Well, the social institution of religions are to spirituality as a concert hall is to music.
Actually, its worse. Religions are like a concert hall where music goes to die.
If you look at the history or religions, innovation starts when somebody has an intense, personal, mystical experience. Other people try to duplicate the experience, with varying degrees of success. People who fail either give up, or move the goal posts, causing bickering over who has the "true way". So authorities start to try to codify the path to mystical experience, which is in fact impractical unless your religion involves eating mushrooms.
What follows is a gradual dumbing down of the religion, until it becomes spiritually moribund.
Take the biblical creation myth. Genesis is obviously patched together from a number of different sources. It doesn't take a genius scholar to figure that out, you just have to read it with an open mind. Who knows why some pieces were put in, but the story of Adam and Even is a pointed one. It asks, "Why is there suffering, and death?" It answers the question with a question: would you rather be an unthinking animal? We are tormented by death because we're thinking creatures, who have an understanding of ourselves in time and space. Because of this, we know there will come a time without us in it. A world where you don't face your future death is only available to animals without self awareness.
This is quite an interesting point, which you miss by treating the story as a kind of primitive natural history. That's what happens to mystical experience after thousands of years of religious dumbing down.
Science works by repeatable, or at least credibly documented observations. Miracles that are repeatable are not "miracles". Observations of singular miracles are ipso facto not credible.
Therefore, if "miracles" existed, science would not be able to prove it. The very structure of science places the miraculous outside its province. That said, when religion claims a scientific result, that claim is open to scientific observation. The belief that prayer can alter outcomes independent of any other factor is one that can be empirically tested.
Not necessarily. It's easy to think of counterexamples.
The event that determines a post's ordinal value is it's completion. Let us imagine a universe in which the completion of every post is separated by a space-like interval. Accordingly, for any pair of posts there must exist a relativistic frame of reference in which they complete at the same time. Thus, in such universes, there is no unambiguous ordering of of any pair of posts, and thus no post can be "first".
Let's try an even simpler counterexample. Let's imagine a universe in which all posts are completed in pairs. That is, every post A must have another post B such that the completion time of A and B is simultaneous in some frame of reference. For example, we could imagine that in this universe, every poster is required to submit at least two posts at a time. In such universes, there may be a first pair of post, but neither post can be called "first" in itself.
Universes with no posts whatsoever fill such conditions trivially; that is to say there do not exist any violations of the condition chosen.
Well, it probably did, but you have to factor in a shift from piracy to properly licensed, free software.
To the degree they are losing market share, it's illogical to attribute that to piracy. Pirated Windows and Office don't count as lost market share, but when somebody who formerly copied MS products illegally turns to legally licensed, free alternatives, it does. Furthermore, when somebody does this, it dilutes the network effect of the software, the value of having that software because it's the software "everybody else" has. Firefox might, in the end, turn out to be the most historically important F/OSS project, other than possibly Apache. It may be the linchpin project that allows non-Windows platforms to achieve parity in web based apps.
Tracers can be diluted. Ducks cannot. The fact that tracers can flow through obstructions and ducks cannot make the ducks a useful complement to tracers. Rubber ducks also attract attention from beachcombers, allowing them to be of service for years.
Obviously, it's a trying too hard joke. Instead of trying too hard to get out of trouble, it's trying too hard to please when there is no possibility of pleasing.
In any case, not everything that is absurd is funny. The absurd becomes funny when you recognize that while a situation is absurd, it is also familiar. IT's funnier if it makes you squirm a bit.
As far as the fish slapping thing, American humor hasn't quite caught up because American hasn't accumulated the same depth of cultural cruft that Britain has. There's nothing like tradition to make the absurd look normal. Still, we're catching up. We might not have much Morris dancing, but we have Civil War reenactors.
The idea that humans are "special", that in some way the rules of life on Earth do not apply to them, is attractive, and it probably has some merit. But in order to counter the actual evidence of Earth's history, all you really have is a sort of narrative about what humans are like and would do.
Humans are unique because as a species it can adapt to novel environments by analyzing those environments and adapting to them, rather than relying on the operation of natural selection on random intergenerational genetic variation. For example, a human population moving from a warm climate to what would otherwise be a fatally cold climate doesn't have to evolve fur or more heat retentive body types. They design and build shelters, including clothing. This gives any individual human a greater geographical scope for survival than any organism other than microbes, fungi, and that sort of thing.
You bring up an extreme example of this. Venus, of course, is difficult, but it is quite possible that humans could develop a self-supporting colony on Mars. I personally don't think this is a practical or useful venture at this point in history, but I don't think anybody believes that Martian colonization is a physical impossibility. That is something which cannot be said for any macrofauna in the history of the Earth, and a good argument that humanity is unique.
It is actually conceivable that humanity could colonize Venus. In some ways Venus might be even more promising than Mars to a sufficiently advanced civilization. It is much more Earth-like than Mars; the key to Venus is CO2. The technology to deal with it is of course beyond any forseeable ability of ours, but it is not inconceivable for the human race. It is inconceivable for any other Earth species or clade, which should demonstrate that we are exceptional as a species.
The paper seemed to be a lot of handwaving to me, at least where it comes to anything remotely practical. A nuclear holocaust in 1962 would not have been anything close to an extinction event.
Some of the calculations in the paper are theoretically interesting, for example balancing the discounted value of lost future generations against current opportunity costs. However, I think that postulating a total extinction is has no practical implications on the analysis. The discounted value of preventing of a 100% future extinction event is probably not distinguishable from preventing a 50% mortality event, given the extreme improbability of a 100% extinction.
It's interesting as a limiting case, of course, but not really a practical concern, since a 50% mortality event is much more probable. In fact, we've seen something on that order happen in Europe, during the Black Death. It doesn't seem implausible that modern technology could make something like this possible on a global scale. Even though such an event would have very little impact on the survival of the human race, it is still quite worth taking into consideration.
Well, the Unabomber was trying to make a better society. However, let's agree that in a couple of billion people, somebody, if in possession of vial of your super-bug would feel compelled to smash it.
Still, such a bug would have to infect practically any multicellular organism it came in contact with to kill everyone on Earth, which I don't think is very likely. Alternatively, you'd need a pretty elaborate delivery system. Well, let's stipulate that our mad genius has that too.
I'd just make a point though. A bioweapon doesn't have to rise to the point of even considering to possibility of total human extinction to be worth taking steps against. The practical economic value of taking steps against something as utterly unlikely to cause species extinction as weaponized anthrax are considerable. I'm guessing more valuable than planning for a super-bug that destroys everything.
In any case, the steps you'd take against garden variety WMD are probably essentially the same ones you'd take against some doomsday device.
Well, you are deliberately misconstruing what I said, but let's start from your point.
Establishing the genus Bacillus as an upper limit on humanity's robustness does not assert any meaningful constraint humanity's survival prospects. You can't point to any species (or taxonomic category you choose to name) that is demonstrably more adaptable than humanity and shows extinction is a meaningful concern over anything less than geological time scales.
Well, if you go by numbers, there are are a thousand times as many individual bacteria in an individual human's gut as there are people in the world. In fact there are roughly the same number of bacteria in an individual's gut as there are human cells in his entire body, so arguably humans are just mobile environments evolved by the bacteria.
Krill and termites easily outnumber and outweigh us in total.
You raise an worthwhile point, but I would say that it is highly likely that 60,000 survivors could repopulate the planet.
True, if we assume they are evenly spread across the planet surface, many, perhaps most of them would perish before finding another human being. But that's a very, very stringent condition, isn't it? It seems almost certain that in such a scenario, people will tend survive in geographic clumps. Places the plague never reached, or where the post comet strike climate changes were survivable.
Given this, I'd be fairly confident at pushing the decimal point one more place, down to 6000 survivors. Maybe even lower. A bit over a hundred years ago, there were only 30 elephant seals in the world, now there are hundreds of thousands. Genetic analysis shows that there were probably fewer than seven total cheetahs in the world at some point around ten thousand years ago. Subsequently populations peaked in the 1950s at the forty thousand mark.
Both these animals are far, far less adaptable and fecund than human beings.
I'd go so far as to say that a single population of a dozen or so healthy breeding individuals, with access to minimal forage and game supplies, would have a far better than even chance of repopulating the world. Given 60,000 survivors or even 6,000 survivors globally, there is likely to be at least one such group if not several.
Leaving aside the points others have made about the example you give, it really proves my point.
The collapse of the Roman empire in the West did not entail the extinction of H. sapiens in Europe. People adapt to changing circumstances. The contiguity of population also means that the cultural collapse of Rome was never complete, even if the political collapse was total. We must not confuse the collapse of civilization with extinction. When they mesoamerican city states like Copan fell and dissolved into the jungle, the people didn't disappear, they just changed their way of life.
With respect to the 99.99% of all species going extinct, that is not a counter argument to my assertion that humans are uniquely adaptable. In point of fact, we aren't necessarily the dominant species on the planet. Ranked by biomass there is more krill on the planet than humanity. There is more termites, both as individuals and by weight. Humans, however, have colonized the greatest variety of geography.
Name another species that is humanity's equal in adaptability and fecundity, and you carry your argument. Otherwise, the 99.99% figure is irrelevant. Humans are far more adaptable than 99.99% or even 99.999% of species that ever lived.
In fact I do know what I'm saying. Microsoft failed to segment the market properly. The built the technology and assumed people would do as they're told and buy it at different prices in different colored boxes. Instead, the people with the most clout balked, and demanded XP.
If you remember, a lot of companies used Windows 9x for a long time after they were "supposed" to go to NT. That was fine. Microsoft still had the bases covered. The Vista roll-out was more like they had tried to discontinue non-NT windows, rather than introducing Windows 95. The result would have been the same: people would have demanded Windows 3 be continued.
I don't see any evidence that home users care about the glitz, or that anybody really cares (in economic terms) about the gloss. There are some worthwhile architectural changes to Vista, it's just too much of an all things for all people project. A narrower focus would result in a more satisfactory niche product (as NT) that could colonize various niches (as NT 4 did), and morph into a widely acceptable corporate OS (as Windows 2000 and XP did) when hardware caught up and the kinks were ironed out.
There is no doubt that 99.99% of the population could be wiped out by a cataclysm. That's probably worth... considering. But killing 99.99% of the world's population leaves over 600,000 individuals alive. Individuals of a species so adaptable that it can thrive everywhere from the deserts of the Kalihari to the coast of Greenland.
Humanity is a weed species. In fact, we're the weed species. We thrive relative to other species on disruption. Rats and cockroaches are just hangers on. They are Kato to our OJ, hitching a ride on our exploitation of new niches opened by environmental cataclysm. Every kind of cataclysm that could possibly be prepared for wiould only in a very short time convert the world into a storehouse of underutilized resources for the survivors. Those survivors might not have much fun, at least in the short term, but people are amazingly adaptable. Hell should hold not terrors for humanity, because it won't take anything like an eternity for anything to seem normal to people.
The only way to cause human extinction is to manage to kill everyone at one go. Things like a the Sun going unexpectedly nova, or some kind of unforseen astronomical radiation burst that sterilizes everything. Stuff you couldn't possibly prepare for.
Of the things you can prepare for, things like plague, the reason to prepare for them isn't the survival of the species. It's the survival of society. We have it pretty good, after all, and it wouldn't take much in those cases to take out a significant amount of insurance for our way of life.
is that Microsoft has, in the past, successfully navigated this kind of situation before. In fact, they were the beneficiary.
Remember OS/2? Highly regarded for its technical quality, however it required a princely amount of RAM. Ideally you needed something like 8MB of RAM, back in the day when this added over $500 in current era dollars to the price of the system. Add this to the cost of the OS itself, and you didn't have high adoption.
Microsoft did a classic market segmentation move: they had Windows 3.1, which ran in 2MB of RAM, and NT 3.x, which ran in 8MB, and provided easy upgrade paths between the two products.
What seems really... odd to me today is the way Microsoft is trying to segment and position its markets. All this Vista Home/Professional/Ultimate business. You may think Windows 3 was a POS, but it addressed a legitimate market segment: people who didn't wanted to do basic computing tasks without dropping the better part of a thousand dollars more for a more powerful system. There may have been all kinds of good reasons for them to go with a better system, but they had other uses for the money.
I look at a box of Windows Vista Super-Duper Ultimate, festooned with bullets, sitting next to Vista Business, Vista Home Premium and Vista Home Basic, and I'm supposed to sort myself into the appropriate market segment by studying the bullets festooning each package. What in the world were they thinking? Don't they study their own history?
Going by their own history, they should release Windows Basic and Windows Advanced. Windows Basic would be XP stripped down to nothing and capable of running in 512MB of RAM on any chipset manufactured in the last five years. Windows Advanced would be Vista with all the bells and whistles and need the latest and greatest chipsets.
I'd make Windows Basic really cheap, but make network login and sharing an add-on, so that corporations who wanted to use it would pay something between the cost of Windows Basic and Windows Advanced, and feel like they're getting a deal. Even the UAC business would have been less of fiasco here. People who wanted to take their chances could go with Windows Basic. IT Departments choosing Windows Advanced could piously tell their users that they were being protected from harm.
Microsoft failed with Vista because they wanted to drag the world onto a product it wasn't ready for, and tried to segment the market in totally meaningless ways.
First of all, forget fruitcake you buy. It's insipid. Store bought fruitcake is to fruitcake as Budweiser is to beer.
Homemade fruitcake -- that's different. It's not for everybody, because it's so intense. I like it toasted and spread with cream cheese, which smoothes out the rough edges.
If the dark, dense US style of fruitcake is too much, you might try a good homemade Italian Pannetone -- which is a yeast bread. Traditionally it takes a special pan, but it cooks fine in a bundt pan.
But in case you haven't noticed, the "desktop" hasn't exactly been the Software Gold Rush it was in the 1980s and early 1990s. People are worried about missing the Next Big Thing; maybe some kind of smart phone; maybe these tiny notebooks are the cusp of some kind of change in software delivery.
Imagine, for a moment, a world where computing power for most tasks is so cheap its disposable and bandwidth its (to coin a phrase) "too cheap to meter". This is a projection of historical trends; it may not be a feasible projection, but we don't know it is not feasible either. In that world, how important is it to "own" desktop computing?
Yes, but that doesn't mean that a country where most of the land is between 1 and 1.5m above local MSL can afford to ignore a 3.1mm/year rise in global MSL.
You are assuming that the geological and atmospheric phenomenon that counterbalance global sea level change will keep pace. That may be true over the short term at least, but this particular country doesn't have much margin of error.
No. I'm just saying that the kinds of things that produce local sea level variations at certain sites aren't going cancel out the long term trends. Either (a) the Maldives needs to plan for future sea level rises on the order of the global average over the last fifty years or (b) they ought to have reason to believe that the global average rise in sea levels will level off or reverse. They can't hope for local atmospheric pressure to increase enough to compensate, or for wind patterns to shift more surface water their way. Nor can they assume that factors that have masked global trends won't somehow reverse.
Planning, then, is sensible and prudent. In a country where most of the land is only about 1m above sea level, a 3.1 mm/year rise in global MSL is a very serious concern. It's not that an island with a high point of 1m is going to turn into a sandbar in twenty or thirty years; it's that the impacts of events like unusually large cyclones or tsunamis are going to be magnified.
I'm not "working for the IPCC". I'm working against public policy by wishful thinking. I'm working for the application of rationality and prudence to problems like this. Nobody is calling for abandoning the Maldives while they are still inhabitable; they are calling for making preparations should projected changes in sea level change the status quo. This preparation could take the form of land investments that would return value to the islands during such period as evacuation remains unnecessary.
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Well, the social institution of religions are to spirituality as a concert hall is to music.
Actually, its worse. Religions are like a concert hall where music goes to die.
If you look at the history or religions, innovation starts when somebody has an intense, personal, mystical experience. Other people try to duplicate the experience, with varying degrees of success. People who fail either give up, or move the goal posts, causing bickering over who has the "true way". So authorities start to try to codify the path to mystical experience, which is in fact impractical unless your religion involves eating mushrooms.
What follows is a gradual dumbing down of the religion, until it becomes spiritually moribund.
Take the biblical creation myth. Genesis is obviously patched together from a number of different sources. It doesn't take a genius scholar to figure that out, you just have to read it with an open mind. Who knows why some pieces were put in, but the story of Adam and Even is a pointed one. It asks, "Why is there suffering, and death?" It answers the question with a question: would you rather be an unthinking animal? We are tormented by death because we're thinking creatures, who have an understanding of ourselves in time and space. Because of this, we know there will come a time without us in it. A world where you don't face your future death is only available to animals without self awareness.
This is quite an interesting point, which you miss by treating the story as a kind of primitive natural history. That's what happens to mystical experience after thousands of years of religious dumbing down.
This argument does not wash.
Science works by repeatable, or at least credibly documented observations. Miracles that are repeatable are not "miracles". Observations of singular miracles are ipso facto not credible.
Therefore, if "miracles" existed, science would not be able to prove it. The very structure of science places the miraculous outside its province. That said, when religion claims a scientific result, that claim is open to scientific observation. The belief that prayer can alter outcomes independent of any other factor is one that can be empirically tested.
Not necessarily. It's easy to think of counterexamples.
The event that determines a post's ordinal value is it's completion. Let us imagine a universe in which the completion of every post is separated by a space-like interval. Accordingly, for any pair of posts there must exist a relativistic frame of reference in which they complete at the same time. Thus, in such universes, there is no unambiguous ordering of of any pair of posts, and thus no post can be "first".
Let's try an even simpler counterexample. Let's imagine a universe in which all posts are completed in pairs. That is, every post A must have another post B such that the completion time of A and B is simultaneous in some frame of reference. For example, we could imagine that in this universe, every poster is required to submit at least two posts at a time. In such universes, there may be a first pair of post, but neither post can be called "first" in itself.
Universes with no posts whatsoever fill such conditions trivially; that is to say there do not exist any violations of the condition chosen.
Well, it probably did, but you have to factor in a shift from piracy to properly licensed, free software.
To the degree they are losing market share, it's illogical to attribute that to piracy. Pirated Windows and Office don't count as lost market share, but when somebody who formerly copied MS products illegally turns to legally licensed, free alternatives, it does. Furthermore, when somebody does this, it dilutes the network effect of the software, the value of having that software because it's the software "everybody else" has. Firefox might, in the end, turn out to be the most historically important F/OSS project, other than possibly Apache. It may be the linchpin project that allows non-Windows platforms to achieve parity in web based apps.
Who's more moronic? The moron or moron who follows him?
Tracers can be diluted. Ducks cannot. The fact that tracers can flow through obstructions and ducks cannot make the ducks a useful complement to tracers. Rubber ducks also attract attention from beachcombers, allowing them to be of service for years.
Obviously, it's a trying too hard joke. Instead of trying too hard to get out of trouble, it's trying too hard to please when there is no possibility of pleasing.
In any case, not everything that is absurd is funny. The absurd becomes funny when you recognize that while a situation is absurd, it is also familiar. IT's funnier if it makes you squirm a bit.
As far as the fish slapping thing, American humor hasn't quite caught up because American hasn't accumulated the same depth of cultural cruft that Britain has. There's nothing like tradition to make the absurd look normal. Still, we're catching up. We might not have much Morris dancing, but we have Civil War reenactors.
Humans are unique because as a species it can adapt to novel environments by analyzing those environments and adapting to them, rather than relying on the operation of natural selection on random intergenerational genetic variation. For example, a human population moving from a warm climate to what would otherwise be a fatally cold climate doesn't have to evolve fur or more heat retentive body types. They design and build shelters, including clothing. This gives any individual human a greater geographical scope for survival than any organism other than microbes, fungi, and that sort of thing.
You bring up an extreme example of this. Venus, of course, is difficult, but it is quite possible that humans could develop a self-supporting colony on Mars. I personally don't think this is a practical or useful venture at this point in history, but I don't think anybody believes that Martian colonization is a physical impossibility. That is something which cannot be said for any macrofauna in the history of the Earth, and a good argument that humanity is unique.
It is actually conceivable that humanity could colonize Venus. In some ways Venus might be even more promising than Mars to a sufficiently advanced civilization. It is much more Earth-like than Mars; the key to Venus is CO2. The technology to deal with it is of course beyond any forseeable ability of ours, but it is not inconceivable for the human race. It is inconceivable for any other Earth species or clade, which should demonstrate that we are exceptional as a species.
That was an editing mistake. It should read NOT extinct, obviously.
The paper seemed to be a lot of handwaving to me, at least where it comes to anything remotely practical. A nuclear holocaust in 1962 would not have been anything close to an extinction event.
Some of the calculations in the paper are theoretically interesting, for example balancing the discounted value of lost future generations against current opportunity costs. However, I think that postulating a total extinction is has no practical implications on the analysis. The discounted value of preventing of a 100% future extinction event is probably not distinguishable from preventing a 50% mortality event, given the extreme improbability of a 100% extinction.
It's interesting as a limiting case, of course, but not really a practical concern, since a 50% mortality event is much more probable. In fact, we've seen something on that order happen in Europe, during the Black Death. It doesn't seem implausible that modern technology could make something like this possible on a global scale. Even though such an event would have very little impact on the survival of the human race, it is still quite worth taking into consideration.
Well, the Unabomber was trying to make a better society. However, let's agree that in a couple of billion people, somebody, if in possession of vial of your super-bug would feel compelled to smash it.
Still, such a bug would have to infect practically any multicellular organism it came in contact with to kill everyone on Earth, which I don't think is very likely. Alternatively, you'd need a pretty elaborate delivery system. Well, let's stipulate that our mad genius has that too.
I'd just make a point though. A bioweapon doesn't have to rise to the point of even considering to possibility of total human extinction to be worth taking steps against. The practical economic value of taking steps against something as utterly unlikely to cause species extinction as weaponized anthrax are considerable. I'm guessing more valuable than planning for a super-bug that destroys everything.
In any case, the steps you'd take against garden variety WMD are probably essentially the same ones you'd take against some doomsday device.
Well, you are deliberately misconstruing what I said, but let's start from your point.
Establishing the genus Bacillus as an upper limit on humanity's robustness does not assert any meaningful constraint humanity's survival prospects. You can't point to any species (or taxonomic category you choose to name) that is demonstrably more adaptable than humanity and shows extinction is a meaningful concern over anything less than geological time scales.
Well, sure. But nobody, I trust, is talking about preparing for events 10^15 years in the future. I chose 10^9 as a nice round number.
Well, if you go by numbers, there are are a thousand times as many individual bacteria in an individual human's gut as there are people in the world. In fact there are roughly the same number of bacteria in an individual's gut as there are human cells in his entire body, so arguably humans are just mobile environments evolved by the bacteria.
Krill and termites easily outnumber and outweigh us in total.
You raise an worthwhile point, but I would say that it is highly likely that 60,000 survivors could repopulate the planet.
True, if we assume they are evenly spread across the planet surface, many, perhaps most of them would perish before finding another human being. But that's a very, very stringent condition, isn't it? It seems almost certain that in such a scenario, people will tend survive in geographic clumps. Places the plague never reached, or where the post comet strike climate changes were survivable.
Given this, I'd be fairly confident at pushing the decimal point one more place, down to 6000 survivors. Maybe even lower. A bit over a hundred years ago, there were only 30 elephant seals in the world, now there are hundreds of thousands. Genetic analysis shows that there were probably fewer than seven total cheetahs in the world at some point around ten thousand years ago. Subsequently populations peaked in the 1950s at the forty thousand mark.
Both these animals are far, far less adaptable and fecund than human beings.
I'd go so far as to say that a single population of a dozen or so healthy breeding individuals, with access to minimal forage and game supplies, would have a far better than even chance of repopulating the world. Given 60,000 survivors or even 6,000 survivors globally, there is likely to be at least one such group if not several.
Leaving aside the points others have made about the example you give, it really proves my point.
The collapse of the Roman empire in the West did not entail the extinction of H. sapiens in Europe. People adapt to changing circumstances. The contiguity of population also means that the cultural collapse of Rome was never complete, even if the political collapse was total. We must not confuse the collapse of civilization with extinction. When they mesoamerican city states like Copan fell and dissolved into the jungle, the people didn't disappear, they just changed their way of life.
With respect to the 99.99% of all species going extinct, that is not a counter argument to my assertion that humans are uniquely adaptable. In point of fact, we aren't necessarily the dominant species on the planet. Ranked by biomass there is more krill on the planet than humanity. There is more termites, both as individuals and by weight. Humans, however, have colonized the greatest variety of geography.
Name another species that is humanity's equal in adaptability and fecundity, and you carry your argument. Otherwise, the 99.99% figure is irrelevant. Humans are far more adaptable than 99.99% or even 99.999% of species that ever lived.
In fact I do know what I'm saying. Microsoft failed to segment the market properly. The built the technology and assumed people would do as they're told and buy it at different prices in different colored boxes. Instead, the people with the most clout balked, and demanded XP.
If you remember, a lot of companies used Windows 9x for a long time after they were "supposed" to go to NT. That was fine. Microsoft still had the bases covered. The Vista roll-out was more like they had tried to discontinue non-NT windows, rather than introducing Windows 95. The result would have been the same: people would have demanded Windows 3 be continued.
I don't see any evidence that home users care about the glitz, or that anybody really cares (in economic terms) about the gloss. There are some worthwhile architectural changes to Vista, it's just too much of an all things for all people project. A narrower focus would result in a more satisfactory niche product (as NT) that could colonize various niches (as NT 4 did), and morph into a widely acceptable corporate OS (as Windows 2000 and XP did) when hardware caught up and the kinks were ironed out.
Over the next billion years or so. Zero.
There is no doubt that 99.99% of the population could be wiped out by a cataclysm. That's probably worth ... considering. But killing 99.99% of the world's population leaves over 600,000 individuals alive. Individuals of a species so adaptable that it can thrive everywhere from the deserts of the Kalihari to the coast of Greenland.
Humanity is a weed species. In fact, we're the weed species. We thrive relative to other species on disruption. Rats and cockroaches are just hangers on. They are Kato to our OJ, hitching a ride on our exploitation of new niches opened by environmental cataclysm. Every kind of cataclysm that could possibly be prepared for wiould only in a very short time convert the world into a storehouse of underutilized resources for the survivors. Those survivors might not have much fun, at least in the short term, but people are amazingly adaptable. Hell should hold not terrors for humanity, because it won't take anything like an eternity for anything to seem normal to people.
The only way to cause human extinction is to manage to kill everyone at one go. Things like a the Sun going unexpectedly nova, or some kind of unforseen astronomical radiation burst that sterilizes everything. Stuff you couldn't possibly prepare for.
Of the things you can prepare for, things like plague, the reason to prepare for them isn't the survival of the species. It's the survival of society. We have it pretty good, after all, and it wouldn't take much in those cases to take out a significant amount of insurance for our way of life.
is that Microsoft has, in the past, successfully navigated this kind of situation before. In fact, they were the beneficiary.
Remember OS/2? Highly regarded for its technical quality, however it required a princely amount of RAM. Ideally you needed something like 8MB of RAM, back in the day when this added over $500 in current era dollars to the price of the system. Add this to the cost of the OS itself, and you didn't have high adoption.
Microsoft did a classic market segmentation move: they had Windows 3.1, which ran in 2MB of RAM, and NT 3.x, which ran in 8MB, and provided easy upgrade paths between the two products.
What seems really ... odd to me today is the way Microsoft is trying to segment and position its markets. All this Vista Home/Professional/Ultimate business. You may think Windows 3 was a POS, but it addressed a legitimate market segment: people who didn't wanted to do basic computing tasks without dropping the better part of a thousand dollars more for a more powerful system. There may have been all kinds of good reasons for them to go with a better system, but they had other uses for the money.
I look at a box of Windows Vista Super-Duper Ultimate, festooned with bullets, sitting next to Vista Business, Vista Home Premium and Vista Home Basic, and I'm supposed to sort myself into the appropriate market segment by studying the bullets festooning each package. What in the world were they thinking? Don't they study their own history?
Going by their own history, they should release Windows Basic and Windows Advanced. Windows Basic would be XP stripped down to nothing and capable of running in 512MB of RAM on any chipset manufactured in the last five years. Windows Advanced would be Vista with all the bells and whistles and need the latest and greatest chipsets.
I'd make Windows Basic really cheap, but make network login and sharing an add-on, so that corporations who wanted to use it would pay something between the cost of Windows Basic and Windows Advanced, and feel like they're getting a deal. Even the UAC business would have been less of fiasco here. People who wanted to take their chances could go with Windows Basic. IT Departments choosing Windows Advanced could piously tell their users that they were being protected from harm.
Microsoft failed with Vista because they wanted to drag the world onto a product it wasn't ready for, and tried to segment the market in totally meaningless ways.
First of all, forget fruitcake you buy. It's insipid. Store bought fruitcake is to fruitcake as Budweiser is to beer.
Homemade fruitcake -- that's different. It's not for everybody, because it's so intense. I like it toasted and spread with cream cheese, which smoothes out the rough edges.
If the dark, dense US style of fruitcake is too much, you might try a good homemade Italian Pannetone -- which is a yeast bread. Traditionally it takes a special pan, but it cooks fine in a bundt pan.
does not read.
Well... sure.
But in case you haven't noticed, the "desktop" hasn't exactly been the Software Gold Rush it was in the 1980s and early 1990s. People are worried about missing the Next Big Thing; maybe some kind of smart phone; maybe these tiny notebooks are the cusp of some kind of change in software delivery.
Imagine, for a moment, a world where computing power for most tasks is so cheap its disposable and bandwidth its (to coin a phrase) "too cheap to meter". This is a projection of historical trends; it may not be a feasible projection, but we don't know it is not feasible either. In that world, how important is it to "own" desktop computing?
Yes, but that doesn't mean that a country where most of the land is between 1 and 1.5m above local MSL can afford to ignore a 3.1mm/year rise in global MSL.
You are assuming that the geological and atmospheric phenomenon that counterbalance global sea level change will keep pace. That may be true over the short term at least, but this particular country doesn't have much margin of error.
No. I'm just saying that the kinds of things that produce local sea level variations at certain sites aren't going cancel out the long term trends. Either (a) the Maldives needs to plan for future sea level rises on the order of the global average over the last fifty years or (b) they ought to have reason to believe that the global average rise in sea levels will level off or reverse. They can't hope for local atmospheric pressure to increase enough to compensate, or for wind patterns to shift more surface water their way. Nor can they assume that factors that have masked global trends won't somehow reverse.
Planning, then, is sensible and prudent. In a country where most of the land is only about 1m above sea level, a 3.1 mm/year rise in global MSL is a very serious concern. It's not that an island with a high point of 1m is going to turn into a sandbar in twenty or thirty years; it's that the impacts of events like unusually large cyclones or tsunamis are going to be magnified.
I'm not "working for the IPCC". I'm working against public policy by wishful thinking. I'm working for the application of rationality and prudence to problems like this. Nobody is calling for abandoning the Maldives while they are still inhabitable; they are calling for making preparations should projected changes in sea level change the status quo. This preparation could take the form of land investments that would return value to the islands during such period as evacuation remains unnecessary.
In which case the video is no argument against global sea level rise, which is well documented.