Even at only seven billion we can't sustainably support the people that we have. We are wholly dependent on fossil fuels, and even if the "ray of hope" from the article somehow miraculously solves our energy problems, and cuts down on carbon emissions enough to alleviate climate change, we would still be dependent on fossil fuels for fertilizer and for plastics, neither of which we can live without. Organic farming couldn't support even three billion people, and that's assuming all forests were cut down. That's also ignoring topsoil:
"In order to reduce gross agricultural topsoil loss to the natural rate of agricultural topsoil creation, the Earth's population would need to fall to about a fifth of its present value--perhaps 1.2 billion."
There are certainly political issues as well, politics is what keeps us from putting reasonable caps on population, among other things, but the fact that the population looks like it's going to level off at around ten billion should not be a source of relief. Not to mention: the ten billion number considers current technology. Sure there may be some improvements in food or energy production, but it's not like medicine stands still. I would expect corresponding improvements in lifespan which would only exacerbate the population issue.
What a stupid... The military used to discriminate against women and homosexuals, then it stopped discriminating against women, then it stopped discriminating against homosexuals (or at least it's on that path). The military used to discriminate against women with body armor, then it stopped discriminating against women with body armor... if someone asks what the next step is and you're looking to make a funny comment about it, the answer should be obvious.
As the listener, it is your obligation to make some effort to figure out what the speaker is saying before you start tossing around assumptions and insults. You are negligent and you have failed.
It's been assumed for a long time that Skype is insecure, as one would expect from a prominent closed-source solution like that. The thing that's new (to me, I hadn't heard it) is that Microsoft purchased Skype. I have no particular fondness for Microsoft but they're more upstanding than Ebay, which gave up a lot of customer information after 9/11 without warrants and denounced other companies for not doing the same.
It's possible that what payment processors did to Wikileaks is illegal in some countries, but this is ultimately unimportant. They did it anyway and the result has been the same.
"These numbers should be treated with some caution, however, as (with the exception of Christianity) there are few if any meaningful distinctions between believers and nonbelievers in Buddhism and Confucianism, which comprise more of a set of ethical values than a religion."
You're saying that there may be a larger number of people who follow a Buddhist or Confucian set of ethics than reported by these figures. A man following a Confucian ethical system would have a strong sense of duty to his parents and lord (or leadership) while a Buddhist man might feel a sense of duty to the world around him, of which he is a part. Neither has a strong stance on creationism. I don't see your point.
I remember that game (or something very much like it on the Apple II), never got to play it as much as I liked. Thanks for the port, and convincing the original devs.
The US isn't as bad as some, but US national debt is approaching $140,000 per taxpayer. All of the money of the top 1% would make only a small dent in that.
Small dent? Perhaps you are unaware of just how rich the top 1% are. They control 35% of the total wealth in the country, which leaves them just shy of $19 trillion. Given the total US national debt of $15.6 trillion, that's more than a small dent.
Obviously the BBC isn't liberal either (I don't know anything about Salon), but to a Fox News aficionado anything that isn't Murdoch owned is "the liberal media." The GP wasn't claiming that those sources were genuinely liberal, he was just pointing out that misbehavior by Chavez isn't solely a fabrication of right-wing propaganda.
If Apple brings a 7-inch pad to market that outperforms Fire and Nexus 7 I'd be interested.
It's possible that Apple could bring a better performing 7-inch tablet, but it will not beat the price/performance ratio. You're forgetting Apple's market - they never compete on price. My guess: they charge $250-$300 for something very similar to whatever's going for $200 in Android land at the time, but they add some trivial feature and play that up in the marketing as being worth the price difference. Siri 2, for example.
This is well said. Nobody wants a union, they add bureaucracy, inefficiency, and they cost their members dues, but that's where people are sometimes forced to turn when employee abuse gets out of control. They're not great, but they're better than the alternative.
The problem is that researchers usually aren't approaching a study as "Lets do xxx and see what happens, then write about that".
This is not a problem, this is part of the scientific method. You always start with a hypothesis, from that create a theory about how it would apply to the natural world, and design your experiment to disprove this theory in every way possible. Doing it the other way around leads to that correlation/causation mantra that people like to throw around: given a data set - it's easy to make tons of conclusions which may or may be true but sound great when you come up with them.
Maintaining your objectivity is one of those things that they try to beat into you at school, and this is part of it.
No, I got that. The point was that Uslan is claiming that he wanted to get away from Batman as a camp figure, and the two movies directed by Burton (and produced by Uslan) did indeed do that, but the last two movies (also produced by Uslan) were very much camp and that fact is hard to reconcile with what Uslan said.
Didn't they take out that line when it was released on video? I recall there were a couple scenes like that which were edited in order to, I guess, make the movie worse.
The point however, is that that line is explicitly a reference to the TV show from which this guy is claiming to want to distance himself and the Batman franchise.
It's certainly hard to explain the existence of Batman Forever and Batman and Robin in this context. The first two of that series, directed by Tim Burton, do show a batman that isn't all about camp.
I don't see why people get all riled up over the Adam West series though, it's consistent with the comic books of the time. Most of the super hero comics were campy back then, that was just the style.
I'll be glad to see flash go as well, but don't you think this is a little premature? Flash is still almost ubiquitous for web-based video and games, and that's not a small market. Adobe could, I'm sure, easily maintain profitability for another 3-4 years as Flash slowly declines, instead of just killing it as they seem to be doing. There's no more Linux client either, if you recall.
Flash is extremely annoying when you don't want it, but it's pretty nice to have around when you go to seek it out. Flash games seem to be where a lot of the innovation is in game making, we wouldn't have Burnout Crash, Angry Birds, all that Zynga garbage... Not all innovation is good, but a low barrier to entry does spawn new ideas and HTML 5 isn't there yet. There's no good replacement for Flash in that respect right now.
That's right, it's important that we let the Job Creators get away with anything. If we strike down all of that abusive regulation holding them back, surely they will come to our rescue.
And tax cuts, let's not forget about those - if the Job Creators only have to pay a tiny amount in taxes then the middle class will have to shoulder the burden. But that's okay because with all of the jobs and money that the Job Creators will shower down upon us, there will be plenty with which to pay the taxes.
Supply and demand doesn't apply to oil the same way it does to other products. The OPEC countries decide what the price of oil should be and they adjust how much they pump based on that. The price of oil has been very high in the last few years as a result of the Arab Spring - the Saudis needed tons of money to fend of talk of revolution in their country. If the price of oil is falling then it's because they've decided that is no longer of primary importance. You could guess their reasons: maybe they want to squash all this talk of wind and solar power, maybe they're trying to do something about Syria, etc. It's hard to say for sure.
The OPEC countries are very careful about maintaining their control over the oil supply and making sure that it isn't subject to typical market forces. One interesting consequence of this, albeit unrelated to the topic at hand, is that the United States has essentially no influence over the price of gas in their country. At least not in the long term - this is interesting, I think, because people talk sometimes about drilling in the nature preserve in Alaska or offshore drilling as a way to reduce gas prices, but doing so would have, at best, a short term effect. The OPEC countries would quickly cut their supply and stabilize the price. Since oil is a global commodity there's really no difference between "foreign oil" and "American oil" unless some major war breaks out that stops international trade.
The mayor has to have his posse, because that's the only way people will know he's a bigshot. This kind of "security" isn't really about security - it may be used a number of different ways, but none of them are there to make us safer.
I've only ever been to Washington D.C. twice, but once was in 1994 and once was in 2008 and I was shocked at what the city had been turned into in that time. The grand facades of the public buildings, with huge staircases and entrances made to accommodate large numbers of people, were completely shut off in favor of small side doors and hour-long lines of people being forced through metal detectors. In 1994 you could walk right into the rotunda in the national archives from the street, spend a minute or two looking over the pages of the constitution, and be on your way. This is what the building was to designed to do.
Meanwhile, every non-public building has been surrounded by bomb barriers for some reason. Only some kind of psychotic would actually believe that the EPA was in real danger from terrorists, this is about maintaining a culture of fear.
I would suggest relaxing. You're not going to have many more summers like this and you might as well enjoy it. This is especially true since you just graduated - most of your high school friends are probably still around, you may not get the chance to see them again.
No the difference is not filled by loans, only grants and scholarships. That's the point - the college advertises a very high price and then charges a more reasonable one by using discounts in the form of grants and scholarships. This gives the college leverage in what students it can recruit and makes it look better because people associate high sticker price with quality. Pushing this strategy is fairly new and that is why tuition has gone up so much, not because of student loans.
(Spoiler: tuition increases are not related to student loans)
Usually when I say stuff like this I try to keep it apolitical, but it's really gotten out of hand - republicans vilify every single thing that the government does nowadays (except the military, and state secrets, and domestic spying). Yes, Bloomberg is a republican politician (even if he's officially independent like Lieberman), and the WSJ is a republican mouthpiece just like every other Murdoch rag. I'll stop there, I don't want this to turn into some long rant, but come on: you can't use some twisted logic to turn lowering taxes into the solution for everything.
My tax dollars shouldn't be paying for that stuff. To each their own - I shouldn't have to fund vaccine programs, education, international response, world heritage sites, international disputes, distributing funds, or working for better labor conditions in any country other than my own.
This is an odd statement to make. Let's say that you live in the US, you are a contributing member to many groups: your municipality, your county, your state, your country, your region (North America), NATO, WIPO, WTO, WHO, the World Bank, Interpol, the G8, the UN... and many more. The largest, of course, is the world. You are a human and live on this planet along with the rest of us. Most of these serve a purpose and non of those could operate without money.
You have, seemingly capriciously, set the boundary of your responsibility to your fellow man at the border of your country, which implicitly suggests that that responsibility does exist - you don't indicate that you're the "I got mine, fuck everyone else" sort. Instead you're saying "I got mine, fuck everyone who lives on this side of a line that I've decided exists at the border of my country instead of, say, at the border of my county." That doesn't seem odd to you? I think that's strange.
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Even at only seven billion we can't sustainably support the people that we have. We are wholly dependent on fossil fuels, and even if the "ray of hope" from the article somehow miraculously solves our energy problems, and cuts down on carbon emissions enough to alleviate climate change, we would still be dependent on fossil fuels for fertilizer and for plastics, neither of which we can live without. Organic farming couldn't support even three billion people, and that's assuming all forests were cut down. That's also ignoring topsoil:
"In order to reduce gross agricultural topsoil loss to the natural rate of agricultural topsoil creation, the Earth's population would need to fall to about a fifth of its present value--perhaps 1.2 billion."
From: http://www.ecofuture.org/pop/rpts/mccluney_maxpop.html
There are certainly political issues as well, politics is what keeps us from putting reasonable caps on population, among other things, but the fact that the population looks like it's going to level off at around ten billion should not be a source of relief. Not to mention: the ten billion number considers current technology. Sure there may be some improvements in food or energy production, but it's not like medicine stands still. I would expect corresponding improvements in lifespan which would only exacerbate the population issue.
What a stupid... The military used to discriminate against women and homosexuals, then it stopped discriminating against women, then it stopped discriminating against homosexuals (or at least it's on that path). The military used to discriminate against women with body armor, then it stopped discriminating against women with body armor... if someone asks what the next step is and you're looking to make a funny comment about it, the answer should be obvious.
As the listener, it is your obligation to make some effort to figure out what the speaker is saying before you start tossing around assumptions and insults. You are negligent and you have failed.
It's been assumed for a long time that Skype is insecure, as one would expect from a prominent closed-source solution like that. The thing that's new (to me, I hadn't heard it) is that Microsoft purchased Skype. I have no particular fondness for Microsoft but they're more upstanding than Ebay, which gave up a lot of customer information after 9/11 without warrants and denounced other companies for not doing the same.
This is easily refuted:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11938320
It's possible that what payment processors did to Wikileaks is illegal in some countries, but this is ultimately unimportant. They did it anyway and the result has been the same.
"These numbers should be treated with some caution, however, as (with the exception of Christianity) there are few if any meaningful distinctions between believers and nonbelievers in Buddhism and Confucianism, which comprise more of a set of ethical values than a religion."
You're saying that there may be a larger number of people who follow a Buddhist or Confucian set of ethics than reported by these figures. A man following a Confucian ethical system would have a strong sense of duty to his parents and lord (or leadership) while a Buddhist man might feel a sense of duty to the world around him, of which he is a part. Neither has a strong stance on creationism. I don't see your point.
According to Wikipedia:
... So my comment is: What? What's going on here?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Korea
Only 53% percent of South Koreans claim any religious affiliation, and 55% of those are Buddhists.
Need some Korean person to explain.
I remember that game (or something very much like it on the Apple II), never got to play it as much as I liked. Thanks for the port, and convincing the original devs.
The US isn't as bad as some, but US national debt is approaching $140,000 per taxpayer. All of the money of the top 1% would make only a small dent in that.
Small dent? Perhaps you are unaware of just how rich the top 1% are. They control 35% of the total wealth in the country, which leaves them just shy of $19 trillion. Given the total US national debt of $15.6 trillion, that's more than a small dent.
(since when is CNN liberal?!)
Obviously the BBC isn't liberal either (I don't know anything about Salon), but to a Fox News aficionado anything that isn't Murdoch owned is "the liberal media." The GP wasn't claiming that those sources were genuinely liberal, he was just pointing out that misbehavior by Chavez isn't solely a fabrication of right-wing propaganda.
If Apple brings a 7-inch pad to market that outperforms Fire and Nexus 7 I'd be interested.
It's possible that Apple could bring a better performing 7-inch tablet, but it will not beat the price/performance ratio. You're forgetting Apple's market - they never compete on price. My guess: they charge $250-$300 for something very similar to whatever's going for $200 in Android land at the time, but they add some trivial feature and play that up in the marketing as being worth the price difference. Siri 2, for example.
This is well said. Nobody wants a union, they add bureaucracy, inefficiency, and they cost their members dues, but that's where people are sometimes forced to turn when employee abuse gets out of control. They're not great, but they're better than the alternative.
The problem is that researchers usually aren't approaching a study as "Lets do xxx and see what happens, then write about that".
This is not a problem, this is part of the scientific method. You always start with a hypothesis, from that create a theory about how it would apply to the natural world, and design your experiment to disprove this theory in every way possible. Doing it the other way around leads to that correlation/causation mantra that people like to throw around: given a data set - it's easy to make tons of conclusions which may or may be true but sound great when you come up with them.
Maintaining your objectivity is one of those things that they try to beat into you at school, and this is part of it.
Come on now, you can't start complaining that Google isn't retaining enough of your data. They might get the wrong idea.
No, I got that. The point was that Uslan is claiming that he wanted to get away from Batman as a camp figure, and the two movies directed by Burton (and produced by Uslan) did indeed do that, but the last two movies (also produced by Uslan) were very much camp and that fact is hard to reconcile with what Uslan said.
Didn't they take out that line when it was released on video? I recall there were a couple scenes like that which were edited in order to, I guess, make the movie worse.
The point however, is that that line is explicitly a reference to the TV show from which this guy is claiming to want to distance himself and the Batman franchise.
It's certainly hard to explain the existence of Batman Forever and Batman and Robin in this context. The first two of that series, directed by Tim Burton, do show a batman that isn't all about camp.
I don't see why people get all riled up over the Adam West series though, it's consistent with the comic books of the time. Most of the super hero comics were campy back then, that was just the style.
I'll be glad to see flash go as well, but don't you think this is a little premature? Flash is still almost ubiquitous for web-based video and games, and that's not a small market. Adobe could, I'm sure, easily maintain profitability for another 3-4 years as Flash slowly declines, instead of just killing it as they seem to be doing. There's no more Linux client either, if you recall.
Flash is extremely annoying when you don't want it, but it's pretty nice to have around when you go to seek it out. Flash games seem to be where a lot of the innovation is in game making, we wouldn't have Burnout Crash, Angry Birds, all that Zynga garbage... Not all innovation is good, but a low barrier to entry does spawn new ideas and HTML 5 isn't there yet. There's no good replacement for Flash in that respect right now.
That's right, it's important that we let the Job Creators get away with anything. If we strike down all of that abusive regulation holding them back, surely they will come to our rescue.
And tax cuts, let's not forget about those - if the Job Creators only have to pay a tiny amount in taxes then the middle class will have to shoulder the burden. But that's okay because with all of the jobs and money that the Job Creators will shower down upon us, there will be plenty with which to pay the taxes.
Supply and demand doesn't apply to oil the same way it does to other products. The OPEC countries decide what the price of oil should be and they adjust how much they pump based on that. The price of oil has been very high in the last few years as a result of the Arab Spring - the Saudis needed tons of money to fend of talk of revolution in their country. If the price of oil is falling then it's because they've decided that is no longer of primary importance. You could guess their reasons: maybe they want to squash all this talk of wind and solar power, maybe they're trying to do something about Syria, etc. It's hard to say for sure.
The OPEC countries are very careful about maintaining their control over the oil supply and making sure that it isn't subject to typical market forces. One interesting consequence of this, albeit unrelated to the topic at hand, is that the United States has essentially no influence over the price of gas in their country. At least not in the long term - this is interesting, I think, because people talk sometimes about drilling in the nature preserve in Alaska or offshore drilling as a way to reduce gas prices, but doing so would have, at best, a short term effect. The OPEC countries would quickly cut their supply and stabilize the price. Since oil is a global commodity there's really no difference between "foreign oil" and "American oil" unless some major war breaks out that stops international trade.
Couldn't agree more.
The mayor has to have his posse, because that's the only way people will know he's a bigshot. This kind of "security" isn't really about security - it may be used a number of different ways, but none of them are there to make us safer.
I've only ever been to Washington D.C. twice, but once was in 1994 and once was in 2008 and I was shocked at what the city had been turned into in that time. The grand facades of the public buildings, with huge staircases and entrances made to accommodate large numbers of people, were completely shut off in favor of small side doors and hour-long lines of people being forced through metal detectors. In 1994 you could walk right into the rotunda in the national archives from the street, spend a minute or two looking over the pages of the constitution, and be on your way. This is what the building was to designed to do.
Meanwhile, every non-public building has been surrounded by bomb barriers for some reason. Only some kind of psychotic would actually believe that the EPA was in real danger from terrorists, this is about maintaining a culture of fear.
I would suggest relaxing. You're not going to have many more summers like this and you might as well enjoy it. This is especially true since you just graduated - most of your high school friends are probably still around, you may not get the chance to see them again.
No the difference is not filled by loans, only grants and scholarships. That's the point - the college advertises a very high price and then charges a more reasonable one by using discounts in the form of grants and scholarships. This gives the college leverage in what students it can recruit and makes it look better because people associate high sticker price with quality. Pushing this strategy is fairly new and that is why tuition has gone up so much, not because of student loans.
This is ridiculous, I feel like I have to post some obvious correction every time some republican politician opens their mouth about money these days:
https://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/05/22/153316565/the-price-of-college-tuition-in-1-graphic
(Spoiler: tuition increases are not related to student loans)
Usually when I say stuff like this I try to keep it apolitical, but it's really gotten out of hand - republicans vilify every single thing that the government does nowadays (except the military, and state secrets, and domestic spying). Yes, Bloomberg is a republican politician (even if he's officially independent like Lieberman), and the WSJ is a republican mouthpiece just like every other Murdoch rag. I'll stop there, I don't want this to turn into some long rant, but come on: you can't use some twisted logic to turn lowering taxes into the solution for everything.
My tax dollars shouldn't be paying for that stuff. To each their own - I shouldn't have to fund vaccine programs, education, international response, world heritage sites, international disputes, distributing funds, or working for better labor conditions in any country other than my own.
This is an odd statement to make. Let's say that you live in the US, you are a contributing member to many groups: your municipality, your county, your state, your country, your region (North America), NATO, WIPO, WTO, WHO, the World Bank, Interpol, the G8, the UN... and many more. The largest, of course, is the world. You are a human and live on this planet along with the rest of us. Most of these serve a purpose and non of those could operate without money.
You have, seemingly capriciously, set the boundary of your responsibility to your fellow man at the border of your country, which implicitly suggests that that responsibility does exist - you don't indicate that you're the "I got mine, fuck everyone else" sort. Instead you're saying "I got mine, fuck everyone who lives on this side of a line that I've decided exists at the border of my country instead of, say, at the border of my county." That doesn't seem odd to you? I think that's strange.