- A healthy dose of scepticism is to be commended, but did you know that the guy behind this site is heavily funded by corporations? Not exactly the most unbiased source...
- Sure, global warming may turn out to be a false alarm. But, I'd far rather we take a bit of caution now, and consider the possibilities, rather than blissfully say "sure it may exist, but we should ignore it, for fear of depressing our economy". Please! There are more important things in life than the state of the stock market.
uclear power... is the only currently viable high-energy source we have
That's why research and investment in other energy sources is necessary as well. Nuclear energy, all safety risks aside, simply is as unsustainable as oil and natural gas - we will eventually run out of easily minable fissionable ore, and pretty soon.
Solar, wind, tidal, wave, and geothermal are all possible, and are nearly competitive already, despite the lack of high-intensity research, and all the subsidies that continue to go to the oil industry. Isn't it worth exploring these options further, so that when the oil and uranium run out, we've got alternative energy sources already up and running that we can seamlessly transfer to?
But then, humanity never has been all that good at planning for the long term..
There was a key "Conservative".. who was of the opinion that we should all just wear hats to cover us from the extra U.V. rays
Cluelessness rides again. Indeed, nothing else can wear hats but us, and even that won't help much if the ozone layer collapses entirely - there's an involuntary test group in southern Chile researching this for us right now...:(
As a Minnesotan, I'm trying to figure the downside to global warming.
Try thinking a little harder. Where does your food supply come from? I bet not much of it comes from Minnesota anymore. Where does your clean water come from? If rivers dry up, or go elsewhere, you may not be getting much anymore. Where does your electricity come from? If the infrastructure keeping that going collapses due to economic pressures, you won't be playing Unreal Tournament much anymore. More likely you'll be trying to hide from the migrating Nile Virus, or worse tropical diseases coming your way...
global warming isn't really
a good name for what is happening
Quite right; "climate change" is a far more accurate description of what is happening around the world, although it is indeed true that (for the moment) the overal average temperature is rising.
However, because of all the violatile swings in climatic conditions, we could very well end up triggering an Ice Age in the end (polar ice caps melt, gulf stream stops, Europe freezes, game over man).
Indeed, before the last ice age (10-12000 years ago), global temperatures were very volatile. It has only been in the last 10000 years that conditions have settled down enough that mankind has been able to stay in one place long enough to cultivate crops, and thereby develop civilization... if we go back to the old volatile conditions, humans won't necessarily die out, but we'd be relegated back to a pre-industrial nomadic society. But, since us geeks don't know how to grow food, tend animals, or build homes anyways, we'd be the first to go...
God knows how long it took him to write it, since perl's got niggly enough syntax that it's difficult to get right even when you *can* spell properly...:)
I don't think that it's a technical problem at this point, I
think it's a business problem. Someone has to figure out a problem that has two attributes: It must lend itself
to being more quickly solved via distributed computing, and it must be something with such a high demand
that someone is willing to pay big money.
They don't even have to do that - they just need to set up the business case for a CPU cycles bidding market, and the applications will create themselves. (So, it is still a technical problem - creating the infrastructure so that arbitrary processing packages can be distributed according to the results of the bidding.)
Wired pondered this recently.. it could be really cool if someone can pull it off.
I have been hearing some scepticism from the peanut gallery as to the validity of the climate change theory. Allow me to provide some references and supplemental reading for you all:
'm not sure if people are in to it because they Dig feeling like part of the worlds largest computation (information age mob
mentality?) or simply because we're incredibly lonely and, more often than not, thourougly dissapointed in the human race.
Despite us living in a very individualistic era, the human instinct generally is to band together into packs. How this manifests itself in an intelligent species is an unquenchable desire to "be a part of something larger than yourself" - such as taking a small piece of an incredibly large computational puzzle. The rewards, when they come, will be enormous, and shared by us all. Until then, we can band together and dream...
Darnit, it looks like the Internet might be good for something after all.
Dammit, I hate being taken for a fool. Here I am, dutifully trying to provide a service, only to find that shoeboy has just posted a babelfished version of a previous post! My humble apologies to the readers, and a vengeful scowl on the prankster.
Whoa, French. Here is the translation, courtesy of the Altavista babelfish and my own limited French background:
Problems:
Acceptance of criminals: "pay this tax, just as if you are a criminal." It is ridiculous. Paying automobile insurance is one thing, because nobody never predicts to have an accident, different from taxing the people's deciding to do something illegal. Shit. Who will it help? Who is this supposed to profit? Artists? Bullshit again - they are already screwed, just as they always were, and will continue to be.
Not that every musician is exploited, but a great number are, and they will not see one one hundredth of these profits.
Business model. To the core, the government is taxing a population in order to continue supporting an out-of-date business model. If true competition were present in industry, the
companies would seek to rather improve their business plans rather than ask for handouts from the government. It is not
my work to compensate for imbeciles of the failed management procedures: should stupidity be painful?
-Shoeboy (not so anonymously)
But what about in the future? Will Wal-Mart sell "1-2-3 Genetic Engineering Kits(TM, as seen on TV)"?
One excellent short story that explores one potential outcome of pervasive genetic engineering (which begins with the protagonist receiving for his eighth birthday "the latest smash-hit biokit, Splicing Your Own Semisentients"), is Gene Wars by Paul J. McAuley. One published location is "The Year's Best Science Fiction, Ninth Edition (1991)", St. Martin's Press.
How are the aliens supposed to convert a *stream* of bits into a TWO DIMENSIONAL image??? We're not shipping a piece
of paper out in a capsule here.
There is a 1 bit wide border all around the page - this would help to separate the pages in the bitstream (128 1 bits, then 2 1 bits in every 127).
This also answers your question "how will they know the dimensions".
Why do we assume they can turn this stream into two dimensions?
Hopefully they are intelligent enough to try and mush the data into 2 and 3 dimensions and see what patterns develop (it's what we would do).
And wouldn't it be easier to do a lexical analysis if all the individual symbols consisted of a *single* connected component
As long as the symbols are seen to each have unique patterns, I don't see a problem. The designers described that the symbols were chosen to be the most robust under different kinds of interference (causing bit errors).
Check out the designers' site, which shows all the pages as well as insightful commentary.
Now with disposable e-mail addresses I just need to find a way to have a disposable shipping address.
Anyone who owns their own domain and can run their own DNS and sendmail server instantly has disposable email address (e.g. the address I use above is a throw-away).
They aren't quite unique, but for shipping addresses I use a variation of my name and mailing address (e.g. adding "apt 1" to the house number, using a new middle initial, etc). I once ordered the Victoria Secret catalog under the name "Vicky", and now receive lots of junk mail of stuff like shampoo and perfume samples under that name.:)
1200 subscribers at $2 a month is $2400 - almost $30,000 a year. I know lots of people who'd love to have that kind of salary (non-geeks, obviously) - and I bet the subscriber base would grow a lot more once the comic got started and publicity was generated. Sounds like he was too premature in canning the idea...
I'm sure the software companies would love to get their hands on the demographics information that comes out of this "hardware registration". Oh, you don't have the newest video accelerator? Time for targetted email/snail mail marketing from vendors. Don't have a spreadsheet yet? Time for MSOffice spam...
But then, this is the National Post we're talking about, which loves to use anything it can as a plank for pitching its views on lower taxes, more financial incentives to the upper class, and fewer public services and social programs.
Sure, if you are wealthy (and most employed geeks are fairly well off), the US can be a more profitable place to live. However, if you are poor, Canada has far better social programs. And as for the "brain drain", yeah, lots of people go south for higher paying jobs and lower taxes, but tons of people come from other countries to Canada for precisely the same reasons. Canada's high-tech companies are getting the best and the brightest from India, China, and Eastern Europe, and in spite of those countries' problems, they have a heck of a lot of them willing to move.
Are they trying to tell me
that someone Apple's silicon chips handle a gravityless environment better than Intel hardware?
Not sure if this is what the "nut" was thinking of when he said it performed better, but apparently the later Intel processors (post-486) have big problems with cosmic rays - flipped bits, missed instructions, etc. This is one of the reasons why NASA relies on older machines still.
I guess he'd need to make a nice heatsink array, for radiating the excess heat out into space (hopefully there's a sunshade around it so it doesn't heat up even more).
While these bugs aren't very effective against those of us who use pine, mutt, etc., they set a dangerous precedent. If users tolerate applications
retrieving untrusted data from the net without notification or permission, we could see even worse abuses like this in the future.
HTML-savvy email clients should have a configuration option that allows the user to disable fetching any off-site data - e.g., any IMG tags that are not embedded in the message, just as we can disable cookies that are sent to a different host in our web client.
Slashdot Mirror
- A healthy dose of scepticism is to be commended, but did you know that the guy behind this site is heavily funded by corporations? Not exactly the most unbiased source...
- Sure, global warming may turn out to be a false alarm. But, I'd far rather we take a bit of caution now, and consider the possibilities, rather than blissfully say "sure it may exist, but we should ignore it, for fear of depressing our economy". Please! There are more important things in life than the state of the stock market.
That's why research and investment in other energy sources is necessary as well. Nuclear energy, all safety risks aside, simply is as unsustainable as oil and natural gas - we will eventually run out of easily minable fissionable ore, and pretty soon.
Solar, wind, tidal, wave, and geothermal are all possible, and are nearly competitive already, despite the lack of high-intensity research, and all the subsidies that continue to go to the oil industry. Isn't it worth exploring these options further, so that when the oil and uranium run out, we've got alternative energy sources already up and running that we can seamlessly transfer to?
But then, humanity never has been all that good at planning for the long term..
Cluelessness rides again. Indeed, nothing else can wear hats but us, and even that won't help much if the ozone layer collapses entirely - there's an involuntary test group in southern Chile researching this for us right now... :(
Try thinking a little harder. Where does your food supply come from? I bet not much of it comes from Minnesota anymore. Where does your clean water come from? If rivers dry up, or go elsewhere, you may not be getting much anymore. Where does your electricity come from? If the infrastructure keeping that going collapses due to economic pressures, you won't be playing Unreal Tournament much anymore. More likely you'll be trying to hide from the migrating Nile Virus, or worse tropical diseases coming your way...
Don't you mean effect? :)
Quite right; "climate change" is a far more accurate description of what is happening around the world, although it is indeed true that (for the moment) the overal average temperature is rising.
However, because of all the violatile swings in climatic conditions, we could very well end up triggering an Ice Age in the end (polar ice caps melt, gulf stream stops, Europe freezes, game over man).
Indeed, before the last ice age (10-12000 years ago), global temperatures were very volatile. It has only been in the last 10000 years that conditions have settled down enough that mankind has been able to stay in one place long enough to cultivate crops, and thereby develop civilization... if we go back to the old volatile conditions, humans won't necessarily die out, but we'd be relegated back to a pre-industrial nomadic society. But, since us geeks don't know how to grow food, tend animals, or build homes anyways, we'd be the first to go...
El Nino is the name for a phenomenon, not a cause. Enough hand-waving and ignoring the problem, already!
God knows how long it took him to write it, since perl's got niggly enough syntax that it's difficult to get right even when you *can* spell properly... :)
They don't even have to do that - they just need to set up the business case for a CPU cycles bidding market, and the applications will create themselves. (So, it is still a technical problem - creating the infrastructure so that arbitrary processing packages can be distributed according to the results of the bidding.)
Wired pondered this recently.. it could be really cool if someone can pull it off.
Global Warming Is Here: The Scientific Evidence
Rumbles in the Arctic - strange new events, never seen before in the Arctic, are terrifying the locals
Scientists Now Acknowledge Role of Humans in Climate Change - yes, it's not just happening coincidentally
Hopefully, we can get a sensible discussion going here?
Despite us living in a very individualistic era, the human instinct generally is to band together into packs. How this manifests itself in an intelligent species is an unquenchable desire to "be a part of something larger than yourself" - such as taking a small piece of an incredibly large computational puzzle. The rewards, when they come, will be enormous, and shared by us all. Until then, we can band together and dream...
Darnit, it looks like the Internet might be good for something after all.
Dammit, I hate being taken for a fool. Here I am, dutifully trying to provide a service, only to find that shoeboy has just posted a babelfished version of a previous post! My humble apologies to the readers, and a vengeful scowl on the prankster.
Problems:
Acceptance of criminals: "pay this tax, just as if you are a criminal." It is ridiculous. Paying automobile insurance is one thing, because nobody never predicts to have an accident, different from taxing the people's deciding to do something illegal. Shit. Who will it help? Who is this supposed to profit? Artists? Bullshit again - they are already screwed, just as they always were, and will continue to be. Not that every musician is exploited, but a great number are, and they will not see one one hundredth of these profits.
Business model. To the core, the government is taxing a population in order to continue supporting an out-of-date business model. If true competition were present in industry, the companies would seek to rather improve their business plans rather than ask for handouts from the government. It is not my work to compensate for imbeciles of the failed management procedures: should stupidity be painful?
-Shoeboy (not so anonymously)
Or for more excitement, combine both. Take advantage of those bear market days by shooting digital ones!
One excellent short story that explores one potential outcome of pervasive genetic engineering (which begins with the protagonist receiving for his eighth birthday "the latest smash-hit biokit, Splicing Your Own Semisentients"), is Gene Wars by Paul J. McAuley. One published location is "The Year's Best Science Fiction, Ninth Edition (1991)", St. Martin's Press.
There is a 1 bit wide border all around the page - this would help to separate the pages in the bitstream (128 1 bits, then 2 1 bits in every 127). This also answers your question "how will they know the dimensions".
Why do we assume they can turn this stream into two dimensions?
Hopefully they are intelligent enough to try and mush the data into 2 and 3 dimensions and see what patterns develop (it's what we would do).
And wouldn't it be easier to do a lexical analysis if all the individual symbols consisted of a *single* connected component
As long as the symbols are seen to each have unique patterns, I don't see a problem. The designers described that the symbols were chosen to be the most robust under different kinds of interference (causing bit errors).
Check out the designers' site, which shows all the pages as well as insightful commentary.
My bet still goes with an enclosed bicycle-like transport, powered inductively via cables laid in the street.
Anyone who owns their own domain and can run their own DNS and sendmail server instantly has disposable email address (e.g. the address I use above is a throw-away).
They aren't quite unique, but for shipping addresses I use a variation of my name and mailing address (e.g. adding "apt 1" to the house number, using a new middle initial, etc). I once ordered the Victoria Secret catalog under the name "Vicky", and now receive lots of junk mail of stuff like shampoo and perfume samples under that name. :)
1200 subscribers at $2 a month is $2400 - almost $30,000 a year. I know lots of people who'd love to have that kind of salary (non-geeks, obviously) - and I bet the subscriber base would grow a lot more once the comic got started and publicity was generated. Sounds like he was too premature in canning the idea...
I'm sure the software companies would love to get their hands on the demographics information that comes out of this "hardware registration". Oh, you don't have the newest video accelerator? Time for targetted email/snail mail marketing from vendors. Don't have a spreadsheet yet? Time for MSOffice spam...
The flight attendants will need to have large nets on hand, for reining in the results of several weightlessness-sick passengers. Ugh!
Sure, if you are wealthy (and most employed geeks are fairly well off), the US can be a more profitable place to live. However, if you are poor, Canada has far better social programs. And as for the "brain drain", yeah, lots of people go south for higher paying jobs and lower taxes, but tons of people come from other countries to Canada for precisely the same reasons. Canada's high-tech companies are getting the best and the brightest from India, China, and Eastern Europe, and in spite of those countries' problems, they have a heck of a lot of them willing to move.
Not sure if this is what the "nut" was thinking of when he said it performed better, but apparently the later Intel processors (post-486) have big problems with cosmic rays - flipped bits, missed instructions, etc. This is one of the reasons why NASA relies on older machines still.
I guess he'd need to make a nice heatsink array, for radiating the excess heat out into space (hopefully there's a sunshade around it so it doesn't heat up even more).
HTML-savvy email clients should have a configuration option that allows the user to disable fetching any off-site data - e.g., any IMG tags that are not embedded in the message, just as we can disable cookies that are sent to a different host in our web client.