He's talking about evolutionary pressures causing a rise in intelligence while I've read other claims that evolution has little to do with intelligence as in beyond a certain point intelligence it's affected by natural selection. I know he's dead wrong about average intelligence for a simple reason, diet. We may live on junk food but the average person alive today has a diet higher in calories and the nutrients needed for brain development. Just look at body size. Genetically little has changed in the last thousand years yet in the last 200 average height has increased by nearly a foot and in some areas it's been even more dramatic. It's going to be difficult if not impossible to compare the genetics of three thousand years ago with today. It would probably be pointless because the real determining factor isn't the last three thousand years but the next three thousand years. The major evolutionary stress at the moment is more intelligent and educated people produce fewer children which may negatively affect the gene pool. That trend could reverse over the next hundred years as fertility rates of the poor drop. The potential is the more intelligent having the financial resources to support more children reversing the trend. The future and evolutionary pressures are impossible to predict so we'll have to wait a few thousand years to see in which direction the trend is headed.
I agree, let's call their bluff and say okay you're out of the union. They're mostly the poorest states that use the most welfare and medicaid and medicare per capita. They also push the hardest for declaring war. If we let them go we might actually balance the budget finally. Give all the right wing conservatives a year to relocate to the red state of their choice then close the borders. About the time they realize how bad off they are it'll be too late and the rest of us can finally move forward without the half of Congress that always stonewalls efforts to fix the mess. It's a win win because they get to live in a world of fear and hate and teach their kids about Jesus riding dinosaurs while the rest of us get the economy back on track and fix the pollution problem and finally get energy independent.
Where did you hear that? I've been following peak oil for decades and I never heard the quote by 2000? First we never run out. Oil eventually gets too expensive between extraction costs and rariety. We eventually have to find a new energy source. If we kept going as we have been traditional oil sources would be exhausted by something like 2056 but oil would likely cost $50 or more a gallon instead of barrel by then. Things like tar sands weren't factored in because no one had come up with a way to get the oil out of them. Right now it's being done using nearby natural gas so they are wasting natural gas to extract easier to transport oil. FYI it's a poor quality oil they get from the tar sands so it's not light sweet crude like is used for making gasoline. It takes a lot more processing and produces a lot more pollution to make gasoline. We can probably get by for a few hundred years with fossil sources but we are trashing the environment by doing it. Bad weather is just the start. By the end of the century it'll be 10X worse. Also it's shortsighted not worrying about the next thousand years and only caring what happens in the next few weeks or months. There is no current technology based on fossil fuels or nuclear that will last a thousand years so without more sustainable sources our current civilization is doomed. There are solutions we just have to decide if we want to make the hard choices or face the end eventually of everything we have built. If we leave it up to our grand kids it'll be too late. That's the real issue not when do we run out of oil. That question in of itself shows a lack of understanding of the problem. It's not running out but when do we run out of cheap oil? The answer really is it's already happened. The earliest gas prices I remember were around $0.25 a gallon when I was really young. It's around $3.50 now and if the economy was strong and demand was up it'd probably be $5 a gallon. Where do you panic? $5 a gallon gas or $10 a gallon gas? Both will happen in the near future so what are your plans when it happens?
He's strong and intelligent, a sociopath so he doesn't care about the agendas of the rich or corporate America. And if some one disagrees with him in Congress and blocks his bill he'll just invite them over for dinner ending the Congressional roadblock by eating his opponent.
"Fortunately" a blogger captured this? Why exactly is this a fortunate thing? It's not like the site shows Romney doing something wrong, or trying to cover up something. Is there something particularly great about the site design that can benefit us in some way? Perhaps it contains some great scripts that we are now fortunate to have access to?
Someone made a mistake, and you say it is a "fortunate" that they can now be made fun of because of it. Politics aside, let's simply not act like assholes please. Also, be thankful that your mistakes don't turn into Slashdot stories.
I'd call it a simple mistake except the guy didn't even bother with speech if he lost. All together it comes off arrogant as hell for such a close race!
Hopefully the Republicans can find a better candidate than a used car salesman next time. And hire a better IT staff.
They're having trouble figuring out those newfangled punch cards. They hope to get some younger blood in the IT department for the next election, some one under 70 that can mange one of those tape driven jobs!
The Universe is expanding so matter gets rarified as it expands. If you can't collect enough mass to create a star then stars stop forming. I'd be curious if Brown dwarfs have increased in numbers since they require less mass. It does set a limit for the age of the Universe. My guess is the last of the stars grow cold 20 to 30 billion years from now. In 10 billion the numbers will drop radically and in around 30 billion the last stars should fade. It doesn't mean the end just that stars will cease to be a feature of the Universe. It'll probably be tens of billion of years after that that the Universe starts to grow cold. Eventually nuclear half life fades and no sources of heat will remain. It's insanely far off but there does seem to be a limit to the Universe as we see it now. Even if black holes and pulsars keep going for a 100 billion years there will still be a time when the energy runs out or at least it becomes so spread out as to be meaningless.
I go away for like FIVE MINUTES to make popcorn, open a beer and settle in for a long night of watching pundits say whatever comes into their heads, and Obama wins it? I made enough popcorn to last UNTIL DECEMBER!
Oh well. I guess I'll go watch Fox News slip into a channel-wide suicidal depression.
Fox News just has a full screen banner running "The Mayans Were Right!"
I can see the switch from PowerPC as IBM and Motorola could not keep up with supplies or advances. To switch from Intel to ARM on PC's will be suicide as performance in PC's far outweigh any negligible benefits in power savings. People using Macs are designers, programmers and heavy users. For those advocating unifying the mobile experience with the desktop, please STOP. I produce content on my desktop. I consume it on my iPad.
I'm in the same situation and I tend to agree. The problem is even when the chips hit an acceptable speed for desktops the Intel chips will still likely be faster. Do they take two steps back in speed to save power? I have doubts they will ever match Intel speeds and that the real benchmark not what Intel chips can do today but what they can do in five years.
If I was Apple I would have set the price at $250 and lived with little or no profit and counted on iTunes sales. The point is Apple has always taken the stance that they are a hardware maker not an OS or even a software and music retailer. Those are considered sidelines. It's one of the reasons their hardware has always cost more but they sell their OS dirt cheap. I don't know the profit margin on a Fire but say Apple is pulling 30% or 35%. It's high but not out of line with some products and no one ever wants to factor in development costs. Yes it's a downsized iPad but there's still tooling and design costs. Overall they are making probably 25% without advertising. Oops there's that cost and Apple loves to advertise. I have no idea the final cost once you add in distribution and advertising and all the other expenses. I'm sure they are easily making 15% or 20% pure profit. It's a health profit but that's what a company in their position should make, a healthy profit. The companies have to make money somewhere but everyone says they don't want to pay much for music, movies, games and software so where exactly do you build in profit? Everyone else is playing catch up so they have to sell near or at a loss but so long as Apple products are selling well they have no incentive to cut out the profit margin. Sure they are making a profit on every step but that's what companies do, make money. At least they are making a solid product. One of the reasons Microsoft got into so much trouble is they became dependent on a couple of products then started turning out crappy products and said so what? We have a monopoly in PC OSs and office software so what are you gonna do about it? Well over the last five or so years a lot of people switched to Apple. Apple's evil? Here's a revelation, corporations are evil! They exist to make money not to make you happy. They want to make their investors happy. As much as I would like to see Apple products cheaper I don't want to see them cut quality to do it. Little things like the metal instead of plastic cases on the pad devices. The iOS is elegant and fun to use once you get used to shoehorning your personal content onto them. I'd love to see them more open but it would come at a sacrifice of stability so I'm happy the way things are. In the end if you want a device with zero profit margin then buy Android. If you want iTunes then you're talking an Apple device and deal with them making a profit.
I keep hearing how it's not the corporations or the rich causing the deficit but let's say if Apple paid the fair amount just on the 100 billion dollar nest egg and let's assume they shorted the system 20% that's 20 billion from one corporation. We're talking trillions of dollars potentially lost without even going near the rich just their corporations. Make the corporations actually pay the 25% and get the rich back on the 50% which was closer to the 100 year average and a big chuck of the debt disappears. Add in cutting military spending in half and axing pork barrel projects and the debt looks manageable. This has always been about a small percentage robbing this country blind while they blame the poor and even the middle class. Look at military spending. Out of what was around 800 billion a year, I haven't looked up the last year or two, only around a 100 billion went to troop support. The bulk of the rest went to contractors. Tens of billions and maybe a few hundred billion is for things Congress approved that the military didn't even ask for. The only mysterious about fixing the problems is why aren't we even trying? We have troops defending half the planet and China is allowed to sell products below cost while Apple pays less than 2% on foreign earnings. Helen Keller could figure out what's wrong, why can't Congress?
As long as the exotic matter isn't made of midichlorians, we can still be friends.
This just in : Disney has bought out the. H.P. Lovecraft estate. A Star Wars/Marvel/Cthuluhu/Disney Princess animated film is rumored to be in production.
Sorry it's all public domain. His aunts died years ago and the last issues over so shared ownership rights expired. The rights have been questionable for years since it was mostly August Derleth claiming he changed a number of stories and got them republished as collections. All that has expired and he's been dead a long time. Even Burrough's stuff is entering public domain. It's why they were able to make that cheesy A Princess of Mars film, I mean the cheapie one not the big budget cheesy film which Disney had in development for decades.
Actually if he came from another dimension that occupied the same space as the US he could conceivable claim citizenship. McCain had a bigger stretch since he was born in Panama.
There may be more to this than selling Star Wars. Lucas just became one of the biggest stockholders in Disney. There may be more behind the scenes than we realize. It may end up more of a merger like with Pixar.
Mickey Mouse and Luke Skywalker will both never leave copyright now. Ever.
You've made an interesting point. You can kiss the fan films goodbye. The Disney lawyers just took to the skies like the flying monkeys from Wizard of Oz.
I'm a huge solar fan but to make an aircraft that could carry a 100 or more passengers the surface area would be massive. No current airport could handle a plane that size and it'd never be cost effective. Better to run a plane off biodiesel. Even battery powered makes no sense. Large aircraft need a dense power source.
Generating electricity from trash is pretty inefficient, the US had almost 200 incinerators in 1990 but roughly half of them have been shut down due to economics. The real money for Sweden is the fee for taking trash from European countries that don't have (or won't build) landfills. Still, in the long run it seems make more sense to burn it rather than just bury it even if burning is more expensive in the short term..
I was living in LA when they had to shut down the main dump because they filled in a valley. That shows how unsustainable our current system is of disposing of waste. Most of the plastics can be converted to various forms of fuel from diesel and fuel oil to a form of gasoline. Most of the rest is burned. So long as you filter the smoke the system works well since high temperatures break down most of the toxic materials. You mostly get carbon and trace amounts of metals. It's how they safely get rid of chemical weapons. Most organics turn back to carbon at high temperatures. If you want to capture the CO2 run it through a few hundred greenhouses. Waste heat from the plant can keep them warm and the plants grow faster and greener under higher levels of CO2. The extra food you produce would add to the cost effectiveness.
Slashdot Mirror
He's talking about evolutionary pressures causing a rise in intelligence while I've read other claims that evolution has little to do with intelligence as in beyond a certain point intelligence it's affected by natural selection. I know he's dead wrong about average intelligence for a simple reason, diet. We may live on junk food but the average person alive today has a diet higher in calories and the nutrients needed for brain development. Just look at body size. Genetically little has changed in the last thousand years yet in the last 200 average height has increased by nearly a foot and in some areas it's been even more dramatic. It's going to be difficult if not impossible to compare the genetics of three thousand years ago with today. It would probably be pointless because the real determining factor isn't the last three thousand years but the next three thousand years. The major evolutionary stress at the moment is more intelligent and educated people produce fewer children which may negatively affect the gene pool. That trend could reverse over the next hundred years as fertility rates of the poor drop. The potential is the more intelligent having the financial resources to support more children reversing the trend. The future and evolutionary pressures are impossible to predict so we'll have to wait a few thousand years to see in which direction the trend is headed.
That explains the Kardashians.
I was wondering about that.
I just thought it was inbreeding
Just image all the man hours of hacker's time think saved! If only other companies were as forward thinking.
Can't we at least let them try it this time?
I agree, let's call their bluff and say okay you're out of the union. They're mostly the poorest states that use the most welfare and medicaid and medicare per capita. They also push the hardest for declaring war. If we let them go we might actually balance the budget finally. Give all the right wing conservatives a year to relocate to the red state of their choice then close the borders. About the time they realize how bad off they are it'll be too late and the rest of us can finally move forward without the half of Congress that always stonewalls efforts to fix the mess. It's a win win because they get to live in a world of fear and hate and teach their kids about Jesus riding dinosaurs while the rest of us get the economy back on track and fix the pollution problem and finally get energy independent.
Oh, wait...
Where did you hear that? I've been following peak oil for decades and I never heard the quote by 2000? First we never run out. Oil eventually gets too expensive between extraction costs and rariety. We eventually have to find a new energy source. If we kept going as we have been traditional oil sources would be exhausted by something like 2056 but oil would likely cost $50 or more a gallon instead of barrel by then. Things like tar sands weren't factored in because no one had come up with a way to get the oil out of them. Right now it's being done using nearby natural gas so they are wasting natural gas to extract easier to transport oil. FYI it's a poor quality oil they get from the tar sands so it's not light sweet crude like is used for making gasoline. It takes a lot more processing and produces a lot more pollution to make gasoline. We can probably get by for a few hundred years with fossil sources but we are trashing the environment by doing it. Bad weather is just the start. By the end of the century it'll be 10X worse. Also it's shortsighted not worrying about the next thousand years and only caring what happens in the next few weeks or months. There is no current technology based on fossil fuels or nuclear that will last a thousand years so without more sustainable sources our current civilization is doomed. There are solutions we just have to decide if we want to make the hard choices or face the end eventually of everything we have built. If we leave it up to our grand kids it'll be too late. That's the real issue not when do we run out of oil. That question in of itself shows a lack of understanding of the problem. It's not running out but when do we run out of cheap oil? The answer really is it's already happened. The earliest gas prices I remember were around $0.25 a gallon when I was really young. It's around $3.50 now and if the economy was strong and demand was up it'd probably be $5 a gallon. Where do you panic? $5 a gallon gas or $10 a gallon gas? Both will happen in the near future so what are your plans when it happens?
He's strong and intelligent, a sociopath so he doesn't care about the agendas of the rich or corporate America. And if some one disagrees with him in Congress and blocks his bill he'll just invite them over for dinner ending the Congressional roadblock by eating his opponent.
That site wasn't supposed to launch until Utah secedes.
So long as they take the rest of the red states with them I'd vote for it!
Patent request, "Makes old farts dicks harder". I don't see the vague"
"Fortunately" a blogger captured this? Why exactly is this a fortunate thing? It's not like the site shows Romney doing something wrong, or trying to cover up something. Is there something particularly great about the site design that can benefit us in some way? Perhaps it contains some great scripts that we are now fortunate to have access to?
Someone made a mistake, and you say it is a "fortunate" that they can now be made fun of because of it. Politics aside, let's simply not act like assholes please. Also, be thankful that your mistakes don't turn into Slashdot stories.
I'd call it a simple mistake except the guy didn't even bother with speech if he lost. All together it comes off arrogant as hell for such a close race!
Shouldn't Ted Nugent be dead or in prison by now?
I grew up in Michigan, trust me he is, take your pick!
Hopefully the Republicans can find a better candidate than a used car salesman next time. And hire a better IT staff.
They're having trouble figuring out those newfangled punch cards. They hope to get some younger blood in the IT department for the next election, some one under 70 that can mange one of those tape driven jobs!
The Universe is expanding so matter gets rarified as it expands. If you can't collect enough mass to create a star then stars stop forming. I'd be curious if Brown dwarfs have increased in numbers since they require less mass. It does set a limit for the age of the Universe. My guess is the last of the stars grow cold 20 to 30 billion years from now. In 10 billion the numbers will drop radically and in around 30 billion the last stars should fade. It doesn't mean the end just that stars will cease to be a feature of the Universe. It'll probably be tens of billion of years after that that the Universe starts to grow cold. Eventually nuclear half life fades and no sources of heat will remain. It's insanely far off but there does seem to be a limit to the Universe as we see it now. Even if black holes and pulsars keep going for a 100 billion years there will still be a time when the energy runs out or at least it becomes so spread out as to be meaningless.
I go away for like FIVE MINUTES to make popcorn, open a beer and settle in for a long night of watching pundits say whatever comes into their heads, and Obama wins it? I made enough popcorn to last UNTIL DECEMBER!
Oh well. I guess I'll go watch Fox News slip into a channel-wide suicidal depression.
Fox News just has a full screen banner running "The Mayans Were Right!"
I can see the switch from PowerPC as IBM and Motorola could not keep up with supplies or advances. To switch from Intel to ARM on PC's will be suicide as performance in PC's far outweigh any negligible benefits in power savings. People using Macs are designers, programmers and heavy users. For those advocating unifying the mobile experience with the desktop, please STOP. I produce content on my desktop. I consume it on my iPad.
I'm in the same situation and I tend to agree. The problem is even when the chips hit an acceptable speed for desktops the Intel chips will still likely be faster. Do they take two steps back in speed to save power? I have doubts they will ever match Intel speeds and that the real benchmark not what Intel chips can do today but what they can do in five years.
If I was Apple I would have set the price at $250 and lived with little or no profit and counted on iTunes sales. The point is Apple has always taken the stance that they are a hardware maker not an OS or even a software and music retailer. Those are considered sidelines. It's one of the reasons their hardware has always cost more but they sell their OS dirt cheap. I don't know the profit margin on a Fire but say Apple is pulling 30% or 35%. It's high but not out of line with some products and no one ever wants to factor in development costs. Yes it's a downsized iPad but there's still tooling and design costs. Overall they are making probably 25% without advertising. Oops there's that cost and Apple loves to advertise. I have no idea the final cost once you add in distribution and advertising and all the other expenses. I'm sure they are easily making 15% or 20% pure profit. It's a health profit but that's what a company in their position should make, a healthy profit. The companies have to make money somewhere but everyone says they don't want to pay much for music, movies, games and software so where exactly do you build in profit? Everyone else is playing catch up so they have to sell near or at a loss but so long as Apple products are selling well they have no incentive to cut out the profit margin. Sure they are making a profit on every step but that's what companies do, make money. At least they are making a solid product. One of the reasons Microsoft got into so much trouble is they became dependent on a couple of products then started turning out crappy products and said so what? We have a monopoly in PC OSs and office software so what are you gonna do about it? Well over the last five or so years a lot of people switched to Apple. Apple's evil? Here's a revelation, corporations are evil! They exist to make money not to make you happy. They want to make their investors happy. As much as I would like to see Apple products cheaper I don't want to see them cut quality to do it. Little things like the metal instead of plastic cases on the pad devices. The iOS is elegant and fun to use once you get used to shoehorning your personal content onto them. I'd love to see them more open but it would come at a sacrifice of stability so I'm happy the way things are. In the end if you want a device with zero profit margin then buy Android. If you want iTunes then you're talking an Apple device and deal with them making a profit.
I keep hearing how it's not the corporations or the rich causing the deficit but let's say if Apple paid the fair amount just on the 100 billion dollar nest egg and let's assume they shorted the system 20% that's 20 billion from one corporation. We're talking trillions of dollars potentially lost without even going near the rich just their corporations. Make the corporations actually pay the 25% and get the rich back on the 50% which was closer to the 100 year average and a big chuck of the debt disappears. Add in cutting military spending in half and axing pork barrel projects and the debt looks manageable. This has always been about a small percentage robbing this country blind while they blame the poor and even the middle class. Look at military spending. Out of what was around 800 billion a year, I haven't looked up the last year or two, only around a 100 billion went to troop support. The bulk of the rest went to contractors. Tens of billions and maybe a few hundred billion is for things Congress approved that the military didn't even ask for. The only mysterious about fixing the problems is why aren't we even trying? We have troops defending half the planet and China is allowed to sell products below cost while Apple pays less than 2% on foreign earnings. Helen Keller could figure out what's wrong, why can't Congress?
It decoded as "drink your Ovaltine".
As long as the exotic matter isn't made of midichlorians, we can still be friends.
This just in : Disney has bought out the. H.P. Lovecraft estate. A Star Wars/Marvel/Cthuluhu/Disney Princess animated film is rumored to be in production.
Sorry it's all public domain. His aunts died years ago and the last issues over so shared ownership rights expired. The rights have been questionable for years since it was mostly August Derleth claiming he changed a number of stories and got them republished as collections. All that has expired and he's been dead a long time. Even Burrough's stuff is entering public domain. It's why they were able to make that cheesy A Princess of Mars film, I mean the cheapie one not the big budget cheesy film which Disney had in development for decades.
I demand to see Cthulhu's birth certificate.
Actually if he came from another dimension that occupied the same space as the US he could conceivable claim citizenship. McCain had a bigger stretch since he was born in Panama.
There may be more to this than selling Star Wars. Lucas just became one of the biggest stockholders in Disney. There may be more behind the scenes than we realize. It may end up more of a merger like with Pixar.
Mickey Mouse and Luke Skywalker will both never leave copyright now. Ever.
You've made an interesting point. You can kiss the fan films goodbye. The Disney lawyers just took to the skies like the flying monkeys from Wizard of Oz.
Can't wait for "Star Wars on Ice"
Okay I'd pay money to see Jar Jar Binks run over by a Zamboni machine. To see blood and inerds spray out the back would be very cathartic.
I'm a huge solar fan but to make an aircraft that could carry a 100 or more passengers the surface area would be massive. No current airport could handle a plane that size and it'd never be cost effective. Better to run a plane off biodiesel. Even battery powered makes no sense. Large aircraft need a dense power source.
Generating electricity from trash is pretty inefficient, the US had almost 200 incinerators in 1990 but roughly half of them have been shut down due to economics. The real money for Sweden is the fee for taking trash from European countries that don't have (or won't build) landfills. Still, in the long run it seems make more sense to burn it rather than just bury it even if burning is more expensive in the short term..
I was living in LA when they had to shut down the main dump because they filled in a valley. That shows how unsustainable our current system is of disposing of waste. Most of the plastics can be converted to various forms of fuel from diesel and fuel oil to a form of gasoline. Most of the rest is burned. So long as you filter the smoke the system works well since high temperatures break down most of the toxic materials. You mostly get carbon and trace amounts of metals. It's how they safely get rid of chemical weapons. Most organics turn back to carbon at high temperatures. If you want to capture the CO2 run it through a few hundred greenhouses. Waste heat from the plant can keep them warm and the plants grow faster and greener under higher levels of CO2. The extra food you produce would add to the cost effectiveness.
They have so much money it's sinking the ship.
More to the point they have so much money a nuke couldn't sink their ship.