No, of course not. Wyoming, per example, is hunting-besotted. Texas' fascination with firearms on the other hand has more to do with shooting other humans than shooting animals. As in, "I shot them thar dude who wuz tryin' to make off with ma pickup truck."
(snark off)
Anywhoo, it's of course a matter of perspective. To most other first world nations, the entire USA is indeed hunting- and firearms- besotted. That Texas may appear to be so from some perspectives (say, that of the average citizen of Boston or San Francisco) should be of no great surprise nor call for alarm.
I'm curious why you were so sensitive to the term? Certainly there are a significant number of people in Texas who are seriously attached to hunting. And given that hunting is a legal and popular activity in this country, "hunting-besotted" is no huge insult in any case. It's not like the poster accused Texas of being "child molestation-besotted" or anything.
Don't think that's true. Counter example: consider the stream of digits comprised of pi with all 7's removed. Still infinitely long and never repeating, but 7 never appears now.
That's true, but pi is not such a sequence. Your sequence is extremely nonrandom/ordered, as is the sequence 101101110111101111101111110 etc. cited in an earlier post.
The digits of pi are apparently random so far as all current tests have measured. (It has not been proven to be random, but as far as we know, it is.)
If the digits of pi are in fact random, as they seem to be, then all finite sequences appear with equal probability in that stream. If so, then as the number of examined digits approaches infinity the probability of finding any particular sequence approaches one.
So the grandparent poster's statement was ill-supported but the conclusion was (probably) correct. If pi's digits are random and it is infinitely long, any specific sequence will appear at some point. "Random" is a much stronger criterion than "non-repeating".
If your son is playing any game an excessive amount, maybe it's time to take him out to the baseball field or footbal field or hunting or whatever.
Hunting? But then he might learn to operate firearms, and I thought that was the whole problem here! The plaintiff claims that GTA taught the kid how to use guns...
and Iran and Korea are all too willing to give or sell them away.
Do you really have any evidence to support that accusation, or are you just pulling it out of your ass.
Suppose an international anti-islamic terrorist group came to the US and said "give or sell us a nuke or three and we'll go blow up Tehran for you!" Do you suppose we would? If so, why? If not, why not?
Then, demonstrate (with evidence to support) that your analysis either does or does not also apply to the governments of those other countries.
For my part, I would contend that powerful people do not ever intentionally give their most powerful weapons to groups they cannot control. What if those people turned out to be an opposition group, turned around, and used them against you?
Moreover, neurotic, unstable leaders cling more to their weapons, not less. Look at all the powerful leaders in history who have killed off even many of their closest underlings and generals out of fear of disloyalty or coup. You think egomaniacs like that are just going to give away their ace card to someone else? If so, you have a very incomplete understanding of human psychology.
Now, there may indeed be a risk of future instability allowing such deadly weapons to *fall* into other hands, a risk I believe is quite real. But Kim Jong-Il handing out nukes like lollipops to terrorist groups? Bullshit.
Moreover, if it was done correctly it would completely prevent cell phones and blackberries from working. I doubt that would fly in today's business environment.
How does having a paper trail make the results any more verifiable?
The same way that checksums and parity bits are useful by telling us that digital data streams have been altered and may contain errors. Even if by themselves they can't reconstruct what the original data stream should have been - the knowledge that your data stream is corrupt is by itself invaluable.
What if there is fraud in the paper trail?
Sure, someone can steal and alter the ballot box in which the paper records were stored. But that is a physical crime far harder to pull off and more likely to leave evidence.
To successfully hack the system, the bad guy would have to simultaneously alter the ballot box AND hack the computer so that they produce identical results. That combination is much harder than just altering a ballot box, and infinitely harder than just hacking a computer. If they only pull off one, then you know a crime has been committed and the election is void.
Joe teenage computer whiz can hack a diebold machine: the vulnerabilities are published. Certainly Joe Diebold programmer can sneak in malicious code. But can the same Joe simultaneously steal all the ballot boxes, forge new ballots to match the computer's altered count, and sneak them back under the noses of the election? Probably not. That requires people on the ground in many locations at once, working very fast. It's extremely hard to cover up.
all you know is that there is a disagreement - there is no way to know for sure which count is accurate.
You know the election is invalid, and you begin an investigation instead of putting the winner directly into office. If the investigation can prove which tally was altered, you still have a good election. If it can't, you hold a new election. Either way, you prevent an invalid election from potentially putting the wrong guy in office.
In an electronic system, one hacker gets the wrong guy into office and nobody ever knows because there is no evidence to even trigger the investigation.
Any open-source voice converters out there to remedy this ? Shouldn't be too difficult - just raise the pitch a few octaves.
There is a lot more difference in character between men's and women's voices than just the pitch. If you just raise the pitch of a man's voice, you get something that sounds like Alvin and the chipmunks, not something that sounds like a woman.
And "a few octaves" is a hell of a lot. The average difference in pitch between men's and women's speaking voices is less than a single octave.
Indeed. Point 5 of the guidelines: Tables should be used to mark up truly tabular information ("data tables"). Content developers should avoid using them to lay out pages ("layout tables"). Tables for any use also present special problems to users of screen readers (refer to checkpoint 10.3).
Even Google's ultra-simple front page violates this guideline, despite zero need to do so.
Point 3 of the guidelines says this: Mark up documents with the proper structural elements. Control presentation with style sheets rather than with presentation elements and attributes.
But if you dig into the source of google.com, you see cruft like this:
<br><font size=-1><font color=red>New!</font>
Google fails rather dramatically to implement any web standard, not even including a doctype. These problems aren't limited to their front page, either. news.google.com is just as bad or worse.
This is really a shame. The content that google presents is lightweight and free of the layout challenges that can sometimes make web standards difficult to follow: Google should be the perfect test case for perfect standards and accessibility. Instead, it's a throwback to 1996 web design. That they're launching a tool to test accessibility to the blind is incredibly ironic.
Hotel Rwanda is a rental. That kind of movie I'll watch with a close friend who shares my feelings about the world, at the time that is right. Since timing is important, it comes from blockbuster.
Netflix is for keeping a stack of cheap eyeball candy available. I use "The Mummy", "Krull", etc. to keep my eyeballs busy while I spend the hours on the stationary bicycle. It doesn't much matter which movie it is in particular.
(Okay, except I'll admit that this week I'm cycling to Lawrence of Arabia. Shockingly, I'm totally absorbed by the story and the character. At one hour a day, it's taking me all week...)
My housemate watches 4-5 netflix movies per week. They send him new ones two days later, like clockwork. I'm constantly sorting a pile of his incoming DVDs in the mail.
He watches movies so reliably that he'd be howling to the four winds if they were throttling him. He's also had an account with them since 2 months after they started, so he would certainly be noticing any slowdown.
Anyway, you can keep paying extra money for your Macs and thinking they are the greatest things on Earth, I will keep spending my money on much cheaper hardware which has always been easier/cheaper to upgrade/custum build my own computer myself (I have heard Macs are getting better in this area, but I do not know for sure) and also "just work". I also don't have the pompousness that a lot of Mac owners (such as you) have which I think is much preferable.
Wow, a good old-fashioned platform flame war. I love it! I'll chip in.
As a freelance developer (LAMP and Java), I have both macs and wintel boxes at my desk, plus intel-based linux servers in the basement. I think all the platforms can be made to be perfectly functional development machines, but there are drawbacks. For me:
1) The mac os is imho cleaner and more stable, faster to navigate files and easier to maintain. I spend less time doing technical support for my own mac than for my own PC by a large margin.
2) Despite the hype, software support for the Mac is still not as good. Office for Mac is buggy as all get out. Bugs are far more rampant in Eclipse when running it on Windows. Guides for simple things like installing MySQL are harder to find. These are all basically because the platform has fewer users, so problems with 3rd-party code are not addressed quickly. I regularly run into 3rd-party apps with no mac equivalent, like the software for my Garmin Forerunner GPS system.
3) The mac interacts with linux and LAMP infinitely better. Out of the box it has a shell, Apache, ssh, sshd, and most of the basic stuff you'd expect from a trim linux distro. I use a cron job and rsync to back up my mac filesystem to a linux server; this took about 30 seconds to set up. This makes it a much better environment than windows when developing LAMP applications.
4) Linux has no Adobe suite. For me, that's death on the desktop; I use Photoshop and Acrobat pro daily, plus Illustrator at least 2-3 times/wk. But it's great for servers, I've got a posse of them.
For me, #3 and #1 outweigh #2 so I use the mac for most of my daily work and use the Win PC for compatibility testing. There are certainly days when I curse that Eclipse/mac doesn't work right, though. (Subversion integration doesn't work right on the mac in either Eclipse *or* Zend Studio... grrr!)
Other item... the most common reason I hear for PC's around/. is "I can build them myself / I can upgrade them". Anyone who really believes this doesn't work for a living, or can't do simple math. I built my last PC, saving approximately $250 over a comparable Dell. I will NEVER do that again. It took two days to get it working right, with a delay in between while I returned the RAM for a different brand with slightly different parameters. I bill my time at $100/hour. The time lost getting it working right cost me around $2500, enough to buy a new Dell AND a new Mac.
Meanwhile, any machine (including a mac) is trivially upgradable with RAM and disk space. Hell, because of the gorgeous case design memory and storage upgrades are easier on a Mac.
But by the time you'd want to upgrade anything else, there will be a new CPU you need that requires a different socket, a new graphics card that requires a different bus (PCI,AGP 2x,4x,8x,16x,PCI-X,PCI-E) a faster type of RAM, and the memory throughput of your old mobo won't be satisfactory. You'll need a whole new system anyway - "upgradability" is pretty useless IMHO. All you can save yourself is a $50 case and PSU. Big whoop. Maybe you can keep your old HD for a while, but if you do important work you really want to replace your HD's every 2-3 years anyway.
Technologies present lots of ethical problems, but I'm not worried about this one. Two reasons.
1) It would never happen. As others point out, we're so worried about the potential problem that we don't allow death row inmates to become organ donors. Why would making organ donation easier and more successful change our already legally established position on the subject?
2) Research into construction and growth of replacement organs is already well advanced for many organs. The technologies include 3-D tissue printers, growth of cells on a scaffolding, and in some cases regrowth from stem cells. Within a couple decades of suspended animation becoming a medical reality we will have plenty of lower-cost options for replacing most organs anyway. Transplantation is more expensive since it requires *two* surgeries.
Oops, make that "Deepness in the Sky", the prequel to the book I named. Similar names, easy to mistype. Both excellent books, but Deepness is the one relevant to this discussion.
Note: This is currently a fictional scenario, but in one hundred years when this is actually going on, someone will stumble upon this post and realize how very forward-thinking I was...
Not if they've read Vernor Vinge's "Fire Upon the Deep". Highly recommended, BTW. One of the best 5 SF books I have read in my life, and I've read a lot.
Hey, then maybe we can start giving people drugs to help keep their brains alert 24/7 so that they can function better as co-processors. In fact, maybe highly-tailored drugs could even improve their speed and efficiency as image-recognition systems.
Has anyone else read "Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge? This sounds frighteningly like the "focus" technology the Bad Guys (TM) use in that book.
I am not worried about the human race *surviving*.
Wars today are no more frequent than they have been at any point in history, and I expect them to decrease (among developed nations only, because of economic interdependency). Even the worst environmental crisis wouldn't kill *everybody*.
In the worst-case scenarios I see, a pair of world wars* kill millions and melting ice caps displace 1.5 billion living on the worlds seacoasts as we move towards the end of the 21st century. I don't think both are necessarily going to happen, but even if they did that's a far cry from wiping out the species.
Even in the case of a full-on nuclear exchange, places like New Zealand and Madagascar are both low population and not particularly strategically located. Both could become reasonably self sufficient and survive with a fairly large population.
* Two world wars: US-Taiwan-India vs. China and Western Christian nations + Israel vs. Islam. They could happen simultaneously if the India/Pakistan conflict pushes the islamic world into an alliance with China.
A far more relevant question is how can the human race prosper and continue to grow? The fact is, I think it will.
Yes, we are running out of oil. But as the price goes up (and it will), other technologies will become competitive. Coal Gasification is frankly not that far away in economic competitiveness, and it can produce enough petrolem for a couple hundred years. We'll switch to it around the time US gas prices hit $6 or $7 per gallon. That will give us plenty of time for fusion and orbital solar power to become developed. We won't run out of energy.
Global warming will probably screw the 25% of humanity living near the seacoasts. Developed nations will build garganutan coastal dikes, and a billion southeast asians will have to move late in the 21st century. That will suck, but it won't significantly affect the global population.
I frankly doubt major world wars between developed nations. The world economy is far more interdependent than it was in 1936. China and the US can't afford to war with each other because both economies would collapse.
The USA will become the 3rd-largest economy, falling behind China and India both in productivity and in science. Much depends on whether or not America can accept this new position without deciding it needs to kill people over it.
Malthusian disaster scenarios are *always* counterbalanced by market forces. When a resource runs scarce its' price goes up, making alternatives viable and spurring research into alternatives. This will be true of everything from energy to food. The poor will get stuck with the short end of the stick, but that's not exactly new or news.
I think there will probably be some nasty terrorist incidents as nuclear and biological technology becomes cheaper and more widespread. Those will be bad, but they won't threaten the existence of the species as a whole.
People have chanted "doom" for centuries. Instead, life has always been nasty, messy, and full of tragedy, but goes on nonetheless. The 21st century will be no different on average, the nastiness will just manifest itself in different ways. But it won't wipe out the species.
The ONLY threat I see truly wiping out all of humanity is an asteroid impact. And that's no more likely in the 21st than at any other point in history. Maybe less, because now we are reaching the point where we could contemplate doing something about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Texas is not "hunting-besotted".
No, of course not. Wyoming, per example, is hunting-besotted. Texas' fascination with firearms on the other hand has more to do with shooting other humans than shooting animals. As in, "I shot them thar dude who wuz tryin' to make off with ma pickup truck."
(snark off)
Anywhoo, it's of course a matter of perspective. To most other first world nations, the entire USA is indeed hunting- and firearms- besotted. That Texas may appear to be so from some perspectives (say, that of the average citizen of Boston or San Francisco) should be of no great surprise nor call for alarm.
I'm curious why you were so sensitive to the term? Certainly there are a significant number of people in Texas who are seriously attached to hunting. And given that hunting is a legal and popular activity in this country, "hunting-besotted" is no huge insult in any case. It's not like the poster accused Texas of being "child molestation-besotted" or anything.
And mine likes broccoli stems. I stir fry the heads, and give him the stem as a "bone". It's gone inside of three minutes every time.
The best comment I heard was "Yeah, but did the IE team include the recipe?"
"Chariots of the Gods", you philistine.
Don't think that's true. Counter example: consider the stream of digits comprised of pi with all 7's removed. Still infinitely long and never repeating, but 7 never appears now.
That's true, but pi is not such a sequence. Your sequence is extremely nonrandom/ordered, as is the sequence 101101110111101111101111110 etc. cited in an earlier post.
The digits of pi are apparently random so far as all current tests have measured. (It has not been proven to be random, but as far as we know, it is.)
If the digits of pi are in fact random, as they seem to be, then all finite sequences appear with equal probability in that stream. If so, then as the number of examined digits approaches infinity the probability of finding any particular sequence approaches one.
So the grandparent poster's statement was ill-supported but the conclusion was (probably) correct. If pi's digits are random and it is infinitely long, any specific sequence will appear at some point. "Random" is a much stronger criterion than "non-repeating".
If your son is playing any game an excessive amount, maybe it's time to take him out to the baseball field or footbal field or hunting or whatever.
...
Hunting? But then he might learn to operate firearms, and I thought that was the whole problem here! The plaintiff claims that GTA taught the kid how to use guns
and Iran and Korea are all too willing to give or sell them away.
Do you really have any evidence to support that accusation, or are you just pulling it out of your ass.
Suppose an international anti-islamic terrorist group came to the US and said "give or sell us a nuke or three and we'll go blow up Tehran for you!" Do you suppose we would? If so, why? If not, why not?
Then, demonstrate (with evidence to support) that your analysis either does or does not also apply to the governments of those other countries.
For my part, I would contend that powerful people do not ever intentionally give their most powerful weapons to groups they cannot control. What if those people turned out to be an opposition group, turned around, and used them against you?
Moreover, neurotic, unstable leaders cling more to their weapons, not less. Look at all the powerful leaders in history who have killed off even many of their closest underlings and generals out of fear of disloyalty or coup. You think egomaniacs like that are just going to give away their ace card to someone else? If so, you have a very incomplete understanding of human psychology.
Now, there may indeed be a risk of future instability allowing such deadly weapons to *fall* into other hands, a risk I believe is quite real. But Kim Jong-Il handing out nukes like lollipops to terrorist groups? Bullshit.
Why not just ban all books from the second half of the 20th century and be done with it?
Because that would include Ann Coulter's first book, and we can't do without that classic of western literature now can we?
Moreover, if it was done correctly it would completely prevent cell phones and blackberries from working. I doubt that would fly in today's business environment.
'Long ago I learned it was a planet and I see no reason to unlearn it. Why should I?' "
Oh yes dear me, because information never changes and people should not EVAR be required to use their brains after their youthful indoctrination.
Dumb dumb dumb. Really:
How does having a paper trail make the results any more verifiable?
The same way that checksums and parity bits are useful by telling us that digital data streams have been altered and may contain errors. Even if by themselves they can't reconstruct what the original data stream should have been - the knowledge that your data stream is corrupt is by itself invaluable.
What if there is fraud in the paper trail?
Sure, someone can steal and alter the ballot box in which the paper records were stored. But that is a physical crime far harder to pull off and more likely to leave evidence.
To successfully hack the system, the bad guy would have to simultaneously alter the ballot box AND hack the computer so that they produce identical results. That combination is much harder than just altering a ballot box, and infinitely harder than just hacking a computer. If they only pull off one, then you know a crime has been committed and the election is void.
Joe teenage computer whiz can hack a diebold machine: the vulnerabilities are published. Certainly Joe Diebold programmer can sneak in malicious code. But can the same Joe simultaneously steal all the ballot boxes, forge new ballots to match the computer's altered count, and sneak them back under the noses of the election? Probably not. That requires people on the ground in many locations at once, working very fast. It's extremely hard to cover up.
all you know is that there is a disagreement - there is no way to know for sure which count is accurate.
You know the election is invalid, and you begin an investigation instead of putting the winner directly into office. If the investigation can prove which tally was altered, you still have a good election. If it can't, you hold a new election. Either way, you prevent an invalid election from potentially putting the wrong guy in office.
In an electronic system, one hacker gets the wrong guy into office and nobody ever knows because there is no evidence to even trigger the investigation.
Any open-source voice converters out there to remedy this ? Shouldn't be too difficult - just raise the pitch a few octaves.
There is a lot more difference in character between men's and women's voices than just the pitch. If you just raise the pitch of a man's voice, you get something that sounds like Alvin and the chipmunks, not something that sounds like a woman.
And "a few octaves" is a hell of a lot. The average difference in pitch between men's and women's speaking voices is less than a single octave.
Tables should be used to mark up truly tabular information ("data tables"). Content developers should avoid using them to lay out pages ("layout tables"). Tables for any use also present special problems to users of screen readers (refer to checkpoint 10.3).
Even Google's ultra-simple front page violates this guideline, despite zero need to do so.
Point 3 of the guidelines says this:
Mark up documents with the proper structural elements. Control presentation with style sheets rather than with presentation elements and attributes.
But if you dig into the source of google.com, you see cruft like this:Google fails rather dramatically to implement any web standard, not even including a doctype. These problems aren't limited to their front page, either. news.google.com is just as bad or worse.
This is really a shame. The content that google presents is lightweight and free of the layout challenges that can sometimes make web standards difficult to follow: Google should be the perfect test case for perfect standards and accessibility. Instead, it's a throwback to 1996 web design. That they're launching a tool to test accessibility to the blind is incredibly ironic.
Hotel Rwanda is a rental. That kind of movie I'll watch with a close friend who shares my feelings about the world, at the time that is right. Since timing is important, it comes from blockbuster.
Netflix is for keeping a stack of cheap eyeball candy available. I use "The Mummy", "Krull", etc. to keep my eyeballs busy while I spend the hours on the stationary bicycle. It doesn't much matter which movie it is in particular.
(Okay, except I'll admit that this week I'm cycling to Lawrence of Arabia. Shockingly, I'm totally absorbed by the story and the character. At one hour a day, it's taking me all week...)
My housemate watches 4-5 netflix movies per week. They send him new ones two days later, like clockwork. I'm constantly sorting a pile of his incoming DVDs in the mail.
He watches movies so reliably that he'd be howling to the four winds if they were throttling him. He's also had an account with them since 2 months after they started, so he would certainly be noticing any slowdown.
Oops, typo.
Bugs are far more rampant in Eclipse when running it on Windows.
Should have said: "Bugs are far more rampant in Eclipse than when running it on Windows."
Anyway, you can keep paying extra money for your Macs and thinking they are the greatest things on Earth, I will keep spending my money on much cheaper hardware which has always been easier/cheaper to upgrade/custum build my own computer myself (I have heard Macs are getting better in this area, but I do not know for sure) and also "just work". I also don't have the pompousness that a lot of Mac owners (such as you) have which I think is much preferable.
... grrr!)
... the most common reason I hear for PC's around /. is "I can build them myself / I can upgrade them". Anyone who really believes this doesn't work for a living, or can't do simple math. I built my last PC, saving approximately $250 over a comparable Dell. I will NEVER do that again. It took two days to get it working right, with a delay in between while I returned the RAM for a different brand with slightly different parameters. I bill my time at $100/hour. The time lost getting it working right cost me around $2500, enough to buy a new Dell AND a new Mac.
Wow, a good old-fashioned platform flame war. I love it! I'll chip in.
As a freelance developer (LAMP and Java), I have both macs and wintel boxes at my desk, plus intel-based linux servers in the basement. I think all the platforms can be made to be perfectly functional development machines, but there are drawbacks. For me:
1) The mac os is imho cleaner and more stable, faster to navigate files and easier to maintain. I spend less time doing technical support for my own mac than for my own PC by a large margin.
2) Despite the hype, software support for the Mac is still not as good. Office for Mac is buggy as all get out. Bugs are far more rampant in Eclipse when running it on Windows. Guides for simple things like installing MySQL are harder to find. These are all basically because the platform has fewer users, so problems with 3rd-party code are not addressed quickly. I regularly run into 3rd-party apps with no mac equivalent, like the software for my Garmin Forerunner GPS system.
3) The mac interacts with linux and LAMP infinitely better. Out of the box it has a shell, Apache, ssh, sshd, and most of the basic stuff you'd expect from a trim linux distro. I use a cron job and rsync to back up my mac filesystem to a linux server; this took about 30 seconds to set up. This makes it a much better environment than windows when developing LAMP applications.
4) Linux has no Adobe suite. For me, that's death on the desktop; I use Photoshop and Acrobat pro daily, plus Illustrator at least 2-3 times/wk. But it's great for servers, I've got a posse of them.
For me, #3 and #1 outweigh #2 so I use the mac for most of my daily work and use the Win PC for compatibility testing. There are certainly days when I curse that Eclipse/mac doesn't work right, though. (Subversion integration doesn't work right on the mac in either Eclipse *or* Zend Studio
Other item
Meanwhile, any machine (including a mac) is trivially upgradable with RAM and disk space. Hell, because of the gorgeous case design memory and storage upgrades are easier on a Mac.
But by the time you'd want to upgrade anything else, there will be a new CPU you need that requires a different socket, a new graphics card that requires a different bus (PCI,AGP 2x,4x,8x,16x,PCI-X,PCI-E) a faster type of RAM, and the memory throughput of your old mobo won't be satisfactory. You'll need a whole new system anyway - "upgradability" is pretty useless IMHO. All you can save yourself is a $50 case and PSU. Big whoop. Maybe you can keep your old HD for a while, but if you do important work you really want to replace your HD's every 2-3 years anyway.
Ridiculous stereotypes modded insightful? Grow up, people.
Technologies present lots of ethical problems, but I'm not worried about this one. Two reasons.
1) It would never happen. As others point out, we're so worried about the potential problem that we don't allow death row inmates to become organ donors. Why would making organ donation easier and more successful change our already legally established position on the subject?
2) Research into construction and growth of replacement organs is already well advanced for many organs. The technologies include 3-D tissue printers, growth of cells on a scaffolding, and in some cases regrowth from stem cells. Within a couple decades of suspended animation becoming a medical reality we will have plenty of lower-cost options for replacing most organs anyway. Transplantation is more expensive since it requires *two* surgeries.
Oops, make that "Deepness in the Sky", the prequel to the book I named. Similar names, easy to mistype. Both excellent books, but Deepness is the one relevant to this discussion.
Note: This is currently a fictional scenario, but in one hundred years when this is actually going on, someone will stumble upon this post and realize how very forward-thinking I was...
Not if they've read Vernor Vinge's "Fire Upon the Deep". Highly recommended, BTW. One of the best 5 SF books I have read in my life, and I've read a lot.
Hey, then maybe we can start giving people drugs to help keep their brains alert 24/7 so that they can function better as co-processors. In fact, maybe highly-tailored drugs could even improve their speed and efficiency as image-recognition systems.
Has anyone else read "Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge? This sounds frighteningly like the "focus" technology the Bad Guys (TM) use in that book.
Evan
He knows this. Don't feed the trolls.
Anyone else here detect a misuse of the mod system?
I am not worried about the human race *surviving*.
Wars today are no more frequent than they have been at any point in history, and I expect them to decrease (among developed nations only, because of economic interdependency). Even the worst environmental crisis wouldn't kill *everybody*.
In the worst-case scenarios I see, a pair of world wars* kill millions and melting ice caps displace 1.5 billion living on the worlds seacoasts as we move towards the end of the 21st century. I don't think both are necessarily going to happen, but even if they did that's a far cry from wiping out the species.
Even in the case of a full-on nuclear exchange, places like New Zealand and Madagascar are both low population and not particularly strategically located. Both could become reasonably self sufficient and survive with a fairly large population.
* Two world wars: US-Taiwan-India vs. China and Western Christian nations + Israel vs. Islam. They could happen simultaneously if the India/Pakistan conflict pushes the islamic world into an alliance with China.
A far more relevant question is how can the human race prosper and continue to grow? The fact is, I think it will.
Yes, we are running out of oil. But as the price goes up (and it will), other technologies will become competitive. Coal Gasification is frankly not that far away in economic competitiveness, and it can produce enough petrolem for a couple hundred years. We'll switch to it around the time US gas prices hit $6 or $7 per gallon. That will give us plenty of time for fusion and orbital solar power to become developed. We won't run out of energy.
Global warming will probably screw the 25% of humanity living near the seacoasts. Developed nations will build garganutan coastal dikes, and a billion southeast asians will have to move late in the 21st century. That will suck, but it won't significantly affect the global population.
I frankly doubt major world wars between developed nations. The world economy is far more interdependent than it was in 1936. China and the US can't afford to war with each other because both economies would collapse.
The USA will become the 3rd-largest economy, falling behind China and India both in productivity and in science. Much depends on whether or not America can accept this new position without deciding it needs to kill people over it.
Malthusian disaster scenarios are *always* counterbalanced by market forces. When a resource runs scarce its' price goes up, making alternatives viable and spurring research into alternatives. This will be true of everything from energy to food. The poor will get stuck with the short end of the stick, but that's not exactly new or news.
I think there will probably be some nasty terrorist incidents as nuclear and biological technology becomes cheaper and more widespread. Those will be bad, but they won't threaten the existence of the species as a whole.
People have chanted "doom" for centuries. Instead, life has always been nasty, messy, and full of tragedy, but goes on nonetheless. The 21st century will be no different on average, the nastiness will just manifest itself in different ways. But it won't wipe out the species.
The ONLY threat I see truly wiping out all of humanity is an asteroid impact. And that's no more likely in the 21st than at any other point in history. Maybe less, because now we are reaching the point where we could contemplate doing something about it.