I think if you were carbon neutral you would safely improve the world's standard of living, but not to "American" levels (I argue that European standards of living are better as evidenced by their better lifespan).
Having spent time in both Europe and America I'm not sure what difference you are talking about here. If you mean the SUV's, d'accord. Otherwise life is not really so different between the U.S. and Europe. Well at least if you are referring to Western Europe. Eastern Europe is a different story.
With electric companies actually billing customers around 10 cents per kilowatt hour
Is that supposed to be some kind of world average? Where I live in the northeastern US we pay between 15 and 20 cents per KWH depending on factors such as how much we use (the more you use the more you pay). I was recently living in Malaysia where I only paid about 6 cents per KWH, but I wonder if that price is state subsidized. I haven't heard of a cheaper price than that.
As a worst case scenario, we can always mine other planetary bodies.
That's fine as long as we don't mind paying around $100,000/KWH for our electricity. Only Bill Gates would be able to afford the electricity produced from round trip flights to asteroids/mars/venus. At the point that we run out of fossil fuels, urunium, and wood to burn, we will only have electricity from photovoltaics, wind, and hydroelectric sources. We can expect the cost of electricity to increase by orders of magnitude when that happens. Lots of us will have had photovoltaics on our roofs long before we reach that point of course. We definitely need photovoltaics with not only better efficiency but longer lifespans as well.
We can also expect a mass exodus away from colder climates toward climates with more moderate (but not too hot) weather. There will also be some migration away from equatorial regions due to air conditioning being too expensive to run. Although, in that case, there are still large numbers of people there who live without it anyway. Of course this is based on the idea that we can't grow trees fast enough to supply everyone living in colder climates with heating fuel in the winter and/or for electricity generation, which seems like a reasonable assumption.
Fusion reactor output has been increasing exponentially since its inception, and it should not be terribly long before it will be a viable alternative to fission power.
man, what the fuck does that have to do with the warning against the "ideal society" promise of communism and its incompatibility with human nature that was the center point of the work entitled 1984 and a number of other works by Orwell?
It is a shame if that is all you got from reading 1984. You may as well have just read the Cliff notes. A novel is far more than just its most abstract theme. His 1984 reference was perfectly justified IMO. And, yes, I have read the novel many times. It is one of my favorites. What a classic and beautiful story.
IANAL, but if the students are over 18, I don't think the RIAA can garnish the parents' wages or go after their assets. They would have to go after the assets of the student which in most cases is likely to be a big fat zero. Since many full time students don't actually work or have assets I think it might be difficult for them to collect say, a million dollars or even $10,000 plus their legal costs. Even if there were wages to garnish, there are practical (and legal?) limits to what (unbribed) judges are willing to do. No doubt this impracticality of actually collecting is what kept the RIAA from pursuing this sort of strategy years ago. They chose the more traditional route of going after the deep pockets. Most low end jobs in the US are barely enough to allow one person to survive. Need I use my own monthly budget to illustrate? If a judge garnished my wages at all, it would take 20 years just for them to recoup their costs in suing me. The nice thing about being poor, at least in the US, is the law protects you well enough to effectively make you judgement proof. Well, except against the government who can just put you in jail.
Huh? That's just another UFO crank website. The UFO crazies have got to be some of the most insane people on the planet. Only the people who think they are God or Napoleon are worse. Still it's fun to listen to them. It's the kind of stuff I would like to be true because its all so exciting and dramatic. I'd like to believe in ghosts and werewolves as well. Too bad that damn reality (i.e. evidence, facts) has to get in the way of all our fun.
That's a pretty big leap of logic. There was a whole big ocean in the way. No way could the Germans have pulled that off. In any case, just like with an individual, a country is usually acting for its own self-interest. Clearly, it was not in our interest to have the entire European continent controlled by Adolf Hitler. Although I don't think his regime would have ultimately been much more successful than the USSR in terms of tech and manufacturing. People aren't going to work for some theoretical 'common good'. They will only work (with any enthusiasm) for their own interest. The US would have left a NAZI Europe in the dust in terms of tech and manufacturing due to the difference in our political systems. Germany was just living on the momentum of its scientists and thinkers from the old days.
I don't think we will be able to overcome these (and many other) problems in my lifetime.
Well that's putting it mildly. The understatement of the year. We don't even have a model in science to figure out how we might be able to do it, at least at reasonable time scales. Even antimatter drives wouldn't do it, and even if they somehow could, we have no theories on how we might make antimatter in sufficient quantity to use as a fuel. Any civilization that could make a true space drive has an understanding of physics that we can only dream of. They would have to have a way of pushing off of the very 'fabric' of space-time itself, the very idea of which is basically nonsensical to us at this point.
Based on what evidence? Most planets that we can detect are gas giants. It is much harder to detect the teeny tiny little rocky planets. Like finding a sand grain compared to finding say something the size of the moon. Our solar system has five gas giants and four rocky planets. But then there are all of the large moons. If you count those, then they outnumber the Jovians.
Looking around our own solar system, those that are no have very thin atmospheres.
Two out of the four rocky planets have very thick atmospheres. If we want to extrapolate, we could say that about half of the rocky planets possess a thick atomosphere.
A higher level language will most likely give you a wider range of ways to solve a problem within the given limitations.
I may be completely lost here. If I am please help me out. It was my understanding that one advantage of assembly is that there are far more ways of solving a given problem. In a compiled language some assembly language programmer decided what functions should be included in the standard library and then what each function should do exactly. How much error checking. Do most people need to do this or that? Those sorts of things. In reality one function may actually be using hundreds or even thousands of lines of assembly. So in general, if you are going to rely on function or object libraries written by someone else, then it is either their way or the highway. I don't see how this is giving you a wider range, but maybe I am missing something here. By programming in (just to use one example) 'C' are you also assuming that you will be hand coding your own functions and then using the resulting 'high level' language? If that's the case then you will get no argument from me.
You can't write efficient algorithms an a small scale using compiled languages. That's the whole point. Am I the only coder in the world who has been frustrated even in C with some function that does X,Y,Z, and A,B,C, when I just need it to do Y. Put that in an inner loop and you're sure as hell going to see a difference. While I don't know much about compilers, I do know that they don't understand your particular problem domain or why you may not need some particular error checking or god knows what that, while useful to 75% of pretty much everyone, is not useful to you in that particular program. Hence the use of inline assembly (or whatever kind of assembly). And if you think assembly is so low level, try coding in raw machine code sometime. Even assembly somewhat abstracts you from the hardware.
Every new sued person is a potential new job for a lawyer.
Which brings me to my new (crackpot) theory. If you want to predict in which direction a judge will rule, just follow the money. If the judgement will bring more money overall to other lawyers he will be in favor of it. In this case more lawyers will be getting paid on both sides. This increases the overall demand for lawyers, thus increasing the average salary. At its root, it really is just an old fashioned conflict of interest. From ambulance chasers all the way down to politicians and judges the only thing a lawyer understands is money. You have to speak their language. Perhaps they will now offer a bribe. And, by 'they' of course I mean some disinterested individual in a trench coat who accosts the judge in the parking lot on his way home, handing him an envelope of cash with a wink.
Unfortunately NASA also closed down the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics program in 2002. The program was a bit more focused on the goals you have mentioned. Since it's not a very controversial subject the wikipedia entry seems excellent. A nice overview. The BPPP was a seriously cool idea and should have been funded forever. In 6 years they only spent 1.6 million. Although, obviously they were not able to come up with any useful ideas. It's probably not a very useful concept. Folks like Einstein or Newton don't usually get hired for those jobs. Can't imagine what the qualifications would be. Trying to reinvent science as we know it is not so easy.
A lot of slashdotters should really read that old BPP page on the practicality of interstellar travel in general. A short but excellent read. Note he is talking about just getting to the alpha centauri system for christ sake. Also note that he seems to be denying the validity of Freeman Dysan's baby Project Orion which, although originally intended for interplanetary travel, could be supersized for interstellar travel as well. Here's an excerpt for the lazy:
Here are four examples [large graphic] of what it would take to send a canister about the size of a Shuttle payload (or a school bus) past our nearest neighboring star...and allowing 900 years for it to make this journey. Well....If you use chemical engines like those that are on the Shuttle, well..., sorry, there isn't enough mass in the universe to supply the rocket propellant you'd need. So let's step up to next possibilities, nuclear rockets with a predicted performance that's 10 to 20 times better! Well...it's still not looking all that good. For a fission rocket you would need a BILLION SUPERTANKER size propellant tanks to get you there, and even with fusion rockets you would still need a THOUSAND SUPERTANKERS! Even if we look at the best conceivable performance that we could engineer based on today's knowledge, say an Ion engine or an antimatter rocket whose performance was 100 times better that the shuttle engines, we would need about ten railway tanker sized propellant tanks. That doesn't sound too bad, until you consider that we didn't bring along any propellant to let us stop when we get to the other star system...or if we want to get there quicker than 9 centuries. Once you add the desire to actually stop at your destination, or if you want to get there sooner, you're back at the incredible supertanker situation again, even for our best conceivable rockets. In conclusion, we'd really like to have a form of propulsion that doesn't need any propellant! This implies the need to find some way to modify gravitational or inertial forces or to find some means to push against the very structure of spacetime itself.
My $20 Chaintech AV-710 with its Via Envy 24 chipset sounds much better to my ears than the Creative Audigy that it recently replaced. I wasn't expecting there to be such a huge difference in sound quality. I found myself enjoying songs which I had long ago become bored with, because I could suddenly hear the music come to life with a detail, richness and sweetness that I had never noticed before. No doubt M-Audio has some better sounding solutions, but not at this price. Creative needs to get their act together and produce something with good sound quality. I mean, is there any feature of a sound card that is more important than that?
From a gaming perspective maybe true 3D positional audio like Aureal produced with their A3D Vortex chips in the late 90s before Creative sued them out of existence in a lawsuit involving...you guessed it, patent infringement. A lawsuit which Creative lost. Creative was not so interested at the time in using positional 3D cues. They were highly successful however if their goal was to prevent anyone else from pursuing accurate positional 3D audio in computer games. Have they finally caught up in terms of 3D audio to where Aureal was a decade ago? This is a particularly telling example of how useful patents can be at keeping smaller, more innovative companies to a minimum. They don't even need to win the lawsuit, just outspend the smaller company in lawyer fees.
Ever hear of supply and demand? The scenario you are envisioning is highly improbable to put it mildly. First of all, American farms will not end without subsidies. Plenty of folks would prefer to buy locally grown produce, even at a higher price. Second, it is hard to envision any scenario that would affect all food (produce/grain) exporting countries at the same time. The fact is free markets have always done the best job of supplying humans with food. Subsidies are not necessary.
I think the basis for libertarianism is that there are lots of people who know nothing about economics, and will buy into whatever idiotic system sounds good at first glance.
Sorry, but you seem to have misspelled 'socialism'. Next time use a spell-checker. Any additional wealth goes directly to the special interest receiving the subsidy. Any studies that indicate otherwise were not conducted fairly or by a genuinely disinterested group.
So a world without business subsidies is anarchy? Curious. I don't think that word means what you think it means. The whole system of competing interests fighting for the government trough is a cruel joke. Lobbying needs to be outlawed. More than any other one factor, it destroys any semblance of the democratic process. Actually, I thought bribery was illegal in this country. Corporations should not be allowed to contribute even $1 to campaign funds. And, no, not by joining together and hiding behind some kind of 'non-profit' alliance either.
A cow needs grass, period. It actually makes the cow happy, healthy and all the products derived from it (milk and meat) are so much better
While I am no expert on cow physiology and I'm not sure about the 'happy' part, I can vouch for the fact that Argentina has the best steak in the world and they feed their cows grass. Everyone has different taste sensitivity (due to varying numbers of taste buds?), but I found the taste differences to be huge. Of course that may not be the only difference American and Argentine cows.
No. I usually memorize verb conjugations without index cards. Nor am I counting the many words which are the same in both languages. At first I did actually write the same word on both sides of an index card, but this exercise quickly lost its appeal. 4000 words is nothing. The problem is most people who are really gifted with languages (IOW not me) never count. And in my experience, if asked, they will consistently underestimate their working vocabulary. A thousand words is enough to, say, rent a hotel room in Mexico, but nowhere near enough to have an actual, in-depth conversation. Considering how many words are actually in even the smallest dictionaries (typically at least 50,000), this should not be surprising to anyone.
Do you have any references to that research? I find that very difficult to believe. I have been studying Spanish for some years now and have a vocabulary of between 4000 and 5000 words (as shown by my stack of index cards), and I am nowhere even close to being fluent. I am estimating that I have at least twice as many words to go before I can have real conversations with people or read a newspaper. I have to assume English cannot be so different. I had heard that somewhere between 3000 and 5000 core words were necessary for day to day speech in most languages, but it certainly has not worked out that way for me.
I cannot understand how anyone could really not want to know. I cannot even imagine being like that. Intentionally living in ignorance. Including all of the consequences to other peoples lives. Spreading the pain and misery as a result.
My mother had a serious disease with a genetic component. As a child I was aware that I had something like a 7% chance of ending up with the disease. It is now statistically unlikely (but still possible) that I will develop it. I always told myself that if I saw the initial signs I would kill myself before the hell began, after which it might be too late to take such drastic action. As it turned out it hit my sister instead and she killed herself because of it. I wasn't aware of any pact she had with herself to do so, but she was aware of my own. She did not leave a note so it is impossible to know for sure what her reasons were.
I don't like children. But even if I did I would not allow myself to have one. Seems irresponsible, even immoral. That didn't stop my sister from having one though. I guess different people have different ideas of 'responsibility'.
The only reason I could think of not to get tested would be with respect to insurance companies. For that reason I don't think I would want to get tested in the US. I would go to Thailand or Argentina or someplace to get tested instead. Then at least I would have the choice of whether to inform the insurance company or not. If you required treatment the insurance company would find out about it eventually anyway, but you would at least be in the same position (wrt insurance) as those who chose to remain ignorant. I think it would still qualify as insurance fraud, but if done cautiously (perhaps even under an assumed name, and preferably in a country where few people speak English) at least you could probably get away with it. Or alternatively, could you not just make sure you are with a good insurance company (that you can remain with for life) for at least a year before getting tested? Even good companies can go out of business or be bought out however. So getting the test done abroad may still be preferable. Although, again, if you end up getting treated for the condition it won't matter either way.
Pebble Bed Fission Reactors are clearly the solution to the unseemly problem of Planet Overheating. Of course that is in addition to the act of making combustion punishable by death. Those found guilty of any form of burning will be summarily shot, electrocuted, hanged, or just buried alive with extreme prejudice by World Consortium Police. Burning at the stake will be forbidden except in the case of heretics such as members of the secret society: For a Warmer Planet. Resistance will be futile.
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That's fine as long as we don't mind paying around $100,000/KWH for our electricity. Only Bill Gates would be able to afford the electricity produced from round trip flights to asteroids/mars/venus. At the point that we run out of fossil fuels, urunium, and wood to burn, we will only have electricity from photovoltaics, wind, and hydroelectric sources. We can expect the cost of electricity to increase by orders of magnitude when that happens. Lots of us will have had photovoltaics on our roofs long before we reach that point of course. We definitely need photovoltaics with not only better efficiency but longer lifespans as well.
We can also expect a mass exodus away from colder climates toward climates with more moderate (but not too hot) weather. There will also be some migration away from equatorial regions due to air conditioning being too expensive to run. Although, in that case, there are still large numbers of people there who live without it anyway. Of course this is based on the idea that we can't grow trees fast enough to supply everyone living in colder climates with heating fuel in the winter and/or for electricity generation, which seems like a reasonable assumption.
It is a shame if that is all you got from reading 1984. You may as well have just read the Cliff notes. A novel is far more than just its most abstract theme. His 1984 reference was perfectly justified IMO. And, yes, I have read the novel many times. It is one of my favorites. What a classic and beautiful story.
IANAL, but if the students are over 18, I don't think the RIAA can garnish the parents' wages or go after their assets. They would have to go after the assets of the student which in most cases is likely to be a big fat zero. Since many full time students don't actually work or have assets I think it might be difficult for them to collect say, a million dollars or even $10,000 plus their legal costs. Even if there were wages to garnish, there are practical (and legal?) limits to what (unbribed) judges are willing to do. No doubt this impracticality of actually collecting is what kept the RIAA from pursuing this sort of strategy years ago. They chose the more traditional route of going after the deep pockets. Most low end jobs in the US are barely enough to allow one person to survive. Need I use my own monthly budget to illustrate? If a judge garnished my wages at all, it would take 20 years just for them to recoup their costs in suing me. The nice thing about being poor, at least in the US, is the law protects you well enough to effectively make you judgement proof. Well, except against the government who can just put you in jail.
Huh? That's just another UFO crank website. The UFO crazies have got to be some of the most insane people on the planet. Only the people who think they are God or Napoleon are worse. Still it's fun to listen to them. It's the kind of stuff I would like to be true because its all so exciting and dramatic. I'd like to believe in ghosts and werewolves as well. Too bad that damn reality (i.e. evidence, facts) has to get in the way of all our fun.
You can't write efficient algorithms an a small scale using compiled languages. That's the whole point. Am I the only coder in the world who has been frustrated even in C with some function that does X,Y,Z, and A,B,C, when I just need it to do Y. Put that in an inner loop and you're sure as hell going to see a difference. While I don't know much about compilers, I do know that they don't understand your particular problem domain or why you may not need some particular error checking or god knows what that, while useful to 75% of pretty much everyone, is not useful to you in that particular program. Hence the use of inline assembly (or whatever kind of assembly). And if you think assembly is so low level, try coding in raw machine code sometime. Even assembly somewhat abstracts you from the hardware.
A lot of slashdotters should really read that old BPP page on the practicality of interstellar travel in general. A short but excellent read. Note he is talking about just getting to the alpha centauri system for christ sake. Also note that he seems to be denying the validity of Freeman Dysan's baby Project Orion which, although originally intended for interplanetary travel, could be supersized for interstellar travel as well. Here's an excerpt for the lazy:
My $20 Chaintech AV-710 with its Via Envy 24 chipset sounds much better to my ears than the Creative Audigy that it recently replaced. I wasn't expecting there to be such a huge difference in sound quality. I found myself enjoying songs which I had long ago become bored with, because I could suddenly hear the music come to life with a detail, richness and sweetness that I had never noticed before. No doubt M-Audio has some better sounding solutions, but not at this price. Creative needs to get their act together and produce something with good sound quality. I mean, is there any feature of a sound card that is more important than that?
From a gaming perspective maybe true 3D positional audio like Aureal produced with their A3D Vortex chips in the late 90s before Creative sued them out of existence in a lawsuit involving...you guessed it, patent infringement. A lawsuit which Creative lost. Creative was not so interested at the time in using positional 3D cues. They were highly successful however if their goal was to prevent anyone else from pursuing accurate positional 3D audio in computer games. Have they finally caught up in terms of 3D audio to where Aureal was a decade ago? This is a particularly telling example of how useful patents can be at keeping smaller, more innovative companies to a minimum. They don't even need to win the lawsuit, just outspend the smaller company in lawyer fees.
Ever hear of supply and demand? The scenario you are envisioning is highly improbable to put it mildly. First of all, American farms will not end without subsidies. Plenty of folks would prefer to buy locally grown produce, even at a higher price. Second, it is hard to envision any scenario that would affect all food (produce/grain) exporting countries at the same time. The fact is free markets have always done the best job of supplying humans with food. Subsidies are not necessary.
So a world without business subsidies is anarchy? Curious. I don't think that word means what you think it means. The whole system of competing interests fighting for the government trough is a cruel joke. Lobbying needs to be outlawed. More than any other one factor, it destroys any semblance of the democratic process. Actually, I thought bribery was illegal in this country. Corporations should not be allowed to contribute even $1 to campaign funds. And, no, not by joining together and hiding behind some kind of 'non-profit' alliance either.
No. I usually memorize verb conjugations without index cards. Nor am I counting the many words which are the same in both languages. At first I did actually write the same word on both sides of an index card, but this exercise quickly lost its appeal. 4000 words is nothing. The problem is most people who are really gifted with languages (IOW not me) never count. And in my experience, if asked, they will consistently underestimate their working vocabulary. A thousand words is enough to, say, rent a hotel room in Mexico, but nowhere near enough to have an actual, in-depth conversation. Considering how many words are actually in even the smallest dictionaries (typically at least 50,000), this should not be surprising to anyone.
Do you have any references to that research? I find that very difficult to believe. I have been studying Spanish for some years now and have a vocabulary of between 4000 and 5000 words (as shown by my stack of index cards), and I am nowhere even close to being fluent. I am estimating that I have at least twice as many words to go before I can have real conversations with people or read a newspaper. I have to assume English cannot be so different. I had heard that somewhere between 3000 and 5000 core words were necessary for day to day speech in most languages, but it certainly has not worked out that way for me.
I cannot understand how anyone could really not want to know. I cannot even imagine being like that. Intentionally living in ignorance. Including all of the consequences to other peoples lives. Spreading the pain and misery as a result.
My mother had a serious disease with a genetic component. As a child I was aware that I had something like a 7% chance of ending up with the disease. It is now statistically unlikely (but still possible) that I will develop it. I always told myself that if I saw the initial signs I would kill myself before the hell began, after which it might be too late to take such drastic action. As it turned out it hit my sister instead and she killed herself because of it. I wasn't aware of any pact she had with herself to do so, but she was aware of my own. She did not leave a note so it is impossible to know for sure what her reasons were.
I don't like children. But even if I did I would not allow myself to have one. Seems irresponsible, even immoral. That didn't stop my sister from having one though. I guess different people have different ideas of 'responsibility'.
The only reason I could think of not to get tested would be with respect to insurance companies. For that reason I don't think I would want to get tested in the US. I would go to Thailand or Argentina or someplace to get tested instead. Then at least I would have the choice of whether to inform the insurance company or not. If you required treatment the insurance company would find out about it eventually anyway, but you would at least be in the same position (wrt insurance) as those who chose to remain ignorant. I think it would still qualify as insurance fraud, but if done cautiously (perhaps even under an assumed name, and preferably in a country where few people speak English) at least you could probably get away with it. Or alternatively, could you not just make sure you are with a good insurance company (that you can remain with for life) for at least a year before getting tested? Even good companies can go out of business or be bought out however. So getting the test done abroad may still be preferable. Although, again, if you end up getting treated for the condition it won't matter either way.
Pebble Bed Fission Reactors are clearly the solution to the unseemly problem of Planet Overheating. Of course that is in addition to the act of making combustion punishable by death. Those found guilty of any form of burning will be summarily shot, electrocuted, hanged, or just buried alive with extreme prejudice by World Consortium Police. Burning at the stake will be forbidden except in the case of heretics such as members of the secret society: For a Warmer Planet. Resistance will be futile.