Sci-fi is free to relax bonds. Usually it's best when it relaxes *one* or at most a *few* bonds, while keeping the rest as consistent as possible with known reality, relaxing all bonds just results in a world that makes absolutely no sense since anything can happen at any point for any reason at all (or for no reason).
The humanity in SIASL is clearly the same one we're having, in the entire first 75% of the book, everyone behaves like human beings do. The thing that *is* purposefully relaxed in the book is the existence of a human brought up by aliens with alien culture, and magical abilities thrown in to make it harder to dismiss him as "yet another prophet".
It's not a problem if sci-fi is inconsistent with the real world we know in a few specific ways. But this is more a case of being inconsistent with *itself*.
True, allthough you need easy access to some of the "new" settings too. For example digital cameras can adjust ISO-value, you can't do that with a film-based camera without swapping film.
And still, changing it rapidly is handy, hell I've even wished for iso auto-bracketing on occasion (like there already is for exposure on decent cameras except prosumer Nikons)
I'd prefer more wheels instead of yet another shift-button for the existing wheel, but I guess the shift-button is easier and/or cheaper to implement
Still gets tedious: wheel for aperture. Shift+wheel for shutter-speed. another_shift+wheel for iso. third_shift+wheel for flash-mode.
Essentially all dangerous situations are unexpected: if you where *expecting* that (for example) a child might emerge running from behind that corner, you can act so as to make that a non-dangerous thing.
But a huge fraction of traffic-deaths fall into a *tiny* collection of situations, more than two thirds of those who die in Norwegian traffic either leaves their lane and crashes into oncoming traffic, or leave the road alltogether and crash into a hard object. Merely avoiding those accidents, would save 2/3rds of the deaths.
There probably exist situations where creative problem-solving is beneficial, and you're right that humans are better at that for the immediate future.
But this is largely negated by the short reaction-times needed. These are typically split-second decisions, and human beings aren't universally good at being creative and solving complex problems in a few hundred milliseconds.
And often, a excellent solution, where the execution starts after one second, is inferior to a mediocre solution where execution starts in 50ms.
And what matters, is the average performance. If the automated car has a better reaction than that of a good driver in 95% of the dangerous situations, and a worse reaction in 5% of them, then it still comes out ahead, despite the existence of the 5%.
Also, computers and algorithms improve with time -- often rapidly so, whereas human drivers aren't likely to be all that much better in a decade.
It's way better than *average* but in no way better than -all-, there's plenty of people who've driven for decades and never had any accident whatsoever.
If you don't count accidents where someone else is 100% to blame, I've driven for 18 years and never had an accident of any kind. This is rare, but not unheard-of.
Joke is old, let it rest. The average slashdotter is in his/her thirties and married, myself I've got 3 kids and have been sexually active since I was 15. Nerds aren't as different from non-nerds as you'd think.
Anyways, having your need for sex and intimacy met does tend to make you calmer, more focused, less frustrated, happier and less aggressive.
Heinleins views on sex are hopelessly naive and adolescent, he basically never grew up. His idea of "nests" for example in Stranger in a strange land, essentially group-marriages. He assumes everyone would just get along, there'd be no internal power-plays, no jealousy, no preference, no cliques, no abuse of power - basically nothing human. Yes he handwaves a new religion to explain it, but a new religion doesn't instantly undo a million years of evolutionary adaption.
Basically, it's a teenage-fantasy-sex, and not mature sex. Not nessecarily much wrong with that, but as you yourself mature, you start to see trough it and see it as shallow and ridicolous, perhaps good for a laugh, but not something that tells you anything useful about real adult human beings and their sexlives.
Yes, it's still the worst of the major browsers, but the distance is smaller, scoring 92% of firefox is a LOT better than 40% which is the current status.
Also, it turns out there should be a lot of orgies - it tends to turn out that way in Heinleins books, particularly the books he wrote as a older guy - in those books it turns out the world would be a better place if hot young women would have more orgies with old guys.
Why is that ? I mean, there's exceptions everywhere, and in some cases it makes sense, but why "computer professional", is there some particular reason computer-work has to have tons of overtime?
I'm a "computer professional" and have been for a decade, but I've never worked unpaid overtime, and I've never been on-call without pay.
Actually, even then, the sensible policy is to document everything meticolously, and start searching for a new job. Then the day after you start your new job, you that the former employer pays what they owe you.
Yes, sure, if you don't find a new job, then that doesn't work, but even then keeping this documentation around is a smart thing to do, it's useful in any situation where you no longer have anything to gain by keeping your employer happy. This could mean after you start a new job, it could mean after they fire your entire department, it could even mean the day after you retire. (though there's limitations on how old claims can be brought, stuff happening 30 years earlier won't help you in that case)
First, you're off by a factor of thousand, so it'd really be sixty thousand tons, not sixty million tons.
Second -- this was the higherst concentration they found, in one small area of the ocean -- they are *not* saying the entire ocean has that much coffeine in it, indeed they sampled other places and found nothing (i.e. the concentration was below their limit of detection)
How does that work ? I mean, I know worker-protections are low in some jurisdictions, but unless you worked in Zimbabwe, surely there are -some- limits ?
If there's a demand for being connected, that'd be -worktime- in my jurisdiction, sure it might be what is known as "on call" i.e. you're not actively doing any work, and probably even at home, but you are available in case something -does- happen, and such forced availability is rewarded with a minimum of 20% of your regular pay.
Thus being available for a year would be 0.2 * 365 * 24 hours = 1752 hours of pay -- assuming you don't actually do -anything- that year.
But the way you describe it, it sounds more like you worked a normal work-week (or more?) and *additionally* had to be available 24x7.
That'd add up to 1800 + 1372 = 3172 hours/year, or a 175% position, which is *wildly* outside of the allowable maximum overtime.
If you still did it, they'd owe you a *shitload* - overtime is a minimum of 150% base-pay, and 200% if it's on sundays or night-time (between 22:00 and 06:00) - do the math and the result is, they should pay you slightly more than triple your base salary - and additionally go directly to jail.
I take it that's not how it actually works in your jurisdiction though.
I'm not sure which part you disagree with. It's not exactly a controversial claim that lack of dependable access to clean water is a major health-challenge in many warm regions, basically most of the ones which are both hot and poor. Diarrhea alone is estimated to have killed 2.6 million people in 2009. Dangerous drinking-water is ofcourse not the only reason for that, but it is the reason for some fraction of that. And diarrhea isn't by far the only problem with bad water, there's dozens of common causes of bad health and/or death that are linked to unsafe drinking-water, and yes, a large fraction of these are concentrated to hot areas.
According to unicef, 3000 children die every day because of lack of access to safe drinking-water.
If you've got access to safe drinking water, then heat ain't usually a problem for a healthy human. But many of the places on earth that are hot, do not, infact, have access to that, take a look at a map over the warm places on earth - notice that many of them (not all, but many!) are also really dry ?
I suggest that getting dependable access to safe drinking-water in a hot place is *not* generally easier than getting dependable access to fur and/or wood for a fire in a cold place.
So, in cold temperatures you need a coat. In warm temperatures you need a continous supply of clean water.
I don't think it's such a given which is easier. Millions of children die every year from lack of the latter, I don't think very many actually die of freezing to death.
I know. But being "used to it" does not trump physics. +40C is warmer than body-temperature. This means you're overheating.
Sweating is the only cure, thus you sweat continously. On the average, a adult human use slightly over 100W, if you lie still in the shade this can be halved while if you exert yourself it can easily be triple.
Thus the more you move, the more profusely you sweat and the more you tend to overheat. No amount of getting used to it can change that basic fact.
It takes 0.75Kwh to evaporate one liter of water, so at a minimum you'll need to sweat on the order of 3-4 litres a day to at normal body-temperature in +40
At high levels of physical activity you'd easily sweat a liter an hour or more.
Basically, they do things cheaper but dirtier. Having lax security-standards and essentially no pollution-standards saves money (atleast in the short run), but means more worker-injuries and deaths, and more pollution. Industry certainly explains most of it, but the inefficiencies exist in private homes as well.
Burning oil in central heating to heat a building that is poorly insulated means that the typical chinese city-apartment needs 5 times the energy, and pollutes infinitely more, compared to a better-insulated Norwegian apartment that is heated with a heat-pump driven by hydropower-derived electricity, for example.
Why do USA pollute twice as much as Sweden, for each dollar of GDP produced ? The reason is essentially the same, and again the blame is shared between industry and private households.
American homes (on the average) are poorly isolated, and insufficiently air-tight, they also tend to lack balanced ventilation, and even if they do have that, it's a rarity to see heat-exchangers.
For survival, that's mostly true. A healthy human being will generally don't die of heat if he can stay in the shade and be sufficiently hydrated. (and the technology for "shade" is even simpler than for "heat")
I didn't really mean merely survival though. It's true you survive +40C lying around in the shade and drinking a lot, but you're not much good for anything and you're unlikely to enjoy it. And that's only 15C above the optimum temperature for humans.
To improve on that, you need high-tech. Meanwhile, improving on your comfort 15C below optimum temperature requires some simple garments.
Their per-capita GDP is only about 1/7th of the EU, thus you could say pro dollar of valure created, China pollutes 7 times as much as the average EU country.
USA pollutes almost twice as much pro dollar of value created as the average European country, and come of even worse than that if you compared to EU-countries of comparable wealth.
True enough, but it's also true that the tech needed to keep a body warm are *much* simpler than those needed to cool it.
Furs, fabrics, wooden houses, controlled-fires are all inventions that go back to the stone-age while any artificial cooling was invented like a hundred years ago and *still* isn't attainable for much of humanity.
The universe has existed for billions of years. We've recorded measurements on parts of it for a few hundred years tops. Therefore any and all data-series we have for anything whatsoever are junk and not representative since they cover such a minute fraction of the history.
It's worse than that: if they where consistently wrong, they'd actually be useful since you'd come out ahead by doing the opposite thing from what they recommend.
No, they're claims are random noise. If you ask them to pick 10 winners and 10 losers for the next month, then check, you'll find that on the average their "winners" did about as well as their "loosers".
Indeed. Congratulations on spotting one of the many imbalances in the current system.
Indeed this is the status quo: if something is patented in one country, other countries have agreed that they too will honor the patent. Yet if something is *invalidated* in one country, there is no requirement that this invalidation is honored elsewhere. And this is true despite it being easy, simple and cheap to get a patent, compared to the enormous expense and close scrutiny that goes into getting one invalidated.
In other news: why does the berne convention only specify that countries should have a minimum length of copyright, and that countries that have too *short* protection are in violation - while saying nothing at all about the maximum duration and allowing countries to set copyright to a million years with no issues. Where's the -balance- in that ?
I was recommending stopping the knee-jerk reaction of slapping a "socialist" stamp on any measure that would restore some minimum of balance between employees and employers.
USA has the most skewed income-distribution of any wealthy first-world country. A huge part of the reason is that your laws are very much tilted in favour of those with capital, and in disfavour of those whose primary capital are your own skills. (i.e. employees)
Yeah, in principle sure. But here's the thing: increased specialization and mass-production means that it's not just you who can't build a good-quality window with your own two hands and basic tools. Indeed *nobody* can. The only way to build a modern window at a reasonable cost, is to make a *shitload* of them at the same time.
The objection that they can then charge anything is valid - if there's insufficient competition in the market. This is a good reason to be real vigilant about anti-trust.
Yeah, I know less about farming than my grandfather did. But I know a lot more about photography, about computer-programming, about electronics, about user-interfaces, about a whole lot of things that are relevant in my world, but wasn't in his.
People learn what they need to live in the world they live in. News at 11.
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Sci-fi is free to relax bonds. Usually it's best when it relaxes *one* or at most a *few* bonds, while keeping the rest as consistent as possible with known reality, relaxing all bonds just results in a world that makes absolutely no sense since anything can happen at any point for any reason at all (or for no reason).
The humanity in SIASL is clearly the same one we're having, in the entire first 75% of the book, everyone behaves like human beings do. The thing that *is* purposefully relaxed in the book is the existence of a human brought up by aliens with alien culture, and magical abilities thrown in to make it harder to dismiss him as "yet another prophet".
It's not a problem if sci-fi is inconsistent with the real world we know in a few specific ways. But this is more a case of being inconsistent with *itself*.
True, allthough you need easy access to some of the "new" settings too. For example digital cameras can adjust ISO-value, you can't do that with a film-based camera without swapping film.
And still, changing it rapidly is handy, hell I've even wished for iso auto-bracketing on occasion (like there already is for exposure on decent cameras except prosumer Nikons)
I'd prefer more wheels instead of yet another shift-button for the existing wheel, but I guess the shift-button is easier and/or cheaper to implement
Still gets tedious: wheel for aperture. Shift+wheel for shutter-speed. another_shift+wheel for iso. third_shift+wheel for flash-mode.
Essentially all dangerous situations are unexpected: if you where *expecting* that (for example) a child might emerge running from behind that corner, you can act so as to make that a non-dangerous thing.
But a huge fraction of traffic-deaths fall into a *tiny* collection of situations, more than two thirds of those who die in Norwegian traffic either leaves their lane and crashes into oncoming traffic, or leave the road alltogether and crash into a hard object. Merely avoiding those accidents, would save 2/3rds of the deaths.
There probably exist situations where creative problem-solving is beneficial, and you're right that humans are better at that for the immediate future.
But this is largely negated by the short reaction-times needed. These are typically split-second decisions, and human beings aren't universally good at being creative and solving complex problems in a few hundred milliseconds.
And often, a excellent solution, where the execution starts after one second, is inferior to a mediocre solution where execution starts in 50ms.
And what matters, is the average performance. If the automated car has a better reaction than that of a good driver in 95% of the dangerous situations, and a worse reaction in 5% of them, then it still comes out ahead, despite the existence of the 5%.
Also, computers and algorithms improve with time -- often rapidly so, whereas human drivers aren't likely to be all that much better in a decade.
It's way better than *average* but in no way better than -all-, there's plenty of people who've driven for decades and never had any accident whatsoever.
If you don't count accidents where someone else is 100% to blame, I've driven for 18 years and never had an accident of any kind. This is rare, but not unheard-of.
Joke is old, let it rest. The average slashdotter is in his/her thirties and married, myself I've got 3 kids and have been sexually active since I was 15. Nerds aren't as different from non-nerds as you'd think.
Anyways, having your need for sex and intimacy met does tend to make you calmer, more focused, less frustrated, happier and less aggressive.
Heinleins views on sex are hopelessly naive and adolescent, he basically never grew up. His idea of "nests" for example in Stranger in a strange land, essentially group-marriages. He assumes everyone would just get along, there'd be no internal power-plays, no jealousy, no preference, no cliques, no abuse of power - basically nothing human. Yes he handwaves a new religion to explain it, but a new religion doesn't instantly undo a million years of evolutionary adaption.
Basically, it's a teenage-fantasy-sex, and not mature sex. Not nessecarily much wrong with that, but as you yourself mature, you start to see trough it and see it as shallow and ridicolous, perhaps good for a laugh, but not something that tells you anything useful about real adult human beings and their sexlives.
They're behind the curve for sure, but it *is* a significant step forward.
IE9 scores 138. Firefox 14 scores 345. IE10 scores 319.
Yes, it's still the worst of the major browsers, but the distance is smaller, scoring 92% of firefox is a LOT better than 40% which is the current status.
Also, it turns out there should be a lot of orgies - it tends to turn out that way in Heinleins books, particularly the books he wrote as a older guy - in those books it turns out the world would be a better place if hot young women would have more orgies with old guys.
Why is that ? I mean, there's exceptions everywhere, and in some cases it makes sense, but why "computer professional", is there some particular reason computer-work has to have tons of overtime?
I'm a "computer professional" and have been for a decade, but I've never worked unpaid overtime, and I've never been on-call without pay.
I guess the big difference is that unemployment is 1.7% generally, and about half that among people with a degree. That, and we've got worker-protection laws which are balanced, and they sting enough that even in times of higher unemployment, things rarely get -that- bad. (healthcare is universal ofcourse, so -that- worry doesn't exist, that's true in essentially all countries on par with USA in wealth. http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/06/heres-a-map-of-the-countries-that-provide-universal-health-care-americas-still-not-on-it/259153/ )
Actually, even then, the sensible policy is to document everything meticolously, and start searching for a new job. Then the day after you start your new job, you that the former employer pays what they owe you.
Yes, sure, if you don't find a new job, then that doesn't work, but even then keeping this documentation around is a smart thing to do, it's useful in any situation where you no longer have anything to gain by keeping your employer happy. This could mean after you start a new job, it could mean after they fire your entire department, it could even mean the day after you retire. (though there's limitations on how old claims can be brought, stuff happening 30 years earlier won't help you in that case)
First, you're off by a factor of thousand, so it'd really be sixty thousand tons, not sixty million tons.
Second -- this was the higherst concentration they found, in one small area of the ocean -- they are *not* saying the entire ocean has that much coffeine in it, indeed they sampled other places and found nothing (i.e. the concentration was below their limit of detection)
How does that work ? I mean, I know worker-protections are low in some jurisdictions, but unless you worked in Zimbabwe, surely there are -some- limits ?
If there's a demand for being connected, that'd be -worktime- in my jurisdiction, sure it might be what is known as "on call" i.e. you're not actively doing any work, and probably even at home, but you are available in case something -does- happen, and such forced availability is rewarded with a minimum of 20% of your regular pay.
Thus being available for a year would be 0.2 * 365 * 24 hours = 1752 hours of pay -- assuming you don't actually do -anything- that year.
But the way you describe it, it sounds more like you worked a normal work-week (or more?) and *additionally* had to be available 24x7.
That'd add up to 1800 + 1372 = 3172 hours/year, or a 175% position, which is *wildly* outside of the allowable maximum overtime.
If you still did it, they'd owe you a *shitload* - overtime is a minimum of 150% base-pay, and 200% if it's on sundays or night-time (between 22:00 and 06:00) - do the math and the result is, they should pay you slightly more than triple your base salary - and additionally go directly to jail.
I take it that's not how it actually works in your jurisdiction though.
I'm not sure which part you disagree with. It's not exactly a controversial claim that lack of dependable access to clean water is a major health-challenge in many warm regions, basically most of the ones which are both hot and poor. Diarrhea alone is estimated to have killed 2.6 million people in 2009. Dangerous drinking-water is ofcourse not the only reason for that, but it is the reason for some fraction of that. And diarrhea isn't by far the only problem with bad water, there's dozens of common causes of bad health and/or death that are linked to unsafe drinking-water, and yes, a large fraction of these are concentrated to hot areas.
According to unicef, 3000 children die every day because of lack of access to safe drinking-water.
If you've got access to safe drinking water, then heat ain't usually a problem for a healthy human. But many of the places on earth that are hot, do not, infact, have access to that, take a look at a map over the warm places on earth - notice that many of them (not all, but many!) are also really dry ?
I suggest that getting dependable access to safe drinking-water in a hot place is *not* generally easier than getting dependable access to fur and/or wood for a fire in a cold place.
So, in cold temperatures you need a coat. In warm temperatures you need a continous supply of clean water.
I don't think it's such a given which is easier. Millions of children die every year from lack of the latter, I don't think very many actually die of freezing to death.
I know. But being "used to it" does not trump physics. +40C is warmer than body-temperature. This means you're overheating.
Sweating is the only cure, thus you sweat continously. On the average, a adult human use slightly over 100W, if you lie still in the shade this can be halved while if you exert yourself it can easily be triple.
Thus the more you move, the more profusely you sweat and the more you tend to overheat. No amount of getting used to it can change that basic fact.
It takes 0.75Kwh to evaporate one liter of water, so at a minimum you'll need to sweat on the order of 3-4 litres a day to at normal body-temperature in +40
At high levels of physical activity you'd easily sweat a liter an hour or more.
Basically, they do things cheaper but dirtier. Having lax security-standards and essentially no pollution-standards saves money (atleast in the short run), but means more worker-injuries and deaths, and more pollution. Industry certainly explains most of it, but the inefficiencies exist in private homes as well.
Burning oil in central heating to heat a building that is poorly insulated means that the typical chinese city-apartment needs 5 times the energy, and pollutes infinitely more, compared to a better-insulated Norwegian apartment that is heated with a heat-pump driven by hydropower-derived electricity, for example.
Why do USA pollute twice as much as Sweden, for each dollar of GDP produced ? The reason is essentially the same, and again the blame is shared between industry and private households.
American homes (on the average) are poorly isolated, and insufficiently air-tight, they also tend to lack balanced ventilation, and even if they do have that, it's a rarity to see heat-exchangers.
For survival, that's mostly true. A healthy human being will generally don't die of heat if he can stay in the shade and be sufficiently hydrated. (and the technology for "shade" is even simpler than for "heat")
I didn't really mean merely survival though. It's true you survive +40C lying around in the shade and drinking a lot, but you're not much good for anything and you're unlikely to enjoy it. And that's only 15C above the optimum temperature for humans.
To improve on that, you need high-tech. Meanwhile, improving on your comfort 15C below optimum temperature requires some simple garments.
That illustrates the point nicely, actually. While not as bad as USA, chinas per capita CO2-emissions now matches those of the EU:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jul/18/china-average-europe-carbon-footprint
Their per-capita GDP is only about 1/7th of the EU, thus you could say pro dollar of valure created, China pollutes 7 times as much as the average EU country.
USA pollutes almost twice as much pro dollar of value created as the average European country, and come of even worse than that if you compared to EU-countries of comparable wealth.
True enough, but it's also true that the tech needed to keep a body warm are *much* simpler than those needed to cool it.
Furs, fabrics, wooden houses, controlled-fires are all inventions that go back to the stone-age while any artificial cooling was invented like a hundred years ago and *still* isn't attainable for much of humanity.
The universe has existed for billions of years. We've recorded measurements on parts of it for a few hundred years tops. Therefore any and all data-series we have for anything whatsoever are junk and not representative since they cover such a minute fraction of the history.
The thing is, they -really- want analogue-out and inputs for audio, to make it 50 cents cheaper to make accessories. USB doesn't support that.
It's worse than that: if they where consistently wrong, they'd actually be useful since you'd come out ahead by doing the opposite thing from what they recommend.
No, they're claims are random noise. If you ask them to pick 10 winners and 10 losers for the next month, then check, you'll find that on the average their "winners" did about as well as their "loosers".
Indeed. Congratulations on spotting one of the many imbalances in the current system.
Indeed this is the status quo: if something is patented in one country, other countries have agreed that they too will honor the patent. Yet if something is *invalidated* in one country, there is no requirement that this invalidation is honored elsewhere. And this is true despite it being easy, simple and cheap to get a patent, compared to the enormous expense and close scrutiny that goes into getting one invalidated.
In other news: why does the berne convention only specify that countries should have a minimum length of copyright, and that countries that have too *short* protection are in violation - while saying nothing at all about the maximum duration and allowing countries to set copyright to a million years with no issues. Where's the -balance- in that ?
Reading-comprehension-problem ?
I wasn't recommending socialism.
I was recommending stopping the knee-jerk reaction of slapping a "socialist" stamp on any measure that would restore some minimum of balance between employees and employers.
USA has the most skewed income-distribution of any wealthy first-world country. A huge part of the reason is that your laws are very much tilted in favour of those with capital, and in disfavour of those whose primary capital are your own skills. (i.e. employees)
Yeah, in principle sure. But here's the thing: increased specialization and mass-production means that it's not just you who can't build a good-quality window with your own two hands and basic tools. Indeed *nobody* can. The only way to build a modern window at a reasonable cost, is to make a *shitload* of them at the same time.
The objection that they can then charge anything is valid - if there's insufficient competition in the market. This is a good reason to be real vigilant about anti-trust.
Yeah, I know less about farming than my grandfather did. But I know a lot more about photography, about computer-programming, about electronics, about user-interfaces, about a whole lot of things that are relevant in my world, but wasn't in his.
People learn what they need to live in the world they live in. News at 11.