Last time I looked, it was Dell that had an actual SEC investigation going on how their earnings were manipulated (known as "cooking the books" in the popular vernacular). Apple's options issues are a tempest in a teapot compared to those.
Or perhaps you mean the Hewlett-Packard hearings in Washington, and the possibility of jail time for their senior management due to their actions in nailing boardroom leakers.
So far as I know (and I'd be willing to bet as far as YOU know), Apple has investigated their options problems thoroughly, and is turning those results over to the SEC. To the best of my knowledge, the only indication of possible further troubles is due to a blizzard of rumors occurring, curiously enough, as Apple closes out the best calendar year in it's history, with a lot of pressure from various quarters to knock the stock down before the earnings are announced. Remember how the rumors surfaced about sales plummeting at the iTMS? Look how silly those rumors appear in the wake of the Christmas Day transaction volume problems at the iTMS.
I think that their product announcements on January 8th will easily eclipse any "stock scandals" in 2007, as will their earnings announcement the following week. And in any event, the magnitude of any impact of past options misbehavior will be shown on Friday (Dec 29), when Apple makes their restated earnings for the past several years public. All the responsible estimates of those changes indicate it will be a trivial change.
... because our government runs by the Golden Rule (i.e., "Those that have the gold make the rules").
The reason that government appropriation of property is on the upswing, is that it is being taken from individual citizens and handed to corporations, corporations having become a class of privileged entities over and above mere individuals. For this to be reversed to allow individuals to appropriate assets of corporations, even for the "greater public good", goes against the Golden Rule -- and thus, is simply never going to happen.
Since the time that the USPTO was founded, there has been a crush of funds motivating the legislators making small (and not-so-small) changes in the laws governing patents, with the intent of making patent law an instrument of wealth hoarding instead of an instrument to protect innovators from established interests.
The established interests now run the game, and all the wailing of the masses is not about to change that.
... or the dynamic duo of Norman and Spolsky cannot manage to communicate the importance of making things no more complicated than they absolutely need to be.
Given the ever-increasing level of complexity in everyday life, if they REALLY THINK that simplicity is over-rated, then they really are idiots.
There is a sweet spot in the design of things that strikes an optimal compromise between functionality and simplicity. Packing a bunch of unrelated functionality into a device, whether that device is hardware or software, always moves one further away from that sweet spot.
... between DVD-R and DVD+R media? From reading the referenced article, it appears that the difference between DVD-R and DVD+R is all in the encoding of the bit stream.
Clearly, that's not the whole story, as when I insert a blank disc, the software can tell me whether it's a DVD-R or a DVD+R.
From the info presented by Wikipedia, there is a series of physical pits between the grooves that is used for addressing and tracking purposes -- I suppose that there is also some sort of identification code that indicates which type of disc it is, but have no idea if there is any other significant difference between the +R and -R flavors of media -- such as types of dyes, or differences in the sizes/shapes of the dye cells on the discs. My guess is not.
... is the contention that global warming is caused by humans and the implication that by reversing the things we have done to "cause" global warming, we can reverse it.
I have no problem with the obvious existence of global warming, or that we are accelerating it.
But the facts are that this round of global warming started about 30,000 years ago, when the land bridges between Russia and Alaska and Ireland and England disappeared due to rising sea levels, as the melting of the prior Ice Age began due to the warming of the planet. What sparked this is certainly open to debate, but it follows a pattern observed across the larger scale of paleological climate.
There are a LOT of things that influence global warming/cooling. Now that the permafrost is well on its way to thawing and decomposing into methane and carbon dioxide, the millions of square miles of locked up greenhouse gases are beginning to emerge.
And even if we were to immediately cease all man-made greenhouse gas production, worldwide, it would not stop the continued increases in greenhouse gases from natural sources.
There are a lot of ways we need to be working on managing our planetary climate, and reducing our own emission of greenhouse gases is only one of them. The film presents it as the only solution. We need to be investigating the use of solar blockers (dust and "stuff" injected into the upper atmosphere to act as a planetary sunshade), ways to scrub excess greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, and above all else, more and better studies to better understand this unbelievably complex process.
... like our society's expectations for our public school system.
Instead of preparing students for adulthood or college (yes, they can be -- and usually are -- different), we have assigned our public schools as the surrogate baby-sitters, keeping our children occupied, but not placing much more in the way of expectations on them.
This is a parental problem -- and by that, I mean a problem with the parents. There are parents who want to ensure that their children are prepared for college, and they are moving their kids to private schools, or home schooling them, or moving to homes situated in the better school districts.
However, that only prepares kids for college, and may or may not prepare them for adulthood. Especially an unimaginable adulthood.
It used to be that kids could get a glimmer of how to be an adult be emulating their parents, who in turn were following their parents down life's pathways. This includes a lot more than simply careers, things like social standing, moral behavior, and how to deal with life's challenges.
But when both parents are scrambling to make sense out of a world that is radically different from anything they were prepared for, it's no surprise that kids are set adrift in life.
... to transfer at least the more important stuff...
And who decides what is important? And will they make that decision before the facilities to read the "important stuff" are inaccessible except via some long-dead proprietary format requiring some long-dead program to read it, that requires some long-dead operating system to run it, that requires some long-dead chip architecture to run it...
And then there is the choice of media used to preserve this "important stuff". If we are preserving it across collapses in civilization, a series of encodings should be used, with the header of each one containing a description of either the technology needed to read the next deeper level, or where to find said description.
When we talk about accessing digital data, it's a bit different than accessing historical data, as historical data has thus far been readable using readers each of us carries around in our eye sockets. Digital data assumes and requires a certain level of technology to access it. If we only care about maintaining the data going forward, then periodic copying to the then-current media will handle things adequately. But if we make no foolish assumptions about what level of technology will exist a thousand (or even a hundred) years from now, then we need to consider ways to communicate the required technology to those who may be attempting to access the archived materials.
Design of encoding algorithms should take into account the possibility that chunks of the data may become missing over extended periods of time, along with markers and tags embedded in the material to enable the readers to function. Perhaps a RAID-5 style striping of parity data would be a wise precaution. And of course, nothing electronic or magnetic should be a candidate for a long-term storage medium. Maybe burning pits into a gold disc might be appropriate, assuming that future archeologists do not melt down the platters for coins.
I'd even go so far as to say that cheap energy for all would save the world. I'm not normally a doom and gloom kinda guy, but it seems to me that the path we're headed on right now leads to civilization breaking down.
Sorry, but while the world is definitely on the path leading to a disintegration of civilization, it's not due to oil, or energy, or anything like that.
What's happening is called Future Shock, a condition that occurs when the rate of change in people's lives exceeds the capacity of the human mind to accommodate.
For the people in the third world, being rapidly brought up to speed with the rest of us, the stresses are obvious -- the world they knew is completely and totally gone.
For us, the social stability we have grown up with is rapidly eroding, and any anchor points of stability that we have in our lives are pretty wobbly.
The upshot to all this is that people are retreating to their most deeply held belief structures -- whether or not they have any relevance in today's world -- and adopting dug-in mindsets, ready to defend their most treasured memes at any cost.
Civilization is fragmenting into different groups scattered along the path of exponential progress, each seeing the other groups as mortal enemies. All that widely available cheap energy will do is to allow people to economically produce WMD to eradicate those they consider to be infidels -- everyone not in their meme-group.
There's no good end to all this, unless people can somehow manage to learn to surf the increasing rates of change in their lives with tolerance.
This ability is not very common in the human genome.
Sending physical objects back in time is not the only way that time travel can be useful.
If this works out, it could be the beginnings of instantaneous communication to distant places. This would neatly do away with the need for autonomous (or semi-autonomous) robots for exploring Mars, as you could in principle drive a Mars rover in real time from Earth.
The financial community is well ahead of this, because I can see plenty of instances of buy-sell activity in selected stocks before the news that eventually moves the stocks occurs.
Computer Science is a different field, and hence requires a different curriculum from Computer Technology.
Subjects such as Turing Machines, the Lambda Calculus and Predicate Calculus are instructive for showing three different approaches to the same ideas, and have good utility in building the conceptual frameworks necessary in Computer Science. But they have zero utility in Computer Technology (a.k.a. "Computer Programming"). Same thing with abstract algebra.
There is a continuum to the underlying math that forms a bridge between Computer Technology and Computer Science -- set theory forms the basis for a great deal of logical thought, and pretty much the entirety of relational databases. If you're going to be doing any significant numerical analysis work (such as one might in engineering applications), then you will require the concepts in calculus, and possibly differential calculus, along with the calculus of finite differences for proper consideration of the accumulation of errors.
Because Computer Science is less related to the application of, and more properly aimed at the understanding of ALL the concepts involved in ALL branches of computing, it requires a substantially stronger foundation in mathematical concepts. Computer programming does not need nearly so much in the way of math, especially if all one is aiming at is constructing web sites and variations on already existing applications.
... on whether or not the technology being employed is beyond the capability of the majority of the voters to understand.
Zero automation voting using paper ballots is fraught with possibilities for error, mostly due to the normal and expected error rates from human counting (and ANY automated system also has a certain error rate that is a function of its design), but including all of the fraudulent errors that interested parties on all sides are wont to insert into the machinery.
The problem with computerized voting systems is the leverage that the technology offers those who can subvert it. Whereas hacking a paper ballot voting scheme is pretty much limited in scope to the organization perpetrating the fraud (and as the number of participants in the fraud grows, so too does the likelihood that they will be exposed), the leverage offered by automation means that a handful of individuals can commandeer far larger blocs of votes, up to and including controlling the outcome of national elections.
Having most of the voting equipment made by a single manufacturer leads us right into the vulnerabilities of the monoculture, and having the designs and software be closed source proprietary designs means that when weaknesses are present, they will have much longer lifetimes than open source alternatives.
When the vast majority of the voters are clueless as to the risks inherent in the voting machinery they use, they are left with only blind faith (or ignorant assumptions that everything is fraudulent, and the accompanying miserable turnout to vote). When the bulk of the voters either understand how things work -- especially the error detection and correction mechanisms -- or have a reasonably large set of disinterested (i.e., they don't get their paychecks from those being elected or making the machines) experts that they can rely upon to provide the understanding that they lack, then automated systems can provide not only more convenient elections, but more secure and accurate ones as well.
But the way things are today, we're rapidly swirling down the drain. About the only thing that would awaken people to the problems that are gnawing away at our democracy would be for a major national election to be obviously thrown to an impossible victor in an undetectable manner. Eventually, that will happen. Then the political duopoly that runs this nation will either have to drag their heads out of the ground and change things, or lose their control over the government of the USofA.
[Since none of the conclusions can be "proven", all we can do is go with our "best guess". In this case, the general concensus among scientists in the field is our best guess.]
Looking back over the accumulated history of so-called expert consensus when there is insufficient information to prove anything, and all the theories leave gaping holes -- things like the fire/air/water/stone "elemental" theory of matter, the Ptolemaic model of the movement of the heavenly bodies, the theories that the Earth was the center of the universe, that ether was the substance that the planets moved through, the list goes on and on and on... -- the natural conclusion is to be very wary of consensus opinion concerning things that the assembled experts cannot explain.
I'm pretty skeptical about the invention of dark matter as a means of making the math work in the absence of any real data, I'd rather admit that we just don't know and seek more data and better theories until we do know, if indeed we are ever able to do so.
But when faced with "don't know" as the answer of the day, polling the assembled experts and having them guess at an answer seems to be something different than what I thought Science was all about. It's not necessary to have an answer for every question, it's the "don't know" answers that give Science its direction.
It's kinda like walking up to a room full of oncologists and asking them to tell you, with no examinations or information, whether or not you have cancer. Some will look at you and try to guess your age, make assumptions about your life style from your appearance, and give a probability based on their experience. Some will shake their heads and say it can't be done, insufficient data. A hypochondriac will take his answer from the first group, a reasonable person, from the second.
Be a little bit skeptical when the experts can't get their stories straight. "Don't know" is a perfectly valid, if not especially satisfying, answer.
Suppose that a mechanism of repeating cycles (and perhaps cycles within cycles) between ice ages (major and minor) has been a requisite factor in the evolution of life on Earth, with the regular cycles of extinction following the alternation of ice ages and greenhouse eras.
It would make for a grand Darwinian scythe.
What does that do to the various elements of the Drake equation?
While the universe is certainly large enough for intelligent life to evolve under a wide variety of conditions, I'm not at all sure that our galaxy has enough systems with clockwork geoclimate cycles similar to our own to permit an evolutionary process at all similar to ours to have taken place.
As poor an example of an intelligent species as we are, we may be the best that this galaxy can muster.
Let's assume -- for the sake of argument -- that there's something to the isostatic rebound notion that melting global ice flexes the crust and serves to induce widespread volcanic action and earthquakes. [for more info on isostatic rebound, Google it]
This fits in well with the widely acknowledged past cycles of ice ages vs greenhouse eras. By some mechanism, (probably Life on Earth), greenhouse gases enter the atmosphere faster than they are removed by natural processes. Eventually, temperatures rise and the icecaps and glaciers melt. The crust adjusts to the loss of lots of pressure on it, causing widespread adjustments in the crust, accompanied by the release of volcanoes that have been corked up for a very long time.
Take the Yellowstone caldera, for instance -- a mega-volcano that has erupted in the past on a roughly 650,000 year cycle (last eruption was 640,000 years ago, the previous 1.3 million years ago, and the one before that 2.1 million years ago). Such an eruption would spew enough dust into the upper atmosphere to block the Sun for a long time, plunging the planet into an ice age as the accumulated atmospheric carbon leaves the atmosphere over several decades and most of the Life on Earth dies off. That would, of course, include me and thee.
Eventually, Life reasserts itself and starts putting carbon back into the atmosphere, after the dust has fallen back onto the planet, and the cycle begins anew.
Just an idea, but it seems to fit the current circumstances. And while we may or may not be responsible for the latest increases in atmospheric carbon (the current warming cycle began 30,000 years ago), we are most certainly contributing to it.
The question is, does this represent a credible notion of what is happening, and if not, what's a better story that fits the historical record?
And if this IS a credible story, what can we do to interrupt the cycle? Greg Benford seems to have several reasonable notions.
And as for Consequences -- consider the incineration of most of Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, with surrounding states including the agricultural areas in the mid-US covered with a meter or so of ash. And with an instant Ice Age in the wings -- now THAT's consequences!
Of course, as a democratic nation, it's our Right to sit around and blather over whether there is a problem of not, and who's to blame, and what SINGLE SOLUTION must be taken to deal with it, or if we should do anything at all, since we cannot prove (until the balloon goes up) whether or not there is anything to this.
Sentient beings would not approach this situation in that manner. Maybe in the next spin of the great wheel of Darwin, some actual sentient beings will come to exist on this planet.
... to just do nothing and let nature take its course.
When the isostatic rebound from the melting global ice jiggles the Yellowstone caldera into erupting and takes out the neocon infestation in America, it will rid the planet of a dangerous meme reservoir that might otherwise require untold expenditures to pacify. The loss of the declining "liberal" population will have to be regarded as unavoidable collateral damage.
The injection of ginormous volumes of dust into the atmosphere will block enough sunlight to reverse the global warming.
The planet takes care of itself, and a Darwinian cycle brings forth another roll of the dice toward producing intelligent life on Earth.
I would have expected a government site to end with.gov
Doing a Whois on www.govtrack.us turned up that the domain name was issued by godaddy.com -- is the US government getting its domain names from GoDaddy.com?
... and largely civil, something that doesn't happen much anymore on Slashdot.
I thought the comment about money not buying happiness, but rather freedom (a larger pallet of choices in life), was spot-on.
The table of marginal tax rates was pretty interesting as well, recognizing with each country, that tax rate comes with a completely different set of "features" -- take the U.K., which has a LOWER marginal tax rate (41% vs our 42.7%), and yet has national health insurance (something I am increasingly aware of, as my wife nears retirement and we lose her employer health insurance). OTOH, in the U.K., one has FAR fewer civil rights as compared to the U.S., and bureaucratic nonsense with permits and regulatory claptrap for many other things that are freely available here in the USofA.
Another example? South Korea. They have marginal tax rates of 38.2%, and one of the best national telecom networks on the planet. But would you REALLY want to live with Kim Jung Il next door?
Or Mexico, with a marginal tax rate of 24.6%, yet widespread crippling poverty (thus giving the lie to the theory that the path to prosperity lies solely with lower tax rates) and wholesale corruption that makes our "finest government that money can buy" just that. You might pay less in taxes, but you would end up having to finance your own private militia (and health care system, etc, etc) to have the security that one has here, and unless you get off shopping via the web (and losing much of your merchandise along the delivery chain), I think you'll wind up missing the shopping malls. There's a reason all those Mexicans come streaming across our borders, and it's not to live under the rule of our whacked-out politicians. And I don't see a flood of millionaires streaming south, renouncing their U.S. citizenship in order to live like billionaires in Mexico.
OTOH, there's no torrent of Scandinavians clamoring to enter the USofA, despite crushing tax rates and generally socialistic governments. They're better educated and have a very free and open press, so why aren't they eager to get out of the cold?
I think it's pretty tough (and pointless) to try and distill national comparisons down to a single number. A life experience isn't so easy to classify, and each of us has a different scale that we evaluate our life experiences by.
All this is not to say that the USofA doesn't have it's drawbacks. Things like a widespread (and growing) intolerance of others, massive corruption in a government that grows without limit and a permanent legislative class (about 90% are reelected, term after term), a health care system that is increasingly expensive, and an educational system that largely fails to deliver spring to mind.
The best option is to become a billionaire, buy one's own island and become your own monarchy.
... that Intel is supporting Apple via lower pricing than it provides to Dell and HP?
This seems to be, on the face of it, an outrageous claim that Gartner offers up with apparently not a shred of evidence.
It has about as much credibility as Gartner's claim that Apple does software better than hardware. Apple's hardware is pretty widely recognized has having excellent quality and strong, innovative designs. And when one compares equivalent products (so that one might have a basis for comparing costs), Apple comes in either under or very close to Dell, yet manages to return profits significantly larger than Dell does (caveat -- we don't have per-unit profits to compare, although we can look at things like profits from notebooks and compare them).
The successful film and music industry women have gone one better -- they now opt to avoid all the inconvenience of pregnancy by "rescuing" infants from impoverished cultures. A much tidier way to satisfy all those maternal instincts without all the tiresome downtime associated with pregnancy.
So while this has interesting implications for societies, it will have little or no effect on species.
We are already seeing this, as the societies of the well-educated are rapidly becoming such that education is a needless waste of energy, as the social groups perform everything that individuals did previously. Name some essential item in Western society for which an individual exists who is able to construct one, unaided, from the raw materials.
Cars? Semiconductor fabs? Electric power generation equipment? Paper? Pharmaceutical production facilities? Fast food? -- all of these are the result of vast organizations with complex supply chains, manufacturing and distribution systems. No individual could produce any of them.
If modern society were to fail tomorrow, western civilization would fall a *very* long way before beginning the tiresome climb back up the technology curve (assuming that humankind would not be extinguished in the fall back to simpler times).
Educated individuals have been obsoleted (except for a very tiny minority who work as components of the societal infrastructure to move it forward), by a society that operates of its own accord. In a few years, when automation begins to make serious headway in eliminating error-prone human decision-making, the remaining human thinkers will settle back to drool in front of their ginormous HDTVs, savoring the then-equivalent of today's America's Got Talent! -- or American Idol, or whatever sports extravaganza is being telecast as pablum for the masses.
All the off-shoring that is taking place today is merely an interim state until those nations are uplifted to the high ideals of Western Civilization.
At that point, Humanity will settle back into collective senility. No frontiers, no need for humans. We will have arrived at our destination.
And it's not going to take a hundred thousand years to get there.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you sure that you don't mean Dell?
Last time I looked, it was Dell that had an actual SEC investigation going on how their earnings were manipulated (known as "cooking the books" in the popular vernacular). Apple's options issues are a tempest in a teapot compared to those.
Or perhaps you mean the Hewlett-Packard hearings in Washington, and the possibility of jail time for their senior management due to their actions in nailing boardroom leakers.
So far as I know (and I'd be willing to bet as far as YOU know), Apple has investigated their options problems thoroughly, and is turning those results over to the SEC. To the best of my knowledge, the only indication of possible further troubles is due to a blizzard of rumors occurring, curiously enough, as Apple closes out the best calendar year in it's history, with a lot of pressure from various quarters to knock the stock down before the earnings are announced. Remember how the rumors surfaced about sales plummeting at the iTMS? Look how silly those rumors appear in the wake of the Christmas Day transaction volume problems at the iTMS.
I think that their product announcements on January 8th will easily eclipse any "stock scandals" in 2007, as will their earnings announcement the following week. And in any event, the magnitude of any impact of past options misbehavior will be shown on Friday (Dec 29), when Apple makes their restated earnings for the past several years public. All the responsible estimates of those changes indicate it will be a trivial change.
... because our government runs by the Golden Rule (i.e., "Those that have the gold make the rules").
The reason that government appropriation of property is on the upswing, is that it is being taken from individual citizens and handed to corporations, corporations having become a class of privileged entities over and above mere individuals. For this to be reversed to allow individuals to appropriate assets of corporations, even for the "greater public good", goes against the Golden Rule -- and thus, is simply never going to happen.
Since the time that the USPTO was founded, there has been a crush of funds motivating the legislators making small (and not-so-small) changes in the laws governing patents, with the intent of making patent law an instrument of wealth hoarding instead of an instrument to protect innovators from established interests.
The established interests now run the game, and all the wailing of the masses is not about to change that.
I'm impressed by the fact that he was his own test pilot ... ... learning the flight characteristics on the way to the ground ...
Obviously, a quick learner.
I'd be interested in knowing what his "Plan B" was in the event the wings folded up in flight, or one engine exploded.
... or the dynamic duo of Norman and Spolsky cannot manage to communicate the importance of making things no more complicated than they absolutely need to be.
Given the ever-increasing level of complexity in everyday life, if they REALLY THINK that simplicity is over-rated, then they really are idiots.
There is a sweet spot in the design of things that strikes an optimal compromise between functionality and simplicity. Packing a bunch of unrelated functionality into a device, whether that device is hardware or software, always moves one further away from that sweet spot.
... between DVD-R and DVD+R media? From reading the referenced article, it appears that the difference between DVD-R and DVD+R is all in the encoding of the bit stream.
Clearly, that's not the whole story, as when I insert a blank disc, the software can tell me whether it's a DVD-R or a DVD+R.
From the info presented by Wikipedia, there is a series of physical pits between the grooves that is used for addressing and tracking purposes -- I suppose that there is also some sort of identification code that indicates which type of disc it is, but have no idea if there is any other significant difference between the +R and -R flavors of media -- such as types of dyes, or differences in the sizes/shapes of the dye cells on the discs. My guess is not.
http://w3.misterhouse.net:81/
http://www.smarthome.com/
"R2D2, peel me a grape".
Of COURSE it will!!
Only those who grew up with (or prior to) TV and are hopelessly clinging the past would ever doubt it.
Actually, that would explain the observed reality.
I guess that makes Starbucks a pretty smart company.
... is the contention that global warming is caused by humans and the implication that by reversing the things we have done to "cause" global warming, we can reverse it.
I have no problem with the obvious existence of global warming, or that we are accelerating it.
But the facts are that this round of global warming started about 30,000 years ago, when the land bridges between Russia and Alaska and Ireland and England disappeared due to rising sea levels, as the melting of the prior Ice Age began due to the warming of the planet. What sparked this is certainly open to debate, but it follows a pattern observed across the larger scale of paleological climate.
There are a LOT of things that influence global warming/cooling. Now that the permafrost is well on its way to thawing and decomposing into methane and carbon dioxide, the millions of square miles of locked up greenhouse gases are beginning to emerge.
And even if we were to immediately cease all man-made greenhouse gas production, worldwide, it would not stop the continued increases in greenhouse gases from natural sources.
There are a lot of ways we need to be working on managing our planetary climate, and reducing our own emission of greenhouse gases is only one of them. The film presents it as the only solution. We need to be investigating the use of solar blockers (dust and "stuff" injected into the upper atmosphere to act as a planetary sunshade), ways to scrub excess greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, and above all else, more and better studies to better understand this unbelievably complex process.
Simple solutions to complex problems don't work.
... like our society's expectations for our public school system.
Instead of preparing students for adulthood or college (yes, they can be -- and usually are -- different), we have assigned our public schools as the surrogate baby-sitters, keeping our children occupied, but not placing much more in the way of expectations on them.
This is a parental problem -- and by that, I mean a problem with the parents. There are parents who want to ensure that their children are prepared for college, and they are moving their kids to private schools, or home schooling them, or moving to homes situated in the better school districts.
However, that only prepares kids for college, and may or may not prepare them for adulthood. Especially an unimaginable adulthood.
It used to be that kids could get a glimmer of how to be an adult be emulating their parents, who in turn were following their parents down life's pathways. This includes a lot more than simply careers, things like social standing, moral behavior, and how to deal with life's challenges.
But when both parents are scrambling to make sense out of a world that is radically different from anything they were prepared for, it's no surprise that kids are set adrift in life.
I have no answers, I only understand the problem.
... to transfer at least the more important stuff ...
...
And who decides what is important? And will they make that decision before the facilities to read the "important stuff" are inaccessible except via some long-dead proprietary format requiring some long-dead program to read it, that requires some long-dead operating system to run it, that requires some long-dead chip architecture to run it
And then there is the choice of media used to preserve this "important stuff". If we are preserving it across collapses in civilization, a series of encodings should be used, with the header of each one containing a description of either the technology needed to read the next deeper level, or where to find said description.
When we talk about accessing digital data, it's a bit different than accessing historical data, as historical data has thus far been readable using readers each of us carries around in our eye sockets. Digital data assumes and requires a certain level of technology to access it. If we only care about maintaining the data going forward, then periodic copying to the then-current media will handle things adequately. But if we make no foolish assumptions about what level of technology will exist a thousand (or even a hundred) years from now, then we need to consider ways to communicate the required technology to those who may be attempting to access the archived materials.
Design of encoding algorithms should take into account the possibility that chunks of the data may become missing over extended periods of time, along with markers and tags embedded in the material to enable the readers to function. Perhaps a RAID-5 style striping of parity data would be a wise precaution. And of course, nothing electronic or magnetic should be a candidate for a long-term storage medium. Maybe burning pits into a gold disc might be appropriate, assuming that future archeologists do not melt down the platters for coins.
Sorry, but while the world is definitely on the path leading to a disintegration of civilization, it's not due to oil, or energy, or anything like that.
What's happening is called Future Shock, a condition that occurs when the rate of change in people's lives exceeds the capacity of the human mind to accommodate.
For the people in the third world, being rapidly brought up to speed with the rest of us, the stresses are obvious -- the world they knew is completely and totally gone.
For us, the social stability we have grown up with is rapidly eroding, and any anchor points of stability that we have in our lives are pretty wobbly.
The upshot to all this is that people are retreating to their most deeply held belief structures -- whether or not they have any relevance in today's world -- and adopting dug-in mindsets, ready to defend their most treasured memes at any cost.
Civilization is fragmenting into different groups scattered along the path of exponential progress, each seeing the other groups as mortal enemies.
All that widely available cheap energy will do is to allow people to economically produce WMD to eradicate those they consider to be infidels -- everyone not in their meme-group.
There's no good end to all this, unless people can somehow manage to learn to surf the increasing rates of change in their lives with tolerance.
This ability is not very common in the human genome.
Sending physical objects back in time is not the only way that time travel can be useful.
If this works out, it could be the beginnings of instantaneous communication to distant places. This would neatly do away with the need for autonomous (or semi-autonomous) robots for exploring Mars, as you could in principle drive a Mars rover in real time from Earth.
The financial community is well ahead of this, because I can see plenty of instances of buy-sell activity in selected stocks before the news that eventually moves the stocks occurs.
Computer Science is a different field, and hence requires a different curriculum from Computer Technology.
Subjects such as Turing Machines, the Lambda Calculus and Predicate Calculus are instructive for showing three different approaches to the same ideas, and have good utility in building the conceptual frameworks necessary in Computer Science. But they have zero utility in Computer Technology (a.k.a. "Computer Programming"). Same thing with abstract algebra.
There is a continuum to the underlying math that forms a bridge between Computer Technology and Computer Science -- set theory forms the basis for a great deal of logical thought, and pretty much the entirety of relational databases. If you're going to be doing any significant numerical analysis work (such as one might in engineering applications), then you will require the concepts in calculus, and possibly differential calculus, along with the calculus of finite differences for proper consideration of the accumulation of errors.
Because Computer Science is less related to the application of, and more properly aimed at the understanding of ALL the concepts involved in ALL branches of computing, it requires a substantially stronger foundation in mathematical concepts. Computer programming does not need nearly so much in the way of math, especially if all one is aiming at is constructing web sites and variations on already existing applications.
... on whether or not the technology being employed is beyond the capability of the majority of the voters to understand.
Zero automation voting using paper ballots is fraught with possibilities for error, mostly due to the normal and expected error rates from human counting (and ANY automated system also has a certain error rate that is a function of its design), but including all of the fraudulent errors that interested parties on all sides are wont to insert into the machinery.
The problem with computerized voting systems is the leverage that the technology offers those who can subvert it. Whereas hacking a paper ballot voting scheme is pretty much limited in scope to the organization perpetrating the fraud (and as the number of participants in the fraud grows, so too does the likelihood that they will be exposed), the leverage offered by automation means that a handful of individuals can commandeer far larger blocs of votes, up to and including controlling the outcome of national elections.
Having most of the voting equipment made by a single manufacturer leads us right into the vulnerabilities of the monoculture, and having the designs and software be closed source proprietary designs means that when weaknesses are present, they will have much longer lifetimes than open source alternatives.
When the vast majority of the voters are clueless as to the risks inherent in the voting machinery they use, they are left with only blind faith (or ignorant assumptions that everything is fraudulent, and the accompanying miserable turnout to vote). When the bulk of the voters either understand how things work -- especially the error detection and correction mechanisms -- or have a reasonably large set of disinterested (i.e., they don't get their paychecks from those being elected or making the machines) experts that they can rely upon to provide the understanding that they lack, then automated systems can provide not only more convenient elections, but more secure and accurate ones as well.
But the way things are today, we're rapidly swirling down the drain. About the only thing that would awaken people to the problems that are gnawing away at our democracy would be for a major national election to be obviously thrown to an impossible victor in an undetectable manner. Eventually, that will happen. Then the political duopoly that runs this nation will either have to drag their heads out of the ground and change things, or lose their control over the government of the USofA.
[Since none of the conclusions can be "proven", all we can do is go with our "best guess". In this case, the general concensus among scientists in the field is our best guess.]
... -- the natural conclusion is to be very wary of consensus opinion concerning things that the assembled experts cannot explain.
Looking back over the accumulated history of so-called expert consensus when there is insufficient information to prove anything, and all the theories leave gaping holes -- things like the fire/air/water/stone "elemental" theory of matter, the Ptolemaic model of the movement of the heavenly bodies, the theories that the Earth was the center of the universe, that ether was the substance that the planets moved through, the list goes on and on and on
I'm pretty skeptical about the invention of dark matter as a means of making the math work in the absence of any real data, I'd rather admit that we just don't know and seek more data and better theories until we do know, if indeed we are ever able to do so.
But when faced with "don't know" as the answer of the day, polling the assembled experts and having them guess at an answer seems to be something different than what I thought Science was all about. It's not necessary to have an answer for every question, it's the "don't know" answers that give Science its direction.
It's kinda like walking up to a room full of oncologists and asking them to tell you, with no examinations or information, whether or not you have cancer. Some will look at you and try to guess your age, make assumptions about your life style from your appearance, and give a probability based on their experience. Some will shake their heads and say it can't be done, insufficient data. A hypochondriac will take his answer from the first group, a reasonable person, from the second.
Be a little bit skeptical when the experts can't get their stories straight. "Don't know" is a perfectly valid, if not especially satisfying, answer.
... that we live on.
Suppose that a mechanism of repeating cycles (and perhaps cycles within cycles) between ice ages (major and minor) has been a requisite factor in the evolution of life on Earth, with the regular cycles of extinction following the alternation of ice ages and greenhouse eras.
It would make for a grand Darwinian scythe.
What does that do to the various elements of the Drake equation?
While the universe is certainly large enough for intelligent life to evolve under a wide variety of conditions, I'm not at all sure that our galaxy has enough systems with clockwork geoclimate cycles similar to our own to permit an evolutionary process at all similar to ours to have taken place.
As poor an example of an intelligent species as we are, we may be the best that this galaxy can muster.
This fits in well with the widely acknowledged past cycles of ice ages vs greenhouse eras. By some mechanism, (probably Life on Earth), greenhouse gases enter the atmosphere faster than they are removed by natural processes. Eventually, temperatures rise and the icecaps and glaciers melt. The crust adjusts to the loss of lots of pressure on it, causing widespread adjustments in the crust, accompanied by the release of volcanoes that have been corked up for a very long time.
Take the Yellowstone caldera, for instance -- a mega-volcano that has erupted in the past on a roughly 650,000 year cycle (last eruption was 640,000 years ago, the previous 1.3 million years ago, and the one before that 2.1 million years ago). Such an eruption would spew enough dust into the upper atmosphere to block the Sun for a long time, plunging the planet into an ice age as the accumulated atmospheric carbon leaves the atmosphere over several decades and most of the Life on Earth dies off. That would, of course, include me and thee.
Eventually, Life reasserts itself and starts putting carbon back into the atmosphere, after the dust has fallen back onto the planet, and the cycle begins anew.
Just an idea, but it seems to fit the current circumstances. And while we may or may not be responsible for the latest increases in atmospheric carbon (the current warming cycle began 30,000 years ago), we are most certainly contributing to it.
The question is, does this represent a credible notion of what is happening, and if not, what's a better story that fits the historical record?
And if this IS a credible story, what can we do to interrupt the cycle? Greg Benford seems to have several reasonable notions.
And as for Consequences -- consider the incineration of most of Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, with surrounding states including the agricultural areas in the mid-US covered with a meter or so of ash. And with an instant Ice Age in the wings -- now THAT's consequences!
Of course, as a democratic nation, it's our Right to sit around and blather over whether there is a problem of not, and who's to blame, and what SINGLE SOLUTION must be taken to deal with it, or if we should do anything at all, since we cannot prove (until the balloon goes up) whether or not there is anything to this.
Sentient beings would not approach this situation in that manner. Maybe in the next spin of the great wheel of Darwin, some actual sentient beings will come to exist on this planet.
When the isostatic rebound from the melting global ice jiggles the Yellowstone caldera into erupting and takes out the neocon infestation in America, it will rid the planet of a dangerous meme reservoir that might otherwise require untold expenditures to pacify. The loss of the declining "liberal" population will have to be regarded as unavoidable collateral damage.
The injection of ginormous volumes of dust into the atmosphere will block enough sunlight to reverse the global warming.
The planet takes care of itself, and a Darwinian cycle brings forth another roll of the dice toward producing intelligent life on Earth.
Nuts! Snake-eyes again!
I would have expected a government site to end with .gov
Doing a Whois on www.govtrack.us turned up that the domain name was issued by godaddy.com -- is the US government getting its domain names from GoDaddy.com?
Methinks I smells a hoax.
I thought the comment about money not buying happiness, but rather freedom (a larger pallet of choices in life), was spot-on.
The table of marginal tax rates was pretty interesting as well, recognizing with each country, that tax rate comes with a completely different set of "features" -- take the U.K., which has a LOWER marginal tax rate (41% vs our 42.7%), and yet has national health insurance (something I am increasingly aware of, as my wife nears retirement and we lose her employer health insurance). OTOH, in the U.K., one has FAR fewer civil rights as compared to the U.S., and bureaucratic nonsense with permits and regulatory claptrap for many other things that are freely available here in the USofA.
Another example? South Korea. They have marginal tax rates of 38.2%, and one of the best national telecom networks on the planet. But would you REALLY want to live with Kim Jung Il next door?
Or Mexico, with a marginal tax rate of 24.6%, yet widespread crippling poverty (thus giving the lie to the theory that the path to prosperity lies solely with lower tax rates) and wholesale corruption that makes our "finest government that money can buy" just that. You might pay less in taxes, but you would end up having to finance your own private militia (and health care system, etc, etc) to have the security that one has here, and unless you get off shopping via the web (and losing much of your merchandise along the delivery chain), I think you'll wind up missing the shopping malls. There's a reason all those Mexicans come streaming across our borders, and it's not to live under the rule of our whacked-out politicians. And I don't see a flood of millionaires streaming south, renouncing their U.S. citizenship in order to live like billionaires in Mexico.
OTOH, there's no torrent of Scandinavians clamoring to enter the USofA, despite crushing tax rates and generally socialistic governments. They're better educated and have a very free and open press, so why aren't they eager to get out of the cold?
I think it's pretty tough (and pointless) to try and distill national comparisons down to a single number. A life experience isn't so easy to classify, and each of us has a different scale that we evaluate our life experiences by.
All this is not to say that the USofA doesn't have it's drawbacks. Things like a widespread (and growing) intolerance of others, massive corruption in a government that grows without limit and a permanent legislative class (about 90% are reelected, term after term), a health care system that is increasingly expensive, and an educational system that largely fails to deliver spring to mind.
The best option is to become a billionaire, buy one's own island and become your own monarchy.
... that Intel is supporting Apple via lower pricing than it provides to Dell and HP?
This seems to be, on the face of it, an outrageous claim that Gartner offers up with apparently not a shred of evidence.
It has about as much credibility as Gartner's claim that Apple does software better than hardware. Apple's hardware is pretty widely recognized has having excellent quality and strong, innovative designs. And when one compares equivalent products (so that one might have a basis for comparing costs), Apple comes in either under or very close to Dell, yet manages to return profits significantly larger than Dell does (caveat -- we don't have per-unit profits to compare, although we can look at things like profits from notebooks and compare them).
Is Dell sponsoring the next Gartner conference?
The successful film and music industry women have gone one better -- they now opt to avoid all the inconvenience of pregnancy by "rescuing" infants from impoverished cultures. A much tidier way to satisfy all those maternal instincts without all the tiresome downtime associated with pregnancy.
We are already seeing this, as the societies of the well-educated are rapidly becoming such that education is a needless waste of energy, as the social groups perform everything that individuals did previously. Name some essential item in Western society for which an individual exists who is able to construct one, unaided, from the raw materials.
Cars? Semiconductor fabs? Electric power generation equipment? Paper? Pharmaceutical production facilities? Fast food? -- all of these are the result of vast organizations with complex supply chains, manufacturing and distribution systems.
No individual could produce any of them.
If modern society were to fail tomorrow, western civilization would fall a *very* long way before beginning the tiresome climb back up the technology curve (assuming that humankind would not be extinguished in the fall back to simpler times).
Educated individuals have been obsoleted (except for a very tiny minority who work as components of the societal infrastructure to move it forward), by a society that operates of its own accord. In a few years, when automation begins to make serious headway in eliminating error-prone human decision-making, the remaining human thinkers will settle back to drool in front of their ginormous HDTVs, savoring the then-equivalent of today's America's Got Talent! -- or American Idol, or whatever sports extravaganza is being telecast as pablum for the masses.
All the off-shoring that is taking place today is merely an interim state until those nations are uplifted to the high ideals of Western Civilization.
At that point, Humanity will settle back into collective senility. No frontiers, no need for humans. We will have arrived at our destination.
And it's not going to take a hundred thousand years to get there.