Manufacturing of all things, including food, is also becoming increasingly *automated*, and is nothing to be nostalgic about. Even without molecular manufacturing (nanotechnology), this trend of accelerating (in)human productivity will mean that fewer and fewer warm bodies are actually NEEDED to engineer and produce most of the necessities and luxuries of modern life, and yet everybody is still expected to somehow earn their (should-be-easier) living, doing... something... anything else.
The day is fast approaching when we'll *have* to solve the unequal DISTRIBUTION problem, as you mentioned. Either the fruits of increasingly automated production will be fairly redistributed (oh noes: soshulism), or the fortunate few who hoard the resources and means of production will find the "barbarians" at their gates.
An economy of abundance isn't that far off - the next boom after the current recession's bust, in all likelihood. Green energy is part of it.
The solution is *better* socialism, and not more of the old dog eat dog bullshit. What we need is the systemic intelligence and compassion to DISTRIBUTE a sustainable BASIC living to EVERYONE, which still preserves incentives to try to better yourself and society above your baseline by being exceptional. In the U.S., at least, this idea is known as the Basic Income Guarantee (BIG), which quite a few nobel laureates have advocated for in vain thus far...
Nobody with a clue has been arguing that SSD's would be cheaper per gigabyte than ye olde spinning-platter HDDs any time soon.
What we're seeing now, and will see much more of, is the hybrid approach of combining a small-ish (80GB) SSD for the most-accessed OS & Apps, with a monsterously huge and relatively slow (array of) HDDs for bulk data archival and backup.
With HDD I/O still the single biggest bottleneck today, it makes sense to start transitioning to SSDs, but it doesn't have to be all at once. The premium for SSDs -- ~$2.50/GB SSD vs ~$0.10/GB HDD -- isn't that much, but it will probably pay for most to wait another year not just for prices to fall more, but for all SSDs to finally support TRIM, and have efficient firmware that competes with indilinx and intel's. SATA3 will also be welcome as current SSDs have already hit the SATA2 xfer limit.
(Oh, and please don't eat the "ZOMG SSDs have limited write-cycles!" FUD. In the vast majority of normal usage patterns, you'll never ever get close to hitting it, and even you did, the failure mode still allows you to READ your data off if you had no backup, as opposed to a HDD crash.)
I certainly am not holding any stocks, apart from my short positions.
Hah. Finally full disclosure from you.
Sorry to hear your shorts are bleeding (probably from as far back as S&P 900), but the market can stay irrational (and/or manipulated) longer than you can stay sane wishing for another crash or even just a no-inflation fair value correction.
(btw - the one thing that will save this screwed planet from bigger booms and busts, and also decimate the old scarcity-based markets, is our accelerating technological progress. We're a few short decades away from massively disruptive nano-abundance along with the (A)Intelligence needed to maximize the efficiency and "good" of these increasingly complex systems all around us.)
Hah. It just so happens that the only package in Fedora's repos with "hate" in its name, does just that, so install it (and then add the applet) if you prefer an absolutely spotless desktop. Of course, it'd be nice to be able to more simply disable it without using a workaround package. $ yum info \*hate\* Loaded plugins: changelog, fastestmirror, presto, refresh-packagekit, security Installed Packages Name : kde-plasma-ihatethecashew Arch : x86_64 Version : 0.3 Release : 2.fc11 Size : 55 k Repo : installed Summary : Removes the KDE Plasma Cashew From the Corner of the Display URL : http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php/I+HATE+the+Cashew?content=91009 License : GPLv2 Description: Removes the KDE Plasma Cashew From the Corner of the Display.
More depressing is that people care about anybody's ashes at all. It's just some worthless carbon/nitrogen/hydrogen/oxgygen/etc leftovers; the valuable pattern of mind was lost (without backup) long ago.
A better explaination can be found here. I'm also running KDE4 with an NVidia 8800, yet this "choppy resize" problem does not affect me, so I haven't needed a workaround.
You can span LVM across many individual PV points of failure (i.e. single disks), but only morons do that. The right way to use LVM is to layer it above the redundant (RAID) storage, and/or make sure you have really good backups if you're only using LVM for its added features.
LVM itself can also do simple mirroring (and striping) internally across multiple PVs, but this is used far less commonly than layering it over s/w, h/w, or remote RAID.
If you stare at text all day long, I've found that high contrast (black on white default) and high color saturation (brightly colored syntax highlighting) is very tiring. Turning both down a notch goes a long way for extending readability.
My terminals all use a light white on dark grey scheme, and my preferred vim color scheme has been ps_color for quite a while. (here's a useful site for visually comparing a ton of color schemes (in iframes) all at once: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~maverick/VimColorSchemeTest/. )
So then, that perfect amount to leave your children should be the capital needed to earn a barely-decent income on a safe 5% return plus inflation.
That's anywhere from a quarter million on up, depending on the definition of the 'decent' amount it takes to keep someone both financially secure yet still incentivized enough to promote progress for more.
According to Bill Gates, that amount is $10 million; according to Warren Buffet, it's zero dollars; and according to me (as well as many Nobel Laureate economists), it's a Guaranteed Minimum Income for everyone.
And for quite a while now I've been using tvrss.net's "Unique" feed -- which is the intersection of EZTV and VTV releases -- along with Azureus' RSSFeed Scanner plugin. Very convenient.
At the same time I also use Miro/Democracy for other vids (like the occasional NBC Nightly News), Liferea for text RSS, and another app + gtkpod for audio podcasts. Quite a mess of apps that I really should consolidate at some point.
True - Humans alone aren't smart enough to solve all our age-old earthly problems, but the true source of hope isn't in exploring outer space in tincans; we'd just take our problems with us. No, the true hope is in developing and merging with friendly A.I. before we destroy ourselves with increasingly powerful technology. The end of most of our problems will coincide with the intelligence to shed our scarcity-based evolutionary baggage and begin exploring innerspace.
Good - because the last time I tried dolphin it didn't support tabs, and it pooped little ".dolphin" files into every single dir you viewed to keep the view state. konqueror++
Yes - low contrast is the way to go. This is why I love the (g)vim ps_color colorscheme: low-saturation colors on a dark grey background is very easy on the eyes for an extended period.
*shrug* Most cultures are still obsessed with the mind's dead vessel; that's not going to change overnight.
IMO, both cremation & cemeteries are a huge waste of resources. When I finally get around to writing my Will, it'll include something to the effect: "If my pattern of mind is beyond repair, drop my naked nutrient-rich matter into a vertical hole and plant a tree. I forbid energy-wastful cremation, and burial in a rip-off casket in a drab cemetery surrounded by giant obelisk phallic symbols..." Of course, there's probably some business-friendly laws which says that's illegal.
A sufficiently advanced civilization that doesn't destroy itself first will inevitably optimize their environment to the point of harvesting every last drop of energy from their star(s), such that we can't detect anything but the gravitational effects.
This mysterious "dark matter" structure is termed a Matrioshka Brain (aka: Dyson Sphere).
I understand that this theory's still a bit too shocking for many to seriously consider, so "exotic particles" - or ANY other explaination - it must surely be.
Oops. I pasted the 2G output where I was talking about 3G. What follows is the output for 3G: acceltime = 4.43937087772704 minutes each way, or 8.87874175545409 total acceldist = 647.408253001861 miles each way, or 1294.81650600372 total cruisetime = 38.4177719794158 minutes cruisedist = 11205.1834939963 miles totaltriptime = 47.2965137348699 minutes
A long time ago I wrote a stupid-simple utility to calculate this data for just such a fun thought experiment, because I believe that one day this will be the most efficient way to quickly move mass around the planet when VR just won't do. Of course, building and maintaining such a giant underground network will require mature nanotech, which is still a few decades off.
So, to travel to the opposite side of the planet (12,500 miles), and plugging in a 1G accel, and a 17,500 "weightless" cruise speed (before decel is necessary), you get the following numbers: $ maglev.pl *** The global network of underground maglev trains in vacuum tubes simulator (GNUMTIVT) v0.1 Total Distance [12500 miles]: Maximum Cruise Velocity [17500 mph]: Acceleration in Gs [1]:
acceltime = 13.3181126331811 minutes each way, or 26.6362252663623 total acceldist = 1942.22475900558 miles each way, or 3884.44951801116 total cruisetime = 29.5390302239617 minutes cruisedist = 8615.55048198884 miles totaltriptime = 56.175255490324 minutes
Tripling the acceleration to 3G gets you there a measly ~9 minutes earlier and extends the "fun" weightless time, but might be uncomfortable/dangerous for some people. Obviously freight can move at much higher Gs: acceltime = 6.65905631659056 minutes each way, or 13.3181126331811 total acceldist = 971.112379502791 miles each way, or 1942.22475900558 total cruisetime = 36.1980865405523 minutes cruisedist = 10557.7752409944 miles totaltriptime = 49.5161991737334 minutes
Guess it should have been called "Intel Positive-Opinion Center Only". I had no idea such corporate lameness was going on behind that odd-colored intel ad-link (and the doubleclick redirect doesn't even work when using privoxy).
I'm going to make a 'wild' prediction and say that in only 10 to 15 years, the CO2 concentration problem will be mostly solved (before it's too late), and may in fact swing the other way - to CO2 depletion. This thanks to the coming molecular manufacturing nanotechnology whose favorite source of building material happens to be Carbon, of which there's literaly TONS of it to extract for "free" from the atmosphere.
A person might not have the land/mining rights to the molecular matter beneath his feet, but nobody owns the air we breathe, right? Free solar energy + Free loosly bonded (C)O2 feedstock + MNT == cheap, clean, boot-strapped material abundance.
Regardless of whether or not carbon extraction from the atomosphere is distributed per person/device or more centralized, it'll be the "artificial trees" and other tiny scrubbers that save the environment. Mark my words.
Sweet indeed! Because a treatment conspiracy is much better than a one-time cure... for my evil Big Pharma portfolio! But... wait... this would be a cure...
Slashdot Mirror
Manufacturing of all things, including food, is also becoming increasingly *automated*, and is nothing to be nostalgic about. Even without molecular manufacturing (nanotechnology), this trend of accelerating (in)human productivity will mean that fewer and fewer warm bodies are actually NEEDED to engineer and produce most of the necessities and luxuries of modern life, and yet everybody is still expected to somehow earn their (should-be-easier) living, doing... something... anything else.
The day is fast approaching when we'll *have* to solve the unequal DISTRIBUTION problem, as you mentioned. Either the fruits of increasingly automated production will be fairly redistributed (oh noes: soshulism), or the fortunate few who hoard the resources and means of production will find the "barbarians" at their gates.
An economy of abundance isn't that far off - the next boom after the current recession's bust, in all likelihood. Green energy is part of it.
The solution is *better* socialism, and not more of the old dog eat dog bullshit. What we need is the systemic intelligence and compassion to DISTRIBUTE a sustainable BASIC living to EVERYONE, which still preserves incentives to try to better yourself and society above your baseline by being exceptional. In the U.S., at least, this idea is known as the Basic Income Guarantee (BIG), which quite a few nobel laureates have advocated for in vain thus far...
Nobody with a clue has been arguing that SSD's would be cheaper per gigabyte than ye olde spinning-platter HDDs any time soon.
What we're seeing now, and will see much more of, is the hybrid approach of combining a small-ish (80GB) SSD for the most-accessed OS & Apps, with a monsterously huge and relatively slow (array of) HDDs for bulk data archival and backup.
With HDD I/O still the single biggest bottleneck today, it makes sense to start transitioning to SSDs, but it doesn't have to be all at once. The premium for SSDs -- ~$2.50/GB SSD vs ~$0.10/GB HDD -- isn't that much, but it will probably pay for most to wait another year not just for prices to fall more, but for all SSDs to finally support TRIM, and have efficient firmware that competes with indilinx and intel's. SATA3 will also be welcome as current SSDs have already hit the SATA2 xfer limit.
(Oh, and please don't eat the "ZOMG SSDs have limited write-cycles!" FUD. In the vast majority of normal usage patterns, you'll never ever get close to hitting it, and even you did, the failure mode still allows you to READ your data off if you had no backup, as opposed to a HDD crash.)
Hah. Finally full disclosure from you.
Sorry to hear your shorts are bleeding (probably from as far back as S&P 900), but the market can stay irrational (and/or manipulated) longer than you can stay sane wishing for another crash or even just a no-inflation fair value correction.
(btw - the one thing that will save this screwed planet from bigger booms and busts, and also decimate the old scarcity-based markets, is our accelerating technological progress. We're a few short decades away from massively disruptive nano-abundance along with the (A)Intelligence needed to maximize the efficiency and "good" of these increasingly complex systems all around us.)
Hah. It just so happens that the only package in Fedora's repos with "hate" in its name, does just that, so install it (and then add the applet) if you prefer an absolutely spotless desktop. Of course, it'd be nice to be able to more simply disable it without using a workaround package.
$ yum info \*hate\*
Loaded plugins: changelog, fastestmirror, presto, refresh-packagekit, security
Installed Packages
Name : kde-plasma-ihatethecashew
Arch : x86_64
Version : 0.3
Release : 2.fc11
Size : 55 k
Repo : installed
Summary : Removes the KDE Plasma Cashew From the Corner of the Display
URL : http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php/I+HATE+the+Cashew?content=91009
License : GPLv2
Description: Removes the KDE Plasma Cashew From the Corner of the Display.
Indeed. Curious minds want to know how many douchebags and printouts of book-length reviews of fucking bags, you can fit, in a fucking bag.
Oh please - you want the exact chemical composition of human ashes VS just an off-hand partial list of elements? Fine.
Those are COMPOSED of the elements oxygen, hydrogen, etc, so fuck you very much.
More depressing is that people care about anybody's ashes at all. It's just some worthless carbon/nitrogen/hydrogen/oxgygen/etc leftovers; the valuable pattern of mind was lost (without backup) long ago.
A better explaination can be found here. I'm also running KDE4 with an NVidia 8800, yet this "choppy resize" problem does not affect me, so I haven't needed a workaround.
You can span LVM across many individual PV points of failure (i.e. single disks), but only morons do that. The right way to use LVM is to layer it above the redundant (RAID) storage, and/or make sure you have really good backups if you're only using LVM for its added features.
LVM itself can also do simple mirroring (and striping) internally across multiple PVs, but this is used far less commonly than layering it over s/w, h/w, or remote RAID.
If you stare at text all day long, I've found that high contrast (black on white default) and high color saturation (brightly colored syntax highlighting) is very tiring. Turning both down a notch goes a long way for extending readability.
My terminals all use a light white on dark grey scheme, and my preferred vim color scheme has been ps_color for quite a while. (here's a useful site for visually comparing a ton of color schemes (in iframes) all at once: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~maverick/VimColorSchemeTest/. )
So then, that perfect amount to leave your children should be the capital needed to earn a barely-decent income on a safe 5% return plus inflation.
That's anywhere from a quarter million on up, depending on the definition of the 'decent' amount it takes to keep someone both financially secure yet still incentivized enough to promote progress for more.
According to Bill Gates, that amount is $10 million; according to Warren Buffet, it's zero dollars; and according to me (as well as many Nobel Laureate economists), it's a Guaranteed Minimum Income for everyone.
Roy said fucker, not father.
Oh, and Han shot first.
And for quite a while now I've been using tvrss.net's "Unique" feed -- which is the intersection of EZTV and VTV releases -- along with Azureus' RSSFeed Scanner plugin. Very convenient.
At the same time I also use Miro/Democracy for other vids (like the occasional NBC Nightly News), Liferea for text RSS, and another app + gtkpod for audio podcasts. Quite a mess of apps that I really should consolidate at some point.
True - Humans alone aren't smart enough to solve all our age-old earthly problems, but the true source of hope isn't in exploring outer space in tincans; we'd just take our problems with us. No, the true hope is in developing and merging with friendly A.I. before we destroy ourselves with increasingly powerful technology. The end of most of our problems will coincide with the intelligence to shed our scarcity-based evolutionary baggage and begin exploring innerspace.
The Singularity is nearing.
Good - because the last time I tried dolphin it didn't support tabs, and it pooped little ".dolphin" files into every single dir you viewed to keep the view state. konqueror++
Yes - low contrast is the way to go. This is why I love the (g)vim ps_color colorscheme: low-saturation colors on a dark grey background is very easy on the eyes for an extended period.
*shrug* Most cultures are still obsessed with the mind's dead vessel; that's not going to change overnight.
IMO, both cremation & cemeteries are a huge waste of resources. When I finally get around to writing my Will, it'll include something to the effect: "If my pattern of mind is beyond repair, drop my naked nutrient-rich matter into a vertical hole and plant a tree. I forbid energy-wastful cremation, and burial in a rip-off casket in a drab cemetery surrounded by giant obelisk phallic symbols..." Of course, there's probably some business-friendly laws which says that's illegal.
A sufficiently advanced civilization that doesn't destroy itself first will inevitably optimize their environment to the point of harvesting every last drop of energy from their star(s), such that we can't detect anything but the gravitational effects.
This mysterious "dark matter" structure is termed a Matrioshka Brain (aka: Dyson Sphere).
I understand that this theory's still a bit too shocking for many to seriously consider, so "exotic particles" - or ANY other explaination - it must surely be.
Oops. I pasted the 2G output where I was talking about 3G. What follows is the output for 3G:
acceltime = 4.43937087772704 minutes each way, or 8.87874175545409 total
acceldist = 647.408253001861 miles each way, or 1294.81650600372 total
cruisetime = 38.4177719794158 minutes
cruisedist = 11205.1834939963 miles
totaltriptime = 47.2965137348699 minutes
A long time ago I wrote a stupid-simple utility to calculate this data for just such a fun thought experiment, because I believe that one day this will be the most efficient way to quickly move mass around the planet when VR just won't do. Of course, building and maintaining such a giant underground network will require mature nanotech, which is still a few decades off.
So, to travel to the opposite side of the planet (12,500 miles), and plugging in a 1G accel, and a 17,500 "weightless" cruise speed (before decel is necessary), you get the following numbers:
$ maglev.pl
*** The global network of underground maglev trains in vacuum tubes simulator (GNUMTIVT) v0.1
Total Distance [12500 miles]:
Maximum Cruise Velocity [17500 mph]:
Acceleration in Gs [1]:
acceltime = 13.3181126331811 minutes each way, or 26.6362252663623 total
acceldist = 1942.22475900558 miles each way, or 3884.44951801116 total
cruisetime = 29.5390302239617 minutes
cruisedist = 8615.55048198884 miles
totaltriptime = 56.175255490324 minutes
Tripling the acceleration to 3G gets you there a measly ~9 minutes earlier and extends the "fun" weightless time, but might be uncomfortable/dangerous for some people. Obviously freight can move at much higher Gs:
acceltime = 6.65905631659056 minutes each way, or 13.3181126331811 total
acceldist = 971.112379502791 miles each way, or 1942.22475900558 total
cruisetime = 36.1980865405523 minutes
cruisedist = 10557.7752409944 miles
totaltriptime = 49.5161991737334 minutes
I still use privoxy instead of AdBlock, since privoxy acts as a proxy for ANY browser (like Opera & Konqueror), while AdBlock's FireFox-only.
Guess it should have been called "Intel Positive-Opinion Center Only". I had no idea such corporate lameness was going on behind that odd-colored intel ad-link (and the doubleclick redirect doesn't even work when using privoxy).
"???" is mature nanotechnology; an engineered scrubber will best anything nature has come up with.
I'm going to make a 'wild' prediction and say that in only 10 to 15 years, the CO2 concentration problem will be mostly solved (before it's too late), and may in fact swing the other way - to CO2 depletion. This thanks to the coming molecular manufacturing nanotechnology whose favorite source of building material happens to be Carbon, of which there's literaly TONS of it to extract for "free" from the atmosphere.
A person might not have the land/mining rights to the molecular matter beneath his feet, but nobody owns the air we breathe, right? Free solar energy + Free loosly bonded (C)O2 feedstock + MNT == cheap, clean, boot-strapped material abundance.
Regardless of whether or not carbon extraction from the atomosphere is distributed per person/device or more centralized, it'll be the "artificial trees" and other tiny scrubbers that save the environment. Mark my words.
Sweet indeed! Because a treatment conspiracy is much better than a one-time cure... for my evil Big Pharma portfolio! But... wait... this would be a cure...
Dude!