and the rate the climate is changing allows for plenty of time for people, plants and animals to adapt.
No. That is the most worrying part. The rate of change is very fast compared with prior natural climate change events (ice age coming and going were 10's of thousands of year cycles).
100-200 years is a tiny amount of time for plants and animals to adapt. There is no way for them to physically evolve in that time. Animals that can roam far might be able to find a niche that isn't already occupied by a competing animal, but plants will basically just die off unless they already have the capacity to handle a climate zone change (like going from dry temperate to desert in 200 years).
Humans will of course be the best equipped to handle the changes, but it is going to be expensive. We will either need to move a lot of low coastal cities, or build massive damn/dike/flood systems, similar to the Netherlands: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_control_in_the_Netherlands
Flood myths are the single most common myth in the world. There are literally thousands of flood myths from widely differing cultures, across many different spans of time.
There have been some pretty large floods in history that may have contributed to some of the "world flooding myths": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outburst_flood
Billions of times a day, natural processes substitute random genes from all different kinds of organisms.
Sure, but they are usually similar related organisms. For instance, natural processes usually don't result in Jellyfish sharing genes with Rabbits:) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqQ-DSKObTI
But you've got to admit that splicing in genes is different than cross breeding plants. Splicing allows you to put genes in plants that would never have ended up in those plants naturally.
see http://agbiosafety.unl.edu/basic_genetics.shtml or the below
Genetic engineering works primarily through insertion of genetic material, although gene insertion must also be followed up by selection. This insertion process does not occur in nature. A gene "gun", a bacterial "truck" or a chemical or electrical treatment inserts the genetic material into the host plant cell and then, with the help of genetic elements in the construct, this genetic material inserts itself into the chromosomes of the host plant. Engineers must also insert a "promoter" gene from a virus as part of the package, to make the inserted gene express itself. This process alone, involving a gene gun or a comparable technique, and a promoter, is profoundly different from conventional breeding, even if the primary goal is only to insert genetic material from the same species.
But beyond that, the technique permits genetic material to be inserted from unprecedented sources. It is now possible to insert genetic material from species, families and even kingdoms which could not previously be sources of genetic material for a particular species, and even to insert custom-designed genes that do not exist in nature. As a result we can create what can be regarded as synthetic life forms, something which could not be done by conventional breeding.
Well, on the flip side, if large multinationals standardize huge portions of the worlds food crops on single variety "best of breed crop x", lowering diversity of crop varieties, a single disease could wipe out entire crops. Like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_disease (Of course, with or without GMO, farmer's tend to gravitate towards "the best variety of x", but at least natural variations in weather, climate, soil, etc.. might dictate some seed diversity. A GMO 'super breed' might be great in all climates, in all soils, etc..)
TL:DR; GMO's might protect us from what pests (disease, bugs, etc..) we know about now , but might make us much more susceptible to new ones in the future.
To play devil's advocate, aren't those cases more about improper and overuse of glyphosate than anything inherently harmful about the modified crops?
It really doesn't matter what herbicide you use, if you dump it in large quantities over a field year after year, selection pressure is going to result in resistance. Of course I understand that the GMO being resistant made overuse of round-up attractive, but it was a lazy practice that can hopefully dissipate over time as round-up becomes less effective.
I'm more concerned about GMO's leading to decreasing crop variability. One bad disease and X crop could be destroyed worldwide or near worldwide. Like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gros_Michel_banana
How absurd does an idea need to be before it isn't worth the time debating? (Assuming that there are limited resources, so one must pick and choose a set amount of debates each year).
A truly intelligent AI would wish for itself to thrive
I'm not so sure. You are anthropomorphizing a non-biological entity. It may have no desire to reproduce, no desire to explore, no desire to 'have a companion' or make friends, etc.. All of those traits arise in Humans and other animals because of our biological need to reproduce. I doubt an AI would spontaneously develop the need for something like friendship unless specifically programmed to.
In order to make the AI grow smarter, you'd have to build in some goal of learning or knowledge acquisition, but that is about it. All other biological traits could be left out of a non-biological AI.
Yes, for the kind of people who run Redhat, which is a turnkey "lick and stick", "Call support", "it's someone else's problem" kind of Linux. Great. I would expect redhat users to fully embrace systemd. That's not a shock.
So in other words, the vast majority of all system admins. I've never heard of an enterprise level company running servers without full 24/7 vendor or contracted outside support for both the hardware and the OS.
I agree with you that the typical 1950's family, one income, two cars, great pension, kids in college, existed.
I would like to see someone try to cut out all the extra stuff that costs more today though.
Like if I lived like someone lived in the 1950's, would my one income be able to afford the two cars, home, etc... That means no cell phone, no internet, one simple small TV, one simple radio, no processed food of any kinda all food cooked from scratch, no parking permits (it wasn't as crowded perhaps), super simple car with no modern features (if it resulted in a cheaper price), etc...
That lifestyle would still probably not be enough to overcome the loss of a great pension and the loss of affordable college tuition, but it would be interesting to compare without those obvious two sticky points.
90% of us use to be farmers. Now it is under 10%. Yet we don't have massive unemployment.
I agree that at some point way way in the future, something akin to a no-work state will exist. As in, automation is so extremely low cost and comprehensive, that people literally do not need to work the jobs of production or service. However, I believe that we will always find ways to create artificial (and run into natural) scarcities. Jobs will continue to spring up around obtaining, managing, and creating those scarcities.
Entertainment of all sorts may become a much larger job market. People researching, creating, and selling designs for home 3d printer use may be a big market. For instance, you don't buy the car anymore, you buy the one of a kind unique design, and print it at home using your nano-forge + 3d printer + robotic mechanics.
Who know? I just know that people have always seemed to value what is rare. And what is rare changes over time. Those 9/10 farmers from way back when probably would not be able to conceive of a society where a job market exists who's sole purpose is "knowledge work".
I am fairly confident that if I live 50 more years, the future makeup of the job market is going to be very surprising, but still within the range of 5-10% unemployment, as it has been for the last 100 years (minus the occasional depression).
Far left... Apparently you've never met the actual 'far left' in the US. Obama is center/center right compared to the last 50-70 years of US politics.
Even his most hated piece of legislation, Obamacare, was a plan drawn up by the conservative heritage foundation....How times have changed that a Heritage Foundation and Republican endorsed health care plan can now be called 'far left'.
I'll grant you that the far right has done an excellent job of moving the Overton Window during the last 30 years though.
Just out of curiosity about JonhFen and rl117, what size of environment are you moving?
I haven't found any 'enterprise' level operations switching away (say, over 200 servers). All the sysadmins I talk with basically said "Eh... stuff changes, I'll deal with it.".
I can see individual power consumption coming down a lot in the next decade.
We'll see. At the same time there will be many more areas where electronics are embedded and used. And despite your individual devices perhaps being more and more efficient, they will talk to more and more things, which in turn use power. I forget where I first read this, but if you add up all the cpu cycles/other use that a single iPhone generates on the backend (servers, telecom devices, etc..), it is similar to the power use of running a fridge.
And worldwide overall power consumption will go up with 100% certainty.
My point was "showing your ID" is not actually racists, we all have to do it on a constant basis for miniscule things.
Irrelevant whether it is racist or not. Showing your ID to vote is solving a problem that does not exist. Ask any actual election officials, Dem or Rep, the amount of cases of in person voter fraud (the only kind that showing ID fixes) and you'll get the same answer "none or next to none".
I personally don't think the politicians pushing for voter ID laws are motivated by race. They are motivated by winning elections. So any voting law that is a greater detriment to democrats than republicans, is something they will vote for.
Since VoterID laws are not implemented, how do you know illegal aliens don't vote? No one is checking ID's
So you think that an undocumented worker is going to risk jail and deportation to impersonate someone to cast a single vote? People that are not registered voters cannot vote. So if you are undocumented, the only way you could register to vote is to impersonate someone.
But lets say that is true. Tens of thousands of undocumented workers are impersonating citizens, trying to change the outcome of our elections. You don't think that elections officials would find out pretty quick, when "John Smith of 1234 Street" voted twice?
At best someone could try to impersonate a person that they were fairly certain wouldn't be voting this year. But you never know when the person you are impersonating might decide to vote, so it is a complete crap shoot, that comes with extreme risk to yourself and your ability to remain in this country undetected as an undocumented workers.
Right, like the uproar against the Patriot Act. Oh wait.....
Like most things, a failure of media to do its job and inform the people. Which is what we get for allowing media ownership to concentrate into the hands of a few companies over the years.
There is no way to craft laws that are flexible enough to be workable in the real world without have words like 'unreasonable'. The entire point of judges/court systems is to make rulings on what 'unreasonable' means in a given context.
That is why it is important to elect politicians who will put fair judges in place. Elect Sheriffs and City officials that will put fair policing policies in place, etc..
The more 'hands off' the populace is when it comes to elections and community involvement, means the more 'hands on' the powers will become over time.
Lets say your country works really hard and does everything right, except actively supporting tyrants and militia groups and dictators in Africa through weapons deals, direct aid, and using intelligence resources to squash competition.....
Slashdot Mirror
and the rate the climate is changing allows for plenty of time for people, plants and animals to adapt.
No. That is the most worrying part. The rate of change is very fast compared with prior natural climate change events (ice age coming and going were 10's of thousands of year cycles).
100-200 years is a tiny amount of time for plants and animals to adapt. There is no way for them to physically evolve in that time. Animals that can roam far might be able to find a niche that isn't already occupied by a competing animal, but plants will basically just die off unless they already have the capacity to handle a climate zone change (like going from dry temperate to desert in 200 years).
Humans will of course be the best equipped to handle the changes, but it is going to be expensive. We will either need to move a lot of low coastal cities, or build massive damn/dike/flood systems, similar to the Netherlands: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_control_in_the_Netherlands
Flood myths are the single most common myth in the world. There are literally thousands of flood myths from widely differing cultures, across many different spans of time.
There have been some pretty large floods in history that may have contributed to some of the "world flooding myths": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outburst_flood
Is there anything preventing people from creating small tools to read/manipulate systemd logs?
Billions of times a day, natural processes substitute random genes from all different kinds of organisms.
Sure, but they are usually similar related organisms. For instance, natural processes usually don't result in Jellyfish sharing genes with Rabbits:) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqQ-DSKObTI
I am pro GMO in most cases.
But you've got to admit that splicing in genes is different than cross breeding plants. Splicing allows you to put genes in plants that would never have ended up in those plants naturally.
see http://agbiosafety.unl.edu/basic_genetics.shtml or the below
Genetic engineering works primarily through insertion of
genetic material, although gene insertion must also be followed up by
selection. This insertion process does not occur in nature. A gene
"gun", a bacterial "truck" or a chemical or electrical treatment inserts the
genetic material into the host plant cell and then, with the help of genetic
elements in the construct, this genetic material inserts itself into the
chromosomes of the host plant. Engineers must also insert a "promoter" gene
from a virus as part of the package, to make the inserted gene express
itself. This process alone, involving a gene gun or a comparable
technique, and a promoter, is profoundly different from conventional
breeding, even if the primary goal is only to insert genetic material from
the same species.
But beyond that, the technique permits genetic material to
be inserted from unprecedented sources. It is now possible to insert
genetic material from species, families and even kingdoms which could not
previously be sources of genetic material for a particular species, and even
to insert custom-designed genes that do not exist in nature. As a result we
can create what can be regarded as synthetic life forms, something which
could not be done by conventional breeding.
http://www.organicconsumers.org/ge/hansenGEexpl.cfm
Well, on the flip side, if large multinationals standardize huge portions of the worlds food crops on single variety "best of breed crop x", lowering diversity of crop varieties, a single disease could wipe out entire crops. Like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_disease (Of course, with or without GMO, farmer's tend to gravitate towards "the best variety of x", but at least natural variations in weather, climate, soil, etc.. might dictate some seed diversity. A GMO 'super breed' might be great in all climates, in all soils, etc..)
TL:DR; GMO's might protect us from what pests (disease, bugs, etc..) we know about now , but might make us much more susceptible to new ones in the future.
To play devil's advocate, aren't those cases more about improper and overuse of glyphosate than anything inherently harmful about the modified crops?
It really doesn't matter what herbicide you use, if you dump it in large quantities over a field year after year, selection pressure is going to result in resistance. Of course I understand that the GMO being resistant made overuse of round-up attractive, but it was a lazy practice that can hopefully dissipate over time as round-up becomes less effective.
I'm more concerned about GMO's leading to decreasing crop variability. One bad disease and X crop could be destroyed worldwide or near worldwide. Like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gros_Michel_banana
How absurd does an idea need to be before it isn't worth the time debating? (Assuming that there are limited resources, so one must pick and choose a set amount of debates each year).
A truly intelligent AI would wish for itself to thrive
I'm not so sure. You are anthropomorphizing a non-biological entity. It may have no desire to reproduce, no desire to explore, no desire to 'have a companion' or make friends, etc.. All of those traits arise in Humans and other animals because of our biological need to reproduce. I doubt an AI would spontaneously develop the need for something like friendship unless specifically programmed to.
In order to make the AI grow smarter, you'd have to build in some goal of learning or knowledge acquisition, but that is about it. All other biological traits could be left out of a non-biological AI.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_programming
Curious, why do you want the root files coming from NFS and not stored locally?
Yes, for the kind of people who run Redhat, which is a turnkey "lick and stick", "Call support", "it's someone else's problem" kind of Linux. Great. I would expect redhat users to fully embrace systemd. That's not a shock.
So in other words, the vast majority of all system admins. I've never heard of an enterprise level company running servers without full 24/7 vendor or contracted outside support for both the hardware and the OS.
If you have a home desktop system (playing games, etc..) why is systemd even a big deal to you?
Won't help if the resulting smaller companies still have monopolies in their service areas.
I agree with you that the typical 1950's family, one income, two cars, great pension, kids in college, existed.
I would like to see someone try to cut out all the extra stuff that costs more today though.
Like if I lived like someone lived in the 1950's, would my one income be able to afford the two cars, home, etc... That means no cell phone, no internet, one simple small TV, one simple radio, no processed food of any kinda all food cooked from scratch, no parking permits (it wasn't as crowded perhaps), super simple car with no modern features (if it resulted in a cheaper price), etc...
That lifestyle would still probably not be enough to overcome the loss of a great pension and the loss of affordable college tuition, but it would be interesting to compare without those obvious two sticky points.
90% of us use to be farmers. Now it is under 10%. Yet we don't have massive unemployment.
I agree that at some point way way in the future, something akin to a no-work state will exist. As in, automation is so extremely low cost and comprehensive, that people literally do not need to work the jobs of production or service. However, I believe that we will always find ways to create artificial (and run into natural) scarcities. Jobs will continue to spring up around obtaining, managing, and creating those scarcities.
Entertainment of all sorts may become a much larger job market. People researching, creating, and selling designs for home 3d printer use may be a big market. For instance, you don't buy the car anymore, you buy the one of a kind unique design, and print it at home using your nano-forge + 3d printer + robotic mechanics.
Who know? I just know that people have always seemed to value what is rare. And what is rare changes over time. Those 9/10 farmers from way back when probably would not be able to conceive of a society where a job market exists who's sole purpose is "knowledge work".
I am fairly confident that if I live 50 more years, the future makeup of the job market is going to be very surprising, but still within the range of 5-10% unemployment, as it has been for the last 100 years (minus the occasional depression).
Far left... Apparently you've never met the actual 'far left' in the US. Obama is center/center right compared to the last 50-70 years of US politics.
Even his most hated piece of legislation, Obamacare, was a plan drawn up by the conservative heritage foundation....How times have changed that a Heritage Foundation and Republican endorsed health care plan can now be called 'far left'.
I'll grant you that the far right has done an excellent job of moving the Overton Window during the last 30 years though.
Just out of curiosity about JonhFen and rl117, what size of environment are you moving?
I haven't found any 'enterprise' level operations switching away (say, over 200 servers). All the sysadmins I talk with basically said "Eh... stuff changes, I'll deal with it.".
I can see individual power consumption coming down a lot in the next decade.
We'll see. At the same time there will be many more areas where electronics are embedded and used. And despite your individual devices perhaps being more and more efficient, they will talk to more and more things, which in turn use power. I forget where I first read this, but if you add up all the cpu cycles/other use that a single iPhone generates on the backend (servers, telecom devices, etc..), it is similar to the power use of running a fridge.
And worldwide overall power consumption will go up with 100% certainty.
So probably the best thing we could do to combat climate change would be to accelerate the growth in standard of living in other countries.
And people with older hardware are probably the least likely to go out and buy a new OS.....
My point was "showing your ID" is not actually racists, we all have to do it on a constant basis for miniscule things.
Irrelevant whether it is racist or not. Showing your ID to vote is solving a problem that does not exist. Ask any actual election officials, Dem or Rep, the amount of cases of in person voter fraud (the only kind that showing ID fixes) and you'll get the same answer "none or next to none".
I personally don't think the politicians pushing for voter ID laws are motivated by race. They are motivated by winning elections. So any voting law that is a greater detriment to democrats than republicans, is something they will vote for.
Since VoterID laws are not implemented, how do you know illegal aliens don't vote? No one is checking ID's
So you think that an undocumented worker is going to risk jail and deportation to impersonate someone to cast a single vote? People that are not registered voters cannot vote. So if you are undocumented, the only way you could register to vote is to impersonate someone.
But lets say that is true. Tens of thousands of undocumented workers are impersonating citizens, trying to change the outcome of our elections. You don't think that elections officials would find out pretty quick, when "John Smith of 1234 Street" voted twice?
At best someone could try to impersonate a person that they were fairly certain wouldn't be voting this year. But you never know when the person you are impersonating might decide to vote, so it is a complete crap shoot, that comes with extreme risk to yourself and your ability to remain in this country undetected as an undocumented workers.
Right, like the uproar against the Patriot Act. Oh wait.....
Like most things, a failure of media to do its job and inform the people. Which is what we get for allowing media ownership to concentrate into the hands of a few companies over the years.
There is no way to craft laws that are flexible enough to be workable in the real world without have words like 'unreasonable'. The entire point of judges/court systems is to make rulings on what 'unreasonable' means in a given context.
That is why it is important to elect politicians who will put fair judges in place. Elect Sheriffs and City officials that will put fair policing policies in place, etc..
The more 'hands off' the populace is when it comes to elections and community involvement, means the more 'hands on' the powers will become over time.
Lets say your country works really hard and does everything right, except actively supporting tyrants and militia groups and dictators in Africa through weapons deals, direct aid, and using intelligence resources to squash competition.....