Though lately I've been using a self-hosted GitLab instance to manage projects and tasks. It is overkill for a SIMPLE todo list. I find it helpful to be able to manage other files with projects, along with code when I am doing a coding project, it also allows me to manage tasks/issues which I can run through a kanban board, and tag tasks in various different ways, comment on tasks (remind myself where I was with it) and do all of what I used OmniFocus for. Though to be fair, I've never used the full extent of OmniFocus features. The nice thing about gitlab is that once hosted, it can be accessed from any platform with a web browser.
This is a system involving magnets and conductors, so when the power goes out and the car begins to drop, it could be made to induce a current which generates a force that resists its movement. This is Lenz's law. Maybe they have figured out a way to use Lenz's Law, in this scenario, allowing the elevator car gently come to rest at the bottom in the event of a power loss.
Lenz's Law: The direction of current induced in a conductor by a changing magnetic field due to Faraday's law of induction will be such that it will create a magnetic field that opposes the change that produced it. -- from wikipedia
Reacting out of fear leads to poor policy. The idea that this will prevent anything bad from happening to us is just incorrect. The idea that we can do things that prevent anything bad from happening to us leads to all sorts of policies that "protect" us, but at great expense to our freedom, and cause us to be assholes to the rest of humanity, and in the end don't work. All the heros that we honor for great acts of valor aren't honored for hiding, but for taking risks to help someone else.
This was a long time ago, but I wired up a photometer (counts photons) to an Apple 2 joystick port, then wrote a tight 6502 assembler timed loop that would count pulses on the joystick button input. It would accurately read over 50,000 button presses per second, which was good enough to do variable star photometry. I also wrote an applesoft basic program that assisted in the process of variable star photometry and used the assembler routine to read values from the photometer. By connecting the photometer to a telescope and following directions of where to aim the telescope given by the software, it could be used to observe and graph brightness of variable stars over time. Also could be used to calculate the angular velocity of asteroids. This was is the days before extrasolar planets were found, but similar in principle to how that is done. Though the objects we were looking at were orders of magnitude brighter than the brightness fluctuations observed to find planets.
We aren't doing climate change study, but that would be a fascinating thing to do here. We are told that 20-30 years ago, the rains arrived so regularly that people would know that rain would come +- a week. Though now days, rains come in deluges or not at all, or at times of the year that they normally wouldn't. There are a lot of people talking about the changes. There are a few organizations doing some amazing things to adjust. One of the coolest that I've seen are sand dams. It's like a man made aquifer in a dry river bed, about the simplest tech you can come up with, but it has huge impact. http://www.utoonidevelopment.org/sample-page/building-sand-dams/
Most of my coding is for fun to keep my skills at least a little bit sharp.
My wife and I decided to do 3 years of volunteer work with an organization that does Food Security and Community Development work in the area, we work as liaisons between our organization and several Maasai organizations being funded to do development work. We end up doing a lot of capacity building with these organizations as well. My job doesn't directly involve any programming, but I do what I can to keep my skills up, in my spare time, and work on an assortment of projects for fun.
Currently I'm sitting in the rift valley of Kenya, in a small rural Maasai community. We are the last house on the power line. No one south of us has any Utility power. We had a Giraffe just outside the back yard a few days back. Internet is via the cell network... there is a single spot in the yard where I've found 3g works. So I've planted a short pole, which has a power and a spot for the hotspot modem to sit. It's covered with a plastic bottle with the bottom cut out. to keep the rain and dust off.
It assumes that being a senator should have a benefits. They are supposed to be representing their constituents, not gathering special privileges for themselves. If they are not living in the system they are creating, all hope is lost. So, anyone still hopeful?
I think we should do the opposite, and merge all 50 states into one single one. Therefore eliminating all the duplication of government, and provide one streamlined service for everything. That would be a much better direction to go.
I did IT work for a private university for 14 years, I managed bandwidth by blocking certain protocols to various networks and hosts until Naptster, and the following peer to peer protocols, after a couple of years trying to manage bandwidth by blocking protocols, sites, advertising, etc. I gave up on that. Ultimately all of that damages the user's experience, and increased my work load. It puts the IT guy in the position of chasing the users behaviors, always responding to the latest fire and worse it put the IT guy in the position of determining what is important to the users, which it turns out is different to each class of user. So next I tried using one of the many products that allow the IT guy to create classes of users, and classify traffic, apply rules by class, build QoS rules based on all classes. Turns out this is the same nightmare with a prettier UI. I ultimately found the Net Equalizer (netequalizer.com) it is an elegant solution at a fraction of the cost. If you want to be the network nazi and control who uses what protocol, this isn't for you. But if you want to forget about bandwidth problems, this is it. It took about an hour to read the manual, play with options and plug it in, then I only touched it when we increased our bandwidth beyond its capacity a few years later. I don't work for the company or anything like that. It is just one device I bought that performed way beyond my expectations. Their web site has all the info about what it does and how. I would encourage everyone check this out if you have less bandwidth than you feel you need.
It seems the observation changed the state of the clam. This has to be some sort of break through in applying quantum physics to a larger set of particles.
I'm living at the moment in the rift valley about 40-50 miles west of Nairobi in the middle of a Maasai community. A surprisingly remote location being so close to the capital of Kenya. The only internet available is via the mobile network. Out in this area, there is no such things as a land line, fiber, etc. Mobile is the only option.
One anecdote about how mobile has changed things here. Last year there was a land dispute between two groups of Maasai near us that was pretty serious, 100+ Maasai on each side were armed with clubs, swords, spears, bow and arrow, ready to do ancient style combat with each other. I watched Braveheart, but it is pretty wild to see people gearing up for combat of that sort in real life. At any rate on their belt with their swords and clubs, they also carry a leather case with their Nokia phone. In this particular case they were used to text taunting messages back and forth between the sides. Normally, they would have to be within arrow shot to get a good taunt in. Now they can text a zinger in from the safety of the lee side of a large rock. For those wondering how it turned out. They had advanced within 100-200m of each other before one side decided it wasn't worth it, turned and ran.
I don't have stats, this is an offhand assessment, but I would say that about 60% of the Maasai in this area have a mobile phone. But this comes with some caveats:
- It is only in the last 15-20 years that people started regularly going to school in this area. So there is still maybe 85% illiteracy rate (off the cuff estimate). Which makes it difficult to SMS, except those who you know can read.
- Also power is a big problem I would estimate that upwards of 95% of people don't have direct access to power. So their phones are not working possibly half of the time. We have a steady stream of people who come to our house to get their phones charged.
- Most people here use a very basic Nokia phone which are great for voice calls and SMS, but aren't very smart.
Where the rich people live there is great 3G+ coverage and you will find lots of smart phones, etc. Out in rural areas the coverage is spotty data rates are low, service is a bit less accessible... Just like the US I suppose.
Africa is a huge continent with diverse culture and situations. There is a wide gap between rich and poor here. I think the mobile infrastructure is enabling, and more resilient than fixed infrastructure (in a place where it is common for people to dig up pipe or remove cabling from poles in order to sell the metal for a bit of cash). It is opening up the world in a way that was not previously possible. However, it is not magic, there are a lot of other things that need to be in place for the benefits to be fully realized. Good education, access to markets, a stable government being just a few.
A girl in my highschool back in 1988 was used voyager I or II photos (I can't recall which) to calculate the depth of craters on a couple of Jupiter's moons. Which is little different than what the article is describing, but it seems shadows have a lot more information encoded in them. This girl and I ended up winning the science fair and going on to the International science fair, where I felt a bit out of my league. She won a few awards. Apparently at that point no one had thought to do that up to that point. (for those interested, I wired up a photometer to an Apple II and wrote some software to automate variable star photometry, which measures the light from light sources through a telescope over time. It can be used to find the rotation of asteriods, or with a sensitive enough instrument, the change in light from a large planet orbiting a star, stuff like that.)
I have a large amount of personal data as well (also, no pr0n), though I realized some place along the line that it wasn't that important not to lose it. When I die most of will probably be tossed anyhow. Who is going to want to sort through it all.
With that said, I still don't want to get rid of all my data, so I have a drobo with 5-2TB drives, and I also have a linux box with raid set up, that backs up the drobo. But really, think hard about how much effort and expense you want to put towards keeping data. There is probably a whole lot of it that can just be tossed because you will never look at it again. It will probably save you a bunch of time and money to go through all the data and get rid of the stuff you'll never actually use. This actually works well for garages too.
If you are interested in a more free experience. There is an excellent OSS flight simulator out there, with tons of aircraft, scenery for the whole planet, etc... There are a number of people who have used it to build their own home walk in simulators. There was one guy a while back who had somehow acquired the front end of an F15 who was working on building it into a simulator environment in his garage. There was some cool stuff going on around this project.
If you are interested in a more free experience. There is an excellent OSS flight simulator out there, with tons of aircraft, scenery for the whole planet, etc... There are a number of people who have used it to build their own home walk in simulators. There was one guy a while back who had somehow acquired the front end of an F15 who was working on building it into a simulator environment in his garage. There was some cool stuff going on around this project.
What happens when SolarNet comes on line, or MilkyNet in the next 100 years, would we have to update the constitution again? Internet is a particular technology, it would be pretty lame to go through all the trouble to make an ammendment only to have it be replaced by something else about the time this actually goes into effect in 30 years.
Is Freedom of Speech the same as Freedom of Communication? If so, all we need is a court ruling or two, not a new amendment. If it is something different, then maybe a Freedom of Communication amendment should be added to the constitution.
Have you actually lived with tribal people in the jungle before?
I would agree, living in the modernized tribal setting is not so bad. But when you hear stories about what life was like before influences of the modern world, yikes, life was brutal. Life expectancy averaged in the 35-40 year range. Almost any injury was potentially life threatening. Revenge killing. Infanticide. Constant fear of the supernatural. Plenty of disease even without colds, flu, chicken-pox, measles. Like any place they sit around the fire laugh and tell stories. Like how 15 years ago the group down the river killed uncle Ed, and we must never forget that we need to go down there and burn one of their houses and try to whack one of them as they run out dazed in the middle of the night, but first we have to get a couple from that group up stream, And while were at it lets steal a little girl to be someones wife. and there are rumors the family to the east is planning a raid on us, so sleep with your spear in your hand.
Though not perfect, Peru has a bilingual education program where most indiginous people have the option of going to school and learning to read and write in their own language as well as spanish. The tribes maintain a sense of identity. They have a university for indiginous people, train teachers, agriculture, etc... Their language is preserved, stories are written down. Even if they all die out or assimilate, there is a record of their existence, culture, customs, etc...
my guess is that given the option most of the tribal groups in Peru would not go back to life the way it was in the 1930's.
Anyone remember losing or damaging a floppy disk? There's a reason why technologies have become "network centered." I'm betting it will be implemented in some stupid way like roaming profiles on a flash card. I can just see it now, you save your stuff, pull out your flash disk, and walk away... "Crap I forgot to 'eject' it." So now, All your data are belong to Xenu.
I think ultimately what needs to be done is to go the next step and develop a name system which doesn't rely on a central authority. P2P systems have developed ways to do distributed searches. I'm sure if it became important enough a replacement could be made. There are issues to overcome, like what happens when two entities decide they want to be google.com. Any way this would be done would require a bit of a paradigm shift in how we think about and use domain names, but maybe it's time to start thinking about new approaches. Some people have been working on this stuff. I'm not sure what they've come up with at this point...
One of the other big benefits is safety. It is much safer to accellerate a space craft to 17,500 mph over the course of three days, rather than doing it in 9 minutes. It eliminates the need to light several million pounds of fuel on fire and try to control it. Same with deceleration and return from orbit. If we took three days to go from orbit to earth, it could be done in a way that would eliminate the need for a heat shield entirely. No more burning up on reentry and all that.
Another benifit is flexibility. We could drop a satellite off at geosyncronous orbit, or continue down the elevator and sling it out of earth orbit. You will need to hual a bit of fuel to put it in certain orbits, but still much less than a big rocket would require.
After geosyncronous orbit, the crawler doesn't need to expend energy to haul the payload out farther, though it probably needs to apply breaks, you could probably convert a bit of this breaking into electricity to charge the batteries for the crawler's return journey.
The analogy is faulty since lot of our "bandaids" won't wash off and a lot of our "symptoms" won't reappear.
The point is we will constantly be working on the solution to the next symptom, we will be chasing the tail of the problem rather than being preventative, not that the bandaid will wash off. Sure we still have to consider the symptom and treat that, but if we end our treatment there, we set ourselves up to repeat the process.
Here's a counterexample. Air pollution in developed countries has declined tremendouly since the 50's. There's no reason the same techniques wouldn't work in India. The "exporting the pollution" argument is bogus.
Technically there is no reason it wouldn't work. But there are lots of other reasons it won't work practically. India is a fairly technically advanced nation as the world goes. Why don't they implement emmissions controls on cars and power plants? Their economy would not be able to sustain it. Now we live in an economy which is globally linked. Are you willing to pay more to your phone company so they can pay their outsourced call centers more, so their employees can afford to ride in newer cleaner transportation? It's not going to happen. I've spent a fair amount of time in the underdeveloped world. The idea that we can transplant technology from the US or Europe to solve problems in other places doesn't work well in reality. It's been tried and failed many times. Example: many NGOs in Africa have had well drilling programs to provide clean drinking water. A very basic need. Most of those wells are not functioning in 6 months or less unless the organization continuously returns to maintain it. It's low tech, not much to a well and a hand pump. The people in these cultures are every bit as intelligent as us, but other cultures don't operate the way ours do, and tech doesn't fit in the same way it does in ours.
My original point was not that we should destroy humanity. Rather it's a complex problem, change is a long way off. It's not as simple as saying hey lets stop this behavior and do it a different way. There is too much momentum pushing culture in the direction it's going. Fixing global warming doesn't change the fact that our culture is geared towards an attitude of "who cares what happens, it won't affect me in my lifetime." Why do we continue to go that way? That's the problem that needs to be fixed. Obviously global warming has to be dealt with too, but if that's all we do, we are still in trouble.
Ok, I realize I am a pathetic peon compared to your great intellect. But that aside...
Rather than suicide and destroy humanity in the process, how about you think about the problem.
Global Warming is not the problem. Global Warming is the symptom. You can stick a bandaid on the symptom, but the problem won't go away and will continue to show up in other ways.
We can reduce the environmental footprint of society. We have already.
I'm sorry, but this statement is absolutely false. Developed countries have done nothing but grow their environmental footprint. They may reduce it in their country, but that is only because the real damaging part of that footprint has been outsourced to India and other less developed countries of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
On a Mac I like OmniFocus.
Though lately I've been using a self-hosted GitLab instance to manage projects and tasks. It is overkill for a SIMPLE todo list. I find it helpful to be able to manage other files with projects, along with code when I am doing a coding project, it also allows me to manage tasks/issues which I can run through a kanban board, and tag tasks in various different ways, comment on tasks (remind myself where I was with it) and do all of what I used OmniFocus for. Though to be fair, I've never used the full extent of OmniFocus features. The nice thing about gitlab is that once hosted, it can be accessed from any platform with a web browser.
This is a system involving magnets and conductors, so when the power goes out and the car begins to drop, it could be made to induce a current which generates a force that resists its movement. This is Lenz's law. Maybe they have figured out a way to use Lenz's Law, in this scenario, allowing the elevator car gently come to rest at the bottom in the event of a power loss.
Reacting out of fear leads to poor policy. The idea that this will prevent anything bad from happening to us is just incorrect. The idea that we can do things that prevent anything bad from happening to us leads to all sorts of policies that "protect" us, but at great expense to our freedom, and cause us to be assholes to the rest of humanity, and in the end don't work. All the heros that we honor for great acts of valor aren't honored for hiding, but for taking risks to help someone else.
This was a long time ago, but I wired up a photometer (counts photons) to an Apple 2 joystick port, then wrote a tight 6502 assembler timed loop that would count pulses on the joystick button input. It would accurately read over 50,000 button presses per second, which was good enough to do variable star photometry. I also wrote an applesoft basic program that assisted in the process of variable star photometry and used the assembler routine to read values from the photometer. By connecting the photometer to a telescope and following directions of where to aim the telescope given by the software, it could be used to observe and graph brightness of variable stars over time. Also could be used to calculate the angular velocity of asteroids. This was is the days before extrasolar planets were found, but similar in principle to how that is done. Though the objects we were looking at were orders of magnitude brighter than the brightness fluctuations observed to find planets.
Mennonite Central Committee - mcc.org
We aren't doing climate change study, but that would be a fascinating thing to do here. We are told that 20-30 years ago, the rains arrived so regularly that people would know that rain would come +- a week. Though now days, rains come in deluges or not at all, or at times of the year that they normally wouldn't. There are a lot of people talking about the changes. There are a few organizations doing some amazing things to adjust. One of the coolest that I've seen are sand dams. It's like a man made aquifer in a dry river bed, about the simplest tech you can come up with, but it has huge impact. http://www.utoonidevelopment.org/sample-page/building-sand-dams/
Most of my coding is for fun to keep my skills at least a little bit sharp.
My wife and I decided to do 3 years of volunteer work with an organization that does Food Security and Community Development work in the area, we work as liaisons between our organization and several Maasai organizations being funded to do development work. We end up doing a lot of capacity building with these organizations as well. My job doesn't directly involve any programming, but I do what I can to keep my skills up, in my spare time, and work on an assortment of projects for fun.
Currently I'm sitting in the rift valley of Kenya, in a small rural Maasai community. We are the last house on the power line. No one south of us has any Utility power. We had a Giraffe just outside the back yard a few days back. Internet is via the cell network... there is a single spot in the yard where I've found 3g works. So I've planted a short pole, which has a power and a spot for the hotspot modem to sit. It's covered with a plastic bottle with the bottom cut out. to keep the rain and dust off.
It assumes that being a senator should have a benefits. They are supposed to be representing their constituents, not gathering special privileges for themselves. If they are not living in the system they are creating, all hope is lost. So, anyone still hopeful?
Good job, Port-0, you got a few bites.
Next time I'll try <sarcastically/> quotes around what I say. Everyone took that a bit too seriously.
I think we should do the opposite, and merge all 50 states into one single one. Therefore eliminating all the duplication of government, and provide one streamlined service for everything. That would be a much better direction to go.
I did IT work for a private university for 14 years, I managed bandwidth by blocking certain protocols to various networks and hosts until Naptster, and the following peer to peer protocols, after a couple of years trying to manage bandwidth by blocking protocols, sites, advertising, etc. I gave up on that. Ultimately all of that damages the user's experience, and increased my work load. It puts the IT guy in the position of chasing the users behaviors, always responding to the latest fire and worse it put the IT guy in the position of determining what is important to the users, which it turns out is different to each class of user. So next I tried using one of the many products that allow the IT guy to create classes of users, and classify traffic, apply rules by class, build QoS rules based on all classes. Turns out this is the same nightmare with a prettier UI. I ultimately found the Net Equalizer (netequalizer.com) it is an elegant solution at a fraction of the cost. If you want to be the network nazi and control who uses what protocol, this isn't for you. But if you want to forget about bandwidth problems, this is it. It took about an hour to read the manual, play with options and plug it in, then I only touched it when we increased our bandwidth beyond its capacity a few years later. I don't work for the company or anything like that. It is just one device I bought that performed way beyond my expectations. Their web site has all the info about what it does and how. I would encourage everyone check this out if you have less bandwidth than you feel you need.
It seems the observation changed the state of the clam. This has to be some sort of break through in applying quantum physics to a larger set of particles.
I'm living at the moment in the rift valley about 40-50 miles west of Nairobi in the middle of a Maasai community. A surprisingly remote location being so close to the capital of Kenya. The only internet available is via the mobile network. Out in this area, there is no such things as a land line, fiber, etc. Mobile is the only option.
One anecdote about how mobile has changed things here. Last year there was a land dispute between two groups of Maasai near us that was pretty serious, 100+ Maasai on each side were armed with clubs, swords, spears, bow and arrow, ready to do ancient style combat with each other. I watched Braveheart, but it is pretty wild to see people gearing up for combat of that sort in real life. At any rate on their belt with their swords and clubs, they also carry a leather case with their Nokia phone. In this particular case they were used to text taunting messages back and forth between the sides. Normally, they would have to be within arrow shot to get a good taunt in. Now they can text a zinger in from the safety of the lee side of a large rock. For those wondering how it turned out. They had advanced within 100-200m of each other before one side decided it wasn't worth it, turned and ran.
I don't have stats, this is an offhand assessment, but I would say that about 60% of the Maasai in this area have a mobile phone. But this comes with some caveats:
- It is only in the last 15-20 years that people started regularly going to school in this area. So there is still maybe 85% illiteracy rate (off the cuff estimate). Which makes it difficult to SMS, except those who you know can read.
- Also power is a big problem I would estimate that upwards of 95% of people don't have direct access to power. So their phones are not working possibly half of the time. We have a steady stream of people who come to our house to get their phones charged.
- Most people here use a very basic Nokia phone which are great for voice calls and SMS, but aren't very smart.
Where the rich people live there is great 3G+ coverage and you will find lots of smart phones, etc. Out in rural areas the coverage is spotty data rates are low, service is a bit less accessible... Just like the US I suppose.
Africa is a huge continent with diverse culture and situations. There is a wide gap between rich and poor here. I think the mobile infrastructure is enabling, and more resilient than fixed infrastructure (in a place where it is common for people to dig up pipe or remove cabling from poles in order to sell the metal for a bit of cash). It is opening up the world in a way that was not previously possible. However, it is not magic, there are a lot of other things that need to be in place for the benefits to be fully realized. Good education, access to markets, a stable government being just a few.
A girl in my highschool back in 1988 was used voyager I or II photos (I can't recall which) to calculate the depth of craters on a couple of Jupiter's moons. Which is little different than what the article is describing, but it seems shadows have a lot more information encoded in them. This girl and I ended up winning the science fair and going on to the International science fair, where I felt a bit out of my league. She won a few awards. Apparently at that point no one had thought to do that up to that point. (for those interested, I wired up a photometer to an Apple II and wrote some software to automate variable star photometry, which measures the light from light sources through a telescope over time. It can be used to find the rotation of asteriods, or with a sensitive enough instrument, the change in light from a large planet orbiting a star, stuff like that.)
I have a large amount of personal data as well (also, no pr0n), though I realized some place along the line that it wasn't that important not to lose it. When I die most of will probably be tossed anyhow. Who is going to want to sort through it all.
With that said, I still don't want to get rid of all my data, so I have a drobo with 5-2TB drives, and I also have a linux box with raid set up, that backs up the drobo. But really, think hard about how much effort and expense you want to put towards keeping data. There is probably a whole lot of it that can just be tossed because you will never look at it again. It will probably save you a bunch of time and money to go through all the data and get rid of the stuff you'll never actually use. This actually works well for garages too.
If you are interested in a more free experience. There is an excellent OSS flight simulator out there, with tons of aircraft, scenery for the whole planet, etc... There are a number of people who have used it to build their own home walk in simulators. There was one guy a while back who had somehow acquired the front end of an F15 who was working on building it into a simulator environment in his garage. There was some cool stuff going on around this project.
I forgot the Link: http://www.flightgear.org/
If you are interested in a more free experience. There is an excellent OSS flight simulator out there, with tons of aircraft, scenery for the whole planet, etc... There are a number of people who have used it to build their own home walk in simulators. There was one guy a while back who had somehow acquired the front end of an F15 who was working on building it into a simulator environment in his garage. There was some cool stuff going on around this project.
What happens when SolarNet comes on line, or MilkyNet in the next 100 years, would we have to update the constitution again? Internet is a particular technology, it would be pretty lame to go through all the trouble to make an ammendment only to have it be replaced by something else about the time this actually goes into effect in 30 years.
Is Freedom of Speech the same as Freedom of Communication? If so, all we need is a court ruling or two, not a new amendment. If it is something different, then maybe a Freedom of Communication amendment should be added to the constitution.
Have you actually lived with tribal people in the jungle before?
I would agree, living in the modernized tribal setting is not so bad. But when you hear stories about what life was like before influences of the modern world, yikes, life was brutal. Life expectancy averaged in the 35-40 year range. Almost any injury was potentially life threatening. Revenge killing. Infanticide. Constant fear of the supernatural. Plenty of disease even without colds, flu, chicken-pox, measles. Like any place they sit around the fire laugh and tell stories. Like how 15 years ago the group down the river killed uncle Ed, and we must never forget that we need to go down there and burn one of their houses and try to whack one of them as they run out dazed in the middle of the night, but first we have to get a couple from that group up stream, And while were at it lets steal a little girl to be someones wife. and there are rumors the family to the east is planning a raid on us, so sleep with your spear in your hand.
Though not perfect, Peru has a bilingual education program where most indiginous people have the option of going to school and learning to read and write in their own language as well as spanish. The tribes maintain a sense of identity. They have a university for indiginous people, train teachers, agriculture, etc... Their language is preserved, stories are written down. Even if they all die out or assimilate, there is a record of their existence, culture, customs, etc...
my guess is that given the option most of the tribal groups in Peru would not go back to life the way it was in the 1930's.
Anyone remember losing or damaging a floppy disk? There's a reason why technologies have become "network centered." I'm betting it will be implemented in some stupid way like roaming profiles on a flash card. I can just see it now, you save your stuff, pull out your flash disk, and walk away... "Crap I forgot to 'eject' it." So now, All your data are belong to Xenu.
I think ultimately what needs to be done is to go the next step and develop a name system which doesn't rely on a central authority. P2P systems have developed ways to do distributed searches. I'm sure if it became important enough a replacement could be made. There are issues to overcome, like what happens when two entities decide they want to be google.com. Any way this would be done would require a bit of a paradigm shift in how we think about and use domain names, but maybe it's time to start thinking about new approaches. Some people have been working on this stuff. I'm not sure what they've come up with at this point...
a lghjun-30-2005.PDF
Here's one example: http://asp2.miuk.com/cmilive/documents/AdamGreenh
There are other benefits other than cost.
One of the other big benefits is safety. It is much safer to accellerate a space craft to 17,500 mph over the course of three days, rather than doing it in 9 minutes. It eliminates the need to light several million pounds of fuel on fire and try to control it. Same with deceleration and return from orbit. If we took three days to go from orbit to earth, it could be done in a way that would eliminate the need for a heat shield entirely. No more burning up on reentry and all that.
Another benifit is flexibility. We could drop a satellite off at geosyncronous orbit, or continue down the elevator and sling it out of earth orbit. You will need to hual a bit of fuel to put it in certain orbits, but still much less than a big rocket would require.
After geosyncronous orbit, the crawler doesn't need to expend energy to haul the payload out farther, though it probably needs to apply breaks, you could probably convert a bit of this breaking into electricity to charge the batteries for the crawler's return journey.
The analogy is faulty since lot of our "bandaids" won't wash off and a lot of our "symptoms" won't reappear.
The point is we will constantly be working on the solution to the next symptom, we will be chasing the tail of the problem rather than being preventative, not that the bandaid will wash off. Sure we still have to consider the symptom and treat that, but if we end our treatment there, we set ourselves up to repeat the process.
Here's a counterexample. Air pollution in developed countries has declined tremendouly since the 50's. There's no reason the same techniques wouldn't work in India. The "exporting the pollution" argument is bogus.
Technically there is no reason it wouldn't work. But there are lots of other reasons it won't work practically. India is a fairly technically advanced nation as the world goes. Why don't they implement emmissions controls on cars and power plants? Their economy would not be able to sustain it. Now we live in an economy which is globally linked. Are you willing to pay more to your phone company so they can pay their outsourced call centers more, so their employees can afford to ride in newer cleaner transportation? It's not going to happen. I've spent a fair amount of time in the underdeveloped world. The idea that we can transplant technology from the US or Europe to solve problems in other places doesn't work well in reality. It's been tried and failed many times. Example: many NGOs in Africa have had well drilling programs to provide clean drinking water. A very basic need. Most of those wells are not functioning in 6 months or less unless the organization continuously returns to maintain it. It's low tech, not much to a well and a hand pump. The people in these cultures are every bit as intelligent as us, but other cultures don't operate the way ours do, and tech doesn't fit in the same way it does in ours.
My original point was not that we should destroy humanity. Rather it's a complex problem, change is a long way off. It's not as simple as saying hey lets stop this behavior and do it a different way. There is too much momentum pushing culture in the direction it's going. Fixing global warming doesn't change the fact that our culture is geared towards an attitude of "who cares what happens, it won't affect me in my lifetime." Why do we continue to go that way? That's the problem that needs to be fixed. Obviously global warming has to be dealt with too, but if that's all we do, we are still in trouble.
Sigh. This is poetic, but meaningless.
Ok, I realize I am a pathetic peon compared to your great intellect. But that aside...
Rather than suicide and destroy humanity in the process, how about you think about the problem.
Global Warming is not the problem. Global Warming is the symptom. You can stick a bandaid on the symptom, but the problem won't go away and will continue to show up in other ways.
We can reduce the environmental footprint of society. We have already.
I'm sorry, but this statement is absolutely false. Developed countries have done nothing but grow their environmental footprint. They may reduce it in their country, but that is only because the real damaging part of that footprint has been outsourced to India and other less developed countries of the world.