's a few Chinese people who might disagree with you. Technologically, we're somewhere unimaginable compared to the 1950s. Scientifically, we're building kilometre-wide telescopes, exploring neighboring planets with insanely sophisticated robots, scrutinising exo-planets, and smashing hadrons with Big Bang-like energy. I think we're still on the up-and-up.
I hope you're right. I love renewables as much as the next man, but it's no mean feat to use them to cover a whole country's power supply.
Wind and solar are both great, but their power production is pretty much lumpy by definition- the wind doesn't necessarily blow strongest at peak times, and blows doggedly through Sunday nights whether you need it to or not. You can't use them for a majority of base-load power on their own. You could invest heavily in power storage schemes to even it out- but they add huge costs to already expensive power plants; standard methods (like hydroelectric reservoirs) are crude and inefficient, and more exotic methods (molten salt, hydrogen, etc.) are still a long R&D route from maturity.
Dammed hydro is great- but massively disruptive, what with submerging huge tracts of land. Germany already has a bunch of dams, and is fairly densely populated, so finding new sites might not be easy. Dam-less hydro solves that problem, but has a lower return on investment. Tidal power could be excellent, but is still young and unproven; and in any case, Germany doesn't have a lot of coast for a country of its size.
The story goes on. Simply switching off high-output power stations and trying to drop in a like-for-like replacement is hard at the best of times, and with renewables it's a problem that few large countries have overcome.
Still, I suppose if any country can manage it, Germany probably can. And I hope my country will be the first in line to buy whatever solutions they might come up with.
Yeah, big centralised countries have never been successful. USA, China, USSR, British Empire, Rome... what did they ever do for us?
We're all far better off squabbling and bitching at each other from tiny nationalistic little bastions, like in that intellectual golden age- the Middle Ages. That way lies progress!
1) The "not have a recharge station every few miles" problem is no different to petrol/diesel. You can't drive a petrol car an infinite distance without refilling; the only difference is the range the vehicle is capable of. Or to put it another way, the amount of energy the vehicle can carry around with it. GP said that not having a comparable range is a "day 1" problem we don't have to worry about- the dream would be that we could bring the range up as the technology improves. It's also worth pointing out that in many cases (for example- across almost all of Western Europe, South Asia and East Asia) it's hardly an insurmountable problem, with population density the way it is.
2) Swappable batteries were mentioned by the GP, which solves the "can't take time to recharge frequently" problem. It might not be palatable for general private users, but seems like a fine idea for commercial drivers, where their companies can sign-up to (or set-up) a national or international battery-swapping scheme.
3) No-one said you need one solution for all vehicles. Perhaps plug-in electric vehicles might do the job in 80% of use cases, and other technologies (good old diesel, or something else like autogas, bio-diesel, whatever) could still be used for long-distance haulage, or whatever else doesn't fit the plug-in model. The current system has at least two mutually incompatible fuels in use simultaneously (petrol and diesel), so it's not inconceivable that multiple methods might continue to coexist.
4) Call me a hopeless optimist, but I'm still holding on to the dream of hydrogen as an energy storage mechanism. We have an essentially endless supply of it as long as you're generating electricity (H20 + electricity = hydrogen + oxygen), it's clean at point-of-use (burn hydrogen, get water), and the usage model is almost identical to gasoline (store it in tanks at filling stations, fill up your vehicle's tank in just a few moments). If only we can deal with the pesky problem of making it economically viable...
Procrastination is still deadly. All of Germany's nuclear power plants will have a regular decommissioning date some time in the next decade or two, at which point they'll be closed down permanently. In order to keep the nuclear juice flowing, replacement plants will need to be built. You can't build nuclear plants without government permission, and you won't get government permission with the political mood as it is at this exact moment.
If you're an energy company looking where to invest, this means you can either act on the government's prevailing whim and build the facility currently in fashion (coal, again), or do nothing. If everyone opts to do nothing, the nuclear plants will gradually get switched off and nothing will be around to replace them.
Even if the next government changes makes nukes fashionable again, it doesn't change all those investment decisions made during their predecessor's tenure. You'll either have had a period of nothing being built, or a whole generation of spanking-new coal plants coming on line.
I feel like it does need mentioning, though: hydro can be pretty nasty when it goes wrong, too. Nuclear meltdowns may not be a barrel of laughs, but a burst damn would ruin your day too.
Slashdot Mirror
Their currency was still fiat, and still could be printed by their central bank (they just shared a central bank with several other countries).
When you get right down to it, the Eurozone is not much different to the USA (or "Dollarzone", if you like); 17 semi-autonomous member states (50 in the US), population of 330 million (310 million in the US), etc.. If the Eurozone could collapse (and if enough of its member states faced default it certainly could happen), so could the US.
And my point still stands as far as Iceland in particular (advanced modern country with full control over its economy and its own fiat currency), and Zimbabwe and North Korea to a lesser extent (their economies were brought down by non-monetary forces; not terrorism obviously, but especially in North Korea's case it's "external enemies" on a grander scale). Could add inter-war Germany or the Soviet Union (both crippled by their economy, despite being able to "print money"), and dozens of smaller states that defaulted on their debts (Google "countries that have defaulted" for more).
I'm not suggesting for even a moment that the US economy is going to collapse, and even less so that terrorists could bring down a country's economy; only pointing out that fiscally independent countries with fiat currencies can bankrupt, and being able to print your own money is no guarantee of staving bankruptcy or default away, as the GGP suggested.
The usual place I see Macs is when I head down to the graphics studio or Marketing departments at work- those guys use Macs as their all-purpose computers to make use of their (I'm told) top-quality or industry standard graphics and media editing software.
I can't really imagine those guys (or our procurement) switching to a form factor other than big-screen desktop machine or high-end laptop. That means the only way Mac could be "phased out" for them would be if iOS could work as a drop-in replacement, with no loss of features or software suite. Seeing as iOS is just Mac optimised for a different form factor and with a different software suite, I'm not sure I can really see the point in doing that. It would be an awful lot of leg-work just to end up where they already are.
Rio-de-Janeirium
I wish that were a real thing so much it almost makes me want to fund a high-energy particle physics lab there just so there would be an excuse.
Stability is relative. If we could create a very heavy element with a half-life of 10 years then that would be fascinating (and perhaps very useful)- but you won't find much of it floating around in space; all elements created "naturally" are created in the fusion reactions of stars, generally dispersed by supernova; anything created in most known supernovae would be gone long before it reaches us. And that's even assuming the fusion reactions in stars would be capable of producing such a very heavy element.
(IANAAstrophysicist, please do reply to this if you are and want to correct me).
Sounds like steady work to me. From the top?
The only different between a mugging and a revolution is scale. You beat up one normal person and it's a mugging. You beat up 10,000 really rich and powerful people, that's probably a revolution.
Not necessarily a revolution with any sensible ideology behind it (pick any real-world military coup you like and you'll find ideology is more or less optional).
Say what you like, defend it or condemn it, one of the world's largest multinational corporations getting hacked and harassed is a bigger deal than when Joe Average gets hacked. And being a revenge attack (rather than a theft) puts it more in the "ideology" camp than not.
I wonder whether the terrorists considered that the world of finance had changed. How can you bankrupt a country that prints its money on a whim?
See Zimbabwe, North Korea, Iceland, Ireland, Greece...
I'd like to know what his reasons for thinking that are, as it just sounds like hand-waving. If all he did was arrogantly assume that scientists weren't as capable as engineers at improving a process, without any good reason for thinking it, I'm inclined not to pay much attention.
Scientists have a huge vested interest in creating more anti-matter to play with. It isn't like they aren't trying.
And offal-based meatballs (delicious!).
If agents of the state (i.e., anyone doing things at the request of the government) do something wrong and are not punished in the same way you'd expect anyone else to be punished, that's wrong.
If I pointed a gun at someone, threatened him, stole his phone and destroyed it, I'd expect a little visit from the law and my due time sat in front of a judge (and beyond). These police officers should expect the same thing. If they don't, just because they're paid by the government, then that's a bad thing.
I thought we were talking about a handful of uniformed goons destroying a camera to hide their rule breaking, not a massive conspiracy. A handful of thugs can smash a camera phone easily enough, but I'd like to see them remove a video from YouTube or delete an email to yourself at Hotmail.
If anything your home computer is more vulnerable (since a sufficiently determined goon can smash that up as well). And I'm not sure automatically creating a torrent would help, seeing as it won't go anywhere unless somebody else actually downloads it from you (and how you're going to get them to do that without at least a little more manual leg-work I don't know).
If you're trying to make something public in the face of a single furious copper, emailing to yourself or uploading to a hosting site seem like the most effective options.
Worship of the uniformed services and allowing authority figures to be above the law are pretty much the key features of fascism, so this is probably a rare instance of the term being used correctly. About the only other key features are ultra-nationalism and the demonising of minority ethnic or cultural-groups.
Traditional fascist states (Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and Japan, Franco's Spain, etc.) usually idealise the military rather than the police (note how many of the leaders of those countries wore military uniforms regardless of military experience), but the principal is much the same.
Some "limits" to freedom of speech are common (and desirable).
In the UK, TV news is legally obliged to be as politically impartial as possible, and politically partisan programmes aren't allowed to advertise themselves as "news". In most countries, it is also (either intentionally or as an effect of a variety of different laws) illegal to present lies or malicious ungrounded facts as the truth (meaning TV news can't just make stuff up). Product placement is also heavily regulated in many countries- in UK TV broadcasts you are not allowed to endorse or advertise a product or brand without explicitly warning the viewers first. All good things in my books.
Different games appeal in different ways. I like "realistic" games; Operation Flashpoint was excellent back in the day, and STALKER (while not exactly strict realism, being sci-fi) has all the usual realistic feature (weight limits on equipment, bleeding wounds, etc.), and so forth. But I also really like "arcade" style games; the Quake's and Unreal's of this world. Sam goes for other genres- Europa Universalis and Total War are both great series; Mario Cart and Gran Turismo both have spots on my shelf. Sometimes you're in the mood for some zany high-pace action, other times you really want to put your geek-hat on and pretend you're a Medieval economic administrator or commercial airline pilot.
The problem is when developers muck with their own formulae. If the Gran Turismo had cars with heat-seeking rockets, you'd be pissed. That's why things like GTA are so irritating- GTA4 is trying to be something that GTA1-3 wasn't. It's better now that Rock Star are feeling more free to make similar-but-different games (like LA Noire) to get the experimenting out of their system, but it's a shame that they had to mess with GTA before that.
If anything, it's the opposite of MS-hate- the inclination not to buy one of their current (non-MS) phones as they are already out-of-date (even their own company has disowned them) and instead wait for the Nokia+MS phones (which could be a year or more away yet). Or buy an Android/Apple/WinMo phone that's already on the market (from a non-Nokia company).
No-one has any reason to buy a Symbian or MeeGo phone now. And it's a long wait until Nokia has something to replace it.
And "desktop" is just another way of saying "icon based GUI metaphor", and "mouse" is just another name for "hand-operated top-down trackball input device".
Giving computer things fluffy consumer-friendly names is par for the course. "Cloud" rolls off the tongue (and off the TV advert) easier than "network-based distributed computing". In a few decades it will either have faded into non-existence or become an inoffensive part of the lexicon.
Unless I'm misreading him, GP didn't say anything about abiogenic oil production. He said that oil is produced by archaea, which I thought was more or less the standard theory of oil production (plus or minus bacteria).
If we switch from cars to mass transit, all turn vegan, cut back on electric gadgets for entertainment, etc.- civilization will still be here, even if you don't enjoy it quite as much as you do now. A potential alien explorer would still be pretty thrilled to find us, regardless of whether we use cars or buses.
Nukes are mature, developed, and here (France relies on it for about 80% of their power). Coal is plentiful too. Just because oil is going to get more expensive, the lights aren't necessarily going to go out.
We've had already two dozen civilizations on earth that self-destructed, so this seems like a likely scenario. The remnants are likely too hard to detect. Our current civilization is pretty much undetectable beyond the orbit of Pluto, and is probably already past its peak.
Depends on your definition of civilization. If you take "Rome" as a civilization, sure it collapsed. But if you take "Humanity" as the civilization, it has never collapsed- just gone from strength to strength, occasionally with a new guy on top.
If we found an alien civilization, I doubt you'd hear anyone saying "Wow, we've found the planet of the Gilgargiangan civilization; it's a real shame that the Flofringian civilization already died out due to barbarian invasion, that would have been way better".
And I'm not sure why you think our civilization is past its peak. Maybe the USA is past its peak, or Europe; but there's a few Chinese people who might disagree with you. Technologically, we're somewhere unimaginable compared to the 1950s. Scientifically, we're building kilometre-wide telescopes, exploring neighboring planets with insanely sophisticated robots, scrutinising exo-planets, and smashing hadrons with Big Bang-like energy. I think we're still on the up-and-up.
I hope you're right. I love renewables as much as the next man, but it's no mean feat to use them to cover a whole country's power supply.
Wind and solar are both great, but their power production is pretty much lumpy by definition- the wind doesn't necessarily blow strongest at peak times, and blows doggedly through Sunday nights whether you need it to or not. You can't use them for a majority of base-load power on their own. You could invest heavily in power storage schemes to even it out- but they add huge costs to already expensive power plants; standard methods (like hydroelectric reservoirs) are crude and inefficient, and more exotic methods (molten salt, hydrogen, etc.) are still a long R&D route from maturity.
Dammed hydro is great- but massively disruptive, what with submerging huge tracts of land. Germany already has a bunch of dams, and is fairly densely populated, so finding new sites might not be easy. Dam-less hydro solves that problem, but has a lower return on investment. Tidal power could be excellent, but is still young and unproven; and in any case, Germany doesn't have a lot of coast for a country of its size.
The story goes on. Simply switching off high-output power stations and trying to drop in a like-for-like replacement is hard at the best of times, and with renewables it's a problem that few large countries have overcome.
Still, I suppose if any country can manage it, Germany probably can. And I hope my country will be the first in line to buy whatever solutions they might come up with.
Yeah, big centralised countries have never been successful. USA, China, USSR, British Empire, Rome... what did they ever do for us?
We're all far better off squabbling and bitching at each other from tiny nationalistic little bastions, like in that intellectual golden age- the Middle Ages. That way lies progress!
A few things:
1) The "not have a recharge station every few miles" problem is no different to petrol/diesel. You can't drive a petrol car an infinite distance without refilling; the only difference is the range the vehicle is capable of. Or to put it another way, the amount of energy the vehicle can carry around with it. GP said that not having a comparable range is a "day 1" problem we don't have to worry about- the dream would be that we could bring the range up as the technology improves. It's also worth pointing out that in many cases (for example- across almost all of Western Europe, South Asia and East Asia) it's hardly an insurmountable problem, with population density the way it is.
2) Swappable batteries were mentioned by the GP, which solves the "can't take time to recharge frequently" problem. It might not be palatable for general private users, but seems like a fine idea for commercial drivers, where their companies can sign-up to (or set-up) a national or international battery-swapping scheme.
3) No-one said you need one solution for all vehicles. Perhaps plug-in electric vehicles might do the job in 80% of use cases, and other technologies (good old diesel, or something else like autogas, bio-diesel, whatever) could still be used for long-distance haulage, or whatever else doesn't fit the plug-in model. The current system has at least two mutually incompatible fuels in use simultaneously (petrol and diesel), so it's not inconceivable that multiple methods might continue to coexist.
4) Call me a hopeless optimist, but I'm still holding on to the dream of hydrogen as an energy storage mechanism. We have an essentially endless supply of it as long as you're generating electricity (H20 + electricity = hydrogen + oxygen), it's clean at point-of-use (burn hydrogen, get water), and the usage model is almost identical to gasoline (store it in tanks at filling stations, fill up your vehicle's tank in just a few moments). If only we can deal with the pesky problem of making it economically viable...
Procrastination is still deadly. All of Germany's nuclear power plants will have a regular decommissioning date some time in the next decade or two, at which point they'll be closed down permanently. In order to keep the nuclear juice flowing, replacement plants will need to be built. You can't build nuclear plants without government permission, and you won't get government permission with the political mood as it is at this exact moment.
If you're an energy company looking where to invest, this means you can either act on the government's prevailing whim and build the facility currently in fashion (coal, again), or do nothing. If everyone opts to do nothing, the nuclear plants will gradually get switched off and nothing will be around to replace them.
Even if the next government changes makes nukes fashionable again, it doesn't change all those investment decisions made during their predecessor's tenure. You'll either have had a period of nothing being built, or a whole generation of spanking-new coal plants coming on line.
When the Nazis tried to look at your pre-order ticket, it melted their faces. That is how truly awesome Duke Nukem Forever is.
I feel like it does need mentioning, though: hydro can be pretty nasty when it goes wrong, too. Nuclear meltdowns may not be a barrel of laughs, but a burst damn would ruin your day too.
http://disasterhistorian.blogspot.com/2010/03/bursting-dams.html
I know you didn't actually argue on that point, but I though it needed mentioning all the same.