What happens when (and if) all the fossil fuels are used up?
We've got another 100 years of petroleum (Discover, June 1999), and we have at least that long with coal. I'm sure we'll come up with something by 2100.
No, the Earth's Moon does not orbit the Earth, and is not a satellite. Unlike every moon of every other planet (Charon excepted), the Moon's orbit around the Sun is never convex. That the Moon changes sides of the Earth and is influenced by Earth's gravity is no more relevant than the fact that Pluto changes sides of Neptune and is influenced by Neptune's gravity.
"Independently orbit a star" presumably is intended to mean "in a orbit around a star not shared by a larger object", which is an acceptable definition that excludes the Moon.
The Earth's Moon does not orbit the Earth, which means it is not a satellite. Unlike every moon of every other planet (Charon excepted), the Moon's orbit around the Sun is never convex. That the Moon changes sides of the Earth and is influenced by Earth's gravity is no more relevant than the fact that Pluto changes sides of Neptune and is influenced by Neptune's gravity.
"Independently orbit a star" presumably is intended to mean "in an orbit around a star not shared by a larger object", which is a definition that conveniently allows us to class the Moon as a non-planet despite its long list of planetlike qualities.
It's very simple -- if you have an ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 code element, you get the equivalent ccTLD, and may manage it however your polity wants.
That keeps ICANN/IANA out of international politics; they don't decide what qualifies as a country, and they don't interfere with the decisions of governments over how they manage their ccTLDs.
Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs
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· Score: 1
We'll start by granting that a G4 per megahertz is overall twice as fast as a Pentium III. That's debatable, but only on the side of being slower, so we're favoring Apple here.
In that case, in this corner we've got the Cube, with a 450 MHz G4 (900 MHz P3 equivalent), 64 MB RAM, 20 GB hard drive, and DVD-ROM, and FireWire for $1,799.97, at CompUSA.
And in this corner, we have a HP Pavilion 8775C with a 933 MHz P3 (466 MHz G4 equivalent), 128 MB RAM, 60 GB hard drive, 8X/4X/32X CD-RW, floppy drive, and DVD-ROM for $1,649.97
Both have USB and ethernet, neither comes with a monitor; the Cube $300 rebate requires purchase of at least a 17" $499.97 monitor, for a net $199.97. The equivalent 17" HP monitor runs $299.97.
So the HP has a faster processor by a smidge (or more, if you dispute the grant of the doubling), twice the RAM, three times the hard drive capacity, and an additional CR-RW drive and floppy drive, and costs $50 less; but the Cube has FireWire, an optical mouse, and what is claimed to be a better display.
gets to be like figuring the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.
Given that the head of a pin is a collection of zero-radius particles connected by virtual force-carrying particles, and that thus the possibility of zero-dimensional objects has been shown by modern science. And if something is massless, entirely noninteractive with other matter under normal circumstances, and has no dimensions, there is no reason to assume that an infinite number cannot be in any location.
As a result, the old debate can be resolved -- the main claims of those that insisted that only a finite number could dance on the head of a pin have been put into serious doubt, leaving clear the claim by their opponents that an infinite number of angels can dance on the head of a pin.
This theory is known as Punctuated Equilibruum, and is currently accepted in the world of biology.
Not nearly as universally as that statement implies; the PE-gradualism debate still continues. Just because Gould has a tall soapbox doesn't mean he's necesssarily right.
Motorola is very capable of producing 1GHz+ PowerPCs but they decided to keep them small and efficient.
Bullshit. Nobody stands still for eighteen months by design. They tried to make 550 megahertz PowerPC chips eighteen months ago, and discovered that their design couldn't hack the higher clockspeed. So they've been busy ever since working on a revision that can ramp up on speed.
And, sure, Apple's worried about bang for the buck. After all, they make their money on hardware, and the less they can pay for components, the more they make. And then they overcharge, and wonder why people don't buy a Cube with half the RAM, half the disk space, no CD-RW drive, and no included monitor for the same price as a PC with equal real-world chip performance and those things included.
So say that he's naked, and then move on without the useless fools that don't see it already. Or sit here wasting your time like another type of useless fool, while others move on without you.
The biggest problem here is that Quimby doesn't seem to realize that you can't take real money from people who don't have any real money. You might as well launch an assault against Hasbro's printers as steal Canadian dollars.
(Hasbro owns Parker Brothers, makers of Monopoly. See SatireWire for details on Hasbro's new printers.)
Yes, I oversimplified. I could have gone into dozens of paragraphs about comparative advantage, legal oversight, bribery costs, utility lobbying power over government, electrical outages and the effect on wire theft risk, relative ease of selling scrap copper vs. fencing electrical substations, etc.
It still comes down to it making economic sense to steal wire in much of Africa, while it makes little sense for all but a tiny fraction of U.S. citizens. Thus, theft is currently and will be for a while a problem with wiring rural Africa, while it is no longer a problem in the U.S.
Farm plants can't replace petroleum for fuel, despite your second link. Even genemod plants that produce triple of the oil of current maximum oil producers, planted on every acre of arable land on Earth, could only replace half the current demand for diesel. If you then extract ethanol and methanol by fermenting the remains and make every gas engine run on those perfectly, you still can't replace demand for gasoline. At best, you'll be extending current petroleum reserves another fifty to a hundred years, then have a massive fuel crunch.
Now, oily algae do have potential, because they can be harvested multiple times per year. The technology is immature, but at least it has the possibility of working.
Even if no new petroleum is discovered from tomorrow on, and we have no other way to make plastic from any other source, we still have enough proven reserves at current expected rates of increase in use to last fifty years. Given that the silicon chip is less than 50 years old, I don't think a minimum life of 50 years for plastic chips is something to worry about.
And, given that the quantity of plastic added to computers would be significantly less than the plastic that already ships with computers, the extra price volatility is fairly small.
Finally, copyright infringement is not theft. Theft involves taking real property from the control of the rightful owner. There is no paradigmatic relationship between theft and the act of reproduction (whether direct or indirect) for illicit profiteering.
Actually, there is such a paradigmatic relationship, but not within the property paradigms of the political systems of Blackstone or Hobbes (the English-speaking world and the rest of the world), but rather within the property paradigm of neo-Lockean theory (neo-Lockean because Locke considered copyright an extension of the royal patent system -- which the copyright systems of his era were).
Under neo-Lockean property theory, slavery, theft, involuntary taxes, conscription, and copyright infringment are all specific instances of the same crime -- nonconsentual appropriation of the labor of others. In fact, in that paradigm, physical property rights are on a weaker base than intellectual property, since intellectual property is pure labor product, while physical property is unowned resources modified by labor.
(Note that under neo-Lockean theory, one's right to one's own labor ends at death, so death+50 or death+70 copyrights are unwarranted and thus illicit interventions by the State. For practical reasons a "death-or-50, whichever is longer" and moderate-term work-for-hire copyrights can be justified with varying degrees of acceptance as a way to make contractual agreements possible.)
Most of the "value" of gold isn't intrinsic, but merely traditional. If people stopped valuing it just because it's gold, its price would drop to about $120/oz. overnight, entirely supported by its rarity and the handful of industrial applications where it is the best material.
Now, admittedly it would be a lot harder to inflate supplies of gold, but there isn't any real way to stop the government from reducing the gold-per-dollar by law, repudiating debt, delinking the dollar from gold again, or any of a dozen other ways which one can learn about by looking at the history of the gold standard.
So, the value of a gold-backed dollar is no more secure than that of one backed by nothing; continued value of each depends on political will to maintain that value.
There are anonymizing services out there that don't keep logs. Using several to access each other gives you a trail that at best will be impossible to reconstruct (because the data doesn't exist) and at worst will take months to trace back to the public library terminal you used.
It was independently invented long before that by at least Plato in Greece, Chuang Tzu in China, the Buddha in India, and the Australian Aboriginies (although details differed, of course).
Per capita GDP in Rwanda is $720. That means the scrap value of the copper in that wire is worth the effort to steal. How long do you think it will stay wired?
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If the angles have spin, then there is no problem.
we've got ample proof that pure laissez-faire capitalism will not do anything that's not economically productive in the very short term.
Really? So when's Amazon.com going to turn a profit?
What happens when (and if) all the fossil fuels are used up?
We've got another 100 years of petroleum (Discover, June 1999), and we have at least that long with coal. I'm sure we'll come up with something by 2100.
No, the Earth's Moon does not orbit the Earth, and is not a satellite. Unlike every moon of every other planet (Charon excepted), the Moon's orbit around the Sun is never convex. That the Moon changes sides of the Earth and is influenced by Earth's gravity is no more relevant than the fact that Pluto changes sides of Neptune and is influenced by Neptune's gravity.
"Independently orbit a star" presumably is intended to mean "in a orbit around a star not shared by a larger object", which is an acceptable definition that excludes the Moon.
The Earth's Moon does not orbit the Earth, which means it is not a satellite. Unlike every moon of every other planet (Charon excepted), the Moon's orbit around the Sun is never convex. That the Moon changes sides of the Earth and is influenced by Earth's gravity is no more relevant than the fact that Pluto changes sides of Neptune and is influenced by Neptune's gravity.
"Independently orbit a star" presumably is intended to mean "in an orbit around a star not shared by a larger object", which is a definition that conveniently allows us to class the Moon as a non-planet despite its long list of planetlike qualities.
It's very simple -- if you have an ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 code element, you get the equivalent ccTLD, and may manage it however your polity wants.
That keeps ICANN/IANA out of international politics; they don't decide what qualifies as a country, and they don't interfere with the decisions of governments over how they manage their ccTLDs.
We'll start by granting that a G4 per megahertz is overall twice as fast as a Pentium III. That's debatable, but only on the side of being slower, so we're favoring Apple here.
In that case, in this corner we've got the Cube, with a 450 MHz G4 (900 MHz P3 equivalent), 64 MB RAM, 20 GB hard drive, and DVD-ROM, and FireWire for $1,799.97, at CompUSA.
And in this corner, we have a HP Pavilion 8775C with a 933 MHz P3 (466 MHz G4 equivalent), 128 MB RAM, 60 GB hard drive, 8X/4X/32X CD-RW, floppy drive, and DVD-ROM for $1,649.97
Both have USB and ethernet, neither comes with a monitor; the Cube $300 rebate requires purchase of at least a 17" $499.97 monitor, for a net $199.97. The equivalent 17" HP monitor runs $299.97.
So the HP has a faster processor by a smidge (or more, if you dispute the grant of the doubling), twice the RAM, three times the hard drive capacity, and an additional CR-RW drive and floppy drive, and costs $50 less; but the Cube has FireWire, an optical mouse, and what is claimed to be a better display.
gets to be like figuring the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.
Given that the head of a pin is a collection of zero-radius particles connected by virtual force-carrying particles, and that thus the possibility of zero-dimensional objects has been shown by modern science. And if something is massless, entirely noninteractive with other matter under normal circumstances, and has no dimensions, there is no reason to assume that an infinite number cannot be in any location.
As a result, the old debate can be resolved -- the main claims of those that insisted that only a finite number could dance on the head of a pin have been put into serious doubt, leaving clear the claim by their opponents that an infinite number of angels can dance on the head of a pin.
This theory is known as Punctuated Equilibruum, and is currently accepted in the world of biology.
Not nearly as universally as that statement implies; the PE-gradualism debate still continues. Just because Gould has a tall soapbox doesn't mean he's necesssarily right.
Motorola is very capable of producing 1GHz+ PowerPCs but they decided to keep them small and efficient.
Bullshit. Nobody stands still for eighteen months by design. They tried to make 550 megahertz PowerPC chips eighteen months ago, and discovered that their design couldn't hack the higher clockspeed. So they've been busy ever since working on a revision that can ramp up on speed.
And, sure, Apple's worried about bang for the buck. After all, they make their money on hardware, and the less they can pay for components, the more they make. And then they overcharge, and wonder why people don't buy a Cube with half the RAM, half the disk space, no CD-RW drive, and no included monitor for the same price as a PC with equal real-world chip performance and those things included.
email (ee'-male), n. obs. mail.
fedex (fed-ex'), n. package transported by Federal Express, United Parcel Serivce, or similar courier.
mail (male), n. 1) An electronic message. 2) obs. A fedex sent by the old U.S. Post Office.
So say that he's naked, and then move on without the useless fools that don't see it already. Or sit here wasting your time like another type of useless fool, while others move on without you.
The biggest problem here is that Quimby doesn't seem to realize that you can't take real money from people who don't have any real money. You might as well launch an assault against Hasbro's printers as steal Canadian dollars.
(Hasbro owns Parker Brothers, makers of Monopoly. See SatireWire for details on Hasbro's new printers.)
Yes, I oversimplified. I could have gone into dozens of paragraphs about comparative advantage, legal oversight, bribery costs, utility lobbying power over government, electrical outages and the effect on wire theft risk, relative ease of selling scrap copper vs. fencing electrical substations, etc.
It still comes down to it making economic sense to steal wire in much of Africa, while it makes little sense for all but a tiny fraction of U.S. citizens. Thus, theft is currently and will be for a while a problem with wiring rural Africa, while it is no longer a problem in the U.S.
Again, use the MPL 1.1, with the dual-licensing clause, and the GPL as the second license named in Exhibit A.
That's why I suggested the MPL 1.1, not the MPL 1.0. See
http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/MPL-1.1.html, section "13. MULTIPLE-LICENSED CODE".
So I'd suggest the MPL 1.1, which does pretty much the same thing but doesn't have any "library" language.
Anything about the MPL that bothers you?
Farm plants can't replace petroleum for fuel, despite your second link. Even genemod plants that produce triple of the oil of current maximum oil producers, planted on every acre of arable land on Earth, could only replace half the current demand for diesel. If you then extract ethanol and methanol by fermenting the remains and make every gas engine run on those perfectly, you still can't replace demand for gasoline. At best, you'll be extending current petroleum reserves another fifty to a hundred years, then have a massive fuel crunch.
Now, oily algae do have potential, because they can be harvested multiple times per year. The technology is immature, but at least it has the possibility of working.
Even if no new petroleum is discovered from tomorrow on, and we have no other way to make plastic from any other source, we still have enough proven reserves at current expected rates of increase in use to last fifty years. Given that the silicon chip is less than 50 years old, I don't think a minimum life of 50 years for plastic chips is something to worry about.
And, given that the quantity of plastic added to computers would be significantly less than the plastic that already ships with computers, the extra price volatility is fairly small.
Finally, copyright infringement is not theft. Theft involves taking real property from the control of the rightful owner. There is no paradigmatic relationship between theft and the act of reproduction (whether direct or indirect) for illicit profiteering.
Actually, there is such a paradigmatic relationship, but not within the property paradigms of the political systems of Blackstone or Hobbes (the English-speaking world and the rest of the world), but rather within the property paradigm of neo-Lockean theory (neo-Lockean because Locke considered copyright an extension of the royal patent system -- which the copyright systems of his era were).
Under neo-Lockean property theory, slavery, theft, involuntary taxes, conscription, and copyright infringment are all specific instances of the same crime -- nonconsentual appropriation of the labor of others. In fact, in that paradigm, physical property rights are on a weaker base than intellectual property, since intellectual property is pure labor product, while physical property is unowned resources modified by labor.
(Note that under neo-Lockean theory, one's right to one's own labor ends at death, so death+50 or death+70 copyrights are unwarranted and thus illicit interventions by the State. For practical reasons a "death-or-50, whichever is longer" and moderate-term work-for-hire copyrights can be justified with varying degrees of acceptance as a way to make contractual agreements possible.)
Intrinsic value of gold?
Most of the "value" of gold isn't intrinsic, but merely traditional. If people stopped valuing it just because it's gold, its price would drop to about $120/oz. overnight, entirely supported by its rarity and the handful of industrial applications where it is the best material.
Now, admittedly it would be a lot harder to inflate supplies of gold, but there isn't any real way to stop the government from reducing the gold-per-dollar by law, repudiating debt, delinking the dollar from gold again, or any of a dozen other ways which one can learn about by looking at the history of the gold standard.
So, the value of a gold-backed dollar is no more secure than that of one backed by nothing; continued value of each depends on political will to maintain that value.
There are anonymizing services out there that don't keep logs. Using several to access each other gives you a trail that at best will be impossible to reconstruct (because the data doesn't exist) and at worst will take months to trace back to the public library terminal you used.
Hey, thanks for the endorsement! Now can you get the moderators to mod me up?
It was independently invented long before that by at least Plato in Greece, Chuang Tzu in China, the Buddha in India, and the Australian Aboriginies (although details differed, of course).
Go ahead, wire Africa. I dare you.
Per capita GDP in Rwanda is $720. That means the scrap value of the copper in that wire is worth the effort to steal. How long do you think it will stay wired?