1) You don't avoid a global Peak Oil with direct consumption/demand-side efforts, you mitigate it's effects. Because oil will peak is a feature of oil production, the only way to actually avoid it would be to produce less, which would obviously not help the people who want to consume oil. This is not a value statement in the usual sense. Though usually "mitigate" is worse option than "avoid", in this case the opposite is true. In the long run we don't want continue burning oil at ever increasing rate, so ability to avoid Peak Oil is useless in the best case and harmful in the worst case.
2) The 70's Peak Oil was a local peak in the US. It's effects were mostly cancelled out by increased production elsewhere and globalization that brought those resources to the global market.
A lot of people are asking why a guy from Microsoft?
Basically, Nokia didn't hire a "Microsoft exec", but Stephen Elop of lately Microsoft, but previously of Juniper Networks, Adobe and Macromedia, a software guy with a reputation of excellent communication skills. That might be a very good move, Nokia can make mobile hardware as well as anyone, it's their software and services that have been the problem and not just lately, but at least since 2000.
One of article gives a good overview. http://www.itworld.com/business/120236/nokia-names-microsofts-elop-new-ceo
The Guardian has very nice article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/sep/10/nokia-stephen-elop-smartphone
Only thing I can think to add, that I read in Finnish media, was that Elop handled Microsoft's relations with Nokia and is relatively well known inside Nokia's boardroom already.
The question isn't whether this limits freedom of speech. The question is whether this is a proper limitation on freedom of speech.
Correct.
I going even answer it. Yes, this is proper limitation of freedom of speech. The church and pastor in question and people in American in general do not suffer from a lack of freedom, the church will get on the net again soon enough - as they should. Cutting them off this one time is a way to say to them and others, in an meaningful and clear way, that what they proposing to do is stupid and that we strongly disapprove them for it.
Freedom and stupid shit are at odds, no way around that. Categorical imperative won't cut it. We go with the freedom by default these days, and that's a good thing, but sometimes it's better idea to say no to some stupid shit that's about to get out of hand.
That's, btw, a bit different from "balancing rights", or at least from how would understand balancing rights. To me balancing rights is still an attempt to come up with an universal or categorical solution and, possibly unfortunately, is doomed to fail. I prefer contextual or pragmatic solutions. The difference being that you when you have to go against some profound principles, you don't try to come up with a rule that allows you to do that, but instead just consider that one situation in itself.
From the article (www.cube20.org): "Google does not release information on their computer systems, but it would take a good desktop PC (Intel Nehalem, four-core, 2.8GHz) 1.1 billion seconds, or about 35 CPU years, to perform this calculation."
Is it life? Yes. It's true that life is somewhat difficult to define, but bacteria lies well within any definition I've heard.
Did they make it? Well, that's a bit more complex.
Bacteria is basically a self-replicating machine that has software to encode it's own building instructions. Its software gets replaced, so it won't any more build copies of itself, but rather a different machine. That new machine is also a self-replicating machine, just a different one (down to protein level). Now both machines build new machines based on the same software. Add several generations and death of the earlies generation. (I think the change is gradual.) Result is a colony of self-replicating machines that are not like the original machine but are like each other. No trace of the original remains.
Also note that the exact type of the original bacteria isn't important. They used the ones they did because they are practical, but they could have used different ones and would have ended up with the same end result. Software/genome determines the composition of the end result.
Is that making? I think it is. An intentional act, using the original bacteria to bootstrap a process, that determines the end result and produces something that would not otherwise exist. One could, I guess, define making to exclude bootstrapping techniques, but I think there are several programmers of silicon-based computers that would disagree with that definition.
I read the complaint, replies and rest of the documents. Made me miss the first period of Montreal @ Philadelphia.
The lack of evidence is staggering and mind-boggling. Who knows what really has been going on, but what I do know that the investigators or the president don't know anything that would be warrant a two-year monitoring and counseling period.
University and other forms of tertiary education are no longer the repositories of the best knowledge humanity has. Or more precisely, not to the degree they used to be just a decade or two ago and definitely not the only repositories that matter. Well into latter parts of the previous century, let's say 80s, universities really were the only place to learn the coolest stuff. Now there's a lot of knowledge in companies, business networks and on the Internet.
There always has been a cost associated with going to a university. It costs money and you lose four or more years from your professional life. However, it used to be a good investment because an university education gave you a know-how advantage, the student life gave you a network of allies and, very importantly, a degree allowed you an access to additional opportunities. Today you can get most of those benefits from other places too.
So it's not that people spend too much time learning stuff, but that the university that has lost competitiveness, as a place of learning, and it doesn't any more make (as much) sense to spend four years there.
Even the bastion of university competitiveness, the degree, has taken a real beating. A bachelor is almost worthless. Entry-limited fields where you need to have a degree to be allowed to play, like medicine or law, have been losing weight in the economy. (Largely because new ones don't get born easily.)
Btw, I'm not predicting the death of universities, and not just because I work in one, but I will say that our grand-kids universities will have fairly little in common with the universities we want to.
I agree. Technical issues notwithstanding, the deal in itself seems reasonable. 90 days of heightened monopoly rights for the producers and significantly faster access at home to the newest content for those consumers that wish to opt-in - and you can opt-in per item.
I don't pretend to know what "broad coverage" means, but if MS wanted to fight Apple, doing via open source proxy would be an ideal way to do it. HTC does the fighting and MS provides the ammunition. All the risks are with HTC and MS is at least partly insulated from bad press it would get in a direct confrontation with Apple. And the situation could be very bad for Apple: they are going after an open source platform, with all the bad press that going to bring on them, but they are also going against one the most intimidating patent portfolios there is, and one of the few companies with a war chest to match theirs, and they would have a lot to lose, while MS doesn't.
Apple is telling developers that they aren't free to choose the tools they use. Specifically you can't use a tool that would allow you to write code once and run it on any platform. Who cares about Adobe, Apple is telling *you* to take it up the ass and like it.
And there are people in Slashdot that are ok with that?
Well... I'll give you that English-speakers are pretty good a coming up with new names and concepts. However, actual compound words are fairly rare in English, relative to many other languages. English-speakers are more likely to use a set phrase than a compound word. Not that it's a bad thing, or a good thing either, it's just the done thing.:)
Ad hominem, but correct. It doesn't happen often, so savour it, folks:)
Jaron Lanier is full of shit and it's not even new shit. He's been on about the evils of the hive mind for a years now, but hey, I guess it pays the bills.
You're wrong about the poor science part too, but I want to address the real issue.
There's no "let's wait and see" option. We committing those trillions of dollars right now to making things worse very fast. That's the reason for the urgency.
"I'm sorry but if the friggin tree ring data is not valid for assessing temperature after 1960, then it is not valid assessing temperature before 1960."
Tree ring data is always a proxy metric and thermometers are the gold standard. After 1960 we have good data about temperatures everywhere in the world. Before that (the satellite era) there are places where the only data available is tree ring data. When building models you use the best data you have. What's so difficult to understand about that?
looking at some trends, I think policy options like world fascist government, killing five billion people, and going backwards on tech are all in play. I figure the motivations do not have much to with whatever science you think you have. So you do not get to be left alone to decide what to do. Thinking you should be, as a serious position, is a little odd.
I too think that many weird and dangerous policy options are on the table. To make sure that those don't come implemented you have to be at the policy table. And to be on that table you have to accept a few basic tenets as foundation of communication and co-operation: Global Warming is happening and is deadly dangerous, it is largely man-made and, finally, it can and should be fixed.
Doing nothing is not an option. If you can't accept those tenets then you actually are much more dangerous and destructive than whatever fringe neo-facist, ludditie back-to-the-nature idiot you seem to be afraid of.
Huh? A few major "scientists", cited multiple times in the IPCC reports (which advises the UN bodies and policy makers worldwide), have been shown to be doing things that are dubious at best. This is so convincing.
I thought what the leaked emails showed actually was pretty convincing. Their opponents got access to their private correspondence and that was the worst of it? Cherry-picked to show the scientists in the worst possible light and they still come up out as given to normal human foibles at worst. And then the denialists start to drum up this "Climategate" on no basis at all and for very specific reason of trying to make the Copenhagen talks fail.
Yeah, that's yet another reason for start shutting up and get on with the work at hand.
"must stand up to rigorous scientific questioning" - true, indeed. The problem is that Global Warming has done so convincingly several times over and still some people refuse to bulge. Hence, denialists.
If this was an ordinary scientific issue it really wouldn't matter: graduate students tend to avoid bad scientists and so denialists die out. Unfortunately, this is not a ordinary scientific issue, but one that begets an extremely important current policy issue; one that may require all sorts of weird things, like actual global governance. I, personally, would very much prefer if the lunatics would shut up and let the rest of us get on to figure out what to do.
"the exact same picture being published by the news media year after year" meaning that MSNBC used the same photo that Guardian had used the year before. And even correctly attributed the image to the British Antarctic Survey. Oh, those devious bastards.
I was also amused to see that satellite images that shows the disintegration / re-growth of Wilkins Ice Shelf is an annual event also pretty clearly show that the annual maxima of disintegration is much greater now than it was previously.
Yup. Logged on to say the exactly same thing. They might well have done some interesting research and have nice data, but they aren't by no means disproving Anderson's conjecture, just because they redefined the issue.
Going forward, I don't think constant internet connectivity is an unreasonable expectation.
While the prices you quote are high, I'd expect them to represent a passing phase even in the US. I know my neck of the woods has progressed to the point that I can have constant connectivity unless I simultaneously lose main connectivity and misplace my phone. I could also purchase a pre-paid SIM (ca. 20â) to be an extra redundancy option, that would allow me to use an older phone as a final backup (probably to call someone to get wireless broadband:-)).
Of course, the backup connections are bound have fairly limited speeds (say 54-200 kbps), and applications like Steam should be build to handle that. Probably needless to say, but with truly critical application you will continue to plan for connectivity loss.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm all for efficiency, but two points:
1) You don't avoid a global Peak Oil with direct consumption/demand-side efforts, you mitigate it's effects. Because oil will peak is a feature of oil production, the only way to actually avoid it would be to produce less, which would obviously not help the people who want to consume oil. This is not a value statement in the usual sense. Though usually "mitigate" is worse option than "avoid", in this case the opposite is true. In the long run we don't want continue burning oil at ever increasing rate, so ability to avoid Peak Oil is useless in the best case and harmful in the worst case.
2) The 70's Peak Oil was a local peak in the US. It's effects were mostly cancelled out by increased production elsewhere and globalization that brought those resources to the global market.
A lot of people are asking why a guy from Microsoft?
Basically, Nokia didn't hire a "Microsoft exec", but Stephen Elop of lately Microsoft, but previously of Juniper Networks, Adobe and Macromedia, a software guy with a reputation of excellent communication skills. That might be a very good move, Nokia can make mobile hardware as well as anyone, it's their software and services that have been the problem and not just lately, but at least since 2000.
One of article gives a good overview.
http://www.itworld.com/business/120236/nokia-names-microsofts-elop-new-ceo
The Guardian has very nice article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/sep/10/nokia-stephen-elop-smartphone
Only thing I can think to add, that I read in Finnish media, was that Elop handled Microsoft's relations with Nokia and is relatively well known inside Nokia's boardroom already.
Correct.
I going even answer it. Yes, this is proper limitation of freedom of speech. The church and pastor in question and people in American in general do not suffer from a lack of freedom, the church will get on the net again soon enough - as they should. Cutting them off this one time is a way to say to them and others, in an meaningful and clear way, that what they proposing to do is stupid and that we strongly disapprove them for it.
Freedom and stupid shit are at odds, no way around that. Categorical imperative won't cut it. We go with the freedom by default these days, and that's a good thing, but sometimes it's better idea to say no to some stupid shit that's about to get out of hand.
That's, btw, a bit different from "balancing rights", or at least from how would understand balancing rights. To me balancing rights is still an attempt to come up with an universal or categorical solution and, possibly unfortunately, is doomed to fail. I prefer contextual or pragmatic solutions. The difference being that you when you have to go against some profound principles, you don't try to come up with a rule that allows you to do that, but instead just consider that one situation in itself.
From the article (www.cube20.org): "Google does not release information on their computer systems, but it would take a good desktop PC (Intel Nehalem, four-core, 2.8GHz) 1.1 billion seconds, or about 35 CPU years, to perform this calculation."
Maybe read the article next time.
Is it life? Yes. It's true that life is somewhat difficult to define, but bacteria lies well within any definition I've heard.
Did they make it? Well, that's a bit more complex.
Bacteria is basically a self-replicating machine that has software to encode it's own building instructions. Its software gets replaced, so it won't any more build copies of itself, but rather a different machine. That new machine is also a self-replicating machine, just a different one (down to protein level). Now both machines build new machines based on the same software. Add several generations and death of the earlies generation. (I think the change is gradual.) Result is a colony of self-replicating machines that are not like the original machine but are like each other. No trace of the original remains.
Also note that the exact type of the original bacteria isn't important. They used the ones they did because they are practical, but they could have used different ones and would have ended up with the same end result. Software/genome determines the composition of the end result.
Is that making? I think it is. An intentional act, using the original bacteria to bootstrap a process, that determines the end result and produces something that would not otherwise exist. One could, I guess, define making to exclude bootstrapping techniques, but I think there are several programmers of silicon-based computers that would disagree with that definition.
I read the complaint, replies and rest of the documents. Made me miss the first period of Montreal @ Philadelphia.
The lack of evidence is staggering and mind-boggling. Who knows what really has been going on, but what I do know that the investigators or the president don't know anything that would be warrant a two-year monitoring and counseling period.
Let me repeat: not guilty.
Ok, guys, let me explain:
University and other forms of tertiary education are no longer the repositories of the best knowledge humanity has. Or more precisely, not to the degree they used to be just a decade or two ago and definitely not the only repositories that matter. Well into latter parts of the previous century, let's say 80s, universities really were the only place to learn the coolest stuff. Now there's a lot of knowledge in companies, business networks and on the Internet.
There always has been a cost associated with going to a university. It costs money and you lose four or more years from your professional life. However, it used to be a good investment because an university education gave you a know-how advantage, the student life gave you a network of allies and, very importantly, a degree allowed you an access to additional opportunities. Today you can get most of those benefits from other places too.
So it's not that people spend too much time learning stuff, but that the university that has lost competitiveness, as a place of learning, and it doesn't any more make (as much) sense to spend four years there.
Even the bastion of university competitiveness, the degree, has taken a real beating. A bachelor is almost worthless. Entry-limited fields where you need to have a degree to be allowed to play, like medicine or law, have been losing weight in the economy. (Largely because new ones don't get born easily.)
Btw, I'm not predicting the death of universities, and not just because I work in one, but I will say that our grand-kids universities will have fairly little in common with the universities we want to.
How do you know which Farnsworth I'm thinking about? Are you reading my mind? Is that a technology North Korea developed too?
I agree. Technical issues notwithstanding, the deal in itself seems reasonable. 90 days of heightened monopoly rights for the producers and significantly faster access at home to the newest content for those consumers that wish to opt-in - and you can opt-in per item.
I don't pretend to know what "broad coverage" means, but if MS wanted to fight Apple, doing via open source proxy would be an ideal way to do it. HTC does the fighting and MS provides the ammunition. All the risks are with HTC and MS is at least partly insulated from bad press it would get in a direct confrontation with Apple. And the situation could be very bad for Apple: they are going after an open source platform, with all the bad press that going to bring on them, but they are also going against one the most intimidating patent portfolios there is, and one of the few companies with a war chest to match theirs, and they would have a lot to lose, while MS doesn't.
Come on, people!
Apple is telling developers that they aren't free to choose the tools they use. Specifically you can't use a tool that would allow you to write code once and run it on any platform. Who cares about Adobe, Apple is telling *you* to take it up the ass and like it.
And there are people in Slashdot that are ok with that?
GTFO.
Sure. And it works too. Tomorrow I'll fire my IT department.
Not really. I don't have an IT department.
But if I had, I'd fire them. For real.
And I'm seriously thinking about asking my boss to ask her boss to fire our IT department. Though not tomorrow.
The day after tomorrow. I actually think I'm bloody well going to do it. What a bother.
Whenever a capitalist talks about "adding value" or "creating wealth", they're really talking about creating scarcity.
I call bullshit.
Well ... I'll give you that English-speakers are pretty good a coming up with new names and concepts. However, actual compound words are fairly rare in English, relative to many other languages. English-speakers are more likely to use a set phrase than a compound word. Not that it's a bad thing, or a good thing either, it's just the done thing. :)
Gerlenter debated Ray Kurzweil on AI and I have to say I wasn't impressed with his arguments or style.
http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/422
Parents have a right to their children, their own flesh and blood; to pass on their traditions and beliefs as they see fit.
No, they really don't.
Ad hominem, but correct. It doesn't happen often, so savour it, folks :)
Jaron Lanier is full of shit and it's not even new shit. He's been on about the evils of the hive mind for a years now, but hey, I guess it pays the bills.
You're wrong about the poor science part too, but I want to address the real issue.
There's no "let's wait and see" option. We committing those trillions of dollars right now to making things worse very fast. That's the reason for the urgency.
"I'm sorry but if the friggin tree ring data is not valid for assessing temperature after 1960, then it is not valid assessing temperature before 1960."
Tree ring data is always a proxy metric and thermometers are the gold standard. After 1960 we have good data about temperatures everywhere in the world. Before that (the satellite era) there are places where the only data available is tree ring data. When building models you use the best data you have. What's so difficult to understand about that?
I personally like Leviathan.
looking at some trends, I think policy options like world fascist government, killing five billion people, and going backwards on tech are all in play. I figure the motivations do not have much to with whatever science you think you have. So you do not get to be left alone to decide what to do. Thinking you should be, as a serious position, is a little odd.
I too think that many weird and dangerous policy options are on the table. To make sure that those don't come implemented you have to be at the policy table. And to be on that table you have to accept a few basic tenets as foundation of communication and co-operation: Global Warming is happening and is deadly dangerous, it is largely man-made and, finally, it can and should be fixed.
Doing nothing is not an option. If you can't accept those tenets then you actually are much more dangerous and destructive than whatever fringe neo-facist, ludditie back-to-the-nature idiot you seem to be afraid of.
Huh? A few major "scientists", cited multiple times in the IPCC reports (which advises the UN bodies and policy makers worldwide), have been shown to be doing things that are dubious at best. This is so convincing.
I thought what the leaked emails showed actually was pretty convincing. Their opponents got access to their private correspondence and that was the worst of it? Cherry-picked to show the scientists in the worst possible light and they still come up out as given to normal human foibles at worst. And then the denialists start to drum up this "Climategate" on no basis at all and for very specific reason of trying to make the Copenhagen talks fail.
Yeah, that's yet another reason for start shutting up and get on with the work at hand.
"must stand up to rigorous scientific questioning" - true, indeed. The problem is that Global Warming has done so convincingly several times over and still some people refuse to bulge. Hence, denialists.
If this was an ordinary scientific issue it really wouldn't matter: graduate students tend to avoid bad scientists and so denialists die out. Unfortunately, this is not a ordinary scientific issue, but one that begets an extremely important current policy issue; one that may require all sorts of weird things, like actual global governance. I, personally, would very much prefer if the lunatics would shut up and let the rest of us get on to figure out what to do.
"the exact same picture being published by the news media year after year" meaning that MSNBC used the same photo that Guardian had used the year before. And even correctly attributed the image to the British Antarctic Survey. Oh, those devious bastards.
I was also amused to see that satellite images that shows the disintegration / re-growth of Wilkins Ice Shelf is an annual event also pretty clearly show that the annual maxima of disintegration is much greater now than it was previously.
Yup. Logged on to say the exactly same thing. They might well have done some interesting research and have nice data, but they aren't by no means disproving Anderson's conjecture, just because they redefined the issue.
Going forward, I don't think constant internet connectivity is an unreasonable expectation.
While the prices you quote are high, I'd expect them to represent a passing phase even in the US. I know my neck of the woods has progressed to the point that I can have constant connectivity unless I simultaneously lose main connectivity and misplace my phone. I could also purchase a pre-paid SIM (ca. 20â) to be an extra redundancy option, that would allow me to use an older phone as a final backup (probably to call someone to get wireless broadband :-)).
Of course, the backup connections are bound have fairly limited speeds (say 54-200 kbps), and applications like Steam should be build to handle that. Probably needless to say, but with truly critical application you will continue to plan for connectivity loss.