You may be right. I'm a "boomer" and I thought in the Sixties that many in my cohort were smug self-centered assholes and have seen little since to alter my assessment. I'm not ready to lay all the blame for all the current ills at their feet, tho, as there was a lot of other stuff going on both then and now.
There was a simplistic saying back then that "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem." Given the many facets to a person's life, I'd say that it can get to be a bit of a tangle for all of us.
You are mos def right that things are messed up. I have few ready answers - suffice that the powers that be of every gen have contributed to the mess, mine more so than others, notwithstanding the mess that we inherited (too many of the un-changed policies from the war years set us all up for an eventual fall).
There are plenty of good people doing good work, plenty more decent folks trying to do the job, and all ever-more hampered by unwieldy and unnecessary laws, policies, and other admin hoops that get in the way. You're right also, there's an attitude problem pervading the mess as well. Only thing I know is that each has to try where possible to resist the bad and favor the good. Anything you know how to do to make things better would be much appreciated.
"Also need to lower the demand for degrees in the private sector; they have become the new HS Diploma only you'll now be working a low wage job with tens of thousands of debt."
You hit the nail, man.
I really don't know the numbers, yet, based just on paper and online want ads, coupled with decades of experience in dealing with people doing jobs that supposedly require a bachelors degree, I'd venture to say that half of those jobs realistically need no more than a B-grade HS graduate with at most six months to a year of additional learning and training. Some, the more technical, a two-year associates degree.
I've long been a fan of voc-tech schools, where a student can get a solid grounding in their field and then go out and be productive. It's not that I disparage education in the wider sense or that I don't place value on the overall general utility of having people be at least exposed to areas outside their field so as to afford them the opportunity of perspective, both of the world they inhabit and the place of their specialty within it.
The unjustified requirement for a bachelors degree for so many positions only drives up costs across the board with no bearing on job performance.
Might want to include Jim Sensenbrenner, normally one of the more backward and repressive guys in the Senate and the guy who introduced the Patriot Act to the House of Representatives, owing to:
"On July 24 2013, in what the New York Times said lawmakers from both parties agreed might be a pivotal moment for the future of the National Security Administration, Sensenbrenner spoke unexpectedly on the House floor for less than a minute to express his support for the Amash Amendment, a plan to defund the NSA's telephone surveillance program. According to the Times, "Never, he said, did he intend to allow the wholesale vacuuming up of domestic phone records, nor did his legislation envision that data dragnets would go beyond specific targets of terrorism investigations"."
Of course, as with others speaking up, either he's at the end of his stay, or he doesn't like what they've got on him and wants something on record before he goes.
Yes, that's an intractable problem. Now. Indeed, inasmuch as it's at the least partly bound directly to structure, doubly intractable in light of what we know. Now.
I'm not a fortune teller, soothsayer, or prognosticator, so I've no idea of what the future may hold in regard the above. Shall we investigate? Or think you it better to lie down and roll over, 'cuz that's just the way it is. I mean, weird_w seems a smart and knowledgeable cat and I'll readily bow to his current knowledge on this thing. I wonder if it be valid to do so over, say, the next few centuries? I don't know.
This ogliodendrocytes thing may well be an inherent limit, a fundamental aspect of brain structure, and not amenable to wishy-washy wondering. Weird_w, from what I can gather, accepts it as so. I don't know. I don't know if there is any room for doubt. I don't know whether every researcher in the field of at least the understanding of weird_w also accepts that this is an absolute. If it is, then I'll accept it, as gracefully as I may.
But between where my brain is today and where it might fetch up against that intractable shore in somewhen, should I live in healthy fashion beyond "my allotted span" I would welcome that voyage.
(And weird_w, should you read this, it's not a slam at all, if you somehow take it that way; on the contrary, I value and thank you for the info and the talent and skill that's put you that far so far.)
"If people didn't grow old and die, we'd turn into a society of stodgy, inflexible people lacking dreams and unwilling to compromise over anything. We'd probably end up killing each other over stupid things like Coke vs Pepsi" and so forth.
Everytime this subject arises, posters tend to fall largely into two camps: the young, with their tendency to shallow, judgemental, impatience, lack of perspective, and gloom; the old, with their tendency to shallow, judgemental, proclaimed perspective, and gloom frosted over by assuming the mantle of age-derived self-proclaimed wisdom - resignation, mostly. There is some room left for nuance, even real thought, but it's fucking rare.
If folks want to kill each other over Coke vs. Pepsi, let them. It'll simply be another category for Darwin Awards.
Gosh, if old folks are so bad, and what with seven billion people getting older daily and more on the way, and what with failing resources and all, maybe we should just maybe help things out a bit, somewhere 'twixt Soylent Green and Arbeit Macht Frei, nu?
I get tired of the wide brushes and canned responses.
I do fear death, although not as much now that it's closer. It's not even so much death as the manner of it, and not even the manner so much as the circumstance - to end as a mind in a coma'd body or no mind in a partially-working body? NO, thank you. If those are the choices I want my hand on the plug and will welcome death, in lieu the slew of bad alternatives.
But perhaps there may be other things possible? Let's look, seek, try. Save the doom and gloom from whatever source for those who need the solace of PSA-carts of canned dumbfuckery. I'd prefer to live and grow, learn and do new things, continue the ones I like, with a bod that doesn't bark or bite every time I breathe or move.
Not sure I still have the original; it's from rec.humor.funny back late '80s. http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/ is the web presence, now, as then, maintained by Brad Templeton.
so I looked it up; it's just the way I remember it, as I sat cackling and chortling at 3am, and for days afterward every time I thought of it.
when i die, i'd like to go peacefully.
in my sleep.
like my grandfather.
not screaming,
like the passengers in his car...
A quiet departure slosser@mindseye.berkeley.edu (Eric Slosser) (smirk)
You mean as in your body starts crapping out just about the time you maybe start putting together enough to understand a bit, perhaps sneak up on snippets of wisdom or at least a few tips and tricks to make it through a day while having a chance at being maybe, just maybe, a little bit better human than you were last year?
Sorry, man, but hitting EOL by tossing off an aphorism and finishing with a bit of condescension doesn't play well with this member of the audience.
Getting older might be one thing but aging isn't an asymptote, it's a bloody acceleration of hurt and misery before the spark goes out when you splat against one of the myriad walls of major system failure. This by you is a good thing?
Me, I want a word with the manufacturer. And an anodyne, at least; a warm-start, better; a fine elixir mending flaws, nice.
Perhaps even more amazing is that the thing has to continuously compute mass, fuel (and its dwindling mass), height and rate of descent, and allow enough fuel and distance for the precisely increased thrust needed to bring it to a stop on the ground with zero speed. Wow, rocket science.
Thank you for that. Although I'd heard of Bob Truax somewhat, from the JATO pack and from his work on Thor and Polaris, I'd no idea of the SeaBee and SeaHorse projects, nor the full design of the Sea Dragon - only bits and pieces that showed up in popular venues.
Sea Horse looks freaking amazing; it's way too bad it and the NASA Future Studies group got shut down. The results from the two proof-of-concept projects seems encouraging to me, and I have to wonder why no one has given serious thought to re-visiting the concept.
No, that's not what the article is about. If it were that, or that was what the matter was, then yes.
The matter is that taking notes by typing them uses different parts of and paths in the brain than writing them with pen or pencil; the latter provides better retention. This is not a new learning, although the study showing it is.
The original research goes back a ways; one result, the bit about writing, was incorporated into Air Force study methods from, IIRC, somewhen late '60s, maybe a bit later. The additional bit, about the contrast 'tween pen and keyboard, has only shown up lately as people began using laptops to take notes and others began to do the studies
A poster below wonders what if people started taking notes via keyboard early on, as used to be done by pen in hand, would the difference disappear. We will find out soon enough with the current crop of digital children. Further there will likely be no difference as using something as old skool or faggy as a pen will disappear. The only real result I foresee is lowered subject matter retention rates. But this is already happening owing to shorter attention spans coupled with difficulty in focusing (they're not quite the same thing, btw.)
Jeez, Paul, you just don't stop with all the things you write that, due to my own failings to be sure, require me to read and try to think about.
I'm not so sanguine (now that's a strange word to come to have this use) about "renewables", principally solar, viz. reality of utility (yes, I like bad puns) in U.S. Oops, nevermind; I just looked at this:
I read it through but only quickly checked a few of the sources; I get the impression this is legit. Good; let's do it. If gov could do Hoover and Grand Coulee, it could easily do this - except for the aspirin Congress. Penny wise, pound foolish, bottom-line Friday, who's buying the votes; bidness as usual. (And no, I don't need the sanctimoniously self-proclaimed expertly literate yahoos critiquing my language choice and use; I've heard at least six high-flying execs speak it this way. Well, two were high flying, anyway, they had their own jets. Kids these days need to read more, get out more. Get off my lawn.)
I've passed through Death Valley, it could use some shade. It's also much cheaper than SPSS. The Sahara and others have some spare real estate as well, I believe. I'll leave it to the crunchers to work things out, but I'm guessing all of Africa could get a big boost in available electricity. Float bonds, live a little, have some faith in future, pay for the grandkids college. It's not just money, it's doing something useful with it and the payoff in real terms is relatively quick, the eventual payout is enormous.
Prisons, manufactured wars, enforced poverty, are the mechanisms of people who like to hurt other people whatever their guise and rationale du jour. Ask any madame - the weirder and more sadistic patrons are invariably at the peak of the power game. (see also de Ropp, The Master Game) Our world is mostly run by sociopaths, a fine bunch of charismatic idiots. The more that things get worse the better they like it - it reinforces their self-sense of superiority while filling their wallets and renders the peons powerless to change anything. (I also have in mind, I think it was "The Arms Merchants" or somesuch, read it about twenty years back; also a fine book on the Krupps figured in there somewhen.) I suppose the counter might be that only the madly bad run things because nobody else wants to; but then, no one else gets the chance, and when someone tries they're killed off right quickly. I recently read a historical analysis of Athens. Ouch. Yet a small voice inside keeps insisting there's gotta be a way....
A friend once suggested that for sanity's sake an easy way to look at things is that we're in a school, a testing ground, and an experiment all in one; that 'do what you can, don't stand too proud lest a hammer, and enjoy as able, persevere as needed' is the way to go. That's a fine choice of a non-choice, really, yet it may be just the thing. Doesn't set quite right, tho.
Ah, Lovins et all, thank you. Some of these folks really did their homework, unlike so many of their detractors. I came across C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite about the same time, so some things began to make more sense about how things were the way they were. (I am un-sophisticated in all this stuff; I read the occasional bit, sometimes hit the stacks for some very dry and tedious source and background, try to keep some of it in mind.)
Isolated habitats are well and good but meaningless if they haven't at least sufficient infrastructure to not only survive but sustain and grow - I posit some growth needed to overcome in some meaningful time (centuries OK, millenia meaningless) whatever the global calamities. Isolated pockets surviving at some level of prosper is fine existentially, until red giant phase, but does little if one has hopes for any larger possible meaning for our species. In that regard I still get a warm-and-fuzzy from Fuller's musing that perhaps the purpose of i
A friend worked for eighteen years for a large state agency in a mythical Great Lakes state, writing mostly engineering code along with benchmarking stuff for hardware acquisitions. He was, and is, nuts.
When given a new project, he'd do a rough design flowchart (!), then start writing the documentation, adding in blobs of pseudo-code to illustrate something or by way of walk-through. He'd go for days, even weeks, writing his doc, while his supervisor would be having fits. (As told by another friend who witnessed some of this.)
In all that time he delivered clean code on time and under budget. Last he heard, some twenty years later, most of his stuff is still used with but very small changes to reflect, for example, newer structural materials from contractors.
This all made a great impression upon me at the time, not in small part because he came damn close a few times to shooting me as he tried to teach me the simplest things about how to program.
I know very little and can do less, but this is one of the kinds of discussion I come here to read. Tnx.
First thought that came to me was using the unique blend from my device picture of the backscatter surround and yours to create a snapshot 'fingerprint' that could be used as key and seed for a one-time pad to use for secure comms. No two people at a given time will have the same, if the resolution is fine enough.
backups, movies, games, emulators w/disk images and virtual hard drives, lossless audio, OS images, virtual machines, installers from Windows days, backups of old Windows installs, distro images, twenty years of docs (admittedly, don't take so much space)... need I go on?
I'm down to just 3.6TB and hurting (a half-TB drive recently died). If I went in and did some cleaning and consolidating, which I've been promising myself to do Real Soon Now, I could free up maybe a terabyte and lose a week in the process.
I look forward to welcoming my memristor memory overlords if I can afford them.
"We sent men to the moon as a cover for developing intercontinental ballistic missiles."
Of all the bits of revisionist or mis-stated partial histories so far in this thread I can't let that one go.
We needed no cover for developing ICBMs. We, the Sovs, and others did quite nicely developing them openly. We already had ICBMs and were developing others and continued to do so well into the '80s. See:
You will note that Saturn was entirely separate from ICBM development, started by Eisenhower who favored solid fuels for ICBMs as in Minuteman, Polaris, and on.
Yup, I've been there, it gets winter, or did, when I lived nearby.
Mar One, a scam? Maybe; a lot can happen in ten years. I'm gonna wait and see, I live so long. If it is a scam, the few folks at the top ought to make a living at it for a while. What they'll do after is a question.
I've long had my own ideas, gleefully stolen from wherever found, about some nifty things to do once out of the huge limiting gravity well of Earth. But to me the argument for SPSS (or whatever the acronym du jour is) is simply the essentially limitless potential for assuming base power load for the planet. It's not all easy and still the need or at least utility of maintaining a sensible blend of hydro, biomass (methane - also viz. CO2 balance), and I've a soft spot for LFTR.
I read a few hours ago that Musk dismisses SPSS and, sharp cookie that he is, I want to know why. Back late '80s, early '90s read a fine little novel, "Lime's Crisis" that dealt with some of this, the ending involved the Saudis launching their own solar power stuff in anticipation of exhausting the only thing of value they have (my estimation; apart from oil about all I can see is arrogance, and blind, fanatical, if cynical, piety - the second sword on their flag.)
As Brain obliquely points out, the key to all is a surfeit of clean energy. With enough energy (all this starts with the electricity from the rectennas) pressing issues such as clean water and waste treatment become bagatelles. We'd be able to forego fertilizing soil into dead dirt and return to sensible soil management. A nice side effect of a huge plenty of electricity is reduced waste heat on planet from combusted electricity generation. Most ground vehicles can go electric. (I haven't looked at use of methane for ships and airplanes so make no claims there but I'm interested in seeing what's been looked at or done so far.)
Had we started, say in '77 with off-the-shelf stuff, by century's end the U.S. could have been a net energy exporter; by now we could be giving electricity away and using it for a tax write-off - not to mention paying down the debt to keeping just enough to keep the financials running. Heck, Boeing et al, persons that they now are, could have _retired_ on the proceeds from all the Saturn launches. Manna's more congenial aspect could be well on its way here by now as well.
We've no will and no vision in a national leadership vehemently averse to fact, science, and sane engineering. They'd much prefer building a Berlin Wall 'tween us and Mexico, telling young girls to put an aspirin tablet between their knees until they're married, and, oh, keeping weed a Schedule I drug, not to mention keeping ever more prisons ever more filled to overflowing so's to keep Bob Barker flush with cookies.
A number of people have tried to point out from as far back as the '80s that given the increasing population and its demand on resources within the current way we go about matters economic and political, if we don't get into space and well on the way to being productive and self-sustaining (and yes, that means tool-and-die, pharmaceuticals, light bulbs, lisles, chip fabs, plush toys, coffee and chocolate, the whole nine yards) by mid-century we'll never do it - we won't be able.
Thanks for the reminder; I followed that bit at the time and recall being horrified also. We carry the conceit that "truth will out" but against ideology there is really no counter, for a true believer cannot be reasoned with, unless maybe you can show direct threat to their wallet or their offspring.
Yeah, sorry, can't shake the cheeky today; what I find encouraging is, particularly in just the past decade or two, the larger amount and...tenacity of research into the erstwhile presumed fundamentals, looking far more closely at what goes on inside the various cells (abetted by some mighty fine newer tools, both observational and those related to vastly increased understanding about the intricacies of folding and fit) against the gross nutritional assumptions - we can now start testing and watching in situ what we used to know to be true.
I've not kept up on this stuff at all but you've spurred me to do some catching up.
As for my list...tell you what, so long as you'll allow me a bit of brown rice, I'll eschew potatoes in favor of sweet. Heck, they're cheaper and tastier anyway - and last time I looked quite a bit more nutritious also. I will definitely look to shift more from meat and spuds to meat and veg. (One thing that will help me as I get more mobile is to be able to get to the store more often so's to get fresh fruit and veg for daily meals. Hmm, maybe yam skins will hold a burger as well as a bun.) Cheers, and thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
You may be right. I'm a "boomer" and I thought in the Sixties that many in my cohort were smug self-centered assholes and have seen little since to alter my assessment. I'm not ready to lay all the blame for all the current ills at their feet, tho, as there was a lot of other stuff going on both then and now.
There was a simplistic saying back then that "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem." Given the many facets to a person's life, I'd say that it can get to be a bit of a tangle for all of us.
You are mos def right that things are messed up. I have few ready answers - suffice that the powers that be of every gen have contributed to the mess, mine more so than others, notwithstanding the mess that we inherited (too many of the un-changed policies from the war years set us all up for an eventual fall).
There are plenty of good people doing good work, plenty more decent folks trying to do the job, and all ever-more hampered by unwieldy and unnecessary laws, policies, and other admin hoops that get in the way. You're right also, there's an attitude problem pervading the mess as well. Only thing I know is that each has to try where possible to resist the bad and favor the good. Anything you know how to do to make things better would be much appreciated.
"Also need to lower the demand for degrees in the private sector; they have become the new HS Diploma only you'll now be working a low wage job with tens of thousands of debt."
You hit the nail, man.
I really don't know the numbers, yet, based just on paper and online want ads, coupled with decades of experience in dealing with people doing jobs that supposedly require a bachelors degree, I'd venture to say that half of those jobs realistically need no more than a B-grade HS graduate with at most six months to a year of additional learning and training. Some, the more technical, a two-year associates degree.
I've long been a fan of voc-tech schools, where a student can get a solid grounding in their field and then go out and be productive. It's not that I disparage education in the wider sense or that I don't place value on the overall general utility of having people be at least exposed to areas outside their field so as to afford them the opportunity of perspective, both of the world they inhabit and the place of their specialty within it.
The unjustified requirement for a bachelors degree for so many positions only drives up costs across the board with no bearing on job performance.
Lovely. Thanks!
Might want to include Jim Sensenbrenner, normally one of the more backward and repressive guys in the Senate and the guy who introduced the Patriot Act to the House of Representatives, owing to:
"On July 24 2013, in what the New York Times said lawmakers from both parties agreed might be a pivotal moment for the future of the National Security Administration, Sensenbrenner spoke unexpectedly on the House floor for less than a minute to express his support for the Amash Amendment, a plan to defund the NSA's telephone surveillance program. According to the Times, "Never, he said, did he intend to allow the wholesale vacuuming up of domestic phone records, nor did his legislation envision that data dragnets would go beyond specific targets of terrorism investigations"."
Quote from Wikipedia, about halfway down the page; you may find the several preceding paragraphs interesting as well. Link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Sensenbrenner
Of course, as with others speaking up, either he's at the end of his stay, or he doesn't like what they've got on him and wants something on record before he goes.
The whoosh is strong in this one.
Yes, that's an intractable problem. Now. Indeed, inasmuch as it's at the least partly bound directly to structure, doubly intractable in light of what we know. Now.
I'm not a fortune teller, soothsayer, or prognosticator, so I've no idea of what the future may hold in regard the above. Shall we investigate? Or think you it better to lie down and roll over, 'cuz that's just the way it is. I mean, weird_w seems a smart and knowledgeable cat and I'll readily bow to his current knowledge on this thing. I wonder if it be valid to do so over, say, the next few centuries? I don't know.
This ogliodendrocytes thing may well be an inherent limit, a fundamental aspect of brain structure, and not amenable to wishy-washy wondering. Weird_w, from what I can gather, accepts it as so. I don't know. I don't know if there is any room for doubt. I don't know whether every researcher in the field of at least the understanding of weird_w also accepts that this is an absolute. If it is, then I'll accept it, as gracefully as I may.
But between where my brain is today and where it might fetch up against that intractable shore in somewhen, should I live in healthy fashion beyond "my allotted span" I would welcome that voyage.
(And weird_w, should you read this, it's not a slam at all, if you somehow take it that way; on the contrary, I value and thank you for the info and the talent and skill that's put you that far so far.)
"If people didn't grow old and die, we'd turn into a society of stodgy, inflexible people lacking dreams and unwilling to compromise over anything. We'd probably end up killing each other over stupid things like Coke vs Pepsi" and so forth.
Everytime this subject arises, posters tend to fall largely into two camps: the young, with their tendency to shallow, judgemental, impatience, lack of perspective, and gloom; the old, with their tendency to shallow, judgemental, proclaimed perspective, and gloom frosted over by assuming the mantle of age-derived self-proclaimed wisdom - resignation, mostly. There is some room left for nuance, even real thought, but it's fucking rare.
If folks want to kill each other over Coke vs. Pepsi, let them. It'll simply be another category for Darwin Awards.
Gosh, if old folks are so bad, and what with seven billion people getting older daily and more on the way, and what with failing resources and all, maybe we should just maybe help things out a bit, somewhere 'twixt Soylent Green and Arbeit Macht Frei, nu?
I get tired of the wide brushes and canned responses.
I do fear death, although not as much now that it's closer. It's not even so much death as the manner of it, and not even the manner so much as the circumstance - to end as a mind in a coma'd body or no mind in a partially-working body? NO, thank you. If those are the choices I want my hand on the plug and will welcome death, in lieu the slew of bad alternatives.
But perhaps there may be other things possible? Let's look, seek, try. Save the doom and gloom from whatever source for those who need the solace of PSA-carts of canned dumbfuckery. I'd prefer to live and grow, learn and do new things, continue the ones I like, with a bod that doesn't bark or bite every time I breathe or move.
Not sure I still have the original; it's from rec.humor.funny back late '80s.
http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/ is the web presence, now, as then, maintained by Brad Templeton.
so I looked it up; it's just the way I remember it, as I sat cackling and chortling at 3am, and for days afterward every time I thought of it.
when i die, i'd like to go peacefully.
in my sleep.
like my grandfather.
not screaming,
like the passengers in his car...
A quiet departure
slosser@mindseye.berkeley.edu (Eric Slosser) (smirk)
http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/93q1/carwreck.html
"Aging isn't a disease; it's a gift."
You mean as in your body starts crapping out just about the time you maybe start putting together enough to understand a bit, perhaps sneak up on snippets of wisdom or at least a few tips and tricks to make it through a day while having a chance at being maybe, just maybe, a little bit better human than you were last year?
Sorry, man, but hitting EOL by tossing off an aphorism and finishing with a bit of condescension doesn't play well with this member of the audience.
Getting older might be one thing but aging isn't an asymptote, it's a bloody acceleration of hurt and misery before the spark goes out when you splat against one of the myriad walls of major system failure. This by you is a good thing?
Me, I want a word with the manufacturer. And an anodyne, at least; a warm-start, better; a fine elixir mending flaws, nice.
Perhaps even more amazing is that the thing has to continuously compute mass, fuel (and its dwindling mass), height and rate of descent, and allow enough fuel and distance for the precisely increased thrust needed to bring it to a stop on the ground with zero speed. Wow, rocket science.
Thank you for that. Although I'd heard of Bob Truax somewhat, from the JATO pack and from his work on Thor and Polaris, I'd no idea of the SeaBee and SeaHorse projects, nor the full design of the Sea Dragon - only bits and pieces that showed up in popular venues.
Sea Horse looks freaking amazing; it's way too bad it and the NASA Future Studies group got shut down. The results from the two proof-of-concept projects seems encouraging to me, and I have to wonder why no one has given serious thought to re-visiting the concept.
No, that's not what the article is about. If it were that, or that was what the matter was, then yes.
The matter is that taking notes by typing them uses different parts of and paths in the brain than writing them with pen or pencil; the latter provides better retention. This is not a new learning, although the study showing it is.
The original research goes back a ways; one result, the bit about writing, was incorporated into Air Force study methods from, IIRC, somewhen late '60s, maybe a bit later. The additional bit, about the contrast 'tween pen and keyboard, has only shown up lately as people began using laptops to take notes and others began to do the studies
A poster below wonders what if people started taking notes via keyboard early on, as used to be done by pen in hand, would the difference disappear. We will find out soon enough with the current crop of digital children. Further there will likely be no difference as using something as old skool or faggy as a pen will disappear. The only real result I foresee is lowered subject matter retention rates. But this is already happening owing to shorter attention spans coupled with difficulty in focusing (they're not quite the same thing, btw.)
"maybe just from discarded Android phones"
Nice. Maybe by then a somewhat better locked-down OS as well, but there are already choices.
"Technically, it was already possible during the second world war (if you can build an intercontinental ballistic missile...."
England now qualifies as a continent? Unless you're counting the A9/10 somehow.
Please, add on at least a decade, viz. the '57 R-7 flight, and operational in '59.
L2 is hardly near-Earth orbit.
Jeez, Paul, you just don't stop with all the things you write that, due to my own failings to be sure, require me to read and try to think about.
I'm not so sanguine (now that's a strange word to come to have this use) about "renewables", principally solar, viz. reality of utility (yes, I like bad puns) in U.S. Oops, nevermind; I just looked at this:
http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/solarenergy.aspx
I read it through but only quickly checked a few of the sources; I get the impression this is legit. Good; let's do it. If gov could do Hoover and Grand Coulee, it could easily do this - except for the aspirin Congress. Penny wise, pound foolish, bottom-line Friday, who's buying the votes; bidness as usual. (And no, I don't need the sanctimoniously self-proclaimed expertly literate yahoos critiquing my language choice and use; I've heard at least six high-flying execs speak it this way. Well, two were high flying, anyway, they had their own jets. Kids these days need to read more, get out more. Get off my lawn.)
I've passed through Death Valley, it could use some shade. It's also much cheaper than SPSS. The Sahara and others have some spare real estate as well, I believe. I'll leave it to the crunchers to work things out, but I'm guessing all of Africa could get a big boost in available electricity. Float bonds, live a little, have some faith in future, pay for the grandkids college. It's not just money, it's doing something useful with it and the payoff in real terms is relatively quick, the eventual payout is enormous.
Prisons, manufactured wars, enforced poverty, are the mechanisms of people who like to hurt other people whatever their guise and rationale du jour. Ask any madame - the weirder and more sadistic patrons are invariably at the peak of the power game. (see also de Ropp, The Master Game) Our world is mostly run by sociopaths, a fine bunch of charismatic idiots. The more that things get worse the better they like it - it reinforces their self-sense of superiority while filling their wallets and renders the peons powerless to change anything. (I also have in mind, I think it was "The Arms Merchants" or somesuch, read it about twenty years back; also a fine book on the Krupps figured in there somewhen.) I suppose the counter might be that only the madly bad run things because nobody else wants to; but then, no one else gets the chance, and when someone tries they're killed off right quickly. I recently read a historical analysis of Athens. Ouch. Yet a small voice inside keeps insisting there's gotta be a way....
A friend once suggested that for sanity's sake an easy way to look at things is that we're in a school, a testing ground, and an experiment all in one; that 'do what you can, don't stand too proud lest a hammer, and enjoy as able, persevere as needed' is the way to go. That's a fine choice of a non-choice, really, yet it may be just the thing. Doesn't set quite right, tho.
Ah, Lovins et all, thank you. Some of these folks really did their homework, unlike so many of their detractors. I came across C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite about the same time, so some things began to make more sense about how things were the way they were. (I am un-sophisticated in all this stuff; I read the occasional bit, sometimes hit the stacks for some very dry and tedious source and background, try to keep some of it in mind.)
Isolated habitats are well and good but meaningless if they haven't at least sufficient infrastructure to not only survive but sustain and grow - I posit some growth needed to overcome in some meaningful time (centuries OK, millenia meaningless) whatever the global calamities. Isolated pockets surviving at some level of prosper is fine existentially, until red giant phase, but does little if one has hopes for any larger possible meaning for our species. In that regard I still get a warm-and-fuzzy from Fuller's musing that perhaps the purpose of i
I caught that, thank you.
A friend worked for eighteen years for a large state agency in a mythical Great Lakes state, writing mostly engineering code along with benchmarking stuff for hardware acquisitions. He was, and is, nuts.
When given a new project, he'd do a rough design flowchart (!), then start writing the documentation, adding in blobs of pseudo-code to illustrate something or by way of walk-through. He'd go for days, even weeks, writing his doc, while his supervisor would be having fits. (As told by another friend who witnessed some of this.)
In all that time he delivered clean code on time and under budget. Last he heard, some twenty years later, most of his stuff is still used with but very small changes to reflect, for example, newer structural materials from contractors.
This all made a great impression upon me at the time, not in small part because he came damn close a few times to shooting me as he tried to teach me the simplest things about how to program.
I know very little and can do less, but this is one of the kinds of discussion I come here to read. Tnx.
First thought that came to me was using the unique blend from my device picture of the backscatter surround and yours to create a snapshot 'fingerprint' that could be used as key and seed for a one-time pad to use for secure comms. No two people at a given time will have the same, if the resolution is fine enough.
backups, movies, games, emulators w/disk images and virtual hard drives, lossless audio, OS images, virtual machines, installers from Windows days, backups of old Windows installs, distro images, twenty years of docs (admittedly, don't take so much space)... need I go on?
I'm down to just 3.6TB and hurting (a half-TB drive recently died). If I went in and did some cleaning and consolidating, which I've been promising myself to do Real Soon Now, I could free up maybe a terabyte and lose a week in the process.
I look forward to welcoming my memristor memory overlords if I can afford them.
they've been offering these for some years now
"We sent men to the moon as a cover for developing intercontinental ballistic missiles."
Of all the bits of revisionist or mis-stated partial histories so far in this thread I can't let that one go.
We needed no cover for developing ICBMs. We, the Sovs, and others did quite nicely developing them openly. We already had ICBMs and were developing others and continued to do so well into the '80s. See:
http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/nudb/datab3.asp for land-based, historical and current, and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trident_missile for submarine-based ICBMs in current inventory;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICBM gives an overview and history.
You will note that Saturn was entirely separate from ICBM development, started by Eisenhower who favored solid fuels for ICBMs as in Minuteman, Polaris, and on.
Name me one ICBM derived from the Saturn stack.
Yup, I've been there, it gets winter, or did, when I lived nearby.
Mar One, a scam? Maybe; a lot can happen in ten years. I'm gonna wait and see, I live so long. If it is a scam, the few folks at the top ought to make a living at it for a while. What they'll do after is a question.
I've long had my own ideas, gleefully stolen from wherever found, about some nifty things to do once out of the huge limiting gravity well of Earth. But to me the argument for SPSS (or whatever the acronym du jour is) is simply the essentially limitless potential for assuming base power load for the planet. It's not all easy and still the need or at least utility of maintaining a sensible blend of hydro, biomass (methane - also viz. CO2 balance), and I've a soft spot for LFTR.
I read a few hours ago that Musk dismisses SPSS and, sharp cookie that he is, I want to know why. Back late '80s, early '90s read a fine little novel, "Lime's Crisis" that dealt with some of this, the ending involved the Saudis launching their own solar power stuff in anticipation of exhausting the only thing of value they have (my estimation; apart from oil about all I can see is arrogance, and blind, fanatical, if cynical, piety - the second sword on their flag.)
As Brain obliquely points out, the key to all is a surfeit of clean energy. With enough energy (all this starts with the electricity from the rectennas) pressing issues such as clean water and waste treatment become bagatelles. We'd be able to forego fertilizing soil into dead dirt and return to sensible soil management. A nice side effect of a huge plenty of electricity is reduced waste heat on planet from combusted electricity generation. Most ground vehicles can go electric. (I haven't looked at use of methane for ships and airplanes so make no claims there but I'm interested in seeing what's been looked at or done so far.)
Had we started, say in '77 with off-the-shelf stuff, by century's end the U.S. could have been a net energy exporter; by now we could be giving electricity away and using it for a tax write-off - not to mention paying down the debt to keeping just enough to keep the financials running. Heck, Boeing et al, persons that they now are, could have _retired_ on the proceeds from all the Saturn launches. Manna's more congenial aspect could be well on its way here by now as well.
We've no will and no vision in a national leadership vehemently averse to fact, science, and sane engineering. They'd much prefer building a Berlin Wall 'tween us and Mexico, telling young girls to put an aspirin tablet between their knees until they're married, and, oh, keeping weed a Schedule I drug, not to mention keeping ever more prisons ever more filled to overflowing so's to keep Bob Barker flush with cookies.
A number of people have tried to point out from as far back as the '80s that given the increasing population and its demand on resources within the current way we go about matters economic and political, if we don't get into space and well on the way to being productive and self-sustaining (and yes, that means tool-and-die, pharmaceuticals, light bulbs, lisles, chip fabs, plush toys, coffee and chocolate, the whole nine yards) by mid-century we'll never do it - we won't be able.
Thanks for the reminder; I followed that bit at the time and recall being horrified also. We carry the conceit that "truth will out" but against ideology there is really no counter, for a true believer cannot be reasoned with, unless maybe you can show direct threat to their wallet or their offspring.
Yeah, sorry, can't shake the cheeky today; what I find encouraging is, particularly in just the past decade or two, the larger amount and...tenacity of research into the erstwhile presumed fundamentals, looking far more closely at what goes on inside the various cells (abetted by some mighty fine newer tools, both observational and those related to vastly increased understanding about the intricacies of folding and fit) against the gross nutritional assumptions - we can now start testing and watching in situ what we used to know to be true.
I've not kept up on this stuff at all but you've spurred me to do some catching up.
As for my list...tell you what, so long as you'll allow me a bit of brown rice, I'll eschew potatoes in favor of sweet. Heck, they're cheaper and tastier anyway - and last time I looked quite a bit more nutritious also. I will definitely look to shift more from meat and spuds to meat and veg. (One thing that will help me as I get more mobile is to be able to get to the store more often so's to get fresh fruit and veg for daily meals. Hmm, maybe yam skins will hold a burger as well as a bun.) Cheers, and thanks.