How about redesigning parking lots so people don't have to walk behind cars. A aisle down the middle of facing cars would work. It'd be safer for everyone.
Some parking lots are designed this way. But it's, you know, expensive: an elevated island in the middle of each couple of rows, wide enough so that encroaching cars still leave enough walking room. Next thing you know, you can't pack as many cars as the property owners would like. And even then, people would jaywalk everywhere because it's a goddamned parking lot.
Besides, "indicators" from whom ie is that trustworthy?
Just from the fact that it's Nokia who takes the responsibility and is rolling out the update. There is no talk about a Windows Phone system software release caused by this, which would apply to other devices.
If you can remove the limiter from your car without 'bricking' it, you've got a car. If you can't, you've got a toy. It's not whether a device has certain settings or abilities stock that matters, it's whether you can/modify/ it to have them. The N900 can be hacked into doing anything possible with the hardware.
You can't replace cellular modem firmware in an N900 without turning it into a non-cellular device. But I understand why do you like this particular toy.
Facebook is a wasteland of religious propaganda, and baby pictures, and photos from last night's trip to the bar. I can post things to Instagram that would somehow seem... pretentious to post to Facebook.
You probably have not been selective with who your "friends" are (and the scariest part is, they can kill you for unfriending them:)). I only check Facebook every few days now, but my friend feed still has enough interesting things to read. Also, there is nothing I would share on any online service that would feel too snobby for my Facebook friends. I use Google+ circles mainly to spare people the postings that would be utterly irrelevant to them.
But Instagram? Sharing photos that have been pretentiously shittified and cut to a square shape? Why?
This might be a little sobering, at least to you, but liquid fuels production is going to continue rising for at least another ten and likely fifteen or more years, thanks exactly to that dreaded technological optimism you speak of fulfilling itself.
What was the question? Was the question, "find me a civilization that lasted longer than the Roman civilization?" I don't think so.
What I mean is, we don't have the benefit of hindsight on development of America, and it has not even lasted longer than many great civilizations of the past. Western Europe can count for more, and it has known booms and busts.
Moore's law was posited in 1965, yet it is holding true. Moore did not know about laser photolithography or the coming photonic chips, but he could see the data going back to early tabulating machines and the first vacuum tube computers and project it out. It seems like a leap of faith, but the law is still holding up 47 years later.
Something about recent developments, like the manufacturers piling up cores instead of making chips faster, or Microsoft making the next Windows work faster on the same hardware than the last one, tells me that it has petered out. It will have to at some point, as no improvements to hardware can make it faster than speed of light and smaller than Planck length.
I wonder how much did the transition hurt in 16th century England contrasted with all other bad Medieval shit, given that the society was much less technologically sophisticated.
It has been around for what, a quarter of the time that the classical Roman civilization existed for?
Seriously, in the past, cultures collapsed because of warfare. With the reduction of war worldwide that we've seen in the last 40 years, it wouldn't be surprising if war ended completely by 2030.
IIRC, people were writing something like this at the end of the XIX century.
Now, this analysis is somewhat un-nuanced, but it is a lot better than saying, "It always happened in the past, therefore it will happen in the future." So don't try that argument again.
The argument "technology/democracy/progress always delivered us in the past, therefore it will in the future" is similarly suspect.
In fact population growth is already well past the inflection point (change in sign of the second derivative) predicted by a logistic function. Nowadays even the most pessimistic projections predict a drop in population at some point in the second half of the XXI century with less alarmist projections placing the start of the population drop somewhere in 2040-2050.
Wait, so you trust predictions in this area? But even if the global population is well on track to stabilize, there may be an odd couple billion people already now who owe their existence to the availability of cheap oil (with emphasis on cheap).
Simply stating that a resource is finite is no proof that we are about to run out of it. The ocean is finite, yet we are not in any danger of running out of sea water.
Funny that you picked up sea water to give an example of a safely available resource. Look at the fresh water issues around the world.
Population will rapidly drop and together with it a much larger decrease in energy use because there will no longer be a need for new roads, schools, or houses.
It will rapidly drop where and starting when? So far it's been growing in most of the world, including the U.S.
We were not running out of firewood. Coal was just much better. And the crucial part is, there was still enough wood to complete the switch.
Now, for the first time, we need to switch from a great energy source (good energy density, easily stored and transported, relatively safe) to some less advantageous alternatives. Solar power is intermittent, and there is not yet a good, scalable way to store electric energy in bulk. Even if everybody will eventually buy a plug-in car and install a vehicle-to-grid system, the expense of ramping this up will be enormous (and may be personally prohibitive for many people, who will be losing their jobs left and right due to the downturn caused by expensive oil).
I agree, if not now, within the next decade or so. But we already have the replacement options: natural gas
That will peak only some decades later, and there will be price shocks during the infrastructure switch.
and soon enough solar power as solar cells keep dropping in price and efficiency keeps on going up.
Maybe. And surely your nearest supermarket chain will celebrate their all-new fleet of futuristic electric trucks (100 miles range, enough to haul from the nearest railhead, good that the electrified rail freight capacity is getting expanded in massive tax-funded efforts) with low prices on the goods. But not too low, farmers will need to recoup the costs of their new electric machinery somehow too, not to mention the power bills and fertilizer (natural gas demand is going to be much higher, remember). Lithium for all those batteries will be precious, someone's gotta pay for it...
No. Monetary manipulation is destroying the economy, which has lead to declining demand. Real costs of production in dollar terms are rising because the world is being flooded with dollars. Price oil in gold, and you will see what I mean. If oil really was becoming scarce, its real price would be rising. http://pricedingold.com/crude-oil/
I see what you've done there. Gold, as other commodities, has been priced through the roof lately, just like oil.
Further, think about what you are saying here. You are denying the fact of technological progress. This flies in the face of every decade of the past 400 years. You think technological progress has peaked too?
No, but there never has been a challenge like this: effect a radical technological change when a resource needed to do pretty much anything is becoming scarce. Actually, I'm wrong: there was this challenge for such advanced societies of their day as Maya or Easter Island Polynesians, and they lost.
Yet guess what? Humanity has continued to expand well past that predicted limits,
It's not so exponential if you look more closely. There was an explosion each time a technological revolution happened, then it was ebb and flow until the next one, and ebbs tended to include events like famine and epidemics. No technological revolution was at hand at the right time in a few isolated places such as Easter Island, where societies never rose back to former levels.
Our current explosion coincided with use of fossil fuels. Think of it: the entire history of United States of America has been a history of expansion. At first there was enough land to colonize, you just had to get rid of some pesky Indians. Then there was the Industrial Revolution, oil-fueled agriculture able to feed more people, computers bringing increased efficiency. People under 30 who have been living in the developed world all their life have no experience of serious shortages of any kind (read up on 1970s oil crises, the lessons of those mild shocks may become useful soon). So energy descent will necessarily bring a great cultural shift.
This is like saying that my prediction that the world was going to end today at 7am was never disproved in principle, it was just my timing that was off.
Their predictions are based on impossibility to continue using a finite resource at an exponentially growing rate, which is what the humankind has been doing to date. The timing may have been off by decades, but the gap is closing with exponentially increasing speed. So by the time it becomes evident that Malthusians were right, the catastrophe is already happening.
You have to understand that you can't just pick a hypothesis and refuse to refine it with the coming of new data. When you continue to make wrong prediction after wrong prediction, you have to consider the possibility that your hypothesis is FUNDAMENTALLY FLAWED, and start from scratch. Let the DATA guide you, not your own dumb ideas that are based on nothing but your own destrudo.
Recent data tell that the global oil production has been on a plateau since 2005, despite the rollercoasting prices. It's hard to tell without hindsight, but the peak of the oil-fueled civilization may be happening now. And there has never been a time in history when people had to change their primary fuel source on the global scale, when the previous best option was becoming scarce. But let this not upset your cozy, self-assured, technologically optimistic worldview.
WinPhone will be irrelevant by then, anyways, what with imminent Win8 launch and all. Why buy a phone that is guaranteed to be obsoleted soon?
Obsoleted, or upgraded to Windows Phone 8?
WinPhone 7, on the other hand, has a completely different development stack vs Win8 Metro.
Really? As far as I could see, it's the same C#/WPF/Silverlight stuff, which I expect Windows 8 will support for years to come. Where do you get your FUD from?
I'm not finding fault with this study, but the conclusion seems to have stepped outside the realm of science and into politics by assuming (at least this is the impression the article gives) that government policy is the only way to limit the growth of our ecological footprint.
The good old freedom-loving alternative has inspired such movies as Mad Max 2.
It's peculiar how science is only OK as long as its conclusions are harmless to powerful interests.
It's amazing how few people understand that Club of Rome's predictions were never disproved in principle. Sure the timing was off, but it's impossible to predict the oil peak accurately given uncertainty of reserve data and technological progress. BTW, if you put your money on the latter, please know that it cannot outrun the laws of nature. The economic growth will have to stop (or, at least, become less than exponential, which is anathema just the same to most modern economists) before the humankind will boil itself with the amount of energy it will need to use to continue it. As things stand, we may not even be able to tech our way out of the oil crunch.
Check it - "just a convenient phone" has a smashing success with percent or two worldwide adoption after two years in the market, while alleged "people who need gazillion gigabytes of swappable storage and don't have a life" and whose numbers are "much smaller" buy Android devices like hot cake.
Where did I say that only geeks buy Android phones?
Oh, and your "#1 in one of three major mobile platforms" somewhere up the thread? Hate to break it to you, but being 99% of WinPhone's 2% means lose to those who have just 5% of Android's 50% market.
MS copying Apple's (past) "It's for true connoiseurs, that's why it doesn't sell much" line, who'da thought?
Let's get back to this conversation (if I can call so getting comments from an AC), say, six months from now. Being an Android fanboi, you may have reasons to be as insecure as you seem to.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would you get stopped for having a broken door lock?
Because they notice you trying to hold the door closed with one hand and failing?
How about redesigning parking lots so people don't have to walk behind cars. A aisle down the middle of facing cars would work. It'd be safer for everyone.
Some parking lots are designed this way. But it's, you know, expensive: an elevated island in the middle of each couple of rows, wide enough so that encroaching cars still leave enough walking room. Next thing you know, you can't pack as many cars as the property owners would like. And even then, people would jaywalk everywhere because it's a goddamned parking lot.
Besides, "indicators" from whom ie is that trustworthy?
Just from the fact that it's Nokia who takes the responsibility and is rolling out the update. There is no talk about a Windows Phone system software release caused by this, which would apply to other devices.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2780315&cid=39649425
If you can remove the limiter from your car without 'bricking' it, you've got a car. If you can't, you've got a toy. /modify/ it to have them. The N900 can be hacked into doing anything possible with the hardware.
It's not whether a device has certain settings or abilities stock that matters, it's whether you can
You can't replace cellular modem firmware in an N900 without turning it into a non-cellular device.
But I understand why do you like this particular toy.
Not new by a long shot. Look at N9.
Right, that is so six months old.
And now it's been improved by software that works faster on more modest, and therefore cheaper, hardware.
I had forgot about that. Too funny and I guess they forgot who they had partnered with.
From all indications, the bug is in Nokia-provided adaptation firmware.
You were saying?
Why ruin a good phone? Android will run slow on that hardware, not to mention the bugs that nobody is going to fix by next Moday.
Facebook is a wasteland of religious propaganda, and baby pictures, and photos from last night's trip to the bar. I can post things to Instagram that would somehow seem... pretentious to post to Facebook.
You probably have not been selective with who your "friends" are (and the scariest part is, they can kill you for unfriending them :)). I only check Facebook every few days now, but my friend feed still has enough interesting things to read. Also, there is nothing I would share on any online service that would feel too snobby for my Facebook friends. I use Google+ circles mainly to spare people the postings that would be utterly irrelevant to them.
But Instagram? Sharing photos that have been pretentiously shittified and cut to a square shape? Why?
Yeah, that's the thing that makes lotteries profitable... for their organizers.
This might be a little sobering, at least to you, but liquid fuels production is going to continue rising for at least another ten and likely fifteen or more years, thanks exactly to that dreaded technological optimism you speak of fulfilling itself.
Right, so how much do those "liquids" cost?
What was the question? Was the question, "find me a civilization that lasted longer than the Roman civilization?" I don't think so.
What I mean is, we don't have the benefit of hindsight on development of America, and it has not even lasted longer than many great civilizations of the past. Western Europe can count for more, and it has known booms and busts.
Moore's law was posited in 1965, yet it is holding true. Moore did not know about laser photolithography or the coming photonic chips, but he could see the data going back to early tabulating machines and the first vacuum tube computers and project it out. It seems like a leap of faith, but the law is still holding up 47 years later.
Something about recent developments, like the manufacturers piling up cores instead of making chips faster, or Microsoft making the next Windows work faster on the same hardware than the last one, tells me that it has petered out. It will have to at some point, as no improvements to hardware can make it faster than speed of light and smaller than Planck length.
Thanks, interesting to learn.
I wonder how much did the transition hurt in 16th century England contrasted with all other bad Medieval shit, given that the society was much less technologically sophisticated.
America.
It has been around for what, a quarter of the time that the classical Roman civilization existed for?
Seriously, in the past, cultures collapsed because of warfare. With the reduction of war worldwide that we've seen in the last 40 years, it wouldn't be surprising if war ended completely by 2030.
IIRC, people were writing something like this at the end of the XIX century.
Now, this analysis is somewhat un-nuanced, but it is a lot better than saying, "It always happened in the past, therefore it will happen in the future." So don't try that argument again.
The argument "technology/democracy/progress always delivered us in the past, therefore it will in the future" is similarly suspect.
In fact population growth is already well past the inflection point (change in sign of the second derivative) predicted by a logistic function. Nowadays even the most pessimistic projections predict a drop in population at some point in the second half of the XXI century with less alarmist projections placing the start of the population drop somewhere in 2040-2050.
Wait, so you trust predictions in this area?
But even if the global population is well on track to stabilize, there may be an odd couple billion people already now who owe their existence to the availability of cheap oil (with emphasis on cheap).
Simply stating that a resource is finite is no proof that we are about to run out of it. The ocean is finite, yet we are not in any danger of running out of sea water.
Funny that you picked up sea water to give an example of a safely available resource. Look at the fresh water issues around the world.
Population will rapidly drop and together with it a much larger decrease in energy use because there will no longer be a need for new roads, schools, or houses.
It will rapidly drop where and starting when? So far it's been growing in most of the world, including the U.S.
Except when we switched from firewood to coal.
We were not running out of firewood. Coal was just much better. And the crucial part is, there was still enough wood to complete the switch.
Now, for the first time, we need to switch from a great energy source (good energy density, easily stored and transported, relatively safe) to some less advantageous alternatives. Solar power is intermittent, and there is not yet a good, scalable way to store electric energy in bulk. Even if everybody will eventually buy a plug-in car and install a vehicle-to-grid system, the expense of ramping this up will be enormous (and may be personally prohibitive for many people, who will be losing their jobs left and right due to the downturn caused by expensive oil).
I agree, if not now, within the next decade or so. But we already have the replacement options: natural gas
That will peak only some decades later, and there will be price shocks during the infrastructure switch.
and soon enough solar power as solar cells keep dropping in price and efficiency keeps on going up.
Maybe. And surely your nearest supermarket chain will celebrate their all-new fleet of futuristic electric trucks (100 miles range, enough to haul from the nearest railhead, good that the electrified rail freight capacity is getting expanded in massive tax-funded efforts) with low prices on the goods. But not too low, farmers will need to recoup the costs of their new electric machinery somehow too, not to mention the power bills and fertilizer (natural gas demand is going to be much higher, remember). Lithium for all those batteries will be precious, someone's gotta pay for it...
No. Monetary manipulation is destroying the economy, which has lead to declining demand. Real costs of production in dollar terms are rising because the world is being flooded with dollars. Price oil in gold, and you will see what I mean. If oil really was becoming scarce, its real price would be rising. http://pricedingold.com/crude-oil/
I see what you've done there. Gold, as other commodities, has been priced through the roof lately, just like oil.
Further, think about what you are saying here. You are denying the fact of technological progress. This flies in the face of every decade of the past 400 years. You think technological progress has peaked too?
No, but there never has been a challenge like this: effect a radical technological change when a resource needed to do pretty much anything is becoming scarce. Actually, I'm wrong: there was this challenge for such advanced societies of their day as Maya or Easter Island Polynesians, and they lost.
Yet guess what? Humanity has continued to expand well past that predicted limits,
It's not so exponential if you look more closely. There was an explosion each time a technological revolution happened, then it was ebb and flow until the next one, and ebbs tended to include events like famine and epidemics. No technological revolution was at hand at the right time in a few isolated places such as Easter Island, where societies never rose back to former levels.
Our current explosion coincided with use of fossil fuels. Think of it: the entire history of United States of America has been a history of expansion. At first there was enough land to colonize, you just had to get rid of some pesky Indians. Then there was the Industrial Revolution, oil-fueled agriculture able to feed more people, computers bringing increased efficiency. People under 30 who have been living in the developed world all their life have no experience of serious shortages of any kind (read up on 1970s oil crises, the lessons of those mild shocks may become useful soon). So energy descent will necessarily bring a great cultural shift.
This is like saying that my prediction that the world was going to end today at 7am was never disproved in principle, it was just my timing that was off.
Their predictions are based on impossibility to continue using a finite resource at an exponentially growing rate, which is what the humankind has been doing to date. The timing may have been off by decades, but the gap is closing with exponentially increasing speed. So by the time it becomes evident that Malthusians were right, the catastrophe is already happening.
You have to understand that you can't just pick a hypothesis and refuse to refine it with the coming of new data. When you continue to make wrong prediction after wrong prediction, you have to consider the possibility that your hypothesis is FUNDAMENTALLY FLAWED, and start from scratch. Let the DATA guide you, not your own dumb ideas that are based on nothing but your own destrudo.
Recent data tell that the global oil production has been on a plateau since 2005, despite the rollercoasting prices. It's hard to tell without hindsight, but the peak of the oil-fueled civilization may be happening now. And there has never been a time in history when people had to change their primary fuel source on the global scale, when the previous best option was becoming scarce. But let this not upset your cozy, self-assured, technologically optimistic worldview.
WinPhone will be irrelevant by then, anyways, what with imminent Win8 launch and all. Why buy a phone that is guaranteed to be obsoleted soon?
Obsoleted, or upgraded to Windows Phone 8?
WinPhone 7, on the other hand, has a completely different development stack vs Win8 Metro.
Really? As far as I could see, it's the same C#/WPF/Silverlight stuff, which I expect Windows 8 will support for years to come. Where do you get your FUD from?
I'm not finding fault with this study, but the conclusion seems to have stepped outside the realm of science and into politics by assuming (at least this is the impression the article gives) that government policy is the only way to limit the growth of our ecological footprint.
The good old freedom-loving alternative has inspired such movies as Mad Max 2.
It's peculiar how science is only OK as long as its conclusions are harmless to powerful interests.
It's amazing how few people understand that Club of Rome's predictions were never disproved in principle. Sure the timing was off, but it's impossible to predict the oil peak accurately given uncertainty of reserve data and technological progress. BTW, if you put your money on the latter, please know that it cannot outrun the laws of nature. The economic growth will have to stop (or, at least, become less than exponential, which is anathema just the same to most modern economists) before the humankind will boil itself with the amount of energy it will need to use to continue it. As things stand, we may not even be able to tech our way out of the oil crunch.
Check it - "just a convenient phone" has a smashing success with percent or two worldwide adoption after two years in the market, while alleged "people who need gazillion gigabytes of swappable storage and don't have a life" and whose numbers are "much smaller" buy Android devices like hot cake.
Where did I say that only geeks buy Android phones?
Oh, and your "#1 in one of three major mobile platforms" somewhere up the thread? Hate to break it to you, but being 99% of WinPhone's 2% means lose to those who have just 5% of Android's 50% market.
MS copying Apple's (past) "It's for true connoiseurs, that's why it doesn't sell much" line, who'da thought?
Let's get back to this conversation (if I can call so getting comments from an AC), say, six months from now. Being an Android fanboi, you may have reasons to be as insecure as you seem to.