While I'd be more interested from an end user and developer perspective, I like the idea of having a phone that will do both Android, WP7, and possibly even something like regular android, rooted android, (with multiple versions of android) and WP7 all at once.
I've had this argument before. My relatives for india and everyone claims that this boom benefits everyone at the time and not the common man. that is, simply put, completely false. If me, and 9 of my coworkers make 10k each, and our boss makes 100k, we combine to make 200k/year. Now, the economy grows for a few years and we're up the 300k. Our boss is a greedy bastard, and he now makes 175k/year, The rest of us now make 12.5k. Which is still a 25% raise over what I was getting before. It may not be as good as my boss, but it's still a nice improvement (how many of us would turn down a 25% raise?). That's what china and india have right now. If you were a subsistence farmer who was doing to die at 50 because you had to no healthcare, well now you're a subsistence factory worker who will still probably die at 50, with or without healthcare, but your child will go to school, he'll have proper roads, access to a diverse diet possibly some healthcare and won't die at 50. Sometimes small improvement is all you can hope for, but it *is* improvement.
My relatives in india have gone, from 15 years ago making about 2% of what we would in canada, to about 5%. That may seem small to us, but for them it's a 250% increase, even in real buying power it's huge. it's the difference between having a bicycle, and a scooter, the difference between having clean water, and not, it's the difference between ever getting to see a doctor, if just for pain management when you're dying, and just suffering.
Chinas vast labour supply is why they're building everything, it keeps labour costs low (which essentially means inflation is kept relatively low), and gives them an edge in their long term plans.
You don't know what you want without the other 95% though, (advertising ) and management and organization may take up a lot of labour, but there's efficiencies derived from that.
The Russians in a non capitalist society produced a lot of cars. They were mostly shit though. Sure, when it came to a shooting war the soviets produced a lot of stuff, and a lot of it was really good. But that was an external motivation. The internal motivation, to make better things is where capitalism finds success.
There is of course a balance too. Ask people to work less and they have more time to spend with, and use 'stuff'.
More people means more capacity to produce. Love them or hate them Japan, russia and china are showing the world how to manage (or how to not manage) demographic shifts. Places with money are taking steps to reduce massive overpopulation, places without it are still growing.
For decades we all assumed chinas vast population was their great weakness, not enough resources for everyone etc etc etc. As it turns out the most valuable resource is people, with energy (not electrical energy, more personal ability to work energy) and education, because everything else can be created from those two things. Not enough coal, uranium, oil etc? No problem, we'll invent something else. Too many people? No problem, we'll figure out how to make birth control.
Yes, it means more people, especially in africa, will probably starve to death. That's another problem we can solve if we bother to.
The biggest problem we face isn't 7 billion people, it's politicians who are unwilling or unable to make tough choices about how to deal with whatever specific challenges that creates in the long ru. I don't think anyone is really fond of chinas 1 child policy (or moreover its implementation), but the alternative is the mess that is india, where children are legally obliged to support parents, and there's no incentive, to have less children. Education and food production can catch up, or keep up, with the people we have, if we create reasonable incentives to limit family sizes and solve problems. And if governments aren't willing or able to make choices like that the people in those states are beyond anyones ability to meaningfully help in the long run anyway, so we'll try, and fail.
Tests would have to be changed to test for learning material related to having laptops if they wanted them to mean anything. Unfortunately, as I am learning more and more the hard way, people assume, because children can text and browse the web, they are actually less capable than those of us who are late 20's early 30's who were actually taught something in school about how the computers work and how to use them.
Whether or not giving kids laptops lets them apply the rest of the skills they did, or did not learn, in a more effective way, in a way more consistent with how society needs those skills isn't on the test. I can do linear algebra by hand very easily, but if I can't write a program to do it no one cares in the slightest. A kid who can write well, but doesn't know how to do it in an office suite of some sort is done a disservice in not knowing how to do it electronically, but the evaluation of what constitutes good writing hasn't changed.
Right, but as I said, like the airline example, that's a bad strategy. Nor does it make sense for this type of problem. A portion of your taxes will always go to something you don't like, so I'm not sure that's an issue. But you shouldn't put all your money in green technology, even if you work for a green tech company, there are too many outside variables for the personal risk to be worth it. That's where the government is suitable, shared risk, shared reward, and in this case the reward is more of a reduced costs than a direct cash payout, a green energy company that makes money is unlikely to make substantially more ROI than a 'non green' energy company before I can retire and need the money, if ever.
Part of the trick here is that it is the government who decide what the value of pollution is, or is not to coal power producers etc. 2 years from now there will be someone new in government, and who knows what they will do policy wise. Hedging on them maintaining a good environment for 'green' business isn't a good strategy for anyone personally. As a taxpayer I have a collective risk and cost associated with coping with pollution, but I'm not in a position to personally risk everything on a solution that Rick perry or Harry Ried decide is no longer in their political interest to keep viable. An airline pilot can invest in the most stable, profitable airline company in the world, but if the price of oil goes up due to war in libya and an oil rig randomly exploding, and a terrorist tries to hijack another plane he could still end up broke - not a personal risk you want to take. Same problem with environmental investing - you're guessing the future without any real cushion if you screw it up, which is a stupid plan.
Depends on if you count the government as 'my own money'. On a personal basis an airline pilot shouldn't put his retirement fund entirely in airline stock - diversity is good. If I'm only willing to invest 1% of my money on a project like this, it's never going to have enough if I invest on my own. That's why the government gave them a grand and not bill gates.
Remember there's a cost on the back end here too, if you *don't* invest your money (through government or on a personal basis) in this, are you going to need to spend more money later (both personally and through the government) in higher insurance, water, security, energy and disaster relief costs (etc.)? What percent of your income are you wiling to risk up front while holding some in reserve to cope if it doesn't work out? That's a much more interesting and challenging problem, and one most people are incapable of dealing with.
The world we have built, around limited liability companies is a difficult one to change, and has some strong advantages for investment and the flow of capital, but it requires a shared acceptance of responsibility via the government. If you aren't going to throw people in prison because a company they own a portion of through a mutual fund as part of their retirement plan happens to go bankrupt then the government has to be there to pick up the pieces when something fails or something needs to be cleaned up.
Therein lies the challenge of power production. It's cheaper to produce energy than store it (in a battery for example), and the source technology doesn't effect the end product. Green energy is, to the end consumer, indistinguishable from that produced by slave labour. In other technology fields new technology does something different, so you can charge a premium for it, and a handful of customers will keep you afloat until you can bring costs down.
Green tech necessarily relies on lossy investments (usually from the government) to start up, or the addition of a cost for pollution or else it has no value. That goes to the second problem of producing anything, which is that pollution is relatively inexpensive, especially airborne pollution that is never forcibly cleaned up. If polluters are not expected to pay for the cleanup of the damage they do, it's very hard to persuade them any new tech is going to be viable economically.
So do we as a society want to make an investment in reducing pollution, and are we willing to lose money on that for long enough for it to turn out viable.
Of course any given company can still be completely incapable of producing a product, and if you're starting a new company, to produce something new, you're going to face a large selection of managerial problems to go with the technical ones.
No, but it's up to him what to do with his money (or lack thereof). Steve's wealth is primarily in Apple stock, he could give it back to the company, thereby enriching his shareholders, he could prefer his shares go to his children or whatever. He doesn't have to give it away, and while he can't take it with him, he could split it up 4 ways amongst his children.
He isn't a minimalist, he's an egomaniac, one tends to appear like the other but they aren't the same (he builds things he can control, which are necessarily minimal since he has to control those parts completely). If he gives up Apple stock he risks losing his hard won (back) control. When he dies almost certainly his heirs will have to pay estate tax (35% federal + state). If he gives away the money, there's no estate tax. If you believe that, on average, how the government spends it's money is good enough, then simply letting your wealth be split up with inheritance tax is just as good, if not better, than giving it away. And this way he doesn't have to micromanage what happens to it. Could you imagine a stand alone Steve Jobs charitable foundation? He'd have his little paws all over it, as would be his right. But that doesn't seem to be what he wants to do, and I think he's more the type to let any donating be done after he is dead, and can't mess with it, than before. I think he knows he's a control freak, and is sufficiently aware of his skills to think it best he not get in the business of charity. But I could be wrong.
The only reason these tablets are selling in droves is because people figure they'll be able to get android running on it, and it's a 100 bucks for a $250 piece of hardware (which would be lucky to be 350 at retail normally). The right price, as in the one that would make money, was probably 350 or 400 dollars, which is what they started with. There's no margins in the PC or tablet business to speak of, regardless of what OS you stick on it, unless you can charge a premium for putting an apple logo on it, or otherwise source slightly cheaper parts, which Apple and Tim Cook have done a good job locking down.
If they'd gone headlong into the android space they'd have a Xoom/Galaxy Tab 10.1 clone. Which isn't bad, but they'd still be late to the market, and basically the same price as the competition. The problem is a 'android light' linux machine is going to look like RIMs plan for android apps on their OS, it won't be as good as a native android, and frankly, if it's the apps that matter, running actual android is preferable.
In terms of the enterprise market, they are substantially larger than Oracle and SAP (even than Oracle and SAP combined), and they're already at least partially in that market. As I said, they're about even with IBM. Compared to google and apple and microsoft they're downright tiny.
The government acts precisely because it thinks a favourable outcome will make more money. Lobbying and bribery are not the same thing, despite the perception to the contrary. If all they needed to do was bribe someone the rich, and large corporations would never need the government. Diplomacy is trying to convince the other guy this is in his interest, and maybe throwing in some incentive to sweeten the deal (possibilities: you allow this 7 billion merger we'll allow on from your side without fuss, you allow this merger and we'll make sure you have less job losses than if you don't etc...), it can also be a negotiation, we'll only allow this if both areas agree to some particular new set of rules.
A company cannot guarantee what a government will do, but ultimately the people, through, governments are the ones who pick up the pieces when companies fail so they have a vested interest in coordinating their efforts to minimize the risk of failure and maximize both short, and long term growth opportunities.
Shouldn't HP have at least tried to make a go of their WebOs tablet before giving up so quickly?
No, they shouldn't have. Jumping into a market with 3 much larger, better connected competitors, who have the loyalties of 3rd parties was just stupid. HP is not, will not be, and should not try to be Apple. They were probably contractually obliged to produce something, or were so far along that they had to finish, but they should have realized this was a stupid plan from the get go.
It's not as though personal computers are going away any time soon. Corporations still need desktop workstations, albeit more in the direction of thin Internet portal devices than the heavily loaded computers of the past.
HP should come out with a world class ultra lightweight laptop to compete with the MacBook Air, with a touch screen and very long battery life. They should come out with an innovative line of consumer and business PCs with touch screen monitors, tiny form factor similar to Mac Mini, remotely flashable, all the bells and whistles.
Those are low margin high competition businesses. Apple, or apple suppliers probably have the macbook air locked down patent and supply wise. IBM abandoned the PC business for the same reason HP is: too much competition, too low margins, no customer loyalty. (HP and IBM are very similar in size and markets and run head long into each other on a regular basis, and some of those things are good reasons to copy your competitor). HP probably could be a premium business PC manufacturer or the like, but I doubt they see much profit in that. Software services and whole solutions with support costs are probably where the money is when you're 120 billion dollar (revenue) company. Too many little guys able to charge just a little bit less in the PC space.
And they should built on their handheld base, come out with some state of the art handsets and tablets to round out their portfolio.
Software services is all very well, but there are plenty of competitors in that space and HP will not be having a picnic. Why did they buy compaq and Palm to begin with? Methinks the current board has taken leave of their senses.
That would be an interesting one. Putting themselves in competition with SAP, oracle, IBM and samsung, HTC and Nokia wouldn't be a bad plan necessarily. I think if they're going to drop the PC business they'd be best to drop the tablet/phone business as well, since there's a lot of overlap there. But there's probably room for a high end windows tablet, along with more space for another high end WP7 and Android phone, though again, not sure there's a lot of margins there. They might be better to use handhelds as lead ins for software and services to connect those devices to corporate needs and build serious applications for them for big customers. But again, they're all crowded markets. Which I suppose is HP's problem, they're late to every game they're playing, and when they get there they are average or below.
GR is suitable as a 4th year or graduate course in physics. The undergrad is a bit sketchy but manageable. So really whatever the math requirements at your school are for 3rd year or 3.5 years of an undergrad in physics and you'll be there. As with most problems in physics there's a few different ways to formulate them, so your instructor may choose the one most appropriate given the available prereqs (and depending on how much time they have they might teach a lot of the math you need in the class).
Typically you'll want PDE's, Linear algebra and and hopefully in there you'll get some tensor analysis, but really, all courses depend on what the instructor chooses to teach of the overall topic, and how your school wants to organize the material so you can't really get handed a list of course names and hope to have a lot of success with only that.
It really does depend a lot on how your school formulates its programme. When I went to school our physics and maths were separate courses, taught by separate departments, but had I been 3 or 4 years earlier it was all one big blob of "mathematics for physics" + the various physics courses.
Unless you're already a BSc in math or physics your best bet is just progress along the path to take it as a regular course, and if not the easiest bet is to just look up the prereqs on a particular schools GR course and go with those.
Mass effect, Bioware titles and other RPG's in general are an interesting problem. Most of them have some sort of mini game that will make you more powerful, in ME it was driving all over planets for resources, in ME2 it was that stupid planet scanning thing. I'm not sure the main plot of an unfinished game isn't the problem. But if you dangle out these rewards (upgrades!) that aren't all that challenging to get, but to get them is so incredibly fucking boring that you don't want to do that, there's a psychological effect of feeling like you're not doing as much as you should to better your character, and you give up before finishing.
If I were running through peoples internal dialogue it's something like "I'm going to do this fight with the best gear I can reasonably get. Ok what's that gear? Alright I'll go get it. 2 hours later... ugh I'm still stuck in the middle of nowhere doing some stupid thing", even if you don't actually *need* the items in question.
Also, as much as I liked Mass effect, not everyone likes the same stuff so it doesn't really surprise me that people aren't finishing some of those games. You buy it, it doesn't work properly (drivers or other compatibility), you're not good at shooters, you don't like choice because you might 'choose wrong', or you discover that you made a wrong choice and don't want to replay half the game to fix it, and well, maybe you just don't like commander shepard.
Ya I'm not even sure if it's so much that content is too hard, or just content out of step with the rest of the game. It's also annoying when, towards the end of the game they try and pad in stuff to make the game bigger or feel open world, but just make it repetitive boring and decreasing in difficulty until suddenly you're at the boss who's actually hard.
Overall it's a tough balancing act between tuning the experience of the game to different tastes and to keep it interesting and challenging but not too hard towards the end. Although I think it was really portal 1 that precipitated the modern trend of the 8 hour game, that was a game that didn't warrant 8 more hours, and portal 2 was a 6 or 7 hour game and could have done with 2 less, I spent more time on loading screens than I did levels for the first half of that game.
Rich guy phones seem to have things like multi-sim options, world phones, maybe even satellite, tracking etc. And the expensive part is the special call centre which will find you the nearest 5 star anything and a chauffeur so you don't have to risk being exposed to people who make less than 500k/year.
That's why I put in the caveat. Dual sim, special numbers you can call for a call centre that will help you avoid people who make less than 500k/year, work anywhere in the world, some diamonds, some gold, every feature under the sun. That sort of thing is not the typical market, and I don't imagine any of the other phone makers are going to get into that market. There are people who will buy an iPhone, diamond encrust it for you, and sell it to you for a ludicrous amount of money, but that's different from the actual manufacturer of the device doing it.
Given how in bed MS and nokia are, I can't see the 3rd party manufacturers all that happy. This now means that the lead, and pure platform for Android will probably be a motorolo product, and google didn't just spend 12 billion dollars to only make prototypes. The Nexus one, nexus S and presumably now Nexus M will follow with the Nexus M2 or whatever.
The MS nokia hookup is equally troublesome. Not that MS can't afford to lose what it has put into Nokia, but as Nokia continues to falter until there's a big new WP7 push it may fall to MS to open the wallet and keep them afloat. That puts other manufacturers in a bind. They don't want to put out something NokiaSoft* is going to obsolete in a heartbeat, and they don't want to find that Nokia sinks and MS abandons the WP7 platform.
*I'm referring to the sub $1000 phone market. The > $1000/phone market is a whole other ball game. I doubt anyone else is going to jump headlong into the 20k/unit smartphone market the way nokia had been, but who knows.
I'm sure the SEALS *tried* to destroy the stuff that really matters. The crew of that EP3 that landed on Hainan island tried to do that too, and the NSA had to rewrite and operating system from scratch given how successful they were.
Either way though, once you use the technology, you know the risk is out there that it's going to be captured and or partially captured. No weapon system should be so valuable you cannot risk it being lost battle.
I never suggested you should be impressed by it. Quite honestly you should be uniformly disappointed in it. As a treaty it, as you rightly recognize, has minimal enforcement mechanisms in it. It is, and was too weak.
In terms of all science and all policy as I said, they are iterative, in that regard Kyoto is no better and no worse than any other treaty, law, or agreement signed. You try something, if it wasn't enough you try more, if it was too much, you back off. Whether that is around alcohol consumption, tobacco taxation/policy, global warming, murder penalties or the like. No policy is going to be perfect the first time, and something like kyoto, which gave broad arching ideas without tangible solutions wasn't a step towards solving it. Therein again, likes my point, people who will do more, which are rich countries, are stuck doing even more to cope with the stupidity of a bad treaty.
Trying to prevent a problem it *is* adaptation. We recognize a problem and start adapting our behaviour to the cheapest/least damaging collective path of a solution. Suggesting we can move the entire population around is utter nonsense. I suspect the millions of people starving in somalia would love to pack up and move. No one (including my own country) seems to be running ships over to ferry them out and come here. Our coping with that problem is to leave 80% of the relevant people in need of food aid without help at the moment. And I will point out the famine in 'somalia' is actually only two provinces in somalia, and only effects about 1/3rd of their population - and we are still proving incapable of helping. (Note: I'm not suggesting the famine in somalia is a direct result of global warming, even if the famine is, the problem there is rooted in the political situation, which includes neighbouring countries only taking in a few hundred thousand refugees and the rest of us talking a lot and accomplishing very little). The problem is that a changing climate, even if that means some areas get better and some areas get worse (which at the moment seems to be just more areas getting worse) poses serious problems. Can you count on canada to take in millions of republican refugees from across the border as they cannot feed themselves anymore or provide safe drinking water, or if the cost becomes prohibitive do you want to abandon decades of infrastructure and building development because you're too cheap to make a long term investment in nuclear power? Saying we'll adapt, when the people who are actually experts at figuring out how to adapt give a best guess at a solution and then saying 'naw, we don't like the current plan, lets make our children spend more money on a plan more ridiculous' is idiotic.
Because the solution to overpopulation involves more pollution and much longer timer horizons than CO2 emissions. More power to keep people alive and so on.
More CO2 in the atmosphere at this point *is* uniformly bad. It's a matter of degree of just how bad. If we'd been having this discussion in 1911 it would be a somewhat different calculation, orders of magnitude and all that.
How about "It's doing less harm than the fix would do. Let's keep going." Does that work for you?
What harm exactly does dumping less shit into the atmosphere do? There are lots of ways to accomplish that, all of which come with their own trade offs of course. Nuclear is well, nuclear, solar and wind have their own complications (mostly about resources and space uses). Burning coal and oil isn't exactly good for the atmosphere. Less CO2 in the atmosphere is good.
The kyoto protocol is not, as you have wrongly referred to it, a 'fix', it is one iterative step, upon which to base more iterative steps. 15% before 1990 levels is both arbitrary and silly. That equates to some actual year (probably 1987 or something), so even the target is phrased in a goofy way. And we can't even do that. Therein lies the problem. The burden on people are going to follow the protocol and make cuts (mostly europeans) is going to be harder, and more to the point if we need to cut X from the atmosphere and only europe is going to cut anything they have to not only cut X, but X+Y, where Y is whetever everyone else is adding to the problem. And yes, no one is obliged to accept anything. International agreements rely on everyone who agrees to actually do it. That's my point of where policy starts to fall apart. Peace treaties require everyone agrees, war requires only one party to agree to it. Such is the way of international agreements. You can try all you want to impose your will on others, and there are non violent ways to accomplish that, but in the end yes, if china doesn't agree to go along with it, either the rest of us cut more to cope, try and impose our will on them (trade sanctions) or we do nothing and cope with the consequences. Of course if no one goes along with it china is unlikely to try and solve this problem on their own, not that they could if they wanted to.
But yes, we must disagree on what to do about it. If you think displacing millions of people, spending hundreds of billions of dollars to keep more people from having to move, seriously disrupting food production around the world and so on are worthwhile tradeoffs so you can keep using coal fired generators rather than uranium, thorium, solar, or wind, then all that remains is disagreement.
Most buildings have life spans several multiples if not orders of magnitude longer than you have suggested. That that may not be good policy, or good for the buildings and people inhabiting them, but your assertion is factually incorrect. Lots of post WW2 housing was not built to last, that's true, but that is a fraction of the total buildings built in the world.
Land is not that scare is an interesting assertion. I certainly disagree with it on two levels. First, not all land is useful. There's lots of empty land in the middle of the sahara, that doesn't help anyone. That goes to the first problem which is that *usable* land is becoming scarce, and moreso if we want to preserve any remnants of natural habitats for other creatures. Secondly, land, overall, in a lot of places *is* scarce, and, importantly, those are the most populated places, and many of them are poor and those people aren't going to be able to move to places with space (least of all places with usable space). Where are we going to move a few hundred million southeast asians, or chinese or japanese? How about europeans? They aren't exactly welcome in africa for example, and the reason the europeans went rampaging around the world is they didn't have enough space for themselves in europe. And there were a lot less people in europe 150 years ago than there are today. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_real_population_density_(based_on_food_growing_capacity) has an illustrative chart. What you are suggesting is sacrificing habitable, food growing areas, to compact people into less space, and hope more of it becomes arable. Not to mention the enormous cost of packing up and moving people and all of the infrastructure t
Trends and quantitative coefficients are not the same thing. In this case the trend matters for policy makers, the coefficients do too, but not nearly so much.
Drunk driving is bad. Since we haven't precisely quantized how exactly every single persons ability decay with blood alcohol limit do we just let people drive drunk, or just go with a best guess of 0.05 or 0.08 and iterate? Even if we have the quantized result, say on warming or drunk driving or anything else that doesn't really tell us what policy should be unless you want to say it should be 0. What should humanities contribution to global warming be? If we say '0', basically you're asking to kill 6 billion people, destroy every factory, car, power plant ever produced and go back to an 80% mortality rate before we're 5 years old. That's probably not a great goal. I suppose it means no abortions, but I don't think even religious nutters would be willing to take that tradeoff. For drunk driving you accept a certain degree of impairment as so minimal as to not really be important, though if we drove cars that went 1000Km/h we'd have a different tolerance level. For global warming we have to accept some amount of warming, because there has already been some, and we're not, in any reasonable time frame going to correct that. So the question is 'how much worse do we let it get, and, on a best guess, how much is it going to cost us'? To with that we wonder 'at what point can we not do any more'? With the ozone layer 160 of the 200 or so countries in the world banned the most serious damaging chemicals about 15 years ago. So there is still damage to the ozone layer happening, and it is likely that it won't be completely repaired until well into the 22nd century. We've certainly taken, in that case, the largest most relevant steps, and we'll be another decade or two before we really know if it was enough, or if we need to do more, but at least we've stopped the, majority of the ongoing damage.
Global warming is a tricky problem, it's not really an individual problem, so we can't mandate individual responsibility for it, it doesn't manifest itself equally everywhere, and if someone else doesn't do there part, the people who do are forced to do more. None of these make for good policy problems, especially when dealing with the americans. The kyoto protocols aim for a CO2 reduction from 1990 levels are basically arbitrary, it's a starting point of a policy, not a quantified analysis of what's required. Because there is no scientific requirement, it's a matter of what cost/benefit we are willing to trade. But it's also a collective, shared responsibility, one that isn't going to be borne equally. Poor countries are poor for a lot of reasons, but the rest of us got rich polluting the planet, and now we're saying they can't become rich unless the do it a different way, that's not fair to them, but it's not fair to the rich world to demand we make all the cuts and poor countries can pollute like crazy negating anything we do.
Either way. Being off on the the exact value of a coefficient is not all that important to the policy problem. We're not doing enough. It's a matter of degree of how much we're not doing. The only thing to do is to try and minimize further warming, and iterate as time goes on.
Since this is a tech board, I'll put it in CS terms. We, in CS, regularly analyze algorithms in 'big O' notation, n^2, n^3 etc. It's a rare, specialized skill to put actual coefficients in front of each term, and most of the time, big O notation gets the job done (and if you really need them it's easier to measure them than calculate them). Policy based around science is mostly worried about the big O notation, because once we start changing policies, whether thats about the ozone layer, sulfur in the air, greenhouse gases or whatever, all the previous detailed assessments get thrown out, and you start looking for the new trend.
We don't want to base world economic policy on "it's not doing any harm lets keep going" when i
Seems more likely to make brown people rich. India has vast reserves of thorium, virtually no oil and is hated by most oil producers. The US has enough money it will have a bidding war with china over the last drop of oil for the presidents car. The rest of us will have to move on before that.
That, and really, how many engineering grads do you know that aren't Chinese, indians, or arabs. My programme (graduate comp sci) has I think 10% 'white' people in it, and I'm only half white. Our engineering programmes are about the same.
Slashdot Mirror
While I'd be more interested from an end user and developer perspective, I like the idea of having a phone that will do both Android, WP7, and possibly even something like regular android, rooted android, (with multiple versions of android) and WP7 all at once.
I've had this argument before. My relatives for india and everyone claims that this boom benefits everyone at the time and not the common man. that is, simply put, completely false. If me, and 9 of my coworkers make 10k each, and our boss makes 100k, we combine to make 200k/year. Now, the economy grows for a few years and we're up the 300k. Our boss is a greedy bastard, and he now makes 175k/year, The rest of us now make 12.5k. Which is still a 25% raise over what I was getting before. It may not be as good as my boss, but it's still a nice improvement (how many of us would turn down a 25% raise?). That's what china and india have right now. If you were a subsistence farmer who was doing to die at 50 because you had to no healthcare, well now you're a subsistence factory worker who will still probably die at 50, with or without healthcare, but your child will go to school, he'll have proper roads, access to a diverse diet possibly some healthcare and won't die at 50. Sometimes small improvement is all you can hope for, but it *is* improvement.
My relatives in india have gone, from 15 years ago making about 2% of what we would in canada, to about 5%. That may seem small to us, but for them it's a 250% increase, even in real buying power it's huge. it's the difference between having a bicycle, and a scooter, the difference between having clean water, and not, it's the difference between ever getting to see a doctor, if just for pain management when you're dying, and just suffering.
Chinas vast labour supply is why they're building everything, it keeps labour costs low (which essentially means inflation is kept relatively low), and gives them an edge in their long term plans.
You don't know what you want without the other 95% though, (advertising ) and management and organization may take up a lot of labour, but there's efficiencies derived from that.
The Russians in a non capitalist society produced a lot of cars. They were mostly shit though. Sure, when it came to a shooting war the soviets produced a lot of stuff, and a lot of it was really good. But that was an external motivation. The internal motivation, to make better things is where capitalism finds success.
There is of course a balance too. Ask people to work less and they have more time to spend with, and use 'stuff'.
More people means more capacity to produce. Love them or hate them Japan, russia and china are showing the world how to manage (or how to not manage) demographic shifts. Places with money are taking steps to reduce massive overpopulation, places without it are still growing.
For decades we all assumed chinas vast population was their great weakness, not enough resources for everyone etc etc etc. As it turns out the most valuable resource is people, with energy (not electrical energy, more personal ability to work energy) and education, because everything else can be created from those two things. Not enough coal, uranium, oil etc? No problem, we'll invent something else. Too many people? No problem, we'll figure out how to make birth control.
Yes, it means more people, especially in africa, will probably starve to death. That's another problem we can solve if we bother to.
The biggest problem we face isn't 7 billion people, it's politicians who are unwilling or unable to make tough choices about how to deal with whatever specific challenges that creates in the long ru. I don't think anyone is really fond of chinas 1 child policy (or moreover its implementation), but the alternative is the mess that is india, where children are legally obliged to support parents, and there's no incentive, to have less children. Education and food production can catch up, or keep up, with the people we have, if we create reasonable incentives to limit family sizes and solve problems. And if governments aren't willing or able to make choices like that the people in those states are beyond anyones ability to meaningfully help in the long run anyway, so we'll try, and fail.
Tests would have to be changed to test for learning material related to having laptops if they wanted them to mean anything. Unfortunately, as I am learning more and more the hard way, people assume, because children can text and browse the web, they are actually less capable than those of us who are late 20's early 30's who were actually taught something in school about how the computers work and how to use them.
Whether or not giving kids laptops lets them apply the rest of the skills they did, or did not learn, in a more effective way, in a way more consistent with how society needs those skills isn't on the test. I can do linear algebra by hand very easily, but if I can't write a program to do it no one cares in the slightest. A kid who can write well, but doesn't know how to do it in an office suite of some sort is done a disservice in not knowing how to do it electronically, but the evaluation of what constitutes good writing hasn't changed.
Right, but as I said, like the airline example, that's a bad strategy. Nor does it make sense for this type of problem. A portion of your taxes will always go to something you don't like, so I'm not sure that's an issue. But you shouldn't put all your money in green technology, even if you work for a green tech company, there are too many outside variables for the personal risk to be worth it. That's where the government is suitable, shared risk, shared reward, and in this case the reward is more of a reduced costs than a direct cash payout, a green energy company that makes money is unlikely to make substantially more ROI than a 'non green' energy company before I can retire and need the money, if ever.
Part of the trick here is that it is the government who decide what the value of pollution is, or is not to coal power producers etc. 2 years from now there will be someone new in government, and who knows what they will do policy wise. Hedging on them maintaining a good environment for 'green' business isn't a good strategy for anyone personally. As a taxpayer I have a collective risk and cost associated with coping with pollution, but I'm not in a position to personally risk everything on a solution that Rick perry or Harry Ried decide is no longer in their political interest to keep viable. An airline pilot can invest in the most stable, profitable airline company in the world, but if the price of oil goes up due to war in libya and an oil rig randomly exploding, and a terrorist tries to hijack another plane he could still end up broke - not a personal risk you want to take. Same problem with environmental investing - you're guessing the future without any real cushion if you screw it up, which is a stupid plan.
Depends on if you count the government as 'my own money'. On a personal basis an airline pilot shouldn't put his retirement fund entirely in airline stock - diversity is good. If I'm only willing to invest 1% of my money on a project like this, it's never going to have enough if I invest on my own. That's why the government gave them a grand and not bill gates.
Remember there's a cost on the back end here too, if you *don't* invest your money (through government or on a personal basis) in this, are you going to need to spend more money later (both personally and through the government) in higher insurance, water, security, energy and disaster relief costs (etc.)? What percent of your income are you wiling to risk up front while holding some in reserve to cope if it doesn't work out? That's a much more interesting and challenging problem, and one most people are incapable of dealing with.
The world we have built, around limited liability companies is a difficult one to change, and has some strong advantages for investment and the flow of capital, but it requires a shared acceptance of responsibility via the government. If you aren't going to throw people in prison because a company they own a portion of through a mutual fund as part of their retirement plan happens to go bankrupt then the government has to be there to pick up the pieces when something fails or something needs to be cleaned up.
Therein lies the challenge of power production. It's cheaper to produce energy than store it (in a battery for example), and the source technology doesn't effect the end product. Green energy is, to the end consumer, indistinguishable from that produced by slave labour. In other technology fields new technology does something different, so you can charge a premium for it, and a handful of customers will keep you afloat until you can bring costs down.
Green tech necessarily relies on lossy investments (usually from the government) to start up, or the addition of a cost for pollution or else it has no value. That goes to the second problem of producing anything, which is that pollution is relatively inexpensive, especially airborne pollution that is never forcibly cleaned up. If polluters are not expected to pay for the cleanup of the damage they do, it's very hard to persuade them any new tech is going to be viable economically.
So do we as a society want to make an investment in reducing pollution, and are we willing to lose money on that for long enough for it to turn out viable.
Of course any given company can still be completely incapable of producing a product, and if you're starting a new company, to produce something new, you're going to face a large selection of managerial problems to go with the technical ones.
No, but it's up to him what to do with his money (or lack thereof). Steve's wealth is primarily in Apple stock, he could give it back to the company, thereby enriching his shareholders, he could prefer his shares go to his children or whatever. He doesn't have to give it away, and while he can't take it with him, he could split it up 4 ways amongst his children.
He isn't a minimalist, he's an egomaniac, one tends to appear like the other but they aren't the same (he builds things he can control, which are necessarily minimal since he has to control those parts completely). If he gives up Apple stock he risks losing his hard won (back) control. When he dies almost certainly his heirs will have to pay estate tax (35% federal + state). If he gives away the money, there's no estate tax. If you believe that, on average, how the government spends it's money is good enough, then simply letting your wealth be split up with inheritance tax is just as good, if not better, than giving it away. And this way he doesn't have to micromanage what happens to it. Could you imagine a stand alone Steve Jobs charitable foundation? He'd have his little paws all over it, as would be his right. But that doesn't seem to be what he wants to do, and I think he's more the type to let any donating be done after he is dead, and can't mess with it, than before. I think he knows he's a control freak, and is sufficiently aware of his skills to think it best he not get in the business of charity. But I could be wrong.
The only reason these tablets are selling in droves is because people figure they'll be able to get android running on it, and it's a 100 bucks for a $250 piece of hardware (which would be lucky to be 350 at retail normally). The right price, as in the one that would make money, was probably 350 or 400 dollars, which is what they started with. There's no margins in the PC or tablet business to speak of, regardless of what OS you stick on it, unless you can charge a premium for putting an apple logo on it, or otherwise source slightly cheaper parts, which Apple and Tim Cook have done a good job locking down.
If they'd gone headlong into the android space they'd have a Xoom/Galaxy Tab 10.1 clone. Which isn't bad, but they'd still be late to the market, and basically the same price as the competition. The problem is a 'android light' linux machine is going to look like RIMs plan for android apps on their OS, it won't be as good as a native android, and frankly, if it's the apps that matter, running actual android is preferable.
In terms of the enterprise market, they are substantially larger than Oracle and SAP (even than Oracle and SAP combined), and they're already at least partially in that market. As I said, they're about even with IBM. Compared to google and apple and microsoft they're downright tiny.
The government acts precisely because it thinks a favourable outcome will make more money. Lobbying and bribery are not the same thing, despite the perception to the contrary. If all they needed to do was bribe someone the rich, and large corporations would never need the government. Diplomacy is trying to convince the other guy this is in his interest, and maybe throwing in some incentive to sweeten the deal (possibilities: you allow this 7 billion merger we'll allow on from your side without fuss, you allow this merger and we'll make sure you have less job losses than if you don't etc...), it can also be a negotiation, we'll only allow this if both areas agree to some particular new set of rules.
A company cannot guarantee what a government will do, but ultimately the people, through, governments are the ones who pick up the pieces when companies fail so they have a vested interest in coordinating their efforts to minimize the risk of failure and maximize both short, and long term growth opportunities.
Shouldn't HP have at least tried to make a go of their WebOs tablet before giving up so quickly?
No, they shouldn't have. Jumping into a market with 3 much larger, better connected competitors, who have the loyalties of 3rd parties was just stupid. HP is not, will not be, and should not try to be Apple. They were probably contractually obliged to produce something, or were so far along that they had to finish, but they should have realized this was a stupid plan from the get go.
It's not as though personal computers are going away any time soon. Corporations still need desktop workstations, albeit more in the direction of thin Internet portal devices than the heavily loaded computers of the past.
HP should come out with a world class ultra lightweight laptop to compete with the MacBook Air, with a touch screen and very long battery life. They should come out with an innovative line of consumer and business PCs with touch screen monitors, tiny form factor similar to Mac Mini, remotely flashable, all the bells and whistles.
Those are low margin high competition businesses. Apple, or apple suppliers probably have the macbook air locked down patent and supply wise. IBM abandoned the PC business for the same reason HP is: too much competition, too low margins, no customer loyalty. (HP and IBM are very similar in size and markets and run head long into each other on a regular basis, and some of those things are good reasons to copy your competitor). HP probably could be a premium business PC manufacturer or the like, but I doubt they see much profit in that. Software services and whole solutions with support costs are probably where the money is when you're 120 billion dollar (revenue) company. Too many little guys able to charge just a little bit less in the PC space.
And they should built on their handheld base, come out with some state of the art handsets and tablets to round out their portfolio.
Software services is all very well, but there are plenty of competitors in that space and HP will not be having a picnic. Why did they buy compaq and Palm to begin with? Methinks the current board has taken leave of their senses.
That would be an interesting one. Putting themselves in competition with SAP, oracle, IBM and samsung, HTC and Nokia wouldn't be a bad plan necessarily. I think if they're going to drop the PC business they'd be best to drop the tablet/phone business as well, since there's a lot of overlap there. But there's probably room for a high end windows tablet, along with more space for another high end WP7 and Android phone, though again, not sure there's a lot of margins there. They might be better to use handhelds as lead ins for software and services to connect those devices to corporate needs and build serious applications for them for big customers. But again, they're all crowded markets. Which I suppose is HP's problem, they're late to every game they're playing, and when they get there they are average or below.
GR is suitable as a 4th year or graduate course in physics. The undergrad is a bit sketchy but manageable. So really whatever the math requirements at your school are for 3rd year or 3.5 years of an undergrad in physics and you'll be there. As with most problems in physics there's a few different ways to formulate them, so your instructor may choose the one most appropriate given the available prereqs (and depending on how much time they have they might teach a lot of the math you need in the class).
Typically you'll want PDE's, Linear algebra and and hopefully in there you'll get some tensor analysis, but really, all courses depend on what the instructor chooses to teach of the overall topic, and how your school wants to organize the material so you can't really get handed a list of course names and hope to have a lot of success with only that.
It really does depend a lot on how your school formulates its programme. When I went to school our physics and maths were separate courses, taught by separate departments, but had I been 3 or 4 years earlier it was all one big blob of "mathematics for physics" + the various physics courses.
Unless you're already a BSc in math or physics your best bet is just progress along the path to take it as a regular course, and if not the easiest bet is to just look up the prereqs on a particular schools GR course and go with those.
Mass effect, Bioware titles and other RPG's in general are an interesting problem. Most of them have some sort of mini game that will make you more powerful, in ME it was driving all over planets for resources, in ME2 it was that stupid planet scanning thing. I'm not sure the main plot of an unfinished game isn't the problem. But if you dangle out these rewards (upgrades!) that aren't all that challenging to get, but to get them is so incredibly fucking boring that you don't want to do that, there's a psychological effect of feeling like you're not doing as much as you should to better your character, and you give up before finishing.
If I were running through peoples internal dialogue it's something like "I'm going to do this fight with the best gear I can reasonably get. Ok what's that gear? Alright I'll go get it. 2 hours later... ugh I'm still stuck in the middle of nowhere doing some stupid thing", even if you don't actually *need* the items in question.
Also, as much as I liked Mass effect, not everyone likes the same stuff so it doesn't really surprise me that people aren't finishing some of those games. You buy it, it doesn't work properly (drivers or other compatibility), you're not good at shooters, you don't like choice because you might 'choose wrong', or you discover that you made a wrong choice and don't want to replay half the game to fix it, and well, maybe you just don't like commander shepard.
Ya I'm not even sure if it's so much that content is too hard, or just content out of step with the rest of the game. It's also annoying when, towards the end of the game they try and pad in stuff to make the game bigger or feel open world, but just make it repetitive boring and decreasing in difficulty until suddenly you're at the boss who's actually hard.
Overall it's a tough balancing act between tuning the experience of the game to different tastes and to keep it interesting and challenging but not too hard towards the end. Although I think it was really portal 1 that precipitated the modern trend of the 8 hour game, that was a game that didn't warrant 8 more hours, and portal 2 was a 6 or 7 hour game and could have done with 2 less, I spent more time on loading screens than I did levels for the first half of that game.
It's an odd market. Hence the caveat.
Rich guy phones seem to have things like multi-sim options, world phones, maybe even satellite, tracking etc. And the expensive part is the special call centre which will find you the nearest 5 star anything and a chauffeur so you don't have to risk being exposed to people who make less than 500k/year.
That's why I put in the caveat. Dual sim, special numbers you can call for a call centre that will help you avoid people who make less than 500k/year, work anywhere in the world, some diamonds, some gold, every feature under the sun. That sort of thing is not the typical market, and I don't imagine any of the other phone makers are going to get into that market. There are people who will buy an iPhone, diamond encrust it for you, and sell it to you for a ludicrous amount of money, but that's different from the actual manufacturer of the device doing it.
Given how in bed MS and nokia are, I can't see the 3rd party manufacturers all that happy. This now means that the lead, and pure platform for Android will probably be a motorolo product, and google didn't just spend 12 billion dollars to only make prototypes. The Nexus one, nexus S and presumably now Nexus M will follow with the Nexus M2 or whatever.
The MS nokia hookup is equally troublesome. Not that MS can't afford to lose what it has put into Nokia, but as Nokia continues to falter until there's a big new WP7 push it may fall to MS to open the wallet and keep them afloat. That puts other manufacturers in a bind. They don't want to put out something NokiaSoft* is going to obsolete in a heartbeat, and they don't want to find that Nokia sinks and MS abandons the WP7 platform.
*I'm referring to the sub $1000 phone market. The > $1000/phone market is a whole other ball game. I doubt anyone else is going to jump headlong into the 20k/unit smartphone market the way nokia had been, but who knows.
I'm sure the SEALS *tried* to destroy the stuff that really matters. The crew of that EP3 that landed on Hainan island tried to do that too, and the NSA had to rewrite and operating system from scratch given how successful they were.
Either way though, once you use the technology, you know the risk is out there that it's going to be captured and or partially captured. No weapon system should be so valuable you cannot risk it being lost battle.
oh and air conditioners don't actually reduce heat. They produce heat, and move heat around.
I never suggested you should be impressed by it. Quite honestly you should be uniformly disappointed in it. As a treaty it, as you rightly recognize, has minimal enforcement mechanisms in it. It is, and was too weak.
In terms of all science and all policy as I said, they are iterative, in that regard Kyoto is no better and no worse than any other treaty, law, or agreement signed. You try something, if it wasn't enough you try more, if it was too much, you back off. Whether that is around alcohol consumption, tobacco taxation/policy, global warming, murder penalties or the like. No policy is going to be perfect the first time, and something like kyoto, which gave broad arching ideas without tangible solutions wasn't a step towards solving it. Therein again, likes my point, people who will do more, which are rich countries, are stuck doing even more to cope with the stupidity of a bad treaty.
Trying to prevent a problem it *is* adaptation. We recognize a problem and start adapting our behaviour to the cheapest/least damaging collective path of a solution. Suggesting we can move the entire population around is utter nonsense. I suspect the millions of people starving in somalia would love to pack up and move. No one (including my own country) seems to be running ships over to ferry them out and come here. Our coping with that problem is to leave 80% of the relevant people in need of food aid without help at the moment. And I will point out the famine in 'somalia' is actually only two provinces in somalia, and only effects about 1/3rd of their population - and we are still proving incapable of helping. (Note: I'm not suggesting the famine in somalia is a direct result of global warming, even if the famine is, the problem there is rooted in the political situation, which includes neighbouring countries only taking in a few hundred thousand refugees and the rest of us talking a lot and accomplishing very little). The problem is that a changing climate, even if that means some areas get better and some areas get worse (which at the moment seems to be just more areas getting worse) poses serious problems. Can you count on canada to take in millions of republican refugees from across the border as they cannot feed themselves anymore or provide safe drinking water, or if the cost becomes prohibitive do you want to abandon decades of infrastructure and building development because you're too cheap to make a long term investment in nuclear power? Saying we'll adapt, when the people who are actually experts at figuring out how to adapt give a best guess at a solution and then saying 'naw, we don't like the current plan, lets make our children spend more money on a plan more ridiculous' is idiotic.
Because the solution to overpopulation involves more pollution and much longer timer horizons than CO2 emissions. More power to keep people alive and so on.
More CO2 in the atmosphere at this point *is* uniformly bad. It's a matter of degree of just how bad. If we'd been having this discussion in 1911 it would be a somewhat different calculation, orders of magnitude and all that.
How about "It's doing less harm than the fix would do. Let's keep going." Does that work for you?
What harm exactly does dumping less shit into the atmosphere do? There are lots of ways to accomplish that, all of which come with their own trade offs of course. Nuclear is well, nuclear, solar and wind have their own complications (mostly about resources and space uses). Burning coal and oil isn't exactly good for the atmosphere. Less CO2 in the atmosphere is good.
The kyoto protocol is not, as you have wrongly referred to it, a 'fix', it is one iterative step, upon which to base more iterative steps. 15% before 1990 levels is both arbitrary and silly. That equates to some actual year (probably 1987 or something), so even the target is phrased in a goofy way. And we can't even do that. Therein lies the problem. The burden on people are going to follow the protocol and make cuts (mostly europeans) is going to be harder, and more to the point if we need to cut X from the atmosphere and only europe is going to cut anything they have to not only cut X, but X+Y, where Y is whetever everyone else is adding to the problem. And yes, no one is obliged to accept anything. International agreements rely on everyone who agrees to actually do it. That's my point of where policy starts to fall apart. Peace treaties require everyone agrees, war requires only one party to agree to it. Such is the way of international agreements. You can try all you want to impose your will on others, and there are non violent ways to accomplish that, but in the end yes, if china doesn't agree to go along with it, either the rest of us cut more to cope, try and impose our will on them (trade sanctions) or we do nothing and cope with the consequences. Of course if no one goes along with it china is unlikely to try and solve this problem on their own, not that they could if they wanted to.
But yes, we must disagree on what to do about it. If you think displacing millions of people, spending hundreds of billions of dollars to keep more people from having to move, seriously disrupting food production around the world and so on are worthwhile tradeoffs so you can keep using coal fired generators rather than uranium, thorium, solar, or wind, then all that remains is disagreement.
Most buildings have life spans several multiples if not orders of magnitude longer than you have suggested. That that may not be good policy, or good for the buildings and people inhabiting them, but your assertion is factually incorrect. Lots of post WW2 housing was not built to last, that's true, but that is a fraction of the total buildings built in the world.
Land is not that scare is an interesting assertion. I certainly disagree with it on two levels. First, not all land is useful. There's lots of empty land in the middle of the sahara, that doesn't help anyone. That goes to the first problem which is that *usable* land is becoming scarce, and moreso if we want to preserve any remnants of natural habitats for other creatures. Secondly, land, overall, in a lot of places *is* scarce, and, importantly, those are the most populated places, and many of them are poor and those people aren't going to be able to move to places with space (least of all places with usable space). Where are we going to move a few hundred million southeast asians, or chinese or japanese? How about europeans? They aren't exactly welcome in africa for example, and the reason the europeans went rampaging around the world is they didn't have enough space for themselves in europe. And there were a lot less people in europe 150 years ago than there are today. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_real_population_density_(based_on_food_growing_capacity) has an illustrative chart. What you are suggesting is sacrificing habitable, food growing areas, to compact people into less space, and hope more of it becomes arable. Not to mention the enormous cost of packing up and moving people and all of the infrastructure t
Trends and quantitative coefficients are not the same thing. In this case the trend matters for policy makers, the coefficients do too, but not nearly so much.
Drunk driving is bad. Since we haven't precisely quantized how exactly every single persons ability decay with blood alcohol limit do we just let people drive drunk, or just go with a best guess of 0.05 or 0.08 and iterate? Even if we have the quantized result, say on warming or drunk driving or anything else that doesn't really tell us what policy should be unless you want to say it should be 0. What should humanities contribution to global warming be? If we say '0', basically you're asking to kill 6 billion people, destroy every factory, car, power plant ever produced and go back to an 80% mortality rate before we're 5 years old. That's probably not a great goal. I suppose it means no abortions, but I don't think even religious nutters would be willing to take that tradeoff. For drunk driving you accept a certain degree of impairment as so minimal as to not really be important, though if we drove cars that went 1000Km/h we'd have a different tolerance level. For global warming we have to accept some amount of warming, because there has already been some, and we're not, in any reasonable time frame going to correct that. So the question is 'how much worse do we let it get, and, on a best guess, how much is it going to cost us'? To with that we wonder 'at what point can we not do any more'? With the ozone layer 160 of the 200 or so countries in the world banned the most serious damaging chemicals about 15 years ago. So there is still damage to the ozone layer happening, and it is likely that it won't be completely repaired until well into the 22nd century. We've certainly taken, in that case, the largest most relevant steps, and we'll be another decade or two before we really know if it was enough, or if we need to do more, but at least we've stopped the, majority of the ongoing damage.
Global warming is a tricky problem, it's not really an individual problem, so we can't mandate individual responsibility for it, it doesn't manifest itself equally everywhere, and if someone else doesn't do there part, the people who do are forced to do more. None of these make for good policy problems, especially when dealing with the americans. The kyoto protocols aim for a CO2 reduction from 1990 levels are basically arbitrary, it's a starting point of a policy, not a quantified analysis of what's required. Because there is no scientific requirement, it's a matter of what cost/benefit we are willing to trade. But it's also a collective, shared responsibility, one that isn't going to be borne equally. Poor countries are poor for a lot of reasons, but the rest of us got rich polluting the planet, and now we're saying they can't become rich unless the do it a different way, that's not fair to them, but it's not fair to the rich world to demand we make all the cuts and poor countries can pollute like crazy negating anything we do.
Either way. Being off on the the exact value of a coefficient is not all that important to the policy problem. We're not doing enough. It's a matter of degree of how much we're not doing. The only thing to do is to try and minimize further warming, and iterate as time goes on.
Since this is a tech board, I'll put it in CS terms. We, in CS, regularly analyze algorithms in 'big O' notation, n^2, n^3 etc. It's a rare, specialized skill to put actual coefficients in front of each term, and most of the time, big O notation gets the job done (and if you really need them it's easier to measure them than calculate them). Policy based around science is mostly worried about the big O notation, because once we start changing policies, whether thats about the ozone layer, sulfur in the air, greenhouse gases or whatever, all the previous detailed assessments get thrown out, and you start looking for the new trend.
We don't want to base world economic policy on "it's not doing any harm lets keep going" when i
Seems more likely to make brown people rich. India has vast reserves of thorium, virtually no oil and is hated by most oil producers. The US has enough money it will have a bidding war with china over the last drop of oil for the presidents car. The rest of us will have to move on before that.
That, and really, how many engineering grads do you know that aren't Chinese, indians, or arabs. My programme (graduate comp sci) has I think 10% 'white' people in it, and I'm only half white. Our engineering programmes are about the same.