It is a well-known fact that the Irish Potato Famine wasn't caused by a lack of potatoes; rather it was an overabundance of Irishmen.
Seriously, though, agriculture is a risky proposition. Prior to European conquest of Africa, the natives largely existed as hunter-gatherers. As such they tended to just eke out an existence on what little food they could find. Also, humans naturally become infertile when they're not fed enough, so during a time of scarcity the population stabilized itself, with the standard very-young and very-old dying off.
The Europeans brought agriculture to Africa. (I'm talking large-scale, tied-to-one-patch-of-dirt agriculture here.) This has upset the "natural balance" by creating subsistence farming. People do tremendously well during good years, but are devastated that much more when a drought comes along. The population swells greatly due to the static nature of life and the need for people to work the farms. Those same populations are routinely eviscerated by famine every decade or so. (Not to mention the social problems as formerly nomadic people have been lumped together in aribtrarty boundaries drawn by their conquerors.) For some reason Sally Struthers seems to think the solution to this problem is to provide more food. It's a short-term fix but it's also a vicious cycle.
Agriculture can bring tremendous profit and clearly supply much more food than the hunter-gatherer lifestlye. But the risks are greater, too, especially once your society becomes dependent on large-scale farming. I saw on Discovery channel the speculation that years of poor harvests led to the extincion of some Middle American people around 1200 AD. (Mayans? I can't remember.) In modern times, we see these risks introducing themselves in new ways, such as mad cow disease, brought about by imposing a cannibalistic diet on cows, which in turn happens because of market pressures to keep producing cheaper meat for an increasing number of increasingly hungrier (to the point of obesity) population. Something has to give. We are also seeing the depletion of natural fish stocks, and the "latest study" says that farmed fish contain much more mercury and PCBs than wild fish.
I liked the CNet article a lot; they could have mentioned SQL Slammer's apparent role in the blackouts last year. I guess that hasn't been explicitly proven and overty recognized, it would probably be too costly to Microsoft's share value, and by extension the economy, and by extension Bush's reelection strategy.
If you read down that thread, I posted a longer, more rational explanation of my views on the whole nuclear issue in response to the AC. If you're interested.
Abusing my right to speak? What the fuck eoes that mean? I didn't realize I had to raise my hand and wait for you to call on me. Anyway, speech does not contstrain action, that takes more action. Just because you don't like what I'm saying doesn't mean I'm abusing you, "the system," or anyone.
I heard Zeppelin's "Tangerine" that way once. The original is pretty mellow, but the muzak version was like being in a pink padded cell with nothing but an ice pick to gouge my brain out of my left ear and end the suffering.
Alright, this is a great point. Allow me to try to explain myself.
Coal power is not going away. Not without a complete sea change. Something akin to World War III, except I think that after a World War III coal power would be just as prevalent, only not as much coal would be burnt because there would be so many fewer people burning it.
Nuclear power; well realistically the genie is out of the bottle, but aside from France and Japan it might be contained. A nuclear reactor is inherently dangerous for the same reason that a nuclear bomb is inherently dangerous. Maybe the so-called nuclear reactor is a part of some secret weapons program. Middle eastern countries simply aren't allowed to have nuclear power. Nuclear power adds a dangerous, potentially catastrophic new dimension.
It's really no surprise that there are tremendous negatives to burning coal. Look at graphic arts from the 30s, the black smoke pouring from the smokestack was proudly displayed as a symbol of progress and pride in industry. It's only recently, by which I mean within the last century, that society has come face to face with just how small and finite the world has become. Decisions that were made hundreds or thousands of years ago were smart then but disastrous now. There's simply no way to know that (just as an example) all the oil we're pumping out of the Earth won't lead to some horrible geologic catastrophe in a century or two. On the other hand, had we not found oil, whales might be extinct. It's tough to come up with a real cost-benefit analysis when the benefits are so obvious and the costs may remain hidden for two hundred years. Asbestos is a more modern example, and who knew in 1902 that the legal system would be able to pry so much wealth away?
Anyway, I feel like I've wandered off a bit. Here's the thrust of my argument: If you can accept that we will continue to burn coal for the forseeable future, then what's the point of nuclear? Maybe it is cleaner, but it will never eliminate coal completely. And surely it could not displace oil, which has its own problems.
Ultimately, we have the same goal, right? Clean power. I'll even grant that in the next thousand years, nuclear would be cleaner. (Though at ten thousand years, nuclear will still be a mess and coal probably won't.) However, solar, geothermal, or wind would be cleaner still. So rather than put all this R&D into nuclear power, which happens to have the negative opportunity cost called worrying about nuclear weapons proliferation, let's focus our non-fossil fuel energy program on less potentially disastrous alternatives.
Hanford's tanks full of nuclear goo are going to rupture "any minute now." The problem with nuclear waste is that "any minute now" means "any time in the next 20,000 years."
It's not so much the reactors that scare me, it's what do we do with the shit they create? With coal, we get pollution and global warming. With nuclera, nobody really seems to know what the fuck to do with the stuff.
But you are right, any problems at Hanford stem from making nuclear bombs, not from nuclear power. Nulcear power is safer, but I think a lot of that is because it's so new, and because the ramifications of failure are so significant. Honestly I'm not convinced there's enough data to really tell, statistically, if nuclear power is safe. Kinda like how the Concorde went from the safest plane to by far the most unsafe after just one crash.
I dunno, maybe nuclear is the best. No more dams, no more air pollution. It's really jsut the waste that worries me.
For it to be feasible, the number of false positives has to be very, very low. If more than say a tenth of one percent of travellers come up "red," then it's broken.
Let's say that at any given time there are 60,000 people flying in the USA. On Sep. 11, 2001, 19 of those people, or.03% were "red." Since then, there have been a handful of other "red" passengers (shoe bomber, maybe one or two others.)
Here's a test that I bet will never be performed: Feed in all the data we had about Mohammed Atta et. al, from Sep 11th. See what color the system flags them. If it's not "red" than what makes anyone think this system will be of any help? And while you're at it, feed in the data for everybody on those flights. Any false positives?
We are looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack, except we're looking in the wrong haystack since, as others have pointed out, a 9-11 style takeover won't succeed these days, since (1) air marshalls have guns and (2) the passengers will fight back.
This is a pork barrel project, it's just that the normal pork we're all used to has been replaced with new Homeland Security flavored pork.
I happen to think my fear of "all things nuclear" is eminently rational, thank you very much.
Chernobyl? No cause for alarm... Three Mile Island? Hiroshima anyone? What about a "dirty bomb?"
You're right, there's absolutely nothing to worry about! How impetuous of me to not simply take the man in the suit's word for it.
Oh, and once you're done telling me how safe modern nuclear reactors are, let's go on the tour of Hanford together, okay? I'm counting on you to hold my hand during the scary parts, like when the nuclear waste enters the water table.
Isn't that what Sony has been doing for like five years? With all their vaio stuff that works with the camera and the minidisc recorder, just plug it in and cool stuff happens. (Which Sony can pull off because they've designed all the hardware) Though I think they've held on to minidisc, or at least kept their head in the sand as to its extreme niche position, for those same five years.
That sony stuff always looks sexy, but I don't think it works too well. I hear a lot of horror stories about vaios. They work fine, but then if they decide to act up, you are SOL baby. Just my impression. I have never owned one.
Carly can't leave yet, she and the board haven't completed her valuectomoy of all that HP stock yet!
I like that word, valuectomoy. Please, everyone start using it! Full disclosure, it's nowhere near as good as Rich Hall talking about the dangers of food-shaped refrigerator magnets being eaten by children. "Last year doctors performed over 800 emergency magnectomies." HA!
Microsoft has never written software that forces a customer to use specific hardware.
Ah, quite the contrary. Microsoft forces specific hardware manufacturers to only use Microsoft software.
If Microsoft could get WMA to catch on bigtime, here's what would happen:
The licensing cost for WMA technology would become so high that it would only be affordable when purchased at "OEM volume." Part of the discount would include requiremnents that players supporing WMA can't support other competing codecs like AAC or Real or (dare I say it... I dare!) Ogg Vorbis.
In other words, we would be limited to Microsoft-based file formats, Limited compatibility with non-Windows OS, DRM, and so on. You're trying to tell me that the bright side is that we could get a player from any number of manufacturers, and I'm telling you you're wearing glasses so rosy this Apple Lisa looks like a strawberry iMac.
This, my anonymous coward, is Microsoft's business strategy. It is called "embrace and extend."
They've "embraced" the mp3 player and are now trying to "extend" their Windows monopoly to include that piece of the hardware market. For this nut to turn, the demand for their entry at the pony show, the WMA format, has to be a hell of a lot stronger than it is now.
I will not speculate on how Microsoft might pull that off, however if anyone from Microsoft is listening I'm willing to demonstrate for a mere six figures.
Nobody ever calls the publisher of a book and says "My book got damaged from normal wear and tear, can you send me a new one?" Obviuosly, you just go buy a new book; you should have taken care of the one you paid for in the first place.
Why should this be different for a CD? I was reinstaling Vice City (known to be a real bitch to copy; I think it requires some sort of emulation to make a working backup) and my roommate had left the CD sitting in a big pile of other CDs, cat hair, and random credit card receipts from the bar. Obviously it wasn't in the best shape. But is that the game company's fault?
Look, having to put the CD in fuck all annoying, and I have either a NoCD or a daemon image to circumvent the physical CD requirement for every game I play, but I don't see what the big problem is. If your copy of "Finding Nemo's Buttplug" DVD gets smeared with peanut butter and the dog plays fetch with it, YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO BUY A NEW ONE. Why should Disney sell you a new one, at reduced cost, just because you have taken the concept of living in a disposable society to heart?
I'm sorry but I don't think software publishers are behaving unreasonably. Now, are these protection mechanisms effective? Hell no. Are game pusblishers wasting their time, and mine? Yes. But the fact remains that if you take care of the CD, the game will last. Far better than a game on floppy disks would last, esp. the early Ultima games where you had to pop the floppy out of the drive AS SOON AS you died or your character died, permanently.
What do you do when, fifteen years down the road, you can't read the CD anymore because of physical degredation of the media?
What do you do when, fifty years from now, you can't read your paperbacks for the same reason?
Personally I hope librarians are working on a solution, because frankly it's in the industry's interests to have you re-purchase everything you've already bought.
The closest analogy I can see is dialing a random phone number and making random noises when they pick up. That's basically legal, though you shouldn't call No Such Agency, because it's also very legal for them to become very interested in you for doing that. Actually it's perfectly legal for them to be spying on you right now, but they probably aren't, because you haven't been opening random UDP connections to their IP block, where ALL connections are HEAVILY monitored. They have something like ten-thousand routers; they're definitely using them.
What about collapsing to mono, downsampling to 8 kHz, and dithering to 8 bits? Would you call that another "way of storing samples"?
I would say it's a way of storing many fewer samples (perhaps an order of magnitude fewer), yet keeping enough samples that the data is still statistically significant.
The grandparent is I suppose incorrect in the assertion that "CD audio is not a lossy compression scheme" for indeed it is. Statistically, though, the data loss is not within the tine-frequency domain of human perception. It's a way of storing samples, enough samples to effectively recreate flawlessly the analog source.
you mean you can't encode files in Apple's AAC format or whatever it is that the iPod plays? You can only get files in that format from the iTunes store?
mp3 sucks, we need to either settle on a better format or try to include ubiquitous support for other formats.
Or maybe we (by which I mean humanity) will establish a penal colony on the moon and send political dissidents there to work the mines. (Okay so maybe working the mines is a bit Klingon, but you see what I'm saying.)
Slashdot Mirror
It is a well-known fact that the Irish Potato Famine wasn't caused by a lack of potatoes; rather it was an overabundance of Irishmen.
Seriously, though, agriculture is a risky proposition. Prior to European conquest of Africa, the natives largely existed as hunter-gatherers. As such they tended to just eke out an existence on what little food they could find. Also, humans naturally become infertile when they're not fed enough, so during a time of scarcity the population stabilized itself, with the standard very-young and very-old dying off.
The Europeans brought agriculture to Africa. (I'm talking large-scale, tied-to-one-patch-of-dirt agriculture here.) This has upset the "natural balance" by creating subsistence farming. People do tremendously well during good years, but are devastated that much more when a drought comes along. The population swells greatly due to the static nature of life and the need for people to work the farms. Those same populations are routinely eviscerated by famine every decade or so. (Not to mention the social problems as formerly nomadic people have been lumped together in aribtrarty boundaries drawn by their conquerors.) For some reason Sally Struthers seems to think the solution to this problem is to provide more food. It's a short-term fix but it's also a vicious cycle.
Agriculture can bring tremendous profit and clearly supply much more food than the hunter-gatherer lifestlye. But the risks are greater, too, especially once your society becomes dependent on large-scale farming. I saw on Discovery channel the speculation that years of poor harvests led to the extincion of some Middle American people around 1200 AD. (Mayans? I can't remember.) In modern times, we see these risks introducing themselves in new ways, such as mad cow disease, brought about by imposing a cannibalistic diet on cows, which in turn happens because of market pressures to keep producing cheaper meat for an increasing number of increasingly hungrier (to the point of obesity) population. Something has to give. We are also seeing the depletion of natural fish stocks, and the "latest study" says that farmed fish contain much more mercury and PCBs than wild fish.
I liked the CNet article a lot; they could have mentioned SQL Slammer's apparent role in the blackouts last year. I guess that hasn't been explicitly proven and overty recognized, it would probably be too costly to Microsoft's share value, and by extension the economy, and by extension Bush's reelection strategy.
If you read down that thread, I posted a longer, more rational explanation of my views on the whole nuclear issue in response to the AC. If you're interested.
Abusing my right to speak? What the fuck eoes that mean? I didn't realize I had to raise my hand and wait for you to call on me. Anyway, speech does not contstrain action, that takes more action. Just because you don't like what I'm saying doesn't mean I'm abusing you, "the system," or anyone.
if your posts are worth reading, why are they at Score:0?
I heard Zeppelin's "Tangerine" that way once. The original is pretty mellow, but the muzak version was like being in a pink padded cell with nothing but an ice pick to gouge my brain out of my left ear and end the suffering.
Alright, this is a great point. Allow me to try to explain myself.
Coal power is not going away. Not without a complete sea change. Something akin to World War III, except I think that after a World War III coal power would be just as prevalent, only not as much coal would be burnt because there would be so many fewer people burning it.
Nuclear power; well realistically the genie is out of the bottle, but aside from France and Japan it might be contained. A nuclear reactor is inherently dangerous for the same reason that a nuclear bomb is inherently dangerous. Maybe the so-called nuclear reactor is a part of some secret weapons program. Middle eastern countries simply aren't allowed to have nuclear power. Nuclear power adds a dangerous, potentially catastrophic new dimension.
It's really no surprise that there are tremendous negatives to burning coal. Look at graphic arts from the 30s, the black smoke pouring from the smokestack was proudly displayed as a symbol of progress and pride in industry. It's only recently, by which I mean within the last century, that society has come face to face with just how small and finite the world has become. Decisions that were made hundreds or thousands of years ago were smart then but disastrous now. There's simply no way to know that (just as an example) all the oil we're pumping out of the Earth won't lead to some horrible geologic catastrophe in a century or two. On the other hand, had we not found oil, whales might be extinct. It's tough to come up with a real cost-benefit analysis when the benefits are so obvious and the costs may remain hidden for two hundred years. Asbestos is a more modern example, and who knew in 1902 that the legal system would be able to pry so much wealth away?
Anyway, I feel like I've wandered off a bit. Here's the thrust of my argument: If you can accept that we will continue to burn coal for the forseeable future, then what's the point of nuclear? Maybe it is cleaner, but it will never eliminate coal completely. And surely it could not displace oil, which has its own problems.
Ultimately, we have the same goal, right? Clean power. I'll even grant that in the next thousand years, nuclear would be cleaner. (Though at ten thousand years, nuclear will still be a mess and coal probably won't.) However, solar, geothermal, or wind would be cleaner still. So rather than put all this R&D into nuclear power, which happens to have the negative opportunity cost called worrying about nuclear weapons proliferation, let's focus our non-fossil fuel energy program on less potentially disastrous alternatives.
Amen brother. The last Kodak camera I owned was the Kodak Disc, and images had about the same quality as a 20K jpeg.
Hanford's tanks full of nuclear goo are going to rupture "any minute now." The problem with nuclear waste is that "any minute now" means "any time in the next 20,000 years."
It's not so much the reactors that scare me, it's what do we do with the shit they create? With coal, we get pollution and global warming. With nuclera, nobody really seems to know what the fuck to do with the stuff.
But you are right, any problems at Hanford stem from making nuclear bombs, not from nuclear power. Nulcear power is safer, but I think a lot of that is because it's so new, and because the ramifications of failure are so significant. Honestly I'm not convinced there's enough data to really tell, statistically, if nuclear power is safe. Kinda like how the Concorde went from the safest plane to by far the most unsafe after just one crash.
I dunno, maybe nuclear is the best. No more dams, no more air pollution. It's really jsut the waste that worries me.
First off, I strongly doubt this system can work.
.03% were "red." Since then, there have been a handful of other "red" passengers (shoe bomber, maybe one or two others.)
For it to be feasible, the number of false positives has to be very, very low. If more than say a tenth of one percent of travellers come up "red," then it's broken.
Let's say that at any given time there are 60,000 people flying in the USA. On Sep. 11, 2001, 19 of those people, or
Here's a test that I bet will never be performed: Feed in all the data we had about Mohammed Atta et. al, from Sep 11th. See what color the system flags them. If it's not "red" than what makes anyone think this system will be of any help? And while you're at it, feed in the data for everybody on those flights. Any false positives?
We are looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack, except we're looking in the wrong haystack since, as others have pointed out, a 9-11 style takeover won't succeed these days, since (1) air marshalls have guns and (2) the passengers will fight back.
This is a pork barrel project, it's just that the normal pork we're all used to has been replaced with new Homeland Security flavored pork.
I happen to think my fear of "all things nuclear" is eminently rational, thank you very much.
Chernobyl? No cause for alarm... Three Mile Island? Hiroshima anyone? What about a "dirty bomb?"
You're right, there's absolutely nothing to worry about! How impetuous of me to not simply take the man in the suit's word for it.
Oh, and once you're done telling me how safe modern nuclear reactors are, let's go on the tour of Hanford together, okay? I'm counting on you to hold my hand during the scary parts, like when the nuclear waste enters the water table.
seriously? what's so great about wma format? can't you just convert it to MP3 or something? Or get the music in a different format in the first place?
Isn't that what Sony has been doing for like five years? With all their vaio stuff that works with the camera and the minidisc recorder, just plug it in and cool stuff happens. (Which Sony can pull off because they've designed all the hardware) Though I think they've held on to minidisc, or at least kept their head in the sand as to its extreme niche position, for those same five years.
That sony stuff always looks sexy, but I don't think it works too well. I hear a lot of horror stories about vaios. They work fine, but then if they decide to act up, you are SOL baby. Just my impression. I have never owned one.
Carly can't leave yet, she and the board haven't completed her valuectomoy of all that HP stock yet!
I like that word, valuectomoy. Please, everyone start using it! Full disclosure, it's nowhere near as good as Rich Hall talking about the dangers of food-shaped refrigerator magnets being eaten by children. "Last year doctors performed over 800 emergency magnectomies." HA!
Microsoft has never written software that forces a customer to use specific hardware.
Ah, quite the contrary. Microsoft forces specific hardware manufacturers to only use Microsoft software.
If Microsoft could get WMA to catch on bigtime, here's what would happen:
The licensing cost for WMA technology would become so high that it would only be affordable when purchased at "OEM volume." Part of the discount would include requiremnents that players supporing WMA can't support other competing codecs like AAC or Real or (dare I say it... I dare!) Ogg Vorbis.
In other words, we would be limited to Microsoft-based file formats, Limited compatibility with non-Windows OS, DRM, and so on. You're trying to tell me that the bright side is that we could get a player from any number of manufacturers, and I'm telling you you're wearing glasses so rosy this Apple Lisa looks like a strawberry iMac.
This, my anonymous coward, is Microsoft's business strategy. It is called "embrace and extend."
They've "embraced" the mp3 player and are now trying to "extend" their Windows monopoly to include that piece of the hardware market. For this nut to turn, the demand for their entry at the pony show, the WMA format, has to be a hell of a lot stronger than it is now.
I will not speculate on how Microsoft might pull that off, however if anyone from Microsoft is listening I'm willing to demonstrate for a mere six figures.
Nobody ever calls the publisher of a book and says "My book got damaged from normal wear and tear, can you send me a new one?" Obviuosly, you just go buy a new book; you should have taken care of the one you paid for in the first place.
Why should this be different for a CD? I was reinstaling Vice City (known to be a real bitch to copy; I think it requires some sort of emulation to make a working backup) and my roommate had left the CD sitting in a big pile of other CDs, cat hair, and random credit card receipts from the bar. Obviously it wasn't in the best shape. But is that the game company's fault?
Look, having to put the CD in fuck all annoying, and I have either a NoCD or a daemon image to circumvent the physical CD requirement for every game I play, but I don't see what the big problem is. If your copy of "Finding Nemo's Buttplug" DVD gets smeared with peanut butter and the dog plays fetch with it, YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO BUY A NEW ONE. Why should Disney sell you a new one, at reduced cost, just because you have taken the concept of living in a disposable society to heart?
I'm sorry but I don't think software publishers are behaving unreasonably. Now, are these protection mechanisms effective? Hell no. Are game pusblishers wasting their time, and mine? Yes. But the fact remains that if you take care of the CD, the game will last. Far better than a game on floppy disks would last, esp. the early Ultima games where you had to pop the floppy out of the drive AS SOON AS you died or your character died, permanently.
What do you do when, fifteen years down the road, you can't read the CD anymore because of physical degredation of the media?
What do you do when, fifty years from now, you can't read your paperbacks for the same reason?
Personally I hope librarians are working on a solution, because frankly it's in the industry's interests to have you re-purchase everything you've already bought.
Windows XP runs rine on a 450 MHz CPU. I'm running it on a 350 MHz machine, though I do have 128 MB RAM.
Now, maybe you have some funky hardware, but in terms of CPU and RAM, you can run XP on what you've got.
Libertarians are just Republicans who smoke pot.
The closest analogy I can see is dialing a random phone number and making random noises when they pick up. That's basically legal, though you shouldn't call No Such Agency, because it's also very legal for them to become very interested in you for doing that. Actually it's perfectly legal for them to be spying on you right now, but they probably aren't, because you haven't been opening random UDP connections to their IP block, where ALL connections are HEAVILY monitored. They have something like ten-thousand routers; they're definitely using them.
Heh, nicely done.
What about collapsing to mono, downsampling to 8 kHz, and dithering to 8 bits? Would you call that another "way of storing samples"?
I would say it's a way of storing many fewer samples (perhaps an order of magnitude fewer), yet keeping enough samples that the data is still statistically significant.
The grandparent is I suppose incorrect in the assertion that "CD audio is not a lossy compression scheme" for indeed it is. Statistically, though, the data loss is not within the tine-frequency domain of human perception. It's a way of storing samples, enough samples to effectively recreate flawlessly the analog source.
you mean you can't encode files in Apple's AAC format or whatever it is that the iPod plays? You can only get files in that format from the iTunes store?
mp3 sucks, we need to either settle on a better format or try to include ubiquitous support for other formats.
why do you write insightful stuff yet youre not logged in?
That's interesting. How would you use weed in a sentence? Is it like, can you help me weed last night's show?
I used to think that way, but you can't tell me that with Al Gore in the White House, we'd have two wars, PATRIOT, deficit spending, etc. etc.
Or maybe we (by which I mean humanity) will establish a penal colony on the moon and send political dissidents there to work the mines. (Okay so maybe working the mines is a bit Klingon, but you see what I'm saying.)
Kinda like Australia. Or that damn book.
and hope that spending $3k+ on a TV doesn't make you a fool in 4 years.
If you plan is to watch TV for the next four years, then I'd say the chances are pretty high.