> And once you've got a self-sustaining colony you have species survival insurance.
Not really. A Mars colony, even a self-sustaining one, would be extremely fragile until it got up to a decent size, and it would be far more sensitive to political turmoil. If a major war happened on Earth, you really think Mars wouldn't get sucked in as well? At the very least, conflict would happen between supporters of various groups. And while humans on Earth can survive collapse of civilization, on Mars collapse of civilization means everyone dies.
Touch-and-go is pointless; having a permanent settlement is the only thing worth spending all that money for, as he's saying. But at the same time, I wonder what safeguards a Mars settlement would really give us as a species. By far the most likely way for us to go extinct is by self-extinction, and a Mars colony would not prevent that.
Yup. By the way, since this is bound to crop up: this doesn't mean "don't be social." You can be a perfectly healthy social human being without broadcasting your photos and your every emotion to the world. You can also have a facebook account and still stay sane: just restrict your use of the site to 1/2 times a week.
> so you have to get away with millions for it to be worth it.
Not if you're not paying for the processors yourself i.e. you control a mining pool. In fact it would be very counterproductive to just make off with millions, because you'd be quickly found out that way. The best way would be to go slow and steady; each time you edge up 51% steal a few thousand dollars or less. Do that enough times and you could make serious money without having any costs at all beyond what it takes to run a mining pool.
Yes, but if your goal is to convert the bitcoins to cash, you don't have to broadcast it immediately. You can create the private blockchain, quickly run through an exchange, then broadcast.
If "The cost of something is what you give up to obtain it", then Bill Gates has 'spent' very little on his charity work. Not trying to diminish the importance of his charity - I'm sure the recipients of his donations are very grateful. But let's not pretend that this man is a shining example of moral perfection for all to follow.
Nope. If someone has 51% control they can effectively create a private blockchain and no one else would even have access to the information required to find out. If it dropped below 51%, people could find out, but if the blockchain were obfuscated enough this would be very hard.
There are ways to obfuscate the block-chain so that it becomes very hard to tell which coins are legitimate and which were double-spent (actually, a double-spent coin is 'legitimate', since the thing that defines legitimacy in the network is number of confirmations, which it would have). The only safe option is for the rest of the community to wrestle back mining power and then invalidate all blocks that were confirmed after the pool got 51%. This would eliminate double-spent coins, but it would create another problem: if any dollar exchanges happened during that time, the exchanges would be left holding the bag. It would be extremely hard to tell which transactions were legitimate and which weren't.
Exactly. Some people think that just because you can buy something from the supermarket, it's sanctioned by modern medicine. Doctors have been screaming at people for years to lower sugar intake. You don't need to eliminate it LHCF-style, but most people consume way too much.
Not to mention that every time a bug or vulnerability has been found in some part of the bitcoin ecosystem (like in Mt.Gox's non-standard trading software), the vulnerability HAS been exploited. Every single time. If you really think that someone isn't going to use this power (or hasn't already), you're dead wrong. Even worse, they can double-trade coins in a way that no one would ever find out, even if they dropped back below 51%. A few smaller cryptocurrencies got completely destroyed by 51% attacks. I think the bitcoin community will be watching this development very closely.
1. The 'paleo diet' as it's usually described has absolutely no relationship to what our paleolithic ancestors actually ate. See this talk by an actual anthropologist on the issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
2. Even if it did, there's no evidence to suggest that adopting a paleo diet is healthier than simply following the nutritional, exercise, and lifestyle recommendations laid out by modern science. In fact, it's probably far less healthy.
half the arguments people use in support of wacky theories like the paleo diet. Or theories like carbohydrates causing heart disease independent of body weight.
Amazingly, a single study counts when it does support their claims, but when it doesn't, you could point them to a thousand studies and they'd just say it's a global medical conspiracy.
Planetary surface colonization is only a romantic sci fi fantasy. It would be much much easier to construct and equip rotating space stations than to colonize planetary surfaces.
> The radical environmental fringe wants radical action. The majority want a slow and measured response that doesn't upset things too much.
Who cares what various groups want. The important thing here is what the most rational solution is. You speak of curbing CO2 emissions as if it's something we can choose not to do. That's a conservative fallacy. We're going to have to reduce CO2 emissions at some point, whether we like it or not. That's a fact that's dictated to us by the economics of fossil fuel power and the impact of global warming on the economy.
Every time serious scientists and analysts have looked at the issue, they've agreed that the negative economic effects of prompt CO2 reduction are miniscule compared to the long-term negative effects of global warming, even assuming an optimistically low level of warming. The problem is that the costs of inaction are thrust upon future generations, not us, so people are content to just coast along and do nothing for now.
> The environmental movement that you and I believe in already won. It got everything it was trying to get.
It had a lot of victories, no doubt about that. Lead-free gas, cleaner water, etc. But there's still a big problem and that's CO2 emissions. It's hard to argue that reducing CO2 is just childish entitlement thinking, when most everyone - environmentalist or not - agrees that it's a problem (except for a small corporate-manipulated fringe). In fact, it's probably the biggest environmental problem.
If we solve CO2 and then environmentalists also ask for a cookie, then I'd agree with you.
The patent system has become so screwed that 'number of patents' is not a meaningful measure of anything. Not arguing for or against your point, just pointing out that you'll have to take a more sophisticated approach if you want to meaningfully compare R&D output.
If that's the general argument, then it's wrong. Deuterium-Tritium fusion (the kind that all fusion efforts are currently pursuing) would produce not-insignificant amounts of neutron-irradiated waste. The waste would be just as hard to deal with as current nuclear waste is, although it would be produced in much smaller quantities. Still, though, both fission and fusion are much better than the alternatives (fossil fuels).
Aneutronic fusion would be virtually waste-free, but it's very hard and in no one's plans for the foreseeable future.
About us environmentalists, there are many different groups, and not all of us are retarded. People need electrical power, I accept that. Electrical power brings prosperity and higher standard of living, and a happier populace. I've been advocating for years for people to stop building fossil fuel plants and replace them with nuclear plants, and a lot of other environmentalists agree with me. Environmentalism isn't just Greenpeace and hippies.
I agree that the sci fi style vision of humans in space will probably never happen, but it's entirely possible that with better technology, at some point the economics will shift do doing a lot of stuff in space instead of the Earth.
Everyone knows that it's all just a big game (except the people who are suckered in and lose everything). Wall Street is propped up by a steady flow of investors who don't know any better and are easily parted with their money.
There are two faces to the financial sector: One is the legitimate 'financial services' part which actually provides value to society by facilitating lending and borrowing money. That's good and necessary. The other face is the one where day traders, hedge funds, "market analysts", and high-frequency trading operate, which is a system that is corrupt to the bone and requires a steady influx of fresh fools to stay alive otherwise it would collapse overnight.
> OSS community has for the most part failed to deliver anything that appeals to the masses
Firefox is an example, but you're making a wrong assumption. Very few open-source projects have 'appealing to the masses' as a primary goal. The goal isn't to sell more, it's to make a nice product that the authors themselves will use (as opposed to commercial software, where the creators themselves rarely use the software they release). If a lot of other people use it, that's great, but that's usually not their main concern.
Aside from that, though, an OS can NEVER "appeal to the masses", because the masses have no idea what an OS is. They want to go on facebook and listen to music and they memorize the button they have to press to do that. It's not that that's bad - they are just concerned with different things than computer tech in their lives. They don't care about security or reliability or long-term support. If some company came out with a Linux laptop and aggressively marketed it (just like Apple does) and it worked well enough to go on facebook and watch tv shows with the press of a few buttons (ordinary Ubuntu is adequate here), people would buy it, they wouldn't fucking care. If you asked them what OS they're using they'd probably give you a blank stare and say, "Windows?" (just like they do with Apple products).
And that's why as for YotLD, I concur with spire3661. The endgame has changed. Most of us still use desktops for doing actual work, but more and more stuff is being done in the browser. Who knows, maybe in 10 years everyone will use google docs and no one will use office anymore. Or maybe google docs will die. But the point is that desktop domination is an obsolete goal, one that the Linux community SHOULDN'T be pursuing at all.
You mean 40% of servers, 96% of supercomputers, and 80% of smartphones/tablets?
Linux may have started out as a desktop OS, but now it's very much a server/enterprise/workstation (am I allowed to use that word anymore?) OS. Oh, and also embedded devices and phones (really, everything except the desktop). Turns out, the average person who buys a PC is going to use the OS the computer ships with and will never upgrade.
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> And once you've got a self-sustaining colony you have species survival insurance.
Not really. A Mars colony, even a self-sustaining one, would be extremely fragile until it got up to a decent size, and it would be far more sensitive to political turmoil. If a major war happened on Earth, you really think Mars wouldn't get sucked in as well? At the very least, conflict would happen between supporters of various groups. And while humans on Earth can survive collapse of civilization, on Mars collapse of civilization means everyone dies.
Touch-and-go is pointless; having a permanent settlement is the only thing worth spending all that money for, as he's saying. But at the same time, I wonder what safeguards a Mars settlement would really give us as a species. By far the most likely way for us to go extinct is by self-extinction, and a Mars colony would not prevent that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
Yup. By the way, since this is bound to crop up: this doesn't mean "don't be social." You can be a perfectly healthy social human being without broadcasting your photos and your every emotion to the world. You can also have a facebook account and still stay sane: just restrict your use of the site to 1/2 times a week.
> so you have to get away with millions for it to be worth it.
Not if you're not paying for the processors yourself i.e. you control a mining pool. In fact it would be very counterproductive to just make off with millions, because you'd be quickly found out that way. The best way would be to go slow and steady; each time you edge up 51% steal a few thousand dollars or less. Do that enough times and you could make serious money without having any costs at all beyond what it takes to run a mining pool.
Yes, but if your goal is to convert the bitcoins to cash, you don't have to broadcast it immediately. You can create the private blockchain, quickly run through an exchange, then broadcast.
If "The cost of something is what you give up to obtain it", then Bill Gates has 'spent' very little on his charity work. Not trying to diminish the importance of his charity - I'm sure the recipients of his donations are very grateful. But let's not pretend that this man is a shining example of moral perfection for all to follow.
Nope. If someone has 51% control they can effectively create a private blockchain and no one else would even have access to the information required to find out. If it dropped below 51%, people could find out, but if the blockchain were obfuscated enough this would be very hard.
There are ways to obfuscate the block-chain so that it becomes very hard to tell which coins are legitimate and which were double-spent (actually, a double-spent coin is 'legitimate', since the thing that defines legitimacy in the network is number of confirmations, which it would have). The only safe option is for the rest of the community to wrestle back mining power and then invalidate all blocks that were confirmed after the pool got 51%. This would eliminate double-spent coins, but it would create another problem: if any dollar exchanges happened during that time, the exchanges would be left holding the bag. It would be extremely hard to tell which transactions were legitimate and which weren't.
LCHF*-style
Exactly. Some people think that just because you can buy something from the supermarket, it's sanctioned by modern medicine. Doctors have been screaming at people for years to lower sugar intake. You don't need to eliminate it LHCF-style, but most people consume way too much.
Not to mention that every time a bug or vulnerability has been found in some part of the bitcoin ecosystem (like in Mt.Gox's non-standard trading software), the vulnerability HAS been exploited. Every single time. If you really think that someone isn't going to use this power (or hasn't already), you're dead wrong. Even worse, they can double-trade coins in a way that no one would ever find out, even if they dropped back below 51%. A few smaller cryptocurrencies got completely destroyed by 51% attacks. I think the bitcoin community will be watching this development very closely.
The problem is that when it comes to reducing appetite, it's hard to separate the psychological factors from the physiological ones.
1. The 'paleo diet' as it's usually described has absolutely no relationship to what our paleolithic ancestors actually ate. See this talk by an actual anthropologist on the issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
2. Even if it did, there's no evidence to suggest that adopting a paleo diet is healthier than simply following the nutritional, exercise, and lifestyle recommendations laid out by modern science. In fact, it's probably far less healthy.
How do you know it's because you're consuming less carbohydrates, rather than just because you're consuming fewer calories?
half the arguments people use in support of wacky theories like the paleo diet. Or theories like carbohydrates causing heart disease independent of body weight.
Amazingly, a single study counts when it does support their claims, but when it doesn't, you could point them to a thousand studies and they'd just say it's a global medical conspiracy.
Planetary surface colonization is only a romantic sci fi fantasy. It would be much much easier to construct and equip rotating space stations than to colonize planetary surfaces.
> The radical environmental fringe wants radical action. The majority want a slow and measured response that doesn't upset things too much.
Who cares what various groups want. The important thing here is what the most rational solution is. You speak of curbing CO2 emissions as if it's something we can choose not to do. That's a conservative fallacy. We're going to have to reduce CO2 emissions at some point, whether we like it or not. That's a fact that's dictated to us by the economics of fossil fuel power and the impact of global warming on the economy.
Every time serious scientists and analysts have looked at the issue, they've agreed that the negative economic effects of prompt CO2 reduction are miniscule compared to the long-term negative effects of global warming, even assuming an optimistically low level of warming. The problem is that the costs of inaction are thrust upon future generations, not us, so people are content to just coast along and do nothing for now.
> The environmental movement that you and I believe in already won. It got everything it was trying to get.
It had a lot of victories, no doubt about that. Lead-free gas, cleaner water, etc. But there's still a big problem and that's CO2 emissions. It's hard to argue that reducing CO2 is just childish entitlement thinking, when most everyone - environmentalist or not - agrees that it's a problem (except for a small corporate-manipulated fringe). In fact, it's probably the biggest environmental problem.
If we solve CO2 and then environmentalists also ask for a cookie, then I'd agree with you.
The patent system has become so screwed that 'number of patents' is not a meaningful measure of anything. Not arguing for or against your point, just pointing out that you'll have to take a more sophisticated approach if you want to meaningfully compare R&D output.
If that's the general argument, then it's wrong. Deuterium-Tritium fusion (the kind that all fusion efforts are currently pursuing) would produce not-insignificant amounts of neutron-irradiated waste. The waste would be just as hard to deal with as current nuclear waste is, although it would be produced in much smaller quantities. Still, though, both fission and fusion are much better than the alternatives (fossil fuels).
Aneutronic fusion would be virtually waste-free, but it's very hard and in no one's plans for the foreseeable future.
About us environmentalists, there are many different groups, and not all of us are retarded. People need electrical power, I accept that. Electrical power brings prosperity and higher standard of living, and a happier populace. I've been advocating for years for people to stop building fossil fuel plants and replace them with nuclear plants, and a lot of other environmentalists agree with me. Environmentalism isn't just Greenpeace and hippies.
I agree that the sci fi style vision of humans in space will probably never happen, but it's entirely possible that with better technology, at some point the economics will shift do doing a lot of stuff in space instead of the Earth.
Everyone knows that it's all just a big game (except the people who are suckered in and lose everything). Wall Street is propped up by a steady flow of investors who don't know any better and are easily parted with their money.
There are two faces to the financial sector: One is the legitimate 'financial services' part which actually provides value to society by facilitating lending and borrowing money. That's good and necessary. The other face is the one where day traders, hedge funds, "market analysts", and high-frequency trading operate, which is a system that is corrupt to the bone and requires a steady influx of fresh fools to stay alive otherwise it would collapse overnight.
> OSS community has for the most part failed to deliver anything that appeals to the masses
Firefox is an example, but you're making a wrong assumption. Very few open-source projects have 'appealing to the masses' as a primary goal. The goal isn't to sell more, it's to make a nice product that the authors themselves will use (as opposed to commercial software, where the creators themselves rarely use the software they release). If a lot of other people use it, that's great, but that's usually not their main concern.
Aside from that, though, an OS can NEVER "appeal to the masses", because the masses have no idea what an OS is. They want to go on facebook and listen to music and they memorize the button they have to press to do that. It's not that that's bad - they are just concerned with different things than computer tech in their lives. They don't care about security or reliability or long-term support. If some company came out with a Linux laptop and aggressively marketed it (just like Apple does) and it worked well enough to go on facebook and watch tv shows with the press of a few buttons (ordinary Ubuntu is adequate here), people would buy it, they wouldn't fucking care. If you asked them what OS they're using they'd probably give you a blank stare and say, "Windows?" (just like they do with Apple products).
And that's why as for YotLD, I concur with spire3661. The endgame has changed. Most of us still use desktops for doing actual work, but more and more stuff is being done in the browser. Who knows, maybe in 10 years everyone will use google docs and no one will use office anymore. Or maybe google docs will die. But the point is that desktop domination is an obsolete goal, one that the Linux community SHOULDN'T be pursuing at all.
You mean 40% of servers, 96% of supercomputers, and 80% of smartphones/tablets?
Linux may have started out as a desktop OS, but now it's very much a server/enterprise/workstation (am I allowed to use that word anymore?) OS. Oh, and also embedded devices and phones (really, everything except the desktop). Turns out, the average person who buys a PC is going to use the OS the computer ships with and will never upgrade.