"Aren't you cute. The population has grown and at some point resources simply won't stretch far enough for all of us."
There is this shocking, general belief that populations are exploding.
The truth is different: in countries as diverse as China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Iran (yes, Iran), and Mexico plus all of Europe, birth rates are below replacement levels. In Russia, there were four deaths for every birth last year. Even in India, the birth rate has collapsed, even if it is still well above replacement.
Sure, populations are still expanding globally: but this is a function of life expectancies rising fast in developing nations. But where birth rates have fallen below replacement levels we are now seeing DECLINING populations. Japan's total population has fallen, and it's working age population is shrinking at an alarming rate. In China, the result of the one child policy in 1979 has also led to an enormous drop off in births. (And one that is compounding now: there are fewer women of child bearing age, having fewer babies.)
Look up the UN population data - they have been consistently revising down "peak" population for 15 years. Read Fewer by Ben Wattenberg. It is amazing to discover that there will probably be fewer humans - by choice - in a 100 years than there are now.
Oil (and its byproducts: kerosene, gasoline, diesel, etc) is one way of converting cheminal potential energy into energy that does actual work. The process of breaking down hydrocarbons creates heat, which through either the internal combusition engine, or turbines, gives us movemement or electrical energy.
Right now, and indeed for the past 30-odd years, oil has been far from the cheapest way of generating energy. There are next to no oil fired power plants in the world. And even when oil was sub-$20 a few years ago (and the consensus was for it to stay that way for ever... remember The Economist headline "Drowning in Oil"?) no-one was rushing to build them.
If you want to generate energy in a fixed place, you will use nuclear, coal or gas. (And in places where emissions are taxed heavily, the sun shines brightly, or the wind is strong and reliable, you might consider alternative energy sources.)
In the last 30 years we have weaned ourselves off oil as our primary source of electrical power. What we have not done is weaned ourselves off oil as our transport fuel, despite the fact that a calorie of energy generated by a nuclear fission plant is undoubtedly cheaper than one generated by burning gasoline.
This is because energy storage, infrastrcture and transport are the real problems. Generating calorific energy with oil is not the problem, having it power your SUV is. Gasolene is a very concentrated source of calories, and is one with an established distribution channel. The only reason we are looking at these strange ways of generating synthetic gasolene is because of its properties as a store of power, and because of our existing infrasture.
In the long run, some form of battery will be needed, to take the clean generated electricity from nuclear, wind, and the sun and allow us to drive Hummers.
"The people had already flocked to the city because they had been evicted from their pastoral livelihood by the Enclosure Laws. The industrial revolution happened substantially due to the critical mass of effectively starved humans ready to make the toil economically and emotionally feasible."
1. The Enclosure Laws were only in England. The Industrial Revolution happened all over Europe and the US. 2. Between 1500 and 1900, the agricultural output of England and Wales rose three-fold. Enclosure, while not nice for those who were dispossesed, allowed the agricultural revolution. 3. Even in England, life expectancy *rose very sharply* between 1700 and 1900 - if these were "effectively starved humans", why was life expectancy rising?
Almost all script kiddies work off the same theory: find an application that has not been updated, and which has a security vulnerability (un-updated versions of Wordpress or AWStats are always favourites), use this to run wget to pull a script, rootkit, etc. onto the server, then "break" the machine and use it as a spambot.
The simplest way, then, to prevent script kiddies from compromising your system is not only allow access to wget through sudo! Simply chmod it.
Now, this is no excuse not to ensure everything else is up to date, etc. But a simple chmod can make an enormous difference to the security of your system.
"Well then Jobs should've looked at a non-GSM provider.. since EVDO uses less power than 1xRTT."
Wow, that's amazing, given both EV-DO and 1xRTT *are* CDMA standards rather than GSM. So it's like saying "You shouldn't buy a petrol car, given diesel has better fuel economy than hydrogen."
"the fact that all incoming calls go straight to voicemail while Safari is running is ridiculous. This is also probably why iChat is unavailable.. you couldn't be on AIM and use the phone at the same time."
Welcome to 2G mobile communications. Neither WCDMA nor EV-DO has this problem.
Its actually for the reasons that they stated. I know the Slashdot set is rife with conspiracy theories but Apple and AT&T simply want to avoid the nightmare that other phones cause, such as Treos and WMobile devices of being returned when the user installs some instable 3rd party app and of course they go home and reload everything that was on the first phone onto the second phone causing another return, repeat repeat repeat.
Wow: nice conspiracy theory. According to Merrill Lynch, return rates at HTC (the world's largest maker of Windows Mobile phone) at 2.2%, against an industry average of 3%. So, those "nightmare" return rates are... made up.
"How about spending this money on ways to reduce the world's population growth?"
Read a book called "Fewer". Did you know that birth rates are below replacement levels in China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Australia, Russia, Mexico, Iran, almost all of Europe, and only just possibly nudge replacement levels (2.1) in the US? Even in places we consider to be high birth rate (the Middle East), the number of births has collapsed. Basically, the only place where birth rates remain very high is sub-saharan Africa. And there are surprisingly few people who live there.
Can I quote from the UN Report on Population 2006 (http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/wpp 2006/wpp2006.htm):
"As a result of declining fertility and increasing longevity, the populations of a growing
number of countries are ageing rapidly. Between 2005 and 2050, half of the increase in the world
population will be accounted for by a rise in the population aged 60 years or over, whereas the
number of children (persons under age 15) will decline slightly."
The reason that World population levels are rising in that people are living longer. If you want to stem world population growth, you'll need people to die earlier. Have you considered encouraging people to smoke?
OK, this is O/T. But there's bound to be someone here who knows the answer.
I just moved house. And I'm now living in a rental, meaning I can't go drilling holes in walls, or putting in ducting. And my wife doesn't want cables snaking between the rooms.
I have various bits of equipment (a HTPC, an Xbox 360) in the lounge, and various bits in the study (fileserver, a couple of PCs). Plus, for reasons I don't understand, the only phone socket that works for DSL is in the bedroom.
I essentially need to bridge these two networks to form a seamless one. And I need it to be *quick*. Fast enough to stream DVDs and Xvids. Wireless-G struggles - not least because it's an old house with think walls. I'd like to use 802.11n to bridge, but I don't know if there are any wireless bridges available for n.
I think OS9 was *at least* as shaky as Windows 95, and was certainly a lot less stable than Win 2000. Of course, with OSX that changed. But then, WindowsXP came along and both Apple and Microsoft had reasonably stable operating systems.
Of course, that's not the only reason why Apple never got more than 10%...
Not everybody buys Apple products for their "cache" [sic]. Some of us buy them because they WORK BETTER, and that does not mean "has the most checkbox features".
Well; do you know the iPhone works better? It's not like the cellphone market is "virgin". Nokia sold more phone in October, November and December last year (84 million) than Apple has sold Macs in the last 20 years! Apple may well have the best product in the market. But, it's not like it's competition has been stupid, or slow, or is new to the game. The GP was right that when the iPod launched, it faced pretty meagre competition from the Rio.
But at least China does not claim to be the best country of the world that all others should follow
Phew, thank goodness. At last the truth is out there: hypocrisy is the worst crime. Let any country torture their citizens (or invade other countries, or fund terrorism, or use Microsoft software), just so long as they don't make any claims about being "the best country of the world."
Although it is worth remembering that the price per solar watt has been falling year after year after year. According to QCells (who have a vested interest, of course) the cost of a cell falls by c. 15% a year (assuming raw material prices stay constant). This is achieved through rising efficiency rates (now in the mid teens), and through thinner substates (meaning less silicon cost).
There are numerous techniques that are being used to drive down cost: there is thin film (depositing a layer of silicon a few microns thick onto a glass substate - see CSG Solar and Sharp), there is monocrsytalline wih all the conducting "wires" on the back of the cell (see SolarWorld).
It doesn't take that many years of 15% annual price declines before solar becomes more cost efficient - at least in Arizona, California, Greece and the like.
Alas, I've looked at the costs of solar and it's not as simple as you suggest. According to QCells, 75% of the cost of making a solar panel is the "raw ingredients" (90% silicon, 10% silver). The cost of solar grade silicon has been rising not falling as the cost of purifying silicon is pretty high. (The processes involved tend to use a fair amount of power, so best to do it somewhere where power is cheap... like Norway.)
And the current (small) quantity of solar panels in the world already uses half of the world's purified silicon, with the rest being used for ICs.
So, we might cut down the manufacturing costs... but we're unlikely to be able to drastically reduce the cost of the raw materials.
I think you'll find there were atrocities committed in Iraq by Saddam and his cronies. Long before he became a Bush target, leftist-liberal organisations like Amnesty here in the UK made terrible revelations about his regime. Indeed, these organisations lambasted the US government for supporting Saddam's regime at the time. It is terribly misleading to claim that all these stories were plants by the right wing media.
Indeed, six months after the fall of Saddam The Spectator (a broadly right wing, in the UK sense, yet anti war magazine) commissioned a poll of Iraqis. The poll basically said: we'd like the Americans to leave as soon as possible. But when asked what they'd prefer, only a few percent saif they'd like the return of Saddam. And the vast majority of people said they were glad he'd gone.
This does not make the war right or just. To quote British anti-war politician Charles Kennedy, there is something profoundly disturbing about the concept of regime change. (And how right he was to question it.) But it is utterly misleading to think that Saddam's regime was anything but murderous and brutish.
It is similar in Dafur. Forget the oil. Unless you think organisations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty, and newspapers like The Guardian, are in the pockets of the CIA, then you must admit there is terrible and nasty stuff going on there. Whether it is right for the US to intervene is another matter all together. To quote philosopher Michael Waltzer: '[T]he campaign against the war should never have been only an antiwar campaign. It should have been a campaign for a strong international system, designed and organized to defeat aggression, control weapons of mass destruction, stop massacres and ethnic cleansing, and assist in the politics of transition after brutal regimes are overthrown.'
All countries defend their interests. All countries reserve the rights to things (although most are less brazen at actually doing them than the US). China just demonsrated it has the ability to shoot down a satellite in space; both Russia and the US have done so in the past. No country unilaterally bars itself from future actions, or at least not without a clear benefit.
So; the US is just like any other country. Only slightly bigger and a little bit more scary.
Rogerborg, normally I appreciate your posts. But this time, I'm afraid you're just plain wrong.
* Qualcomm no longer makes handsets. * Casio is a very minor player worldwide. * DoCoMo is not a handset maker, it is the Japanese version of Verizon. * Hitachi: do they still make mobile phones? * Samsung *is* the third largest mobile phone maker in the world.
Of all the world's smartphones, 95% run on one of three platforms: Symbian (Nokia, Sony Ericsson), Blackberry (RIM) and Windows Mobile (HTC, Samsung). Samsung, with the BlackJack, is a small player. Trust me, the world's best selling smartphones are in the Nokia N- and E- series. After Nokia, HTC is almost certainly the second best selling smartphone maker.
You clot. Plot "difficulty of learning" against "amount learned" and you'll find the analogy holds true.
Errr: but you wouldn't plot "difficulty of learning" in that way. "Difficulty of learning" would not be a cumulative thing, in the way that "time spent" or "amount learnt" is.
It's worth noting that Microsoft's IronPython project is *explicitly* for.NET and Mono. (Technically IronPython is "A fast Python implementation for.NET and Mono".)
Any decent attorney would ask why - if Mono was in clear and obvious breach of Microsoft's patents - then they were explicitly developing software for it.
In the 1960s and 1970s, it was "cheap Japanese rip-offs". Then Japan become rich. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was "cheap Korean/Taiwanese rip-offs". Then Korea and Taiwan became rich. In the 2000s, it is "cheap Chinese rip-offs."
The more things change, the more they stay the same...
Could you name one - just one - person convicted of defending themselves from criminal attack? (And no, Tony Martin doesn't count. He shot a burglar in the back at 30 yards as he was running away.)
Slashdot Mirror
"Aren't you cute. The population has grown and at some point resources simply won't stretch far enough for all of us."
There is this shocking, general belief that populations are exploding.
The truth is different: in countries as diverse as China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Iran (yes, Iran), and Mexico plus all of Europe, birth rates are below replacement levels. In Russia, there were four deaths for every birth last year. Even in India, the birth rate has collapsed, even if it is still well above replacement.
Sure, populations are still expanding globally: but this is a function of life expectancies rising fast in
developing nations. But where birth rates have fallen below replacement levels we are now seeing DECLINING populations. Japan's total population has fallen, and it's working age population is shrinking at an alarming rate. In China, the result of the one child policy in 1979 has also led to an enormous drop off in births. (And one that is compounding now: there are fewer women of child bearing age, having fewer babies.)
Look up the UN population data - they have been consistently revising down "peak" population for 15 years. Read Fewer by Ben Wattenberg. It is amazing to discover that there will probably be fewer humans - by choice - in a 100 years than there are now.
OK. I'm about to begin my energy rant.
Oil (and its byproducts: kerosene, gasoline, diesel, etc) is one way of converting cheminal potential energy into energy that does actual work. The process of breaking down hydrocarbons creates heat, which through either the internal combusition engine, or turbines, gives us movemement or electrical energy.
Right now, and indeed for the past 30-odd years, oil has been far from the cheapest way of generating energy. There are next to no oil fired power plants in the world. And even when oil was sub-$20 a few years ago (and the consensus was for it to stay that way for ever... remember The Economist headline "Drowning in Oil"?) no-one was rushing to build them.
If you want to generate energy in a fixed place, you will use nuclear, coal or gas. (And in places where emissions are taxed heavily, the sun shines brightly, or the wind is strong and reliable, you might consider alternative energy sources.)
In the last 30 years we have weaned ourselves off oil as our primary source of electrical power. What we have not done is weaned ourselves off oil as our transport fuel, despite the fact that a calorie of energy generated by a nuclear fission plant is undoubtedly cheaper than one generated by burning gasoline.
This is because energy storage, infrastrcture and transport are the real problems. Generating calorific energy with oil is not the problem, having it power your SUV is. Gasolene is a very concentrated source of calories, and is one with an established distribution channel. The only reason we are looking at these strange ways of generating synthetic gasolene is because of its properties as a store of power, and because of our existing infrasture.
In the long run, some form of battery will be needed, to take the clean generated electricity from nuclear, wind, and the sun and allow us to drive Hummers.
"The people had already flocked to the city because they had been evicted from their pastoral livelihood by the Enclosure Laws. The industrial revolution happened substantially due to the critical mass of effectively starved humans ready to make the toil economically and emotionally feasible."
1. The Enclosure Laws were only in England. The Industrial Revolution happened all over Europe and the US.
2. Between 1500 and 1900, the agricultural output of England and Wales rose three-fold. Enclosure, while not nice for those who were dispossesed, allowed the agricultural revolution.
3. Even in England, life expectancy *rose very sharply* between 1700 and 1900 - if these were "effectively starved humans", why was life expectancy rising?
Almost all script kiddies work off the same theory: find an application that has not been updated, and which has a security vulnerability (un-updated versions of Wordpress or AWStats are always favourites), use this to run wget to pull a script, rootkit, etc. onto the server, then "break" the machine and use it as a spambot.
The simplest way, then, to prevent script kiddies from compromising your system is not only allow access to wget through sudo! Simply chmod it.
Now, this is no excuse not to ensure everything else is up to date, etc. But a simple chmod can make an enormous difference to the security of your system.
"Well then Jobs should've looked at a non-GSM provider.. since EVDO uses less power than 1xRTT."
Wow, that's amazing, given both EV-DO and 1xRTT *are* CDMA standards rather than GSM. So it's like saying "You shouldn't buy a petrol car, given diesel has better fuel economy than hydrogen."
"the fact that all incoming calls go straight to voicemail while Safari is running is ridiculous. This is also probably why iChat is unavailable.. you couldn't be on AIM and use the phone at the same time."
Welcome to 2G mobile communications. Neither WCDMA nor EV-DO has this problem.
Its actually for the reasons that they stated. I know the Slashdot set is rife with conspiracy theories but Apple and AT&T simply want to avoid the nightmare that other phones cause, such as Treos and WMobile devices of being returned when the user installs some instable 3rd party app and of course they go home and reload everything that was on the first phone onto the second phone causing another return, repeat repeat repeat.
Wow: nice conspiracy theory. According to Merrill Lynch, return rates at HTC (the world's largest maker of Windows Mobile phone) at 2.2%, against an industry average of 3%. So, those "nightmare" return rates are... made up.
In Microsoft's defence, they didn't actually release it until '07.
Read a book called "Fewer". Did you know that birth rates are below replacement levels in China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Australia, Russia, Mexico, Iran, almost all of Europe, and only just possibly nudge replacement levels (2.1) in the US? Even in places we consider to be high birth rate (the Middle East), the number of births has collapsed. Basically, the only place where birth rates remain very high is sub-saharan Africa. And there are surprisingly few people who live there.
Can I quote from the UN Report on Population 2006 (http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/wpp 2006/wpp2006.htm):
"As a result of declining fertility and increasing longevity, the populations of a growing number of countries are ageing rapidly. Between 2005 and 2050, half of the increase in the world population will be accounted for by a rise in the population aged 60 years or over, whereas the number of children (persons under age 15) will decline slightly."
The reason that World population levels are rising in that people are living longer. If you want to stem world population growth, you'll need people to die earlier. Have you considered encouraging people to smoke?
OK, this is O/T. But there's bound to be someone here who knows the answer.
I just moved house. And I'm now living in a rental, meaning I can't go drilling holes in walls, or putting in ducting. And my wife doesn't want cables snaking between the rooms.
I have various bits of equipment (a HTPC, an Xbox 360) in the lounge, and various bits in the study (fileserver, a couple of PCs). Plus, for reasons I don't understand, the only phone socket that works for DSL is in the bedroom.
I essentially need to bridge these two networks to form a seamless one. And I need it to be *quick*. Fast enough to stream DVDs and Xvids. Wireless-G struggles - not least because it's an old house with think walls. I'd like to use 802.11n to bridge, but I don't know if there are any wireless bridges available for n.
Can anyone help?
Many thanks
Robert
I think OS9 was *at least* as shaky as Windows 95, and was certainly a lot less stable than Win 2000. Of course, with OSX that changed. But then, WindowsXP came along and both Apple and Microsoft had reasonably stable operating systems.
Of course, that's not the only reason why Apple never got more than 10%...
Well; do you know the iPhone works better? It's not like the cellphone market is "virgin". Nokia sold more phone in October, November and December last year (84 million) than Apple has sold Macs in the last 20 years! Apple may well have the best product in the market. But, it's not like it's competition has been stupid, or slow, or is new to the game. The GP was right that when the iPod launched, it faced pretty meagre competition from the Rio.
But at least China does not claim to be the best country of the world that all others should follow
Phew, thank goodness. At last the truth is out there: hypocrisy is the worst crime. Let any country torture their citizens (or invade other countries, or fund terrorism, or use Microsoft software), just so long as they don't make any claims about being "the best country of the world."
Although it is worth remembering that the price per solar watt has been falling year after year after year. According to QCells (who have a vested interest, of course) the cost of a cell falls by c. 15% a year (assuming raw material prices stay constant). This is achieved through rising efficiency rates (now in the mid teens), and through thinner substates (meaning less silicon cost).
There are numerous techniques that are being used to drive down cost: there is thin film (depositing a layer of silicon a few microns thick onto a glass substate - see CSG Solar and Sharp), there is monocrsytalline wih all the conducting "wires" on the back of the cell (see SolarWorld).
It doesn't take that many years of 15% annual price declines before solar becomes more cost efficient - at least in Arizona, California, Greece and the like.
Alas, I've looked at the costs of solar and it's not as simple as you suggest. According to QCells, 75% of the cost of making a solar panel is the "raw ingredients" (90% silicon, 10% silver). The cost of solar grade silicon has been rising not falling as the cost of purifying silicon is pretty high. (The processes involved tend to use a fair amount of power, so best to do it somewhere where power is cheap... like Norway.)
And the current (small) quantity of solar panels in the world already uses half of the world's purified silicon, with the rest being used for ICs.
So, we might cut down the manufacturing costs... but we're unlikely to be able to drastically reduce the cost of the raw materials.
I think you'll find there were atrocities committed in Iraq by Saddam and his cronies. Long before he became a Bush target, leftist-liberal organisations like Amnesty here in the UK made terrible revelations about his regime. Indeed, these organisations lambasted the US government for supporting Saddam's regime at the time. It is terribly misleading to claim that all these stories were plants by the right wing media.
Indeed, six months after the fall of Saddam The Spectator (a broadly right wing, in the UK sense, yet anti war magazine) commissioned a poll of Iraqis. The poll basically said: we'd like the Americans to leave as soon as possible. But when asked what they'd prefer, only a few percent saif they'd like the return of Saddam. And the vast majority of people said they were glad he'd gone.
This does not make the war right or just. To quote British anti-war politician Charles Kennedy, there is something profoundly disturbing about the concept of regime change. (And how right he was to question it.) But it is utterly misleading to think that Saddam's regime was anything but murderous and brutish.
It is similar in Dafur. Forget the oil. Unless you think organisations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty, and newspapers like The Guardian, are in the pockets of the CIA, then you must admit there is terrible and nasty stuff going on there. Whether it is right for the US to intervene is another matter all together. To quote philosopher Michael Waltzer: '[T]he campaign against the war should never have been only an antiwar campaign. It should have been a campaign for a strong international system, designed and organized to defeat aggression, control weapons of mass destruction, stop massacres and ethnic cleansing, and assist in the politics of transition after brutal regimes are overthrown.'
Well, that rather depends on where and when you were living.
Have you heard of The King David Hotel Bombing, Irgun or The Stern Gang?
The world changes, but few groups of peoples have particularly pure histories.
Hang on.
All countries defend their interests. All countries reserve the rights to things (although most are less brazen at actually doing them than the US). China just demonsrated it has the ability to shoot down a satellite in space; both Russia and the US have done so in the past. No country unilaterally bars itself from future actions, or at least not without a clear benefit.
So; the US is just like any other country. Only slightly bigger and a little bit more scary.
The Palm Treo devices are made by HTC, so are included in there.
Cheers, Robert
Rogerborg, normally I appreciate your posts. But this time, I'm afraid you're just plain wrong.
* Qualcomm no longer makes handsets.
* Casio is a very minor player worldwide.
* DoCoMo is not a handset maker, it is the Japanese version of Verizon.
* Hitachi: do they still make mobile phones?
* Samsung *is* the third largest mobile phone maker in the world.
Of all the world's smartphones, 95% run on one of three platforms: Symbian (Nokia, Sony Ericsson), Blackberry (RIM) and Windows Mobile (HTC, Samsung). Samsung, with the BlackJack, is a small player. Trust me, the world's best selling smartphones are in the Nokia N- and E- series. After Nokia, HTC is almost certainly the second best selling smartphone maker.
*Globally* Symbian is not an irrelevance.
You clot. Plot "difficulty of learning" against "amount learned" and you'll find the analogy holds true.
Errr: but you wouldn't plot "difficulty of learning" in that way. "Difficulty of learning" would not be a cumulative thing, in the way that "time spent" or "amount learnt" is.
Maybe 'pedantic' should be my middle name.
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"
:-)
Not that your post was an example of that, or anything
It's worth noting that Microsoft's IronPython project is *explicitly* for .NET and Mono. (Technically IronPython is "A fast Python implementation for .NET and Mono".)
Any decent attorney would ask why - if Mono was in clear and obvious breach of Microsoft's patents - then they were explicitly developing software for it.
But he has to pay alimony to his poor, deserving, uni-legged wife!
In the 1960s and 1970s, it was "cheap Japanese rip-offs". Then Japan become rich.
In the 1980s and 1990s, it was "cheap Korean/Taiwanese rip-offs". Then Korea and Taiwan became rich.
In the 2000s, it is "cheap Chinese rip-offs."
The more things change, the more they stay the same...
Could you name one - just one - person convicted of defending themselves from criminal attack? (And no, Tony Martin doesn't count. He shot a burglar in the back at 30 yards as he was running away.)