Uhm, where did you get that figure? 700 million years is two supercontinent cycles ago - Antarctica was slightly north of the equator then. The antarctic ice cap didn't even start to form until the end of the Eocene. According to wikipedia, lake Vostok may have been isolated for the past 15 to 25 million years.
I love living in a world where the regular headlines sound like the start of a decent sci fi adventure.
Now let's just hope this puppy doesn't get out of the lab and become a sci-fi/horror. Two hundred years from now it could be on the History Channel as "Zombie Plagues from the Past".
Indeed. If it escapes, it might colonize every pitch dark, ice cold and almost sterile lake in the immediate area!!!
Yes, but they make virtually all their money off of other companies products. Steam itself is poorly coded and buggy. It's good enough that people don't run away from it, but the software itself is in bad need of a rewrite.
The latter half-life projects are laughably far behind.
So, I'd say that Valve really demonstrates why bossless isn't a good idea. Somebody needs to be in charge and making sure things are done at some point.
Steam is much like their games: technology-wise it's behind the curve, but the 'gameplay' was well designed.
I suspect Valve painted themselves in a corner by designing their own game engine. It's expensive and time consuming to maintain, and it's clearly not one of the best ones out there. I can' t think of any major titles outside Valve that have licensed it. They do produce top class content: game design and game play, which seems to have paid the bills despite the glacial pace of development.
You're showing your age with conspiracy theories from a decade ago. Microsoft isn't the fear inspiring behemoth it was a decade ago. No one talks about them any more, no one fears them any more, if anything, they are the ones being bullied out of a market or two these days. The only place still obsessed with them is Slashdot.
Go ahead, take your plant to the Netherlands (or wherever), you'll be back in five years, looking for qualified steel workers!
How can a US based company ever compete with a low wage, low cost of living country like the Netherlands, where employees aren't entitled to any benefits and will work 12+ hours a day for a basic meal?
The real stupidity comes from failing to notice how well the rest of the world can keep pace with the much-vaunted "American productivity" while maintaining a vastly better quality of life
Quality of life is really subjective. In Europe, you need longer vacations, because you can get so little out of your free time. Buying groceries is extremely stressful, because stores only open during office hours. Everything is closed after 6pm, on Sundays and outside the major cities on Saturday afternoons too. If you need something from the store, if you need a doctors appointment, visit a bank office, deal with the government, get a haircut, even receive a package through the mail, you have no choice but to take off work. Everyone, and I mean absolutely everyone, goes shopping on Saturday morning, even the 75% of the population that either doesn't work, or works part time. This means you spend entire Saturdays standing in line for a single item, and hope it's not out of stock. On Sunday you hang around your tiny town house without a yard, because everything is closed. About a third of my ample vacation time is used up taking off work for irritating tasks like these. I suspect Europeans work part time, because it is the only way to cope with the extreme stress of having to do everything that involves the exchange of money on weekdays between 9 and 5.
Compare this to the US, where even in a small town out in the sticks, you can achieve most or all of those things any day of the week. Shopping even 24 hours a day. You can drive to the store without being caught in traffic, there will be ample parking space and they will always have what you planned to buy. A trip to the store that takes all Saturday and costs you a year of your life in frustration and stress in Europe now takes only a few minutes. The entire culture and economy are organized around the assumption that you and your spouse both have a regular, full time job, and facilitates this lifestyle. Despite the longer office hours and shorted vacations, it doesn't 'feel' like you're working harder.
Wish I had mod points today. Sooner or later though we will meet civilization that will crush our conquest when we try to crush them. Isn't it better to simply live in peace? The Universe is big enough for all, I guess. Think about it - if everyone out there was a conqueror, chances are someone would have taken our planet already, say a 100 million years ago. But they didn't (or couldn't but we are not looking at this possibility here - we assume interstellar travel is reasonably possible). Would we have moral issue to colonize a planet teaming with primitive lizards? Of course not (well, the vast majority of us, anyway). Oh, wait, after 100 million years and at least one huge asteroid there are apes on that planet and look, one branch is evolving technological civilization! Who would have thought....
I think there is a lot to be said about the Prime Directive...
A travel time of a hundred years at realistic speeds (now don't start about approaching the speed of light, this is not going to happen) gives plenty of time to cool off and think again. I don't see interplanetary warfare as extremely likely. Even if those Taurans turn out to be real jerks, all it will take is to stop responding to the conversation going at one message per generation.
I DO think that brazilian legislators are as corrupt as they were 10 years ago (2003) or 15 years ago (1998).
They will sell themselves so they can have their own Apple iPhones without having to struggle into "popular prices shoppings"
And Brazil IS still a "Banana Republic". Do you really think that rich people will ever be arrested for driving drunk?
That is not a banana republic, it's just a place with open corruption. A banana republic is a place that is effectively owned and run by a foreign company that makes the rules for the local government instead of the other way around. The classic example were the Standard Fruit Company and the United Fruit Company, which effectively owned several central American countries during the 20th century.
Older workers cost more for insurance, benefits, and typically salary; are likely to have families, and not be willing to put in long hours. Also, at age 58, that means an employer can only expect a few years after training you before you retire.
I agree. At 58, you better have decades of relevant experience if you're looking for a job. No one is going to hire a 50+ or even a 30+ year old for an entry level coding job. It doesn't even matter if you drop your wage demands to a level appropriate for your experience, he's not going to get interviews. With education and work experience dating back to the 70's, employers will be able to guess his age. If he leaves all that away, and somehow manages to score an interview, he'll get a very short interview followed by "don't call us, we'll call you".
You keep reading alarmist reports about a shortage of techies, particularily programmers, but there is no such thing. There is a shortage of people willing to do that kind of work for minimum wage, 70 hours a week, with no benefits, which is what some managers without a technical background really feel they ought to be paying their digital janitors. If anything, the IT business has been a buyers market for several years now. Rates have been dropping, especially at the "more experienced" side of the equation. There is always a matter of diminishing returns with experience, and especially so in such a rapidly changing field. There's noone out there with 10+ years of iOS experience, and very few with 5+ years. The 25+ years you previously had with obsolete technologies usually aren't worth the extra cost.
TL;DR -> Op, keep programming as a hobby, but find a new job where your experience matters.
I have also had the impression that assert() is a hack that shouldn't be used much (?).
It's a hack that should be used extensively - in development code. In the production build, you generally turn on a compiler flag that prevents asserts from being compiled. This is why it's absolutely criminal to put code in an assert that has any side effects whatsoever.
I grew up literally an ocean away from the Washington monument and yet I speak and write considerably better than most of those who grew up near it.
It's so brave of you to admit this out in the open, but just because you managed to overcome your disability, it's tempting to mock those who are more severely affected. It's best to resist this urge.
By what, a turnstile? If one group can migrate Northward the other can migrate Southward.
The groups didn't migrate out of Africa. There are still people living in Africa, as you may have noticed. People expanded out of Africa. Species don't easily expand into an ecosystem where its niche is already occupied. Neanderthals had a population that was under stress and shrinking, in the face of a severe ice age and disappearing food sources, so there was no expanding for them.
Anyway, this all took place over the space of some 20 to 30 thousands years, and involved populations that were very small to begin with. One species can out compete and replace another species over that timescale, without the two even seeing each other very often, as long as they're after the same food.
You all keep forgetting about the non-native-speaker syndrome. A severe and debilitating developmental defect, caused by growing up too far away from the Washington monument, which often results in a speech impediment that makes the victim unintelligible to unaffected individuals. There is no cure, but with the right therapy, patients may learn to speak later in life, though rarely very fluently or coherently. It is downright insensitive to make fun of this terrible condition. It's better for their fragile self esteem to just repeat what they say, without the mistakes, and then answer, as though something was said that makes sense.
Being intelligent don't ensure your survival. You needed a lot of intelligence to build atomic bombs, and see what could had happened.
Anyway, intelligence is just part of the equation. Culture is another, an important one. How much different should be a neanderthal intelligence to be distinguished from one of us if grows with our culture? And maybe more important, if with our culture is more or less like us, at least in the way of thinking, will be falling in the same kind of moral problems like growing kids on labs?
I agree intelligence doesn't seem to be that important for survival. Dinosaurs lasted for 150 million years without brains to speak of, until they were nuked from orbit, an end which our superior intellect would not have protected us from either, at least not in the first few hundred thousand years of our existence as modern humans.
As for the demise of the Neanderthal: no need to look at culture or intelligence, simple environmental factors will do. The last ice age was particularly long and brutal. The Eurasian mega fauna, which the Neanderthals depended on for food, died out. Modern humans in Eurasia could be replenished from their habitat in Africa, with much more favorable conditions, while the Neanderthal was trapped in Europe and western Asia.
for shallow waters the oil companies use the same design but rather build a concrete cylinder that is connected to bedrock, (...)this seems a simpler solution then trying to build a sand island.
There is a small flaw in your plan, as far as it applies to that part of the world. The bedrock is hundreds of meters down below the sediment. Building a sand island just means using the materials at hand, rather than having to ship them in from scandinavia. Dredging sand is a relatively easy and cheap method for building structures off the coast, and there is ample experience with this.
First, i'm Dutch, the northern neighbor of the Belgians, and we like to make jokes of each other.
This is a misunderstanding. The Dutch may like to joke about Belgians, but don't really mean it. Belgians are deadly serious when they call the Dutch nasty, greedy, unreliable, uncultured, rude and stupid. There is no joking involved.
You're comparing burning old growth forests that take decades or centuries to grow to burning grasses that can grow 10 ft tall in a single season?
I'm saying you are either underestimating how much energy we use today, or overestimating how much net energy you can grow per area unit of land. Switchgrass may be a way of making areas productive that are now too dry for agriculture other than low intensity cattle farming. This means turning land that is now essentially wilderness into mono culture farmland, which is just another form of the same ecological disaster I described earlier.
Bio fuels should not be mistaken for the green, organic, nature lover's wet dream. It will require an awful lot of land to cover the energy needs of our current standard of living. As we will still want to eat food as well, this extra land will have to come from wilderness or forests, rather than from existing farm land. This is not a happy solution for bears, deer and buffalo. The only ones cheering will be people who bought prairie land wilderness for a dollar per acre.
That sounds like a load of bullshit to me..... - How was the total US energy 'budget' calculated? Note the word 'budget' not 'usage'.. which is indicative of an estimate, not a fact
Up to the industrial revolution, our main source of fuel used to be biomass: wood (charcoal). Keep in mind that this was when the population size and total energy use of western civilization were tiny by today's standards. Nevertheless, we managed to run out of wood.
Britain and Ireland were almost completely stripped of trees. Even today, the only trees you'll find older than the industrial revolution are in places that were some noble family's private hunting ground at the time. The eastern mediterranean was stripped of trees as far back as ancient times, and still hasn't recovered. In the low countries, after they ran out of wood, they started burning the soil (peat), turning their land into lakes, which they later had to drain to turn it back into land, which is why they now live below sea level. They did however make a fortune importing timber from the sparsely populated Baltic. Yes, wood had to come from as far as Russia and Finland, because western Europe had run out.
Believe it or not, burning biofuels was an environmental disaster, and switching to coal allowed forests and wildlife to recover.
Now, turning agricultural waste into fuel sounds like a good idea to me (that's what they do in Brazil with the leftovers from the sugar production), but when you're thinking of growing crops with the express purpose of making fuel, you have to consider the fact that modern, high-yield agriculture is effectively our way of using land to turn fossil fuel and sunlight into food. Tilling, sowing, fertilizing, pest control, harvesting, processing and transport together have to use substantially less energy than the fuel you are making will yield.
Clearly, land + fuel + sunlight -> food -> fuel -> energy is an inefficient process. Why not eliminate a couple of conversion steps from the process, and use solar cells to generate electricity? The process land + sunlight -> energy has fewer inefficient conversion steps.
Slashdot Mirror
Only that the north, above the 45th parallel is. That's Canada, Northern Europe, Russia and up to the arctic.
When you say Northern Europe, you really mean nearly all of Europe except for parts of Spain, Italy and the Balkans.
700 million years (or more!)
Uhm, where did you get that figure? 700 million years is two supercontinent cycles ago - Antarctica was slightly north of the equator then. The antarctic ice cap didn't even start to form until the end of the Eocene. According to wikipedia, lake Vostok may have been isolated for the past 15 to 25 million years.
I love living in a world where the regular headlines sound like the start of a decent sci fi adventure.
Now let's just hope this puppy doesn't get out of the lab and become a sci-fi/horror. Two hundred years from now it could be on the History Channel as "Zombie Plagues from the Past".
Indeed. If it escapes, it might colonize every pitch dark, ice cold and almost sterile lake in the immediate area!!!
More like Nuclear Chemistry if you ask me. Where else is the Chromosomal DNA found?
Thank God I, Mr. Pedantic, got here just in time, to ruin your joke with unsolicited facts: bacteria do not have a cell nucleus.
Yes, but they make virtually all their money off of other companies products. Steam itself is poorly coded and buggy. It's good enough that people don't run away from it, but the software itself is in bad need of a rewrite.
The latter half-life projects are laughably far behind.
So, I'd say that Valve really demonstrates why bossless isn't a good idea. Somebody needs to be in charge and making sure things are done at some point.
Steam is much like their games: technology-wise it's behind the curve, but the 'gameplay' was well designed.
I suspect Valve painted themselves in a corner by designing their own game engine. It's expensive and time consuming to maintain, and it's clearly not one of the best ones out there. I can' t think of any major titles outside Valve that have licensed it. They do produce top class content: game design and game play, which seems to have paid the bills despite the glacial pace of development.
You're showing your age with conspiracy theories from a decade ago. Microsoft isn't the fear inspiring behemoth it was a decade ago. No one talks about them any more, no one fears them any more, if anything, they are the ones being bullied out of a market or two these days. The only place still obsessed with them is Slashdot.
Go ahead, take your plant to the Netherlands (or wherever), you'll be back in five years, looking for qualified steel workers!
How can a US based company ever compete with a low wage, low cost of living country like the Netherlands, where employees aren't entitled to any benefits and will work 12+ hours a day for a basic meal?
Employs 350,000 people? Rakes in about $350 Billion in revenues each year?
A million in revenues per employee sounds pretty amazing. Where did you get these numbers, and did it hurt when you got them out?
The real stupidity comes from failing to notice how well the rest of the world can keep pace with the much-vaunted "American productivity" while maintaining a vastly better quality of life
Quality of life is really subjective. In Europe, you need longer vacations, because you can get so little out of your free time. Buying groceries is extremely stressful, because stores only open during office hours. Everything is closed after 6pm, on Sundays and outside the major cities on Saturday afternoons too. If you need something from the store, if you need a doctors appointment, visit a bank office, deal with the government, get a haircut, even receive a package through the mail, you have no choice but to take off work. Everyone, and I mean absolutely everyone, goes shopping on Saturday morning, even the 75% of the population that either doesn't work, or works part time. This means you spend entire Saturdays standing in line for a single item, and hope it's not out of stock. On Sunday you hang around your tiny town house without a yard, because everything is closed. About a third of my ample vacation time is used up taking off work for irritating tasks like these. I suspect Europeans work part time, because it is the only way to cope with the extreme stress of having to do everything that involves the exchange of money on weekdays between 9 and 5.
Compare this to the US, where even in a small town out in the sticks, you can achieve most or all of those things any day of the week. Shopping even 24 hours a day. You can drive to the store without being caught in traffic, there will be ample parking space and they will always have what you planned to buy. A trip to the store that takes all Saturday and costs you a year of your life in frustration and stress in Europe now takes only a few minutes. The entire culture and economy are organized around the assumption that you and your spouse both have a regular, full time job, and facilitates this lifestyle. Despite the longer office hours and shorted vacations, it doesn't 'feel' like you're working harder.
This.
Wish I had mod points today. Sooner or later though we will meet civilization that will crush our conquest when we try to crush them. Isn't it better to simply live in peace? The Universe is big enough for all, I guess. Think about it - if everyone out there was a conqueror, chances are someone would have taken our planet already, say a 100 million years ago. But they didn't (or couldn't but we are not looking at this possibility here - we assume interstellar travel is reasonably possible). Would we have moral issue to colonize a planet teaming with primitive lizards? Of course not (well, the vast majority of us, anyway). Oh, wait, after 100 million years and at least one huge asteroid there are apes on that planet and look, one branch is evolving technological civilization! Who would have thought....
I think there is a lot to be said about the Prime Directive...
A travel time of a hundred years at realistic speeds (now don't start about approaching the speed of light, this is not going to happen) gives plenty of time to cool off and think again. I don't see interplanetary warfare as extremely likely. Even if those Taurans turn out to be real jerks, all it will take is to stop responding to the conversation going at one message per generation.
The sun will be lost. It will explode before the universe does.
Don't be so negative
I DO think that brazilian legislators are as corrupt as they were 10 years ago (2003) or 15 years ago (1998).
They will sell themselves so they can have their own Apple iPhones without having to struggle into "popular prices shoppings"
And Brazil IS still a "Banana Republic". Do you really think that rich people will ever be arrested for driving drunk?
That is not a banana republic, it's just a place with open corruption. A banana republic is a place that is effectively owned and run by a foreign company that makes the rules for the local government instead of the other way around. The classic example were the Standard Fruit Company and the United Fruit Company, which effectively owned several central American countries during the 20th century.
Older workers cost more for insurance, benefits, and typically salary; are likely to have families, and not be willing to put in long hours. Also, at age 58, that means an employer can only expect a few years after training you before you retire.
I agree. At 58, you better have decades of relevant experience if you're looking for a job. No one is going to hire a 50+ or even a 30+ year old for an entry level coding job. It doesn't even matter if you drop your wage demands to a level appropriate for your experience, he's not going to get interviews. With education and work experience dating back to the 70's, employers will be able to guess his age. If he leaves all that away, and somehow manages to score an interview, he'll get a very short interview followed by "don't call us, we'll call you".
You keep reading alarmist reports about a shortage of techies, particularily programmers, but there is no such thing. There is a shortage of people willing to do that kind of work for minimum wage, 70 hours a week, with no benefits, which is what some managers without a technical background really feel they ought to be paying their digital janitors.
If anything, the IT business has been a buyers market for several years now. Rates have been dropping, especially at the "more experienced" side of the equation. There is always a matter of diminishing returns with experience, and especially so in such a rapidly changing field. There's noone out there with 10+ years of iOS experience, and very few with 5+ years. The 25+ years you previously had with obsolete technologies usually aren't worth the extra cost.
TL;DR -> Op, keep programming as a hobby, but find a new job where your experience matters.
I have also had the impression that assert() is a hack that shouldn't be used much (?).
It's a hack that should be used extensively - in development code. In the production build, you generally turn on a compiler flag that prevents asserts from being compiled. This is why it's absolutely criminal to put code in an assert that has any side effects whatsoever.
Me too. Sounds perfect for a geek with a small house and young children.
I grew up literally an ocean away from the Washington monument and yet I speak and write considerably better than most of those who grew up near it.
It's so brave of you to admit this out in the open, but just because you managed to overcome your disability, it's tempting to mock those who are more severely affected. It's best to resist this urge.
By what, a turnstile? If one group can migrate Northward the other can migrate Southward.
The groups didn't migrate out of Africa. There are still people living in Africa, as you may have noticed. People expanded out of Africa. Species don't easily expand into an ecosystem where its niche is already occupied. Neanderthals had a population that was under stress and shrinking, in the face of a severe ice age and disappearing food sources, so there was no expanding for them.
Anyway, this all took place over the space of some 20 to 30 thousands years, and involved populations that were very small to begin with. One species can out compete and replace another species over that timescale, without the two even seeing each other very often, as long as they're after the same food.
Did you have a stroke while writing that?
You all keep forgetting about the non-native-speaker syndrome. A severe and debilitating developmental defect, caused by growing up too far away from the Washington monument, which often results in a speech impediment that makes the victim unintelligible to unaffected individuals. There is no cure, but with the right therapy, patients may learn to speak later in life, though rarely very fluently or coherently. It is downright insensitive to make fun of this terrible condition. It's better for their fragile self esteem to just repeat what they say, without the mistakes, and then answer, as though something was said that makes sense.
Being intelligent don't ensure your survival. You needed a lot of intelligence to build atomic bombs, and see what could had happened.
Anyway, intelligence is just part of the equation. Culture is another, an important one. How much different should be a neanderthal intelligence to be distinguished from one of us if grows with our culture? And maybe more important, if with our culture is more or less like us, at least in the way of thinking, will be falling in the same kind of moral problems like growing kids on labs?
I agree intelligence doesn't seem to be that important for survival. Dinosaurs lasted for 150 million years without brains to speak of, until they were nuked from orbit, an end which our superior intellect would not have protected us from either, at least not in the first few hundred thousand years of our existence as modern humans.
As for the demise of the Neanderthal: no need to look at culture or intelligence, simple environmental factors will do. The last ice age was particularly long and brutal. The Eurasian mega fauna, which the Neanderthals depended on for food, died out. Modern humans in Eurasia could be replenished from their habitat in Africa, with much more favorable conditions, while the Neanderthal was trapped in Europe and western Asia.
for shallow waters the oil companies use the same design but rather build a concrete cylinder that is connected to bedrock, (...)this seems a simpler solution then trying to build a sand island.
There is a small flaw in your plan, as far as it applies to that part of the world. The bedrock is hundreds of meters down below the sediment. Building a sand island just means using the materials at hand, rather than having to ship them in from scandinavia. Dredging sand is a relatively easy and cheap method for building structures off the coast, and there is ample experience with this.
secret agents, trashmen
Yup, that's me. Secret trash agent. Three times winner of the mister dumpster competition.
First, i'm Dutch, the northern neighbor of the Belgians, and we like to make jokes of each other.
This is a misunderstanding. The Dutch may like to joke about Belgians, but don't really mean it. Belgians are deadly serious when they call the Dutch nasty, greedy, unreliable, uncultured, rude and stupid. There is no joking involved.
one word,
Algae
One reply: water.
You're comparing burning old growth forests that take decades or centuries to grow to burning grasses that can grow 10 ft tall in a single season?
I'm saying you are either underestimating how much energy we use today, or overestimating how much net energy you can grow per area unit of land. Switchgrass may be a way of making areas productive that are now too dry for agriculture other than low intensity cattle farming. This means turning land that is now essentially wilderness into mono culture farmland, which is just another form of the same ecological disaster I described earlier.
Bio fuels should not be mistaken for the green, organic, nature lover's wet dream. It will require an awful lot of land to cover the energy needs of our current standard of living. As we will still want to eat food as well, this extra land will have to come from wilderness or forests, rather than from existing farm land. This is not a happy solution for bears, deer and buffalo. The only ones cheering will be people who bought prairie land wilderness for a dollar per acre.
That sounds like a load of bullshit to me. .... .. which is indicative of an estimate, not a fact
- How was the total US energy 'budget' calculated? Note the word 'budget' not 'usage'
Up to the industrial revolution, our main source of fuel used to be biomass: wood (charcoal). Keep in mind that this was when the population size and total energy use of western civilization were tiny by today's standards. Nevertheless, we managed to run out of wood.
Britain and Ireland were almost completely stripped of trees. Even today, the only trees you'll find older than the industrial revolution are in places that were some noble family's private hunting ground at the time. The eastern mediterranean was stripped of trees as far back as ancient times, and still hasn't recovered. In the low countries, after they ran out of wood, they started burning the soil (peat), turning their land into lakes, which they later had to drain to turn it back into land, which is why they now live below sea level. They did however make a fortune importing timber from the sparsely populated Baltic. Yes, wood had to come from as far as Russia and Finland, because western Europe had run out.
Believe it or not, burning biofuels was an environmental disaster, and switching to coal allowed forests and wildlife to recover.
Now, turning agricultural waste into fuel sounds like a good idea to me (that's what they do in Brazil with the leftovers from the sugar production), but when you're thinking of growing crops with the express purpose of making fuel, you have to consider the fact that modern, high-yield agriculture is effectively our way of using land to turn fossil fuel and sunlight into food. Tilling, sowing, fertilizing, pest control, harvesting, processing and transport together have to use substantially less energy than the fuel you are making will yield.
Clearly, land + fuel + sunlight -> food -> fuel -> energy is an inefficient process. Why not eliminate a couple of conversion steps from the process, and use solar cells to generate electricity? The process land + sunlight -> energy has fewer inefficient conversion steps.