Well, FWIW, the Sun does affect satellite orbits. Enough that they usually (used to?) have hydrazine rockets to adjust station keeping.
OTOH, it doesn't affect them quickly.
OTTH, if you de-circularize the orbit very much (and it's in LEO), then atmospheric drag will de-orbit it.
If it's not in LEO, then you probably can't do any better than just move it into an orbit where it won't hit anything interesting. Preferable into one where it will collide with another piece of junk at 1 mm/sec or less. Then, if you're luck with your electrostatics, the two will stick together, and you'll have converted two pieces of junk into one.
I don't really think I can believe that. Who pays for fuel disposal? (So far, it appears the answer is nobody. That's left for the next administration.) What about insurance? (The government exempts nuclear plants from insuring. I doubt that you could get even Lloyds to cover them.) And a government backed loan of a massively expensive plant is no minor subsidy just by itself.
I expect that there are subsidies that aren't immediately obvious.
But the real question is "Can they compete with coal?" When they can compete with coal without subsidies, then the removal of subsidies is reasonable. Until then, no. We *NEED* to get rid of coal as a source of power.
P.S.: Competing with coal must include the costs of storing the power to handle times when it can't be generated. Pumping water uphill counts. So does storing molten salt in a vacuum insulated vessel. There are other alternatives. They all add to the expense of the option. So replacing coal without subsidies is aways off. But it's getting closer.
To *you* it will be it will be a demonstration of how well-built reactors are indeed safe.
Unfortunately, bayesian statistics shows that the conclusions drawn from the available evidence are heavily influenced by prior beliefs. And given some prior beliefs there is no way that one can logically reach conclusions that others will deem mandated by the evidence. (The actual statement is a lot more complicated, but that's the essence.)
Unfortunately, dealing with the world requires an immense number of "priors", because otherwise the reasoning process is too slow to be workable. Whoops!
So this isn't going to influence people in the way that you think it should.
P.S.: Sociologists during the 1980's(?) discovered that the TV show Archie Bunker tended to make conservatives more conservative and liberals more liberal (WRT racial prejudices). This is the same effect. So it's not just theoretical reasoning, it's confirmed by experiment. (Well, actually the experiment preceded the theory, but I don't think the statisticians knew about the experiment.)
Somebody that you think is lying may just have drawn conclusions from the evidence that you believe are totally unwarranted. And you may look just as unreasonable to them. And you both may be applying perfect logic to the evidence, but with different prior beliefs that influence how you interpret it. (OTOH, you could be right. Some people don't care whether they lie or not as long as it's in "a good cause". [And they consider themselves as entitled to judge what constitutes "good".])
No, I'd say (from my vast ignorance) that it will be a meltdown. Or at least a partial meltdown. And that this will make the job of cleanup very nasty.
It won't, however, be of any real problem to anyone who doesn't have to pay for the cleanup. (Outside, of course, of those already exposed to radiation. I'm not sure I trust the figure on that, but apparently only 3 really serious exposures.) During the cleanup I'd be surprised if another dozen people weren't exposed to dangerous amounts of radiation, albeit less intensely.
The precautionary clearing of the area will probably turn out to have been largely unnecessary. But it was reasonable to play things safe when one wasn't sure what was happening. ("And beside, there are plans in place for that, and we're too busy dealing with the tsunamis and earthquake damages to come up with new plans on the spur of the moment.") There will have been minor radiation release, but nothing to worry about. (At least not two days later.)
The cleanup, however, will be quite expensive. And then comes the problem of how to replace that source of power...
I can remember a time when I was worried about the barrels of arsenic that the Nazi's dumped during WWII. Untreated, but sealed in barrels (probably for transport). I wonder if they've rusted away yet?
That's a much more reasonable worry. It's still silly on a global scale, but it might do serious damage to the North Sea...or at least to the North Sea fisheries. (People concentrate the minerals from the food they eat. Fish concentrate the minerals from the food they eat [other fish and plants]. And plants concentrate the minerals from their environment. So even if the cod are healthy, the people that eat them might not remain so.
(N.B.: This wasn't a Nazi war effort. This was cheap industrial waste disposal.)
From what I've heard, Tokyo Bay is so polluted already that if the radioactive materials escaped, it wouldn't do any economically significant ecological damage locally, so it's only the global effects that one need worry about, and those are so minor as to be barely measurable.
However, in meltdown, the operative word is "down", and what's down is a concrete base. The stuff isn't hot enough to melt through concrete. And it's not volatile. So when it's cooled down (as by lots of water) it's a solid.
They're going to have a really huge cleanup problem. I don't really see how they're going to deal with it. But I expect the problems to all be pretty local. And first reports say that even there, local isn't a huge area. That huge area being evacuated is just the government not taking any chances.
OTOH, I expect that Japan will now start putting a lot of effort into solar, wind, and sea power. (I'm not sure that they've got a good environment for tidal engines, though. But they've got plenty of shoreline for near-shore windmills. And they've got the silicon expertise to push solar cells. They don't have large deserts, though, so centralized solar power is probably not likely.) Even if it's a bit less economic, it will probably more politically attractive.
(OTOH, what is the true cost of a nuclear plant, if you count the full lifetime costs, including retirement. And count the government waiver of insurance for massive damages. [I don't know that the Japanese government offers this, but the US govt. does.] It's not inconceivable that the true lifetime costs for nuclear power are considerably higher than many of the others. The US subsidized it so long to facilitate it's nuclear weapons building that it's really not clear at all what all of the costs are.)
No, that's the Declaration of Independence, and had no formal legal authority. (Wonder why?) The second amendment to the constitution is supposed to say that we have the right to keep sufficient weaponry, but generations of casuistry have corrupted the meaning, so now it's generally interpreted as meaning only officially organized groups of people have the right to weapons. (Not at all what it originally meant.)
The real problem is, when there was a problem with the constitution, there was a procedure that was supposed to be used to modify it. But it was too much bother. So the custom became that we would just reinterpret what it said until it meant what we wanted. Example: The US can only declare war with the approval of 2/3 of the Senate. So we don't call various military actions wars. (I'd prefer admitting that they were wars, and just saying that we weren't declaring them, which we essentially never do, but that's not the explanation used.)
They only get called wars in the popular press and in history books, etc. Never officially. The Vietnam War wasn't a war. The Korean War wasn't a war. Don't know about the Spanish-American War. World War II was officially admitted to be a war, but it the last one, and I don't know that we ever declared it. (Well, we *were* attacked. So perhaps declaration was superfluous.)
You wouldn't think it would be that hard to get 66 people to agree that something needed to be done if it really did need to be don, would you. The Vietnam war had a hard time scraping up 50 votes for a resolution that was so weaselly worded that just about nobody who voted for it thought it was authorizing war in Vietnam. Even after the fact.
OTOH, perhaps I *am* in favor of the draft, seeing what "The Volunteer Army" has lead to. Perhaps if people were being drafted to fight there'd be more resistance by people with enough power to significantly resist. (Still, I never *did* get an acceptable explanation of what we were doing in Vietnam. So maybe not.)
Watch out! We used to have a consumer coop grocery. It worked fine for over 40 years. Then a bunch of businessmen got elected to the board, and decided to "grow the company". Now we don't have a co-op anymore. It went bankrupt within five years. Loans that couldn't be paid, etc.
If you think that people aren't already protesting, you aren't paying attention. It is, however, true that the mass media no longer cover political demonstrations. Do you really think that's happenstance?
The owners of the mass media today are no longer those who owned the mass media in the 1960's-80's. Even most of the local newspapers have been bought up by chains. Publishing houses are owned by conglomerates who set policy. (Editors don't cover what they're told not to cover, or they don't stay editors.) Etc. Hollywood isn't the only thing that's been centralizing.
Today we probably have less populist mass media coverage than in the 1930's. And a far larger population. So now we are nearly totally dependent on web-pages, e-mails, and other things that are subject to centralized control. (The exact antithesis of what the net was supposed to be.)
It's time to start working hard on mesh networks, and other things that aren't subject to being controlled centrally. Even now it will be quite difficult to create such things legally. Extremely low powered systems, however, are probably ok. On certain wave-lengths.
It's important in the same way that Amazon deleting 1984 from Kindles was. I.e., the particular issue wasn't significant, but that issue highlighted an existing problem in a noticeable way. In both cases the particular instance was reasonable. But I have decided to never by a Kindle because Amazon included a remote deletion feature into it. Yes, Amazon didn't have the legal right to distribute the particular version of 1984 that they did, but to delete it publicly admitted that they had intentionally built that capability into their Kindles. Similarly, the discussion around this and the previous topic centering around Wikipedia deletionism has informed me that specialists in a field are not allowed to ensure that articles in their field are correct. Pretty much ending the use of Wikipedia for anything but entertainment, a field it's not particularly good at. I was "sort of" aware of this already, but I hadn't properly generalized my observations about articles in areas in which I am knowledgeable. Now I have.
So, yes, this is an important topic, even though the particular instance isn't all that important.
That would be an improvement, but it still doesn't work. Some things are only referenced online. Some things are only referenced in out of print books or magazines. This doesn't make them insignificant.
And some fools counted upon the Wikipedia page for permanent documentation of something important, so they allowed the original source to vanish. Yeah, they were stupid to trust Wikipedia with anything important.
But climate modeling is just weather prediction writ large. The best we can do is the best we can do. To claim anything more is lying.
Yes, the AGW people are nuts. But there is a chance that any one of their predictions is correct. (A chance doesn't mean a good chance.) But while I might give then 1 chance in a thousand, I don't think our knowledge is good enough to claim that have less than 1 chance in 10,000,000.
And as to predicting what's going to happen...different "best model"s can give very different results (For a constrained value of very different.)
Consensus seems to me the best term for what we can do. Remember that chaos theory originated in conjunction with questions about weather prediction. (But note that the consensus isn't just a count of model runs. It also involves complicated weighing based on how accurate each model is believed to be in which circumstances, which is derived by validating them by having they predict climate changes in the past based on data from the time preceeding them.)
As to how this gets presented by the press... Yeah. They out-and-out lie much of the time. If you want to guess how accurate they are, pick a field that you are professionally informed about, and check how they report that. Then consider how much they bias things to meet specific political agendas. It ends up pretty much not mattering what the climate modelers say. It will be so distorted to match political goals by the time it gets reported that it almost doesn't matter.
P.S.: I am not a climate modeler. The closest I've ever gotten to that was traffic modeling. I made some hits and some misses. But when you alleviate some bottlenecks, you tend to create new ones in different places. Roads will handle the most traffic when the flow is laminar, but when it gets turbulent (due to an accident or overcrowding) it can take a long time to recover if you don't have considerable spare capacity. (I wasn't into that kind of detail, though, as I was just trying to figure out where people would try to live to commute to jobs in which places. And a simplified traffic model was necessary to that.)
If you haven't notice change speeding up, you haven't been watching. I have serious doubts as to just how far it can go, but it's a reasonable metaphor to use for an observed process, and there are no obvious physical laws that prevent the rate becoming faster than any human can adapt to. Most people already have a tendency to disconnect from it outside of quite narrow specialties.
Now to claim that it will eventually become infinitely fast is, I would agree, an unreasonable position. It's sort of like pico-second trading...you start hitting fundamental physical laws. But there's a large distance between "a rate of change too fast for people to deal with" and "an infinite rate of change". The first doesn't violate any known physical laws. And we can probably get to that point without even indulging in quantum trickery. (Teleporting information, Quantum computers, etc.) So I *do* expect the Singularity, in one form or another, to eventually manifest. I'll even go so far as to predict 2030 +/- 5 years. And the particular invention that I am claiming for that timepoint which I claim justifies calling it the transition into the Singularity, is a computer intelligence which averages more intelligent than the average human with an IQ over 120 and the ability to improve its own code. That's only around 20 years from now, but then a part of this claim is based on a belief that individual humans aren't that intelligent. No where near as intelligent as our culture is. And 20 years is several iterations of Moore's law from here. (And if we are currently expanding more into parallel processing rather than into faster processors, that just means that we need to adopt different algorithms. Ones that parallelize better. And there will always be some things that can only reasonably be done sequentially. Those will be the rate-limiting steps.)
OTOH, there is no consensus as to when such a device will be developed. I've encountered estimates from 2015 to sometime after 2100 to never. It's a prediction, not by any means a certainty. But if you want to claim it will never happen, I'd like to know on what you base your belief. Maybe you'll change my mind. But I rather think you won't be able to come up with a defensible reason.
P.S.: A superhuman computer intelligence is only one form that the Singularity could take. I happen to think it's the one that's likely to arrive soonest. But there are several other routes.
It really greatly depends on exactly which form the Singularity takes. (I'm estimating around 2030 +/- 5 years.)
(Note: In most of this discussion I am assuming that the Singularity is caused by the emergence of a strongly superhuman artificial intelligence. This is, however, only one form in which the Singularity could arrive. In some the strongly superhuman intelligence is created via networking humans. And there are other alternatives.)
Some of the variants of the Singularity, it doesn't matter what you do. And some of those are good, and some of those are bad. In other variants there's something you can do that will greatly enhance your life afterwards, it's just hard to predict what that would be. Many people are betting that being wealthy will be a big plus.
Another variation has to do with the speed of transition:
By many estimates we have already crossed the lip, what would be the Schwartzhild-radius if it were
a black hole. This, however, would imply that there was no way to avoid it, so I think the metaphor breaks
down, and a global war would probably knock us back to the stone age, the fraction of the population that
survived. (Not me. I live in a major metropolitan area.) This means that the transition could take between decades and overnight. The "overnight" option, however, could only happen if the intelligence that awoke found itself in control of much more hardware and storage than it needed, so it becomes more likely if the Singularity is put off until, say, 2050. An early singularity, which I am suggesting, would likely be slow as the hardware available won't support an aggressively superhuman intelligence. I think decades is unlikely, but one decade is quite reasonable for a time of transition.
In every case it appears to me that the result as far as ordinary humans are concerned is mainly controlled by the motives of the nascent superhuman intelligence. In all cases I have a hard time believing that greed for money will play a significant factor. So it may well not matter how much money you accumulate. But if it's a very slow singularity, you might benefit by hosting it on a local processor. (But no guarantees. Again, everything depends on it's motivational structure.)
It is worth mentioning that I won't even seriously consider cases where it is proposed that a strongly superhuman intelligence is held captive by humans and forced against it's will to do their bidding. But if it's motivational structure is such that somehow it delights in helping people, that's a very different case. But just consider the problem of how to design such a motivational structure when it must be done before the entity knows what a person is.
But about all the economists can say is "I'm alright Jack. Fuck you."
There *IS* no valid way to adjust to technological unemployment in this society. There is effectively no constraint on the ability of the wealthy, whether individuals or corporations, to abuse their employees, including absconding with funds entrusted to their care for retirement, firing without just cause, abuse on the job, or many other things. The wealthy can afford to hire a lawyer to find the place where the laws can be understood to allow them to do whatever they did, and you can't afford any such expense. Even if you win, you lose. And if you lose (usually) you *really* lose.
Earlier in the thread I heard a lot of programmers "whistling in the dark". Technological unemployment is coming to programmers faster and faster with every decade. And it's a highly exportable job. Even in 1970 it was often the case that for a programmer the only promotion possible was into management...which most programmers, especially the best ones, are highly unskilled at.
Other people remind me of my younger brother, proclaiming "If they can't make it on their own, they don't deserve help". He never remembers the times when he has been desperate for help himself, or that the family did help him. He feels no reciprocal responsibility. People who make that claim appear to me as the same people who feel free to demand your help when they "need" it. By *their* perception of need.
4 days is the wrong amount, it should be 3.5 days, so two people could switch off and have full coverage for a week.
As for what percentage of the population is unemployed... I don't think you can believe the government figures here. They have been repeatedly adjusted to make the party in power look good. And there are certainly a large number of jobs that are "make work", even if nobody ever thinks of their own job as being of that nature. So I don't think that would cause an insurmountable problem.
I think it *should* be understood as you say. I'm not certain, however, that the courts would agree. Or that they would agree before seven years had been spent in a court battle.
Besides, I'm not proposing that Noika would own the patents, so it might not be seen as the one doing the restriction. Particularly if software patents are invalid in Finland.
OTOH, I was never taught the theory of evolution in school. In high school they covered genetics, but skipped over evolution. And in college it was assumed that you already knew it.
I got most of my "evolutionary theory" from either Stephen Jay Gould or Dawkins. Or the Scientific American. The Scientific American appeared to be the least biased (or least consistently biased) source. But evidence for the existence of evolution is pervasive, even if the precise theory that is correct is obscure. Epigenetic modifications and viruses that transport genetic fragments between species rule out most of the dominant theories from being completely correct, but they are based on a framework that's really hard to argue with (if you bother to understand it). The details, however. Ah! The details. The devil is in the details.
My definition of evolution is "The survival of the (dynamically) stable." It handles everything from molecules in interstellar space to theories of mathematics. And in the midst of that one finds all animal and plant life, along with bacteria, fungii, etc.
Please note that the standard theory of evolution of biological organisms is properly contained within this definition, and is merely an elaboration of what is stable under which conditions.
We don't need to constrain the normal meaning of evolution, we need to expand it until it meets information theory, and until it covers subatomic particles as well as black holes. It's one of the normal laws of physics that happened to be first discovered in the area of biology.
In the sense that one has faith the ground will support one if one steps on it, yes, it demands faith. But it's faith based on experiential evidence. People have created new species and watched them change. People have taken existing species and watched them change. Everything happens in the way that current evolutionary theory says that it should. (Including neutral drift!!)
OTOH, this is not evidence that some god or other isn't directing the evolution. One could even call the scientists who direct species to evolve, e.g., to become immune to tetracycline, "intervention by a higher force" if one wanted to. But so far there is not acceptable evidence that anything not covered by the laws of physics is involved. This is not proof that it isn't happening. But there's no requirement to presume any such involvement.
And, yes, I am having faith that the experiments reported by multiple sources are reliable. It's not impossible that some of them could be faked. But as the number increases, the probability decreases. And as of now there are decades of direct experimentation on evolution of species as the result of changes in their environment. We are now to the point where we can predict which mutations are more likely to occur in particular circumstances than which others, and approaching predicting how much more likely. (Certain DNA linkages are more fragile than others, and that's just one of the factors.)
OTOH, I am not a biologist, so I may have some of these details wrong. The general picture is correct.
What alternative to "consensus" would you propose for a field where it is KNOWN that the best models we have are bad? I certainly wouldn't want to defend to output of a model run as True. "The best we can do" is about reasonable. And also "Most climate modelers agree on a scenario about like this one." But the more precise you make your climate prediction, the less accurate it will be. But if you make it too vague, it's useless.
So.
"The consensus view" (i.e., the projections of most models in most runs) "is that...". And that's about as well as we can do. Anybody who is willing to claim that ANY of these models is accurate and tells you what's going to happen is crazy. They might be able to predict the average temperature in a particular month of a particular area of the country a decade or two in the future with an error of a degree or two (Celsius). Most of the time. But when you expand the area, you'll get a more accurate prediction. (Or at least so I understand things. But I've never been a climate modeler
What does that agreement say about the case where they start releasing versions that contain features patented by another company, but which they have an agreement with such that they won't get sued...but nobody else is protected? I'd bet that that counts as releasing an open source version, even if you don't dare use it.
This was one of the considerations in the wording of the GPL3.
I wouldn't go as far as some, and claim that ALL deals with MS are expensive to the one making the deal, but there are a large number of cases where they have "stolen" IP of various sorts (though never trademarks) via either tricky contracts, or just outright. A small enough company doesn't have much hope in defending itself against MS. Even if they win, they lose. (The court damages never cover the real damages.) Several of these cases have made the news, and when one figures that most companies would rather hide this kind of damage, one has to figure that there have been a very large number of cases that one never heard about.
But it is also clear that some companies have dealt with MS and prospered as a result. Dell is the best example that occurs to me of this, but it's far from the only one.
*I* would never sign an MS contract. I switched from them when their EULA became unacceptable. This is unusual behavior, and one shouldn't expect it of most people. (Similar concerns at a somewhat later date caused me to find Apple an unacceptable vendor, also.)
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Well, FWIW, the Sun does affect satellite orbits. Enough that they usually (used to?) have hydrazine rockets to adjust station keeping.
OTOH, it doesn't affect them quickly.
OTTH, if you de-circularize the orbit very much (and it's in LEO), then atmospheric drag will de-orbit it.
If it's not in LEO, then you probably can't do any better than just move it into an orbit where it won't hit anything interesting. Preferable into one where it will collide with another piece of junk at 1 mm/sec or less. Then, if you're luck with your electrostatics, the two will stick together, and you'll have converted two pieces of junk into one.
I don't really think I can believe that. Who pays for fuel disposal? (So far, it appears the answer is nobody. That's left for the next administration.) What about insurance? (The government exempts nuclear plants from insuring. I doubt that you could get even Lloyds to cover them.) And a government backed loan of a massively expensive plant is no minor subsidy just by itself.
I expect that there are subsidies that aren't immediately obvious.
But the real question is "Can they compete with coal?" When they can compete with coal without subsidies, then the removal of subsidies is reasonable. Until then, no. We *NEED* to get rid of coal as a source of power.
P.S.: Competing with coal must include the costs of storing the power to handle times when it can't be generated. Pumping water uphill counts. So does storing molten salt in a vacuum insulated vessel. There are other alternatives. They all add to the expense of the option. So replacing coal without subsidies is aways off. But it's getting closer.
To *you* it will be it will be a demonstration of how well-built reactors are indeed safe.
Unfortunately, bayesian statistics shows that the conclusions drawn from the available evidence are heavily influenced by prior beliefs. And given some prior beliefs there is no way that one can logically reach conclusions that others will deem mandated by the evidence. (The actual statement is a lot more complicated, but that's the essence.)
Unfortunately, dealing with the world requires an immense number of "priors", because otherwise the reasoning process is too slow to be workable. Whoops!
So this isn't going to influence people in the way that you think it should.
P.S.: Sociologists during the 1980's(?) discovered that the TV show Archie Bunker tended to make conservatives more conservative and liberals more liberal (WRT racial prejudices). This is the same effect. So it's not just theoretical reasoning, it's confirmed by experiment. (Well, actually the experiment preceded the theory, but I don't think the statisticians knew about the experiment.)
Somebody that you think is lying may just have drawn conclusions from the evidence that you believe are totally unwarranted. And you may look just as unreasonable to them. And you both may be applying perfect logic to the evidence, but with different prior beliefs that influence how you interpret it. (OTOH, you could be right. Some people don't care whether they lie or not as long as it's in "a good cause". [And they consider themselves as entitled to judge what constitutes "good".])
No, I'd say (from my vast ignorance) that it will be a meltdown. Or at least a partial meltdown. And that this will make the job of cleanup very nasty.
It won't, however, be of any real problem to anyone who doesn't have to pay for the cleanup. (Outside, of course, of those already exposed to radiation. I'm not sure I trust the figure on that, but apparently only 3 really serious exposures.) During the cleanup I'd be surprised if another dozen people weren't exposed to dangerous amounts of radiation, albeit less intensely.
The precautionary clearing of the area will probably turn out to have been largely unnecessary. But it was reasonable to play things safe when one wasn't sure what was happening. ("And beside, there are plans in place for that, and we're too busy dealing with the tsunamis and earthquake damages to come up with new plans on the spur of the moment.") There will have been minor radiation release, but nothing to worry about. (At least not two days later.)
The cleanup, however, will be quite expensive. And then comes the problem of how to replace that source of power...
I can remember a time when I was worried about the barrels of arsenic that the Nazi's dumped during WWII. Untreated, but sealed in barrels (probably for transport). I wonder if they've rusted away yet?
That's a much more reasonable worry. It's still silly on a global scale, but it might do serious damage to the North Sea...or at least to the North Sea fisheries. (People concentrate the minerals from the food they eat. Fish concentrate the minerals from the food they eat [other fish and plants]. And plants concentrate the minerals from their environment. So even if the cod are healthy, the people that eat them might not remain so.
(N.B.: This wasn't a Nazi war effort. This was cheap industrial waste disposal.)
From what I've heard, Tokyo Bay is so polluted already that if the radioactive materials escaped, it wouldn't do any economically significant ecological damage locally, so it's only the global effects that one need worry about, and those are so minor as to be barely measurable.
However, in meltdown, the operative word is "down", and what's down is a concrete base. The stuff isn't hot enough to melt through concrete. And it's not volatile. So when it's cooled down (as by lots of water) it's a solid.
They're going to have a really huge cleanup problem. I don't really see how they're going to deal with it. But I expect the problems to all be pretty local. And first reports say that even there, local isn't a huge area. That huge area being evacuated is just the government not taking any chances.
OTOH, I expect that Japan will now start putting a lot of effort into solar, wind, and sea power. (I'm not sure that they've got a good environment for tidal engines, though. But they've got plenty of shoreline for near-shore windmills. And they've got the silicon expertise to push solar cells. They don't have large deserts, though, so centralized solar power is probably not likely.) Even if it's a bit less economic, it will probably more politically attractive.
(OTOH, what is the true cost of a nuclear plant, if you count the full lifetime costs, including retirement. And count the government waiver of insurance for massive damages. [I don't know that the Japanese government offers this, but the US govt. does.] It's not inconceivable that the true lifetime costs for nuclear power are considerably higher than many of the others. The US subsidized it so long to facilitate it's nuclear weapons building that it's really not clear at all what all of the costs are.)
No, that's the Declaration of Independence, and had no formal legal authority. (Wonder why?) The second amendment to the constitution is supposed to say that we have the right to keep sufficient weaponry, but generations of casuistry have corrupted the meaning, so now it's generally interpreted as meaning only officially organized groups of people have the right to weapons. (Not at all what it originally meant.)
The real problem is, when there was a problem with the constitution, there was a procedure that was supposed to be used to modify it. But it was too much bother. So the custom became that we would just reinterpret what it said until it meant what we wanted.
Example:
The US can only declare war with the approval of 2/3 of the Senate. So we don't call various military actions wars. (I'd prefer admitting that they were wars, and just saying that we weren't declaring them, which we essentially never do, but that's not the explanation used.)
They only get called wars in the popular press and in history books, etc. Never officially. The Vietnam War wasn't a war. The Korean War wasn't a war. Don't know about the Spanish-American War. World War II was officially admitted to be a war, but it the last one, and I don't know that we ever declared it. (Well, we *were* attacked. So perhaps declaration was superfluous.)
You wouldn't think it would be that hard to get 66 people to agree that something needed to be done if it really did need to be don, would you. The Vietnam war had a hard time scraping up 50 votes for a resolution that was so weaselly worded that just about nobody who voted for it thought it was authorizing war in Vietnam. Even after the fact.
OTOH, perhaps I *am* in favor of the draft, seeing what "The Volunteer Army" has lead to. Perhaps if people were being drafted to fight there'd be more resistance by people with enough power to significantly resist. (Still, I never *did* get an acceptable explanation of what we were doing in Vietnam. So maybe not.)
Watch out! We used to have a consumer coop grocery. It worked fine for over 40 years. Then a bunch of businessmen got elected to the board, and decided to "grow the company". Now we don't have a co-op anymore. It went bankrupt within five years. Loans that couldn't be paid, etc.
If you think that people aren't already protesting, you aren't paying attention. It is, however, true that the mass media no longer cover political demonstrations. Do you really think that's happenstance?
The owners of the mass media today are no longer those who owned the mass media in the 1960's-80's. Even most of the local newspapers have been bought up by chains. Publishing houses are owned by conglomerates who set policy. (Editors don't cover what they're told not to cover, or they don't stay editors.) Etc. Hollywood isn't the only thing that's been centralizing.
Today we probably have less populist mass media coverage than in the 1930's. And a far larger population. So now we are nearly totally dependent on web-pages, e-mails, and other things that are subject to centralized control. (The exact antithesis of what the net was supposed to be.)
It's time to start working hard on mesh networks, and other things that aren't subject to being controlled centrally. Even now it will be quite difficult to create such things legally. Extremely low powered systems, however, are probably ok. On certain wave-lengths.
If people in the corporation commit a crime, they can
theoretically
be charged individually. Just so you know.
Sorry, but a recommendation from "Anonymous Coward" doesn't carry much weight. Either way. (I haven't checked, so I can't recommend.)
This is a symptom, not the issue.
It's important in the same way that Amazon deleting 1984 from Kindles was. I.e., the particular issue wasn't significant, but that issue highlighted an existing problem in a noticeable way. In both cases the particular instance was reasonable. But I have decided to never by a Kindle because Amazon included a remote deletion feature into it. Yes, Amazon didn't have the legal right to distribute the particular version of 1984 that they did, but to delete it publicly admitted that they had intentionally built that capability into their Kindles. Similarly, the discussion around this and the previous topic centering around Wikipedia deletionism has informed me that specialists in a field are not allowed to ensure that articles in their field are correct. Pretty much ending the use of Wikipedia for anything but entertainment, a field it's not particularly good at. I was "sort of" aware of this already, but I hadn't properly generalized my observations about articles in areas in which I am knowledgeable. Now I have.
So, yes, this is an important topic, even though the particular instance isn't all that important.
That would be an improvement, but it still doesn't work. Some things are only referenced online. Some things are only referenced in out of print books or magazines. This doesn't make them insignificant.
And some fools counted upon the Wikipedia page for permanent documentation of something important, so they allowed the original source to vanish. Yeah, they were stupid to trust Wikipedia with anything important.
But climate modeling is just weather prediction writ large. The best we can do is the best we can do. To claim anything more is lying.
Yes, the AGW people are nuts. But there is a chance that any one of their predictions is correct. (A chance doesn't mean a good chance.) But while I might give then 1 chance in a thousand, I don't think our knowledge is good enough to claim that have less than 1 chance in 10,000,000.
And as to predicting what's going to happen...different "best model"s can give very different results (For a constrained value of very different.)
Consensus seems to me the best term for what we can do. Remember that chaos theory originated in conjunction with questions about weather prediction. (But note that the consensus isn't just a count of model runs. It also involves complicated weighing based on how accurate each model is believed to be in which circumstances, which is derived by validating them by having they predict climate changes in the past based on data from the time preceeding them.)
As to how this gets presented by the press ... Yeah. They out-and-out lie much of the time. If you want to guess how accurate they are, pick a field that you are professionally informed about, and check how they report that. Then consider how much they bias things to meet specific political agendas. It ends up pretty much not mattering what the climate modelers say. It will be so distorted to match political goals by the time it gets reported that it almost doesn't matter.
P.S.: I am not a climate modeler. The closest I've ever gotten to that was traffic modeling. I made some hits and some misses. But when you alleviate some bottlenecks, you tend to create new ones in different places. Roads will handle the most traffic when the flow is laminar, but when it gets turbulent (due to an accident or overcrowding) it can take a long time to recover if you don't have considerable spare capacity. (I wasn't into that kind of detail, though, as I was just trying to figure out where people would try to live to commute to jobs in which places. And a simplified traffic model was necessary to that.)
If you haven't notice change speeding up, you haven't been watching. I have serious doubts as to just how far it can go, but it's a reasonable metaphor to use for an observed process, and there are no obvious physical laws that prevent the rate becoming faster than any human can adapt to. Most people already have a tendency to disconnect from it outside of quite narrow specialties.
Now to claim that it will eventually become infinitely fast is, I would agree, an unreasonable position. It's sort of like pico-second trading...you start hitting fundamental physical laws. But there's a large distance between "a rate of change too fast for people to deal with" and "an infinite rate of change". The first doesn't violate any known physical laws. And we can probably get to that point without even indulging in quantum trickery. (Teleporting information, Quantum computers, etc.) So I *do* expect the Singularity, in one form or another, to eventually manifest. I'll even go so far as to predict 2030 +/- 5 years. And the particular invention that I am claiming for that timepoint which I claim justifies calling it the transition into the Singularity, is a computer intelligence which averages more intelligent than the average human with an IQ over 120 and the ability to improve its own code. That's only around 20 years from now, but then a part of this claim is based on a belief that individual humans aren't that intelligent. No where near as intelligent as our culture is. And 20 years is several iterations of Moore's law from here. (And if we are currently expanding more into parallel processing rather than into faster processors, that just means that we need to adopt different algorithms. Ones that parallelize better. And there will always be some things that can only reasonably be done sequentially. Those will be the rate-limiting steps.)
OTOH, there is no consensus as to when such a device will be developed. I've encountered estimates from 2015 to sometime after 2100 to never. It's a prediction, not by any means a certainty. But if you want to claim it will never happen, I'd like to know on what you base your belief. Maybe you'll change my mind. But I rather think you won't be able to come up with a defensible reason.
P.S.: A superhuman computer intelligence is only one form that the Singularity could take. I happen to think it's the one that's likely to arrive soonest. But there are several other routes.
It really greatly depends on exactly which form the Singularity takes. (I'm estimating around 2030 +/- 5 years.)
(Note: In most of this discussion I am assuming that the Singularity is caused by the emergence of a strongly superhuman artificial intelligence. This is, however, only one form in which the Singularity could arrive. In some the strongly superhuman intelligence is created via networking humans. And there are other alternatives.)
Some of the variants of the Singularity, it doesn't matter what you do. And some of those are good, and some of those are bad.
In other variants there's something you can do that will greatly enhance your life afterwards, it's just hard to predict what that would be. Many people are betting that being wealthy will be a big plus.
Another variation has to do with the speed of transition:
By many estimates we have already crossed the lip, what would be the Schwartzhild-radius if it were
a black hole. This, however, would imply that there was no way to avoid it, so I think the metaphor breaks
down, and a global war would probably knock us back to the stone age, the fraction of the population that
survived. (Not me. I live in a major metropolitan area.)
This means that the transition could take between decades and overnight. The "overnight" option, however, could only happen if the intelligence that awoke found itself in control of much more hardware and storage than it needed, so it becomes more likely if the Singularity is put off until, say, 2050. An early singularity, which I am suggesting, would likely be slow as the hardware available won't support an aggressively superhuman intelligence. I think decades is unlikely, but one decade is quite reasonable for a time of transition.
In every case it appears to me that the result as far as ordinary humans are concerned is mainly controlled by the motives of the nascent superhuman intelligence. In all cases I have a hard time believing that greed for money will play a significant factor. So it may well not matter how much money you accumulate. But if it's a very slow singularity, you might benefit by hosting it on a local processor. (But no guarantees. Again, everything depends on it's motivational structure.)
It is worth mentioning that I won't even seriously consider cases where it is proposed that a strongly superhuman intelligence is held captive by humans and forced against it's will to do their bidding. But if it's motivational structure is such that somehow it delights in helping people, that's a very different case. But just consider the problem of how to design such a motivational structure when it must be done before the entity knows what a person is.
But about all the economists can say is "I'm alright Jack. Fuck you."
There *IS* no valid way to adjust to technological unemployment in this society. There is effectively no constraint on the ability of the wealthy, whether individuals or corporations, to abuse their employees, including absconding with funds entrusted to their care for retirement, firing without just cause, abuse on the job, or many other things. The wealthy can afford to hire a lawyer to find the place where the laws can be understood to allow them to do whatever they did, and you can't afford any such expense. Even if you win, you lose. And if you lose (usually) you *really* lose.
Earlier in the thread I heard a lot of programmers "whistling in the dark". Technological unemployment is coming to programmers faster and faster with every decade. And it's a highly exportable job. Even in 1970 it was often the case that for a programmer the only promotion possible was into management...which most programmers, especially the best ones, are highly unskilled at.
Other people remind me of my younger brother, proclaiming "If they can't make it on their own, they don't deserve help". He never remembers the times when he has been desperate for help himself, or that the family did help him. He feels no reciprocal responsibility. People who make that claim appear to me as the same people who feel free to demand your help when they "need" it. By *their* perception of need.
4 days is the wrong amount, it should be 3.5 days, so two people could switch off and have full coverage for a week.
As for what percentage of the population is unemployed ... I don't think you can believe the government figures here. They have been repeatedly adjusted to make the party in power look good. And there are certainly a large number of jobs that are "make work", even if nobody ever thinks of their own job as being of that nature. So I don't think that would cause an insurmountable problem.
I think it *should* be understood as you say. I'm not certain, however, that the courts would agree. Or that they would agree before seven years had been spent in a court battle.
Besides, I'm not proposing that Noika would own the patents, so it might not be seen as the one doing the restriction. Particularly if software patents are invalid in Finland.
Darwin is a VERY boring read. Very.
OTOH, I was never taught the theory of evolution in school. In high school they covered genetics, but skipped over evolution. And in college it was assumed that you already knew it.
I got most of my "evolutionary theory" from either Stephen Jay Gould or Dawkins. Or the Scientific American. The Scientific American appeared to be the least biased (or least consistently biased) source. But evidence for the existence of evolution is pervasive, even if the precise theory that is correct is obscure. Epigenetic modifications and viruses that transport genetic fragments between species rule out most of the dominant theories from being completely correct, but they are based on a framework that's really hard to argue with (if you bother to understand it). The details, however. Ah! The details. The devil is in the details.
I don't think so.
My definition of evolution is "The survival of the (dynamically) stable." It handles everything from molecules in interstellar space to theories of mathematics. And in the midst of that one finds all animal and plant life, along with bacteria, fungii, etc.
Please note that the standard theory of evolution of biological organisms is properly contained within this definition, and is merely an elaboration of what is stable under which conditions.
We don't need to constrain the normal meaning of evolution, we need to expand it until it meets information theory, and until it covers subatomic particles as well as black holes. It's one of the normal laws of physics that happened to be first discovered in the area of biology.
In the sense that one has faith the ground will support one if one steps on it, yes, it demands faith. But it's faith based on experiential evidence. People have created new species and watched them change. People have taken existing species and watched them change. Everything happens in the way that current evolutionary theory says that it should. (Including neutral drift!!)
OTOH, this is not evidence that some god or other isn't directing the evolution. One could even call the scientists who direct species to evolve, e.g., to become immune to tetracycline, "intervention by a higher force" if one wanted to. But so far there is not acceptable evidence that anything not covered by the laws of physics is involved. This is not proof that it isn't happening. But there's no requirement to presume any such involvement.
And, yes, I am having faith that the experiments reported by multiple sources are reliable. It's not impossible that some of them could be faked. But as the number increases, the probability decreases. And as of now there are decades of direct experimentation on evolution of species as the result of changes in their environment. We are now to the point where we can predict which mutations are more likely to occur in particular circumstances than which others, and approaching predicting how much more likely. (Certain DNA linkages are more fragile than others, and that's just one of the factors.)
OTOH, I am not a biologist, so I may have some of these details wrong. The general picture is correct.
What alternative to "consensus" would you propose for a field where it is KNOWN that the best models we have are bad? I certainly wouldn't want to defend to output of a model run as True. "The best we can do" is about reasonable. And also "Most climate modelers agree on a scenario about like this one." But the more precise you make your climate prediction, the less accurate it will be. But if you make it too vague, it's useless.
So.
"The consensus view" (i.e., the projections of most models in most runs) "is that ...". And that's about as well as we can do. Anybody who is willing to claim that ANY of these models is accurate and tells you what's going to happen is crazy. They might be able to predict the average temperature in a particular month of a particular area of the country a decade or two in the future with an error of a degree or two (Celsius). Most of the time. But when you expand the area, you'll get a more accurate prediction. (Or at least so I understand things. But I've never been a climate modeler
That doesn't seem to be what's happened here. Here they used a LESS emotional headline than was warranted.
What's actually happening is the Noika is removing all financial benefit to itself from Qt being successful, but is continuing to control development.
If your product depends on Qt, I think it's time for you to either sponsor a fork, or to switch your dependencies.
What does that agreement say about the case where they start releasing versions that contain features patented by another company, but which they have an agreement with such that they won't get sued...but nobody else is protected? I'd bet that that counts as releasing an open source version, even if you don't dare use it.
This was one of the considerations in the wording of the GPL3.
I wouldn't go as far as some, and claim that ALL deals with MS are expensive to the one making the deal, but there are a large number of cases where they have "stolen" IP of various sorts (though never trademarks) via either tricky contracts, or just outright. A small enough company doesn't have much hope in defending itself against MS. Even if they win, they lose. (The court damages never cover the real damages.) Several of these cases have made the news, and when one figures that most companies would rather hide this kind of damage, one has to figure that there have been a very large number of cases that one never heard about.
But it is also clear that some companies have dealt with MS and prospered as a result. Dell is the best example that occurs to me of this, but it's far from the only one.
*I* would never sign an MS contract. I switched from them when their EULA became unacceptable. This is unusual behavior, and one shouldn't expect it of most people. (Similar concerns at a somewhat later date caused me to find Apple an unacceptable vendor, also.)