Thanks for the review. I like this Bladerunner kind of stuff. I'll be ordering it, and also checking out other similar books mentioned here.
IMO the no solar energy and reliance on animal powered cranks (and especially in a dense urban environment) is totally unrealistic but dramatic license.
The 23rd century is way too optimistic. The ocean will have flooded Thailand well before that and there will be massive death from starvation and a runaway bioengineered disaster even before that. Human nature being what it is, it's guaranteed we will do nothing to prevent it.
I read the responses so far and none mentioned probably the biggest analytical factor, minimizing labor costs (in form of salespeople / managers) while retaining maximum sales, hard as it is to believe for those that see very little sales help when needed.
Chains have been analyzing store traffic for a number of years with a combination of movement detectors and / or surveillance cameras. Shoppertrak was a major vendor. I wrote an app system for a large retailer correlating Shoppertrak customer counts, cash register sales, and labor minute by minute. They care about average sales and sales / time period and staffing levels to accomplish it. There's no personal particulars involved. They just want to cut sales staff to bare bone which can still support sales without it falling off.
The data can be used for good as well, justifying changes to convert traffic to sales, be that better staffing, changes in product placement, and any number of things. It's mostly to cut sales labor costs though AFAICT.
I thought Google was ticked off that they couldn't get this, thus Google+.
As for govt monitoring and especially doing it by subcontracting to defense contractors, I have a long list of govt agencies and defense contractors that have spidered my little site through the years, and I mean a long list.
They might be tweaking to better assimilate random social site comments but they've been mining the web for years.
I already opt out of everything new they've been doing as possible. However they appear to be determined to alter what I see based on my actions, "helping" me.
It's already marginal as to what I'm able to opt out of, and it's rapidly getting worse. Their vision of internet utopia doesn't match mine.
I have to be signed in to be able to disable as much of the personalization crap as possible to have some semblance of the Google that I used to love. Also to subscribe in Youtube and view 18+ videos.
What I don't want is them changing anything I enter or changing what I see based on anything about me. But they are bound and determined to do exactly that.
I don't want to be helped. Show me ads relevant to content, but leave me out of it.
I took vocational electronics in HS (back in the day) and glad I did. Good prep for my programming career, probably better than "software engineering" in HS had they had it at the time.
no, I wouldn't, but I wasn't referring to the White Cliffs of Dover, I was referring to fossil fuel matter (I.e. plants buried that became coal and oil).
In a later post I stated I overemphasized the impact of uncombusted fossil fuel matter to oxygen levels after revisiting it but it was part of the process.
Yes, Lane refers to it in all three of the books I have of his, but extensively in Power, Sex, Suicide, about mitochondria. Refers to her oxygen holocaust theory in Oxygen.
I see that oxygen levels were as much as 18 percent prior to Cambrian, didn't realize they were that high so definitely misunderstood the specific effect on oxygen levels that fossil fuel matter had, but still Lane contends that oxygen levels are essentially the mismatch of uncombusted life due to being buried and protected from decay, otherwise would be used in the combustion process.
I noted her passing recently, glad that she got to see her theories recognized as ground breaking. I am only slightly familiar with her work through quotations.
Thanks for the info, but I didn't learn this in school, I am undertaking extensive readings in molecular biology. I learned this in Oxygen by Nick Lane, and I think the points I made about what established the oxygen levels to sustain multiicellular organisms is correct. It was buried undecayed plants that established sufficient oxygen (GT 15 percent) to sustain organisms according to what I read. I find that fossil fuel matter made breathing possible to be fascinating and it is not only not taught in schools, it is virtually unaddressed including all who replied to me in this thread.
That's interesting, but just to clarify, I mention the fossil fuels not as fixing carbon but as freeing up the oxygen that makes up atmospheric oxygen (about 21 percent of the atmosphere).
This is never mentioned publically and interestingly neither acknowledged nor disputed in this thread.
This was downmodded Overrated -1 when it hasn't even received a positive mod rating. What is that, an attempt to hide my comment from view? That's just censorship. If there's something wrong with the comment then say what it is. I don't sEe anything wrong with it other than a typo in last word which I followed up with a post correcting it.
I notice in certain topics (GW, IPV6 for example) we have a lot of censorship going on with people downmodding what they don't like. Why don't we just be honest and call these people and their downmods censors and call it Censored -1.
I remember reading about this in Oxygen, thanks for the clarification, but as I understood it oxygen is consumed when the plant or bacteria or trees that generated the oxygen with photosynthesis is combusted, and it is primarily the buried plants that are now fossil fuels that established a significant atmospheric level of oxygen that sustains oxygen based metabolism. Other than the buried plants that weren't combusted (decayed, etc) oxygen and carbon dioxide are consumed in photosynthesis and decay and oxygen doesn't accumulate.
Of course I am always learning about this stuff but I considered the the buried matter that is now our fossil fuels making all the oxygen we breathe available to be very interesting and something this hasn't been pointed out publically AFAIK.
I don't understand that. As I read any early atmospheric oxygen combined with iron, and it was only photosynthesis being adapted by plants and trees that emitted a new source of oxygen, and unconsumed plants and trees that left sufficient oxygen for multi-cellular organisms based on an oxygen metabolism, as I understand it that and incorporating mitochondria pretty much required for multi-cellular organisms.
Single cells able to use oxygen in their metabolism, like mitochondria, existed to be adapted but I thought oxygen was pretty scarce until photosynthesis was used widely by plants and animals.
My understanding from reading Oxygen by Nick Lane is that atmospheric oxygen at levels high enough to sustain oxygen based metabolism came from plants and trees being buried and not consumed which would have used the oxygen in the consumption. The buried plants and trees became our fossil fuels.
disclaimer: I'm a programmer by profession, just a layman reader in molecular biology.
I can't believe this has to be explained to everyone and many still don't get it. Your post should be first post readers see, actually should be appended to TFS.
Google is the prototype aggragator. I saw a post that said aggragators display more than a fair use snippet and use that to get ad revenue. If someone is doing that news organizations (or whoever's content is being aggragated inappropriately) can contact and advise to get their content out of the web site and some of have been doing that. It's successful stopping the copying of articles by various interest sites.
Now as to actual aggragators such as Google and others, they direct traffic to the content site. Tons of traffic. We've been through this on slashdot many times through the years IIRC. If you don't want Google and others to list your content and provide links to your site, they won't. But these news organizations do want the links and traffic directed to them. So they're not behaving rationally on this.
I guess it's because they're financially desperate, and think that somehow aggragators like Google are keeping traffic that would go to them by showing a news headline and the first sentence and half or whatever of the article.
They just haven't come to grips with the fact that the traffic they think has been stolen just wasn't interested enough to click through to their site. Maybe went to another article, maybe wasn't interested, but without aggragators wouldn't even get the interested ones who did click through to them.
IIRC the take on this is that this is a desperate attempt to shoehorn in on Google's revenues. The answer is, if they don't want links to their content displayed block the search bots and take your chances with someone caring enough to go find you... somehow.
Everytime they screw up the Google search page (which I have made my home page since 1999) I try to find a way to disable it and revert to the classic mode, and if I can't find it, type a bunch of searches on the latest Google screwing with the search to see how others are coping with it (or not).
And each time I find quotes from that Marisa whatever saying she will do whatever she wants to it, they want to be on the cutting edge (or at least not left behind by Bing's changes or whatever).
This is only happening to my laptop so far, not my desktops, but doesn't appear to be a way to revert it.
The experience with Google is slipping day by day, attributed to Marisa's (or whatever her name is - I don't feel like Googling it in a rant against Google) perpetual meddling with it as that constitutes her justification for existence at Google.
But everything else is worse. If it gets bad enough I'll use scripts to display the Google pages the way I want but it hasn't come to that yet. She's basically a major annoyance to me so far.
All legitimate points. FYI I didn't say RIPE was USSR, I said most attacks came from RIPE and the other non-ARIN which I listed. I don't understand your point about bots. I was agreeing that most people are intelligent and well intentioned but some people created and use bots, and that's what the traffic is.
I agree with server host thing as you mention and include them under the broad category of ARIN proxies. It is irrelevant to me whther they are actually a proxy or not, servers accessing my web site are not people and I block them. I used to have a ton of legitimate traffic from education networks but I am changing my focus and at this point schools are idiots downloading the worst of the internet, so they are blocked.
Based on the business the criteria would be different but I said legitimate business accessing the site from the beginning.
Businesses often block outgoing overseas phone calls for same reason. There's only one reason these communications with overseas are taking place, and it's not good.
I also said earlier that if there were legitimate traffic I would compartmentalize the traffic to separate servers. There is no reasin for all these servers being cracked to be exposed to the Chinese and Russians, but businesses and government are being raped by them every day. I attribute it to Chinese and Russians being smarter than the clowns running these servers.
If there were any appreciable ratio of legitimate traffic to attacks then it'd be different, but there isn't. Practically all traffic from those areas are bots. I'm not cutting off communications if you're not communicating, and vis versa.
Most attacks are from RIPE, APNIC, South American, and AFRIN IP addresses. Maybe 10 percent from ARIN proxies. I and many servers that are broken into have no legitimate business to conduct with these addresses, and if there were better to compartmentalize the traffic to dedicated servers for different areas.
The people like you say are intelligent and well intentioned, but it's the bots that come this way.
Nearly all the traffic to the US from those places are attacks anyway.
I see attacks on my little site from new IP address ranges everyday. In my opinion the criminals are constantly expanding to new IP addresses for two reasons: short term it evades prior IP address range blocking, and long term I believe they are trying to use up ipv4 to bring on ipv6 as soon as possible. Once we are on ipv6 the attacks might as well be from every grain of sand. There will be no way to block them, game over.
To those who say blocking IP addresses shouldn't be done anyway, I would say not blocking IP addresses where 99 per cent of traffic is attacks and no real business need for it for your main servers is why there are constant reports of server breakins, data stolen, money stolen, trojans installed, and worse. Yes there are some high profile Anonymous attacks but 99 per cent are from those other places and proxy servers which also should be blocked.
I would be more than happy for Asia, Soviet Union, and Africa to use ipv6 if they are in such dire need of IP addresses and limit connectivity to whom they consider future victims.
Yeah, it was in news last month. I just googled carbon levels 2011 and the info came up in Durango Herald for Nov 21, 2011. (Sorry typing post into phone.) UN agency WMO found levels now rising at 2.3 per year. Had been around 2 per year for last few years, so actually accellerating despite major economic downturn.
Just as an aside, I think only thing that will slow down carbon burning will be exploding prices when a huge Saudi oilfield peters out in a few years (symbolic event) but have no illusions that the damage will have already been done to go over 450 by then (in the 2030's). And of course our unusual catastophic events will continually worsen in the meantime.
Someone wrote that this is all a good thing, like a rainforest everywhere. Between seas several feet higher and saturated with carbon, it's not going to be like today but warmer.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the info. It sounds like an interesting read.
Thanks for the review. I like this Bladerunner kind of stuff. I'll be ordering it, and also checking out other similar books mentioned here.
IMO the no solar energy and reliance on animal powered cranks (and especially in a dense urban environment) is totally unrealistic but dramatic license.
The 23rd century is way too optimistic. The ocean will have flooded Thailand well before that and there will be massive death from starvation and a runaway bioengineered disaster even before that. Human nature being what it is, it's guaranteed we will do nothing to prevent it.
I read the responses so far and none mentioned probably the biggest analytical factor, minimizing labor costs (in form of salespeople / managers) while retaining maximum sales, hard as it is to believe for those that see very little sales help when needed.
Chains have been analyzing store traffic for a number of years with a combination of movement detectors and / or surveillance cameras. Shoppertrak was a major vendor. I wrote an app system for a large retailer correlating Shoppertrak customer counts, cash register sales, and labor minute by minute. They care about average sales and sales / time period and staffing levels to accomplish it. There's no personal particulars involved. They just want to cut sales staff to bare bone which can still support sales without it falling off.
The data can be used for good as well, justifying changes to convert traffic to sales, be that better staffing, changes in product placement, and any number of things. It's mostly to cut sales labor costs though AFAICT.
I thought Google was ticked off that they couldn't get this, thus Google+.
As for govt monitoring and especially doing it by subcontracting to defense contractors, I have a long list of govt agencies and defense contractors that have spidered my little site through the years, and I mean a long list.
They might be tweaking to better assimilate random social site comments but they've been mining the web for years.
I already opt out of everything new they've been doing as possible. However they appear to be determined to alter what I see based on my actions, "helping" me.
It's already marginal as to what I'm able to opt out of, and it's rapidly getting worse. Their vision of internet utopia doesn't match mine.
I have to be signed in to be able to disable as much of the personalization crap as possible to have some semblance of the Google that I used to love. Also to subscribe in Youtube and view 18+ videos.
What I don't want is them changing anything I enter or changing what I see based on anything about me. But they are bound and determined to do exactly that.
I don't want to be helped. Show me ads relevant to content, but leave me out of it.
I took vocational electronics in HS (back in the day) and glad I did. Good prep for my programming career, probably better than "software engineering" in HS had they had it at the time.
no, I wouldn't, but I wasn't referring to the White Cliffs of Dover, I was referring to fossil fuel matter (I.e. plants buried that became coal and oil).
In a later post I stated I overemphasized the impact of uncombusted fossil fuel matter to oxygen levels after revisiting it but it was part of the process.
Yes, Lane refers to it in all three of the books I have of his, but extensively in Power, Sex, Suicide, about mitochondria. Refers to her oxygen holocaust theory in Oxygen.
I see that oxygen levels were as much as 18 percent prior to Cambrian, didn't realize they were that high so definitely misunderstood the specific effect on oxygen levels that fossil fuel matter had, but still Lane contends that oxygen levels are essentially the mismatch of uncombusted life due to being buried and protected from decay, otherwise would be used in the combustion process.
I noted her passing recently, glad that she got to see her theories recognized as ground breaking. I am only slightly familiar with her work through quotations.
Thanks for the info, but I didn't learn this in school, I am undertaking extensive readings in molecular biology. I learned this in Oxygen by Nick Lane, and I think the points I made about what established the oxygen levels to sustain multiicellular organisms is correct. It was buried undecayed plants that established sufficient oxygen (GT 15 percent) to sustain organisms according to what I read. I find that fossil fuel matter made breathing possible to be fascinating and it is not only not taught in schools, it is virtually unaddressed including all who replied to me in this thread.
That's interesting, but just to clarify, I mention the fossil fuels not as fixing carbon but as freeing up the oxygen that makes up atmospheric oxygen (about 21 percent of the atmosphere).
This is never mentioned publically and interestingly neither acknowledged nor disputed in this thread.
This was downmodded Overrated -1 when it hasn't even received a positive mod rating. What is that, an attempt to hide my comment from view? That's just censorship. If there's something wrong with the comment then say what it is. I don't sEe anything wrong with it other than a typo in last word which I followed up with a post correcting it.
I notice in certain topics (GW, IPV6 for example) we have a lot of censorship going on with people downmodding what they don't like. Why don't we just be honest and call these people and their downmods censors and call it Censored -1.
I remember reading about this in Oxygen, thanks for the clarification, but as I understood it oxygen is consumed when the plant or bacteria or trees that generated the oxygen with photosynthesis is combusted, and it is primarily the buried plants that are now fossil fuels that established a significant atmospheric level of oxygen that sustains oxygen based metabolism. Other than the buried plants that weren't combusted (decayed, etc) oxygen and carbon dioxide are consumed in photosynthesis and decay and oxygen doesn't accumulate.
Of course I am always learning about this stuff but I considered the the buried matter that is now our fossil fuels making all the oxygen we breathe available to be very interesting and something this hasn't been pointed out publically AFAIK.
correction: plants and trees.
And yeah, I saw trees came way later, but whatever was buried and became fossil fuels, plants of some type.
I don't understand that. As I read any early atmospheric oxygen combined with iron, and it was only photosynthesis being adapted by plants and trees that emitted a new source of oxygen, and unconsumed plants and trees that left sufficient oxygen for multi-cellular organisms based on an oxygen metabolism, as I understand it that and incorporating mitochondria pretty much required for multi-cellular organisms.
Single cells able to use oxygen in their metabolism, like mitochondria, existed to be adapted but I thought oxygen was pretty scarce until photosynthesis was used widely by plants and animals.
My understanding from reading Oxygen by Nick Lane is that atmospheric oxygen at levels high enough to sustain oxygen based metabolism came from plants and trees being buried and not consumed which would have used the oxygen in the consumption. The buried plants and trees became our fossil fuels.
disclaimer: I'm a programmer by profession, just a layman reader in molecular biology.
I can't believe this has to be explained to everyone and many still don't get it. Your post should be first post readers see, actually should be appended to TFS.
Hopefully FF3.6 finds a reliable home to serve out installs and source code if desired. I like it just the way it is.
Google is the prototype aggragator. I saw a post that said aggragators display more than a fair use snippet and use that to get ad revenue. If someone is doing that news organizations (or whoever's content is being aggragated inappropriately) can contact and advise to get their content out of the web site and some of have been doing that. It's successful stopping the copying of articles by various interest sites.
Now as to actual aggragators such as Google and others, they direct traffic to the content site. Tons of traffic. We've been through this on slashdot many times through the years IIRC. If you don't want Google and others to list your content and provide links to your site, they won't. But these news organizations do want the links and traffic directed to them. So they're not behaving rationally on this.
I guess it's because they're financially desperate, and think that somehow aggragators like Google are keeping traffic that would go to them by showing a news headline and the first sentence and half or whatever of the article.
They just haven't come to grips with the fact that the traffic they think has been stolen just wasn't interested enough to click through to their site. Maybe went to another article, maybe wasn't interested, but without aggragators wouldn't even get the interested ones who did click through to them.
IIRC the take on this is that this is a desperate attempt to shoehorn in on Google's revenues. The answer is, if they don't want links to their content displayed block the search bots and take your chances with someone caring enough to go find you... somehow.
Google would do well to offer something like-
http://classic.google.com/ [google.com]
Everytime they screw up the Google search page (which I have made my home page since 1999) I try to find a way to disable it and revert to the classic mode, and if I can't find it, type a bunch of searches on the latest Google screwing with the search to see how others are coping with it (or not).
And each time I find quotes from that Marisa whatever saying she will do whatever she wants to it, they want to be on the cutting edge (or at least not left behind by Bing's changes or whatever).
This is only happening to my laptop so far, not my desktops, but doesn't appear to be a way to revert it.
The experience with Google is slipping day by day, attributed to Marisa's (or whatever her name is - I don't feel like Googling it in a rant against Google) perpetual meddling with it as that constitutes her justification for existence at Google.
But everything else is worse. If it gets bad enough I'll use scripts to display the Google pages the way I want but it hasn't come to that yet. She's basically a major annoyance to me so far.
All legitimate points. FYI I didn't say RIPE was USSR, I said most attacks came from RIPE and the other non-ARIN which I listed. I don't understand your point about bots. I was agreeing that most people are intelligent and well intentioned but some people created and use bots, and that's what the traffic is.
I agree with server host thing as you mention and include them under the broad category of ARIN proxies. It is irrelevant to me whther they are actually a proxy or not, servers accessing my web site are not people and I block them. I used to have a ton of legitimate traffic from education networks but I am changing my focus and at this point schools are idiots downloading the worst of the internet, so they are blocked.
Based on the business the criteria would be different but I said legitimate business accessing the site from the beginning.
Businesses often block outgoing overseas phone calls for same reason. There's only one reason these communications with overseas are taking place, and it's not good.
I also said earlier that if there were legitimate traffic I would compartmentalize the traffic to separate servers. There is no reasin for all these servers being cracked to be exposed to the Chinese and Russians, but businesses and government are being raped by them every day. I attribute it to Chinese and Russians being smarter than the clowns running these servers.
I don't have to be one of them.
If there were any appreciable ratio of legitimate traffic to attacks then it'd be different, but there isn't. Practically all traffic from those areas are bots. I'm not cutting off communications if you're not communicating, and vis versa.
Most attacks are from RIPE, APNIC, South American, and AFRIN IP addresses. Maybe 10 percent from ARIN proxies. I and many servers that are broken into have no legitimate business to conduct with these addresses, and if there were better to compartmentalize the traffic to dedicated servers for different areas.
The people like you say are intelligent and well intentioned, but it's the bots that come this way.
Nearly all the traffic to the US from those places are attacks anyway.
I see attacks on my little site from new IP address ranges everyday. In my opinion the criminals are constantly expanding to new IP addresses for two reasons: short term it evades prior IP address range blocking, and long term I believe they are trying to use up ipv4 to bring on ipv6 as soon as possible. Once we are on ipv6 the attacks might as well be from every grain of sand. There will be no way to block them, game over.
To those who say blocking IP addresses shouldn't be done anyway, I would say not blocking IP addresses where 99 per cent of traffic is attacks and no real business need for it for your main servers is why there are constant reports of server breakins, data stolen, money stolen, trojans installed, and worse. Yes there are some high profile Anonymous attacks but 99 per cent are from those other places and proxy servers which also should be blocked.
I would be more than happy for Asia, Soviet Union, and Africa to use ipv6 if they are in such dire need of IP addresses and limit connectivity to whom they consider future victims.
Yeah, it was in news last month. I just googled carbon levels 2011 and the info came up in Durango Herald for Nov 21, 2011. (Sorry typing post into phone.) UN agency WMO found levels now rising at 2.3 per year. Had been around 2 per year for last few years, so actually accellerating despite major economic downturn.
Just as an aside, I think only thing that will slow down carbon burning will be exploding prices when a huge Saudi oilfield peters out in a few years (symbolic event) but have no illusions that the damage will have already been done to go over 450 by then (in the 2030's). And of course our unusual catastophic events will continually worsen in the meantime.
Someone wrote that this is all a good thing, like a rainforest everywhere. Between seas several feet higher and saturated with carbon, it's not going to be like today but warmer.
Thanks. Who knew I would learn stuff like that from an interest in climate change.