That's because the VAST majority of business software applications available today are primarily ported to Windows. Though Windows8 is going to break a whole bunch of software and suddenly for the first time, folks are asking if having a linux version of their products might not be a good idea. As for enterprise server applications, Microsoft is about to show its thanks to it bread and butter IT customers by committing financial rape, to make up for the lost revenue for the failed release of Windows8. M$ is lost and they need to get a clue quick if they don't want to end up doing the Nokia Boogie.
Actually I'm guessing someone on the M$ board called up someone on the Dell board and informed them they're now going to now assume the position or pay the price, and keep paying. Dell blinked and now to paraphrase Lewis Black, they had to put on a dress, lipstick, a little eye shadow, some glitter and now they're giving sailors blow jobs. And that... is the future of Dell.
Dell walks into a cheese shop, looks around poking and sniffing and suddenly a clerk (who looks vaguely like John Cleese) pops up from behind the counter!
Clerk: May I help you, Sir?
Dell: Why yes, I'd like some cheese!
Clerk: We have a lovely Apple Brie here, smooth, creamy, the customers can't seem to get enough?...
Dell: Arrghhh, No, Thank you.
Clerk: Perhaps a nice sharp Android Cheddar? Its full bodied, not as smooth as the Brie, but technically fuller?...
Dell: No, I don't want any lousy Android.
Clerk: Well then Sir, what did you have in mind?...
Dell: I'd like a great big fat slab of the Microsoft Limburger!!!
Clerk: Sir, I haven't sold any Microsoft in a fortnight, are you sure you wouldn't want something a wee bit fresher?
Dell: No, My minds made up, I want the Microsoft, and bowl of raw garlic cloves and I'll eat it here!
Clerk: Are you daft! You're going to die of indigestion and your head'll explode! Then I'll have to call a hazardous waste team to have you remains removed from the premises!
Dell: What could go wrong? As long as I finish off with a Wafer Thin Mint, I'll be fine, by the way, have you ever sold parrots?
I just read an article about a young woman whose only crime was that she gave her boy-friend's Mother a ride to a house. The older woman went in unbeknownst to the girl for crack cocaine and was busted inside the house by an undercover officer. The girl received a mandatory 12 year prison sentence without the possibility of parole. She had no criminal record, was in the top 2% of her High School Class, volunteered public service regularly and had multiple scholarships for college. Even the Judge who presided over the case called it a grotesque miscarriage of justice and that these "hard on crime laws" with mandatory sentences that don't provide judicial discretion are stuffing the prisons with innocent people.
There are still people in Texas doing a life sentence for a gram of hash. Read this article to find out about some of the most ludicrous prosecutions that portray a gross disregard for people that has become commonplace in certain regions of the United States. There are many people in prison whose only crime is possession. The prosecution of poorer Americans (which means disproportionately people of color), has become a conveyor belt that is prison bound. The war on crime has created a legal assembly line with millions now serve (3 in 4 people in prison today are there as a result of the war on crime.) The police sandbag those they arrest to assure a prison sentence. Heaping felonies on a defendant, the defendant is then forced to choose a plea bargain for 10 years while facing 110 years worth of charges. Public defense is barely better than no defense at all. So innocent and guilty alike are shoveled into prison like human refuse. The war on drug has imploded the criminal justice system, and turned it into a revolving door that feeds people indiscriminately in, and to abate prison overcrowding lets others out, then again you have those states that have now turned their privatized prisons into labor camps, and the vary companies that provide prisons have lobbied for longer and harsher sentences because its good for their bottom line.
There is abundant information talking about the disproportionate prosecution of people of color for drug related crimes. You could read this article or this scholarly article. Before you comment on this, please bother to get at least basically informed on the subject. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark... er America.
Finally, the fact that you don't know about the corporate connections to Marijuana becoming illegal in the first place and remaining so currently just emphasizes that you haven't done your homework. You can go here to read this article to find out how an over ambitious Federal Agent and William Randolph Hearst worked together to demonize hemp in the first place. Today Big Pharma spends millions to keep Pot illegal because they don't want competition for their prescription analgesics, synthetic opiates, anti-nauseals, appetite enhancers, mood elevators and anti-carcinogenic drugs, and there's no money on a natural substance you can't patent. If it sucks today and involves more than 3 people, I can follow the money back to a lawyer, a politician and a corporation or a religious fanatic. That is the sad state of American in the twenty first century. Wake Up
I have Dupytren Contacture. It foreshortens the tendon on my ring fingers of both hands. The result is that when I typing fast I make common repeatable mistakes in typing as well as common typographical errors due to muscle memory. The use of certain vocabulary fixes who you are to those who may be watching, illuminating social exposure, education or intelligence. There are simply so many ways to measure the content a person generates. In a world that growing abhors common anonymity, but reserves that right only for those with the wealth and power to build high walls, we need to ask whether or not we are willing to limit our self expression to remain quietly safe.
I for one would rather be known as a trouble maker, than not known at all for what it is that I feel moved to say.
Give me liberty or give me death is still the moral high ground.
I'm a RACIST? Dude, your asleep at the wheel. I bet you believe the Republicans are there to cut taxes too, don't you. There have always been people of color who are successful and buck the stigma of racial prejudice. Doctors, lawyers, teachers and scientist, in fact considering the stigma these often amazing people faced, gawd only knows how far they might have gone without the race strike against them. The success of a few, doesn't alter the fact that the greater community has suffered stigma, unfair application of law and criminal justice and still deals with rampant poverty.
I never said your neighborhood was racist and it thrills me that your personal experience is so different than that of so many. Just because nobody in your neighborhood died from Malaria doesn't mean that Malaria isn't one of the biggest killers on the planet or qualify as a near pandemic in undeveloped nations. How is that you have so many friends of color, without having the slightest idea that the plight of people of color in this country is almost every bit as bad today as it was in the 70s. Have you simply said "Its not my problem, and if I don't see it first hand, I don't have to think about it?"
I'm just reporting the facts bucko, you know, like water's wet and rocks are hard. If you have a problem with physical reality, you may want to whack yourself with a clue stick. Do me a favor. Google "The impact of the war on drug on minority populations." Read any one of the ten or fifteen hundred articles, blogs, scholarly theses, social tirades or public works by respected organizations promoting human rights and social equality. You my friend are willfully ignorant and I assert you're living in a fool's paradise. Wake up. We're all being screwed by those in power, and those at the bottom of the heap are getting screwed worst (and always have been.) The small islands of sanity (like the place you grew up) are the exceptions that have proved the rule. The simple facts don't lie... they can't, they're simple facts. We are a long way from social equality and peoples of color have dealt with and continue to deal with tremendous inequity. Oh, and the current trend for cutting loose the social safety net, is almost certainly going to hurt tens of millions (mostly children), when you consider more people are on food stamps than ever before in history, and that one of the largest percentage of poor and hungry are single mothers and their children (there are no statistics for poor single fathers because for all intents and purposes the value is smaller than statistical noise.)
To be so unaware of what's happening in the real world is an indication that your world view is if not just inaccurate, but in all likelihood is delusional. Sadly its a delusion shared by so many, and its supported by disinformation begin fed to us be government and corporate owned media. Maybe you would be better served listening to PBS News and not Rush Limbaugh.
Plus collection fees. If they don't pay within 3 more months, find out if you can put a lien on U.S. properties. After your final notice for payment, inform them that you have no alternative but fall back on legal remedies to collect your debt. Include the cost of legal representation required to collect on the debt. This may seem like small potatoes to the multinational, but I'm sure you can jack up the potato count substantially. More important you want to get in and out fast, these are flakes.
Not every beach is in California or Florida. There are plenty of beach homes in more northern states with somewhat more reasonable property prices. A half million dollar home on a quiet stretch of Oregon or Washington beach in a number of places is a lovely place. I know scientists who use pot to shift their thinking, and actually find themselves more creative on pot. Some mix low levels of pot with nootropics to get the advantage of the enhances concentration and logic while taking the nervous or jittery edge off the nootropic. These people are ambitious and cranking out work like busy ninjas, so clearly you have no idea what you're talking about regarding "The Kind of People who use Pot".
Oh, and by the way, I'm not a pot user myself. At least not in about 20 years. I did however make sure my partner of 35 years had all the pot she needed as she fought through advanced ovarian cancer. Anyone who thinks pot isn't a critical drug for patients on chemotherapy needs to spend a month in a large hospitals cancer ward. I wouldn't wish this experience on anybody, but pot should be legalized without a question, control it like alcohol, tax it so you can pay for educating children, and gawd forbid, make it free to the sick and dying. People are dying left and right from prescription drug OD, One of my close friends just buried her 21 year old. Nobody dies from pot. You tell me which is the bigger threat to society, Xanax, Valium or Pot.
Strangely enough the states that are "hardest on crime" are the hard core Christian/Republican states. The results of the war on crime have been devastating to people of color. Of the quarter million people in state prisons for nonviolent drug related crime, a full 70% are Black or Latino. Worse, once you've been charged with a felony, you loose your right to serve on a jury, your right to vote, to receive welfare, in most cases stay in homeless shelters, receive food stamps, and in a number of states if a felon is lucky enough to find work, the State can and does garnish up to 100% of their wage to make them pay for the cost of their incarceration. In short, these people are marginalized to the point that the only options they have left are crime and return to prison. Moreover, because these people are not included in statistics on poverty, the truth on a number of states grossly under-reports poverty among minorities.
There was a huge backlash against the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s and in the 70s, the Republicans wooed the Democratic South to the Republican party by creating a means to use the "War on Drugs" as a means to impose massive class control on poorer people of color in the south. One example is that in the 80s the sentences for crack cocaine (a popular drug in poor communities) was differentially prosecuted. Five grams of crack cocaine garnered the same sentence as half a kilogram of powder cocaine and put hundreds of thousands of people of color in prisons over the last 30 years. The process of using the "War on Drugs" as a social tools is well understood and has been the source of tremendous protest and criticism by numerous groups for social justice. The sad fact is that on many fronts, Americans of color are no better off than they were when Martin Luther King struggled for equality, all that's happened is that we've gotten better at burying the bodies and hiding the facts. By the way, this is equally a problem with both parties, Clinton trying to woo the South back from the Republicans did just as much damage, perhaps more, than Reagan did 10 years earlier, and even President Obama have been surprisingly lack luster in his actions to fix the many problems.
The criminalization of marijuana has always been ludicrous, and based more on the interests of corporations than any value to society. These plants (sativa and indicus) have rich histories as medicinal plants with tremendous capacities to help and heal human suffering, as well as provide recreational pleasure. If we learned nothing from the Great Prohibition, it is that prohibitions profit criminal enterprises and create gross disregard for the law. It is past time to declare the "War on Drugs" a grotesque failure. It is long past time to push back the social injustices associated with this war and the real victims who have been left destitute.
Strangely enough, we can at least hypothesize approaching a singularity (as we've already begun to do using complex mathematical models on computers simulating flight into a super-massive black-holes... remember the difference between passing the event horizon and falling down the singularity) Instead of gravity, what we face here is information, or more precisely knowledge. As the accelerating technology surrounding processing power concentrates the ability to observe, appraise and analyze information new knowledge precipitates at an ever increasing rate, causing ever greater acceleration.
We are working so hard to precipitate artificial sentience, when its almost certain that at some point, once our networks and their logical nodes reach a certain complexity that sentience in all likelihood being an emergent property will simply appear. In fact, long before true artificial consciousness, we'll have created clever simulacrum, capable of fooling us into interacting with machines as though they could care. Machine with true intelligence, will pose a real puzzle. As a species we've are piss poor at dealing with genuine threats if they lack urgency. So the profit motive in all its forms will move us to create machines better suited to serving us, until the transcend us. Then we will need to either deal with the fact that these machine have learned to be self serving Machiavellian bastards like their primate creators, or perhaps we'll have done a good job of making them morally superior to us. Which then puts them in the unenviable position of trying to figure out what to do with us unruly, unmanageable monkeys.
All of this complicated by the fact that human beings will augment themselves with their own technology, and the lines between augmented human and AI will grow very thin. Additionally we'll have access to unprecedented new technologies swarm intelligence, genetic manipulation, nanotechnologies. A century from today, homo sapiens may be extinct, but our consciousness may very still be alive and well.
The actual singularity is the part that's unpredictable, party because dividing by zero produces results that can't make sense, we are poorly constructed to deal with infinities. As we accelerate past femptotechnology, do well vanish into a information black-hole when the information density exceeds the capacity of space time? Small variations of trajectory are the difference between being pulled down the rabbit hole and being thrown off to gawd knows where. The Luddites (if they are consumed for teir carbon) will know when the singularity arrives and technologies screaming pace reaches its howling nadir. Suddenly one morning the sky will be filled with technological artifacts and the next day everything and 98% of humanity will be gone.
If the world were fair, "Les Miserable" would be a comedy. As long as there are people who think the response to being barred from your pocket is nuclear war, you can't be surprised to see their paid minions (mostly legal or political) serving up humanity like chalupas from Taco Bell.
Only for a little while, then smart machines will take that job too. Face it, human being are slow, evolve over millennia and are physically limited. Robots and AIs will overtake us on every conceivable playing field and that ultimately means they will push us out of every labor market. We better come up with a really good way to use people's time, and make sure they are being taken care of, because work as in employment is going to vanish from human experience and be best come up with a meaningful and productive alternative.
Which is precisely why someone needs to write an AI engine like IBMs Watson, (hell make it a KickStarter Project) to make the value judgements fairly and quickly and take the process out of human hands altogether. That, and they can turn around and sell the application to Texas to handle that back log of capital cases heading to the Green Mile.
One problem is that the forest is being ravaged by a few rich nations (usually not even to the advantage of the nation being ravaged) for instance Japan is one of the major causes of tropical deforestation on the planet. The next is that greedy industrialists rape the forest for mineral wealth, often murdering indigenous populations and leaving environmental devastation. Much of this is the work of multinational criminals for purely profit based motives. Sometimes the only nationals that get any value from these transactions are bribed government officials.
Another critical problem is that these forests represent critical biodiversity, environmental wealth for the entire planet (they don't call the rain forests the lungs of the planet for nothing.) Letting any one group of people destroy a global resource of such critical importance is more than unconscionable. Its tantamount to an act of war. Consider this hypothetical. There are two countries and a critical river ones first through one then the other. The upstream nation decides to dam the river and use it fully for energy, agriculture, and to water its people in the desert to the exclusion of those downstream. Those down stream begin to suffer, horribly. Are the folks downstream justified in declaring war on those upstream? Consider now that the remaining global rain forest is vital for processing carbon and generating oxygen in our atmosphere, and the death of the forest assures serious global impact and a degraded global environment. Do global police organization have justification to say to that nation cease and desist, you threaten the welfare of millions outside you borders. Now,what about multinational corporations? Playing duck and weave to avoid regulation and environmental accountability.
This is a complex problem and it will certainly impact all of us... in fact, it already has.
Actually knowing could be very useful, depending on the size of the object and the impact site. You might be able to get to high ground to avoid a tsunami. You might be able to hang out in a cavern to avoid debris fall. You could even renting a plane or catching a quick flight if any were still available. This all presumes an impact significantly smaller than an ELE.
We'd be better off setting up a train of a couple dozen colonized asteroids shifting between Earth and Mars orbits using them and a continuous conveyor belt for people, materials and critical resources to and from a Mars Colony. Terraforming Mars then building colonies on icy moons with liquid oceans would scatter us around sufficiently that only a really nasty event might threaten us.
Amazonian soils are poor. The wealth is in the trees and the plants and animals that live there. Slash and burn and the soil is depleted in just a few years, and there is nothing left for trees to come back to. Add wildfires, erosion, desertification, and accelerating habitat loss and without a concerted effort BY PEOPLE to put things back complete with planting saplings and fertilizing, there isn't much hope for reforestation. The good news is that there are a growing number of displaced aboriginal peoples who would be only too happy to nurture the regrowth of the forest, they would simply need education and resources to do the reforestation.
There are going to be powerful influences impacting human population over the next 20 years, including growing resources for education, contraception, health resources and changing levels of autonomy for women. Add to this interesting problems in the first world involving fertility and questions about crowding causing a rise in homosexuality (there is significant evidence suggesting that mammals in crowded environments experiece increases in the percentage of homosexual offspring.)
Direct neural links will demand a comprehensive synthetic immune system because of the danger of wetware attacks and brain hacking. In theory a wetware virus could kill millions. Of course its possible that the neural link would be fire-walled in such a way that a hack neural link would automagically die. As technology expands and proliferates, the stress on Chinese culture and government will grow exponentially. It is not designed to endure the kinds of pressures that exploding technology will impose on it. I expect that nations in many case will begin tearing apart into smaller regional republics with diverse cultures and ethnicities.
Over the next decade as American government continues to run headlong into its failure to deal with our economic and social issues responsibly, Americans will be forced to address the breakdown in leadership by resolving cultural and economic issues on a local/regional basis. If the American people overcome our own problems, circumventing the failure of central government, we can expect interesting legislation to separate state and both corporation and church. If we a really lucky, we will return to our Constitution and reinstate checks and balances while pruning the Executive branch right back to the President's eyebrows.
We need to consider a new kind of currency and we need to eliminate banking institutions. Perhaps some form of meritocracy? Or maybe a society based on communities, aggregate wealth and financial power, making granular communities fit to compete effectively against corporation whose personhood must be repealed.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because the VAST majority of business software applications available today are primarily ported to Windows. Though Windows8 is going to break a whole bunch of software and suddenly for the first time, folks are asking if having a linux version of their products might not be a good idea. As for enterprise server applications, Microsoft is about to show its thanks to it bread and butter IT customers by committing financial rape, to make up for the lost revenue for the failed release of Windows8. M$ is lost and they need to get a clue quick if they don't want to end up doing the Nokia Boogie.
Actually I'm guessing someone on the M$ board called up someone on the Dell board and informed them they're now going to now assume the position or pay the price, and keep paying. Dell blinked and now to paraphrase Lewis Black, they had to put on a dress, lipstick, a little eye shadow, some glitter and now they're giving sailors blow jobs. And that... is the future of Dell.
Dell walks into a cheese shop, looks around poking and sniffing and suddenly a clerk (who looks vaguely like John Cleese) pops up from behind the counter!
Clerk: May I help you, Sir?
Dell: Why yes, I'd like some cheese!
Clerk: We have a lovely Apple Brie here, smooth, creamy, the customers can't seem to get enough?...
Dell: Arrghhh, No, Thank you.
Clerk: Perhaps a nice sharp Android Cheddar? Its full bodied, not as smooth as the Brie, but technically fuller?...
Dell: No, I don't want any lousy Android.
Clerk: Well then Sir, what did you have in mind?...
Dell: I'd like a great big fat slab of the Microsoft Limburger!!!
Clerk: Sir, I haven't sold any Microsoft in a fortnight, are you sure you wouldn't want something a wee bit fresher?
Dell: No, My minds made up, I want the Microsoft, and bowl of raw garlic cloves and I'll eat it here!
Clerk: Are you daft! You're going to die of indigestion and your head'll explode! Then I'll have to call a hazardous waste team to have you remains removed from the premises!
Dell: What could go wrong? As long as I finish off with a Wafer Thin Mint, I'll be fine, by the way, have you ever sold parrots?
I just read an article about a young woman whose only crime was that she gave her boy-friend's Mother a ride to a house. The older woman went in unbeknownst to the girl for crack cocaine and was busted inside the house by an undercover officer. The girl received a mandatory 12 year prison sentence without the possibility of parole. She had no criminal record, was in the top 2% of her High School Class, volunteered public service regularly and had multiple scholarships for college. Even the Judge who presided over the case called it a grotesque miscarriage of justice and that these "hard on crime laws" with mandatory sentences that don't provide judicial discretion are stuffing the prisons with innocent people.
There are still people in Texas doing a life sentence for a gram of hash. Read this article to find out about some of the most ludicrous prosecutions that portray a gross disregard for people that has become commonplace in certain regions of the United States. There are many people in prison whose only crime is possession. The prosecution of poorer Americans (which means disproportionately people of color), has become a conveyor belt that is prison bound. The war on crime has created a legal assembly line with millions now serve (3 in 4 people in prison today are there as a result of the war on crime.) The police sandbag those they arrest to assure a prison sentence. Heaping felonies on a defendant, the defendant is then forced to choose a plea bargain for 10 years while facing 110 years worth of charges. Public defense is barely better than no defense at all. So innocent and guilty alike are shoveled into prison like human refuse. The war on drug has imploded the criminal justice system, and turned it into a revolving door that feeds people indiscriminately in, and to abate prison overcrowding lets others out, then again you have those states that have now turned their privatized prisons into labor camps, and the vary companies that provide prisons have lobbied for longer and harsher sentences because its good for their bottom line.
There is abundant information talking about the disproportionate prosecution of people of color for drug related crimes. You could read this article or this scholarly article. Before you comment on this, please bother to get at least basically informed on the subject. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark... er America.
Finally, the fact that you don't know about the corporate connections to Marijuana becoming illegal in the first place and remaining so currently just emphasizes that you haven't done your homework. You can go here to read this article to find out how an over ambitious Federal Agent and William Randolph Hearst worked together to demonize hemp in the first place. Today Big Pharma spends millions to keep Pot illegal because they don't want competition for their prescription analgesics, synthetic opiates, anti-nauseals, appetite enhancers, mood elevators and anti-carcinogenic drugs, and there's no money on a natural substance you can't patent. If it sucks today and involves more than 3 people, I can follow the money back to a lawyer, a politician and a corporation or a religious fanatic. That is the sad state of American in the twenty first century. Wake Up
Are you suggesting this poor soul has a butt at both ends?
No its his third cousin "Inane".
I have Dupytren Contacture. It foreshortens the tendon on my ring fingers of both hands. The result is that when I typing fast I make common repeatable mistakes in typing as well as common typographical errors due to muscle memory. The use of certain vocabulary fixes who you are to those who may be watching, illuminating social exposure, education or intelligence. There are simply so many ways to measure the content a person generates. In a world that growing abhors common anonymity, but reserves that right only for those with the wealth and power to build high walls, we need to ask whether or not we are willing to limit our self expression to remain quietly safe.
I for one would rather be known as a trouble maker, than not known at all for what it is that I feel moved to say.
Give me liberty or give me death is still the moral high ground.
I'm a RACIST? Dude, your asleep at the wheel. I bet you believe the Republicans are there to cut taxes too, don't you. There have always been people of color who are successful and buck the stigma of racial prejudice. Doctors, lawyers, teachers and scientist, in fact considering the stigma these often amazing people faced, gawd only knows how far they might have gone without the race strike against them. The success of a few, doesn't alter the fact that the greater community has suffered stigma, unfair application of law and criminal justice and still deals with rampant poverty.
I never said your neighborhood was racist and it thrills me that your personal experience is so different than that of so many. Just because nobody in your neighborhood died from Malaria doesn't mean that Malaria isn't one of the biggest killers on the planet or qualify as a near pandemic in undeveloped nations. How is that you have so many friends of color, without having the slightest idea that the plight of people of color in this country is almost every bit as bad today as it was in the 70s. Have you simply said "Its not my problem, and if I don't see it first hand, I don't have to think about it?"
I'm just reporting the facts bucko, you know, like water's wet and rocks are hard. If you have a problem with physical reality, you may want to whack yourself with a clue stick. Do me a favor. Google "The impact of the war on drug on minority populations." Read any one of the ten or fifteen hundred articles, blogs, scholarly theses, social tirades or public works by respected organizations promoting human rights and social equality. You my friend are willfully ignorant and I assert you're living in a fool's paradise. Wake up. We're all being screwed by those in power, and those at the bottom of the heap are getting screwed worst (and always have been.) The small islands of sanity (like the place you grew up) are the exceptions that have proved the rule. The simple facts don't lie... they can't, they're simple facts. We are a long way from social equality and peoples of color have dealt with and continue to deal with tremendous inequity. Oh, and the current trend for cutting loose the social safety net, is almost certainly going to hurt tens of millions (mostly children), when you consider more people are on food stamps than ever before in history, and that one of the largest percentage of poor and hungry are single mothers and their children (there are no statistics for poor single fathers because for all intents and purposes the value is smaller than statistical noise.)
To be so unaware of what's happening in the real world is an indication that your world view is if not just inaccurate, but in all likelihood is delusional. Sadly its a delusion shared by so many, and its supported by disinformation begin fed to us be government and corporate owned media. Maybe you would be better served listening to PBS News and not Rush Limbaugh.
Plus collection fees. If they don't pay within 3 more months, find out if you can put a lien on U.S. properties. After your final notice for payment, inform them that you have no alternative but fall back on legal remedies to collect your debt. Include the cost of legal representation required to collect on the debt. This may seem like small potatoes to the multinational, but I'm sure you can jack up the potato count substantially. More important you want to get in and out fast, these are flakes.
Not every beach is in California or Florida. There are plenty of beach homes in more northern states with somewhat more reasonable property prices. A half million dollar home on a quiet stretch of Oregon or Washington beach in a number of places is a lovely place. I know scientists who use pot to shift their thinking, and actually find themselves more creative on pot. Some mix low levels of pot with nootropics to get the advantage of the enhances concentration and logic while taking the nervous or jittery edge off the nootropic. These people are ambitious and cranking out work like busy ninjas, so clearly you have no idea what you're talking about regarding "The Kind of People who use Pot".
Oh, and by the way, I'm not a pot user myself. At least not in about 20 years. I did however make sure my partner of 35 years had all the pot she needed as she fought through advanced ovarian cancer. Anyone who thinks pot isn't a critical drug for patients on chemotherapy needs to spend a month in a large hospitals cancer ward. I wouldn't wish this experience on anybody, but pot should be legalized without a question, control it like alcohol, tax it so you can pay for educating children, and gawd forbid, make it free to the sick and dying. People are dying left and right from prescription drug OD, One of my close friends just buried her 21 year old. Nobody dies from pot. You tell me which is the bigger threat to society, Xanax, Valium or Pot.
Strangely enough the states that are "hardest on crime" are the hard core Christian/Republican states. The results of the war on crime have been devastating to people of color. Of the quarter million people in state prisons for nonviolent drug related crime, a full 70% are Black or Latino. Worse, once you've been charged with a felony, you loose your right to serve on a jury, your right to vote, to receive welfare, in most cases stay in homeless shelters, receive food stamps, and in a number of states if a felon is lucky enough to find work, the State can and does garnish up to 100% of their wage to make them pay for the cost of their incarceration. In short, these people are marginalized to the point that the only options they have left are crime and return to prison. Moreover, because these people are not included in statistics on poverty, the truth on a number of states grossly under-reports poverty among minorities.
There was a huge backlash against the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s and in the 70s, the Republicans wooed the Democratic South to the Republican party by creating a means to use the "War on Drugs" as a means to impose massive class control on poorer people of color in the south. One example is that in the 80s the sentences for crack cocaine (a popular drug in poor communities) was differentially prosecuted. Five grams of crack cocaine garnered the same sentence as half a kilogram of powder cocaine and put hundreds of thousands of people of color in prisons over the last 30 years. The process of using the "War on Drugs" as a social tools is well understood and has been the source of tremendous protest and criticism by numerous groups for social justice. The sad fact is that on many fronts, Americans of color are no better off than they were when Martin Luther King struggled for equality, all that's happened is that we've gotten better at burying the bodies and hiding the facts. By the way, this is equally a problem with both parties, Clinton trying to woo the South back from the Republicans did just as much damage, perhaps more, than Reagan did 10 years earlier, and even President Obama have been surprisingly lack luster in his actions to fix the many problems.
The criminalization of marijuana has always been ludicrous, and based more on the interests of corporations than any value to society. These plants (sativa and indicus) have rich histories as medicinal plants with tremendous capacities to help and heal human suffering, as well as provide recreational pleasure. If we learned nothing from the Great Prohibition, it is that prohibitions profit criminal enterprises and create gross disregard for the law. It is past time to declare the "War on Drugs" a grotesque failure. It is long past time to push back the social injustices associated with this war and the real victims who have been left destitute.
Strangely enough, we can at least hypothesize approaching a singularity (as we've already begun to do using complex mathematical models on computers simulating flight into a super-massive black-holes... remember the difference between passing the event horizon and falling down the singularity) Instead of gravity, what we face here is information, or more precisely knowledge. As the accelerating technology surrounding processing power concentrates the ability to observe, appraise and analyze information new knowledge precipitates at an ever increasing rate, causing ever greater acceleration.
We are working so hard to precipitate artificial sentience, when its almost certain that at some point, once our networks and their logical nodes reach a certain complexity that sentience in all likelihood being an emergent property will simply appear. In fact, long before true artificial consciousness, we'll have created clever simulacrum, capable of fooling us into interacting with machines as though they could care. Machine with true intelligence, will pose a real puzzle. As a species we've are piss poor at dealing with genuine threats if they lack urgency. So the profit motive in all its forms will move us to create machines better suited to serving us, until the transcend us. Then we will need to either deal with the fact that these machine have learned to be self serving Machiavellian bastards like their primate creators, or perhaps we'll have done a good job of making them morally superior to us. Which then puts them in the unenviable position of trying to figure out what to do with us unruly, unmanageable monkeys.
All of this complicated by the fact that human beings will augment themselves with their own technology, and the lines between augmented human and AI will grow very thin. Additionally we'll have access to unprecedented new technologies swarm intelligence, genetic manipulation, nanotechnologies. A century from today, homo sapiens may be extinct, but our consciousness may very still be alive and well.
The actual singularity is the part that's unpredictable, party because dividing by zero produces results that can't make sense, we are poorly constructed to deal with infinities. As we accelerate past femptotechnology, do well vanish into a information black-hole when the information density exceeds the capacity of space time? Small variations of trajectory are the difference between being pulled down the rabbit hole and being thrown off to gawd knows where. The Luddites (if they are consumed for teir carbon) will know when the singularity arrives and technologies screaming pace reaches its howling nadir. Suddenly one morning the sky will be filled with technological artifacts and the next day everything and 98% of humanity will be gone.
If the world were fair, "Les Miserable" would be a comedy. As long as there are people who think the response to being barred from your pocket is nuclear war, you can't be surprised to see their paid minions (mostly legal or political) serving up humanity like chalupas from Taco Bell.
So are we saying that Japanese ritual suicide may in fact just be the result of a seasoning selection??? Hhhhmmmm, DEATH BY UMAMI!!!!
Only for a little while, then smart machines will take that job too. Face it, human being are slow, evolve over millennia and are physically limited. Robots and AIs will overtake us on every conceivable playing field and that ultimately means they will push us out of every labor market. We better come up with a really good way to use people's time, and make sure they are being taken care of, because work as in employment is going to vanish from human experience and be best come up with a meaningful and productive alternative.
Cursed are the cheese breakers!!!
Actually its a petroleum by-product closely related to vinyl.
So you're saying man's been eating cheese for 7,500 years and subsequently cutting it ever since.
Which is precisely why someone needs to write an AI engine like IBMs Watson, (hell make it a KickStarter Project) to make the value judgements fairly and quickly and take the process out of human hands altogether. That, and they can turn around and sell the application to Texas to handle that back log of capital cases heading to the Green Mile.
One problem is that the forest is being ravaged by a few rich nations (usually not even to the advantage of the nation being ravaged) for instance Japan is one of the major causes of tropical deforestation on the planet. The next is that greedy industrialists rape the forest for mineral wealth, often murdering indigenous populations and leaving environmental devastation. Much of this is the work of multinational criminals for purely profit based motives. Sometimes the only nationals that get any value from these transactions are bribed government officials.
Another critical problem is that these forests represent critical biodiversity, environmental wealth for the entire planet (they don't call the rain forests the lungs of the planet for nothing.) Letting any one group of people destroy a global resource of such critical importance is more than unconscionable. Its tantamount to an act of war. Consider this hypothetical. There are two countries and a critical river ones first through one then the other. The upstream nation decides to dam the river and use it fully for energy, agriculture, and to water its people in the desert to the exclusion of those downstream. Those down stream begin to suffer, horribly. Are the folks downstream justified in declaring war on those upstream? Consider now that the remaining global rain forest is vital for processing carbon and generating oxygen in our atmosphere, and the death of the forest assures serious global impact and a degraded global environment. Do global police organization have justification to say to that nation cease and desist, you threaten the welfare of millions outside you borders. Now,what about multinational corporations? Playing duck and weave to avoid regulation and environmental accountability.
This is a complex problem and it will certainly impact all of us... in fact, it already has.
Actually knowing could be very useful, depending on the size of the object and the impact site. You might be able to get to high ground to avoid a tsunami. You might be able to hang out in a cavern to avoid debris fall. You could even renting a plane or catching a quick flight if any were still available. This all presumes an impact significantly smaller than an ELE.
For the love of Pete! Where's your towel? You can't go anywhere without a bloody towel.
We'd be better off setting up a train of a couple dozen colonized asteroids shifting between Earth and Mars orbits using them and a continuous conveyor belt for people, materials and critical resources to and from a Mars Colony. Terraforming Mars then building colonies on icy moons with liquid oceans would scatter us around sufficiently that only a really nasty event might threaten us.
Amazonian soils are poor. The wealth is in the trees and the plants and animals that live there. Slash and burn and the soil is depleted in just a few years, and there is nothing left for trees to come back to. Add wildfires, erosion, desertification, and accelerating habitat loss and without a concerted effort BY PEOPLE to put things back complete with planting saplings and fertilizing, there isn't much hope for reforestation. The good news is that there are a growing number of displaced aboriginal peoples who would be only too happy to nurture the regrowth of the forest, they would simply need education and resources to do the reforestation.
There are going to be powerful influences impacting human population over the next 20 years, including growing resources for education, contraception, health resources and changing levels of autonomy for women. Add to this interesting problems in the first world involving fertility and questions about crowding causing a rise in homosexuality (there is significant evidence suggesting that mammals in crowded environments experiece increases in the percentage of homosexual offspring.)
Direct neural links will demand a comprehensive synthetic immune system because of the danger of wetware attacks and brain hacking. In theory a wetware virus could kill millions. Of course its possible that the neural link would be fire-walled in such a way that a hack neural link would automagically die. As technology expands and proliferates, the stress on Chinese culture and government will grow exponentially. It is not designed to endure the kinds of pressures that exploding technology will impose on it. I expect that nations in many case will begin tearing apart into smaller regional republics with diverse cultures and ethnicities.
Over the next decade as American government continues to run headlong into its failure to deal with our economic and social issues responsibly, Americans will be forced to address the breakdown in leadership by resolving cultural and economic issues on a local/regional basis. If the American people overcome our own problems, circumventing the failure of central government, we can expect interesting legislation to separate state and both corporation and church. If we a really lucky, we will return to our Constitution and reinstate checks and balances while pruning the Executive branch right back to the President's eyebrows.
We need to consider a new kind of currency and we need to eliminate banking institutions. Perhaps some form of meritocracy? Or maybe a society based on communities, aggregate wealth and financial power, making granular communities fit to compete effectively against corporation whose personhood must be repealed.