How did 25 MILLION people's records get recounted as 7 million families?
If they're rich families, two parents, 1.57 children. If they're poor families, one parent, 2.57 children. 25 million such families makes 25 million people. And if anything I'd say those families are too small; however, there's a large single population (like, say, me) that might drag down the average.
Incidentally, you have have detected a slight hint of British cynicism in my post, it is pretty common. When Obama got elected I was thinking, "Does this guy have a brother that can come and help us out?", then I found out he has a brother that has recently been charged with drug offenses in Kenya... but to be honest, I am still thinking... 'He'll do!'.
You like Obama, eh? He's young, he's cool, he's fantastically charismatic, he's a little left of centre but not intimidatingly so, he's selling a vision of hope and change, and capitalising on the recent downfall of the most unpopular government since the 1970s. People normally jaded and cynical about the entire political process seem to really and truly believe that this guy can deliver.
Sound familiar?
Did you by any chance believe in Tony Blair as well?
Maureen Rees was perhaps Britain's first reality TV celebrity, after being featured in a docusoap following learner drivers. She was comically dreadful and I'm glad she wasn't on the road anywhere near me.
But the scale of this woman's incompetence blows Maureen out of the water. How can someone fail that many times? How many years has she been at it, and how frequently does she retry it? Even if she's taking the test once a week, it's still well over a decade. Is this sheer pigheadedness, a deliberate world record attempt, or what?
Say you are a group of 2 or more vacationers traveling in an unfamiliar town, all doing your own thing.. and one of you calls the other(s) to meet up at some location that might be interesting.. with the gps locator it would be a little easier for the others to find them.
I was in Venice last spring with family, and we had just that problem. The place is a maze of twisty little passages, all different. I sent a text message 'I'm in a pub called The Devil's Forest, sort of straight on from the Rialto and a bit to the right'. It's hard to imagine a less useful set of directions. They found me, I still don't know how. GPS would have helped a whole lot in that place... although I suspect Venice would be a lot less fun with a map:-)
I'd actually quite like to be able to fire up Facebook mobile and see, for instance, which friends are in pubs nearby right now. I imagine most users have people on there that they haven't seen in years; being able to facilitate apparently coincidental meetups years later would greatly improve Facebook's utility as a social facilitator, and might well help reduce the shortage of births in highly developed societies. Of course the privacy implications are appalling, but this is a generation that will give away such information freely; welcome to the post-privacy world.
(in case you didn't know, the BBC and the Guardian are not pro-Israel news sources)
I'll give you the Grauniad, but the BBC? These are the people who, alone among major TV channels, refused to broadcast a national charity appeal on behalf of the civilian victims in Gaza, for fear of upsetting Israel? They're 'not pro-Israel'? Please.
So... wouldn't they be in favour of games featuring lots of guns? For hunting delicious animals, home defence, and keeping the King of England out of your face, of course.
My version doesn't have fundamentalism. I always choose monarchy.
Communism is better in the late game, when cities further away from your capital are well developed; corruption crushes their productivity under Monarchy, so the small flat-rate penalty under Communism works out better.
Then again, it's quite possible to wage aggressive war as a Democracy - you just need to have Women's Suffrage and a decent rate of luxuries to keep war protests under control. If you simply refuse to meet with enemy leaders, then the Senate can't force you to make peace.
I mean, if Slashdot had Karma coupons that we could all trade, we'd all be suckered in.
I hit the karma cap in, what, early 2001? Just about the same time as it changed to 'Excellent' to stop people obsessing over the karma cap, anyway. Since then I've made thousands of comments of which many hundreds hit +5. If they introduce a karma trading market, I'll insist upon being reimbursed for eight years' back karma.
Evolution, through nature's nasty tendency to wipe the slate clean, has to keep taking steps backwards. Dinosaurs lost their place on top of the heap after 100s of millions of years of dominance and 65 million years later we have intelligent life.
Actually, I reckon periodic meteor impacts are a benefit to a planet that wants to evolve a spacefaring civilisation. As long as they're not too frequent.
Let evolution run long enough and eventually every niche will be filled with a creature that is very good at making a living there. At this point, evolution stagnates. Everything is so well adapted that any small change to any creature will be detrimental. Maybe there's a wholesale redesign you could come up with that makes a big improvement to some creature, but evolution doesn't do that: it's cumulative small changes, every one of which has to be beneficial at the time. The dinosaurs did this repeatedly: they developed species that filled each niche, lasted millions of years in much the same form, then got knocked back. Then they developed a _different_ set of species to refill those niches. Allosaurus is wiped out by some disaster, before long T-Rex has replaced him. Stegosaurus is dead, long live Triceratops. That kind of thing.
So, you set life going. Give it long enough to reach that point of stagnation. Then throw a rock at it. This rock can be interpreted as a question from God: 'Have you evolved a spacefaring civilisation yet?' If the answer is no, the rock hits: mass extinction. Try again. If the answer is yes, the rock does not hit: spacefaring civilisation expands into the galaxy.
What is way more plausible is something involving a nanotech-based seed that can start up a virtual society that fits easily within a few kilograms of payload. That seems feasible today. That doesn't seem like something we could build today, but it involves no fundamental breakthroughs in physics. This would tear apart the entire target solar system and turn it into computronium.
Good plan. It's what I'd do. Most efficient way imaginable to convert mass into intelligence.
Of course it has the downside that if a planet in the target system already has life on it, you lose a valuable scientific resource. You lose the potential insights of alien minds very different from yours, that might have different perspectives, different ideas, even to artificial intelligences however vast that you have implicitly patterned after your own.
So what do you do? Of course: you scan the biosphere carefully and you run a simulation of that world's future. Given the capacity of the Matrioshka brain you build around its sun, this is a small task. You maintain that simulation in a hypothetical world in which no interstellar invader ever arrived, and you wait and see what evolves and what it does.
THAT solves the Fermi paradox. We don't observe aliens because they're already here, they ate the Earth millions of years ago to build a monster computer. On it they have been running a SimSolarSystem ever since, in which nothing from outside ever intruded.
Another thought: if any mind that evolves is interesting enough, by whatever criteria you happen to value, you might take a copy of it to run as part of your larger culture in the real universe. I think I might have just reinvented both God and heaven...
But then you run into the psychological problem that the grandchildren have only ever known the inside of a giant hollow cylinder, and if they are the kind of people/society that have survived in such an environment, then they are not the kind of people who are going to leave the inside of their limited, friendly cylinder to go down to a big, open, inhospitable planet.
That's a practical engineering problem, not a psychological problem. Having spent enormous resources to escape one gravity well, why would you want to go straight back down another one on arrival? You settle the dust cloud. Grab asteroids for metals, comets for organics and fusion fuel, restock on volatiles that might have been lost in transit, build a couple more generational starships to offload the surplus population (your own might be rather crowded by now through natural population growth) and then move on.
Planets are an evolutionary dead end. One big immobile target, and you only use the tiny fraction of it that's right on the very top. The Culture has it right: live on your ships. Much more efficient.
Just because you pull fiber to someone's home and claim it is capable of 1Gbps, it doesn't mean you will get a useful 1Gbps. At some point all those strands of fiber are going to meet in a Central Office. How much bandwidth will they have on the backbone?
Enough. Only one download has to come from the outside world; after that a swarm of incredibly high speed Korean peers distribute the torrent locally with enormous efficiency.
What, you thought people were going to use a gigabit connection for web browsing?
Why does a CPU emit heat when X instructions are made? Is there a reason, or perhaps a physical law that requires X quanta of heat per Information instruction?
A computation is a process in which we take a memory area that may be in any randomly-chosen state, and reconfigure it to be in one specific state, corresponding to the return value of our computation.
This is a local reduction in entropy - reconfiguring that memory area into a single state out of the many possible. That means work has to be done, and there has to be an increase in the entropy of the Universe at large that at least exceeds the decrease in entropy in the memory chip. And that means heat.
I haven't used Windows in a long time so I'm not sure if it's still true, but XP wasn't terrible (when free of malware)
So, that's... I'm not sure. What's the current half-life of an unpatched, out-of-the-box XP install before some worm or other gets in? Six minutes or something, wasn't it? It definitely got bad enough at one point that it simply wasn't possible to download and install the necessary updates in time to be safe.
Actually I'd love to see a comparison of supposed man made climate changing gasses verses natural.
Human activity typically puts out some 130 times more carbon dioxide than all the world's volcanoes combined. Neither come close to the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by rotting foliage in the autumn - but that is cancelled out by the carbon dioxide absorbed by growing foliage in the spring. That's why the concentration in the atmosphere oscillates up and down, but maintains a continuous upward trend.
You have to ask why a monarch who is such a great guy needs the law to protect him from insults anyway. If I want to call Queen Liz an old hag, I can. That's freedom. The Thai monarch can't take it like Liz can?
It doesn't appear to be the king's doing. The king of Thailand is enormously popular, and prosecutions under these laws are well supported by the public. I gather that the king usually pardons offenders, and seems to think the whole thing rather silly.
As for insulting Queen Elizabeth - she is also extremely popular, but not to the same extent. You'd still be safer insulting her children, whose private lives have become a national joke over the last couple of decades. And when you do so, be careful around the UK's notoriously plaintiff-friendly libel laws.
The Superconducting Super-Collider to be built in Texas fifteen years ago used magnetic monopoles in its design. In my physics class in 1991 we received a lecture visit from an SSC representative who casually hand-waved the matter of inventing such a thing.
Er, wow. Citation? The SSC was pushing the boundaries all right - the clue's in the name, superconducting, and that's difficult to do even now as witness the LHC explosion - but I hadn't heard that it would have used magnetic monopoles. Possibly it might have hoped to create magnetic monopoles in some exotic collision, but not to have them as part of its structure.
What I don't understand about all the end-game whining is that the first 2 Fallout games had an ending, too. It should come as no surprise this one ends.
IIRC, it was possible to continue after the end of Fallout 2.
Although, I don't agree with you that's it's a well composed ending.
'So, whoever goes in there gets a lethal dose of radiation, eh? Hey, Fawkes, job for you... what do you mean no, you were happy enough to get the GECK out for me... My fucking destiny? RAGE...'
Next play through, I swear, I switch on the incinerators in Fawkes' cell.
In saying that I'd be all for a Ringworld movie or series too - so long as it was left in the hands of someone other than the usual gibbering idiots that get SF movies these days. As you say, the two sequels would be equally suitable for use as followup material.
Three sequels. Unfortunately.
You've really got three big problems with a Ringworld adaptation. First off, you need to make a convincing kzin. You don't want Speaker-to-Animals to look like he's about to announce how grrrrrrrrreat a breakfast cereal is. That's going to be difficult. Second, you need to make a convincing puppeteer. If you thought a kzin was going to be difficult, now you're really up against it. Third, if you're going to go on to the sequels, you need to get the audience to accept that all hominidae are descended from space monsters even though the other mammals apparently aren't - and you've got to explain all about the Pak lifecycle and tree-of-life and how they're so psychotically devoted to their descendants, all without the audience getting bored.
Oh, and another problem with the sequels: good luck filming a rishathra scene without everyone either laughing or threatening to firebomb the film studios.
I'd suspect that a study of the guys who slam their heads against a leather sphere probably suffer from similar results...
It was known back in the day. When the ball was actually made of leather, with laces, on a rainy day on a muddy pitch it would be heavy. Footballers who frequently headed the ball would sometimes come down with cumulative brain damage similar to that suffered by boxers. There's a reason 'heid-the-baw' is a Scots term for 'lunatic' to this day.
Nowadays the ball is much lighter, so heading it is a far smaller impact and not likely to be a health risk - at least compared to the far greater hazards associated with giving a man in his teens or early twenties tens of thousands of pounds every week. The human wreckage going by the name of Paul Gascoigne or Diego Maradona has nothing to do with blows to the head.
Slashdot Mirror
If they're rich families, two parents, 1.57 children. If they're poor families, one parent, 2.57 children. 25 million such families makes 25 million people. And if anything I'd say those families are too small; however, there's a large single population (like, say, me) that might drag down the average.
You like Obama, eh? He's young, he's cool, he's fantastically charismatic, he's a little left of centre but not intimidatingly so, he's selling a vision of hope and change, and capitalising on the recent downfall of the most unpopular government since the 1970s. People normally jaded and cynical about the entire political process seem to really and truly believe that this guy can deliver.
Sound familiar?
Did you by any chance believe in Tony Blair as well?
I think the Democrats were traditionally the party of slavery. Hardly a platform of support for the workers.
But the scale of this woman's incompetence blows Maureen out of the water. How can someone fail that many times? How many years has she been at it, and how frequently does she retry it? Even if she's taking the test once a week, it's still well over a decade. Is this sheer pigheadedness, a deliberate world record attempt, or what?
I was in Venice last spring with family, and we had just that problem. The place is a maze of twisty little passages, all different. I sent a text message 'I'm in a pub called The Devil's Forest, sort of straight on from the Rialto and a bit to the right'. It's hard to imagine a less useful set of directions. They found me, I still don't know how. GPS would have helped a whole lot in that place... although I suspect Venice would be a lot less fun with a map :-)
I'd actually quite like to be able to fire up Facebook mobile and see, for instance, which friends are in pubs nearby right now. I imagine most users have people on there that they haven't seen in years; being able to facilitate apparently coincidental meetups years later would greatly improve Facebook's utility as a social facilitator, and might well help reduce the shortage of births in highly developed societies. Of course the privacy implications are appalling, but this is a generation that will give away such information freely; welcome to the post-privacy world.
You might want to have a word with the Sultan of Kinakuta about that idea.
I'll give you the Grauniad, but the BBC? These are the people who, alone among major TV channels, refused to broadcast a national charity appeal on behalf of the civilian victims in Gaza, for fear of upsetting Israel? They're 'not pro-Israel'? Please.
So... wouldn't they be in favour of games featuring lots of guns? For hunting delicious animals, home defence, and keeping the King of England out of your face, of course.
Not sure - wasn't he a friend of Eskimo Nell?
Communism is better in the late game, when cities further away from your capital are well developed; corruption crushes their productivity under Monarchy, so the small flat-rate penalty under Communism works out better.
Then again, it's quite possible to wage aggressive war as a Democracy - you just need to have Women's Suffrage and a decent rate of luxuries to keep war protests under control. If you simply refuse to meet with enemy leaders, then the Senate can't force you to make peace.
I hit the karma cap in, what, early 2001? Just about the same time as it changed to 'Excellent' to stop people obsessing over the karma cap, anyway. Since then I've made thousands of comments of which many hundreds hit +5. If they introduce a karma trading market, I'll insist upon being reimbursed for eight years' back karma.
Actually, I reckon periodic meteor impacts are a benefit to a planet that wants to evolve a spacefaring civilisation. As long as they're not too frequent.
Let evolution run long enough and eventually every niche will be filled with a creature that is very good at making a living there. At this point, evolution stagnates. Everything is so well adapted that any small change to any creature will be detrimental. Maybe there's a wholesale redesign you could come up with that makes a big improvement to some creature, but evolution doesn't do that: it's cumulative small changes, every one of which has to be beneficial at the time. The dinosaurs did this repeatedly: they developed species that filled each niche, lasted millions of years in much the same form, then got knocked back. Then they developed a _different_ set of species to refill those niches. Allosaurus is wiped out by some disaster, before long T-Rex has replaced him. Stegosaurus is dead, long live Triceratops. That kind of thing.
So, you set life going. Give it long enough to reach that point of stagnation. Then throw a rock at it. This rock can be interpreted as a question from God: 'Have you evolved a spacefaring civilisation yet?' If the answer is no, the rock hits: mass extinction. Try again. If the answer is yes, the rock does not hit: spacefaring civilisation expands into the galaxy.
Good plan. It's what I'd do. Most efficient way imaginable to convert mass into intelligence.
Of course it has the downside that if a planet in the target system already has life on it, you lose a valuable scientific resource. You lose the potential insights of alien minds very different from yours, that might have different perspectives, different ideas, even to artificial intelligences however vast that you have implicitly patterned after your own.
So what do you do? Of course: you scan the biosphere carefully and you run a simulation of that world's future. Given the capacity of the Matrioshka brain you build around its sun, this is a small task. You maintain that simulation in a hypothetical world in which no interstellar invader ever arrived, and you wait and see what evolves and what it does.
THAT solves the Fermi paradox. We don't observe aliens because they're already here, they ate the Earth millions of years ago to build a monster computer. On it they have been running a SimSolarSystem ever since, in which nothing from outside ever intruded.
Another thought: if any mind that evolves is interesting enough, by whatever criteria you happen to value, you might take a copy of it to run as part of your larger culture in the real universe. I think I might have just reinvented both God and heaven...
That's a practical engineering problem, not a psychological problem. Having spent enormous resources to escape one gravity well, why would you want to go straight back down another one on arrival? You settle the dust cloud. Grab asteroids for metals, comets for organics and fusion fuel, restock on volatiles that might have been lost in transit, build a couple more generational starships to offload the surplus population (your own might be rather crowded by now through natural population growth) and then move on.
Planets are an evolutionary dead end. One big immobile target, and you only use the tiny fraction of it that's right on the very top. The Culture has it right: live on your ships. Much more efficient.
Enough. Only one download has to come from the outside world; after that a swarm of incredibly high speed Korean peers distribute the torrent locally with enormous efficiency.
What, you thought people were going to use a gigabit connection for web browsing?
Fine by me. He can introduce me to Summer Glau.
A computation is a process in which we take a memory area that may be in any randomly-chosen state, and reconfigure it to be in one specific state, corresponding to the return value of our computation.
This is a local reduction in entropy - reconfiguring that memory area into a single state out of the many possible. That means work has to be done, and there has to be an increase in the entropy of the Universe at large that at least exceeds the decrease in entropy in the memory chip. And that means heat.
So, that's... I'm not sure. What's the current half-life of an unpatched, out-of-the-box XP install before some worm or other gets in? Six minutes or something, wasn't it? It definitely got bad enough at one point that it simply wasn't possible to download and install the necessary updates in time to be safe.
Human activity typically puts out some 130 times more carbon dioxide than all the world's volcanoes combined. Neither come close to the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by rotting foliage in the autumn - but that is cancelled out by the carbon dioxide absorbed by growing foliage in the spring. That's why the concentration in the atmosphere oscillates up and down, but maintains a continuous upward trend.
It doesn't appear to be the king's doing. The king of Thailand is enormously popular, and prosecutions under these laws are well supported by the public. I gather that the king usually pardons offenders, and seems to think the whole thing rather silly.
As for insulting Queen Elizabeth - she is also extremely popular, but not to the same extent. You'd still be safer insulting her children, whose private lives have become a national joke over the last couple of decades. And when you do so, be careful around the UK's notoriously plaintiff-friendly libel laws.
Er, wow. Citation? The SSC was pushing the boundaries all right - the clue's in the name, superconducting, and that's difficult to do even now as witness the LHC explosion - but I hadn't heard that it would have used magnetic monopoles. Possibly it might have hoped to create magnetic monopoles in some exotic collision, but not to have them as part of its structure.
IIRC, it was possible to continue after the end of Fallout 2.
Although, I don't agree with you that's it's a well composed ending.
'So, whoever goes in there gets a lethal dose of radiation, eh? Hey, Fawkes, job for you... what do you mean no, you were happy enough to get the GECK out for me... My fucking destiny? RAGE...'
Next play through, I swear, I switch on the incinerators in Fawkes' cell.
Three sequels. Unfortunately.
You've really got three big problems with a Ringworld adaptation. First off, you need to make a convincing kzin. You don't want Speaker-to-Animals to look like he's about to announce how grrrrrrrrreat a breakfast cereal is. That's going to be difficult. Second, you need to make a convincing puppeteer. If you thought a kzin was going to be difficult, now you're really up against it. Third, if you're going to go on to the sequels, you need to get the audience to accept that all hominidae are descended from space monsters even though the other mammals apparently aren't - and you've got to explain all about the Pak lifecycle and tree-of-life and how they're so psychotically devoted to their descendants, all without the audience getting bored.
Oh, and another problem with the sequels: good luck filming a rishathra scene without everyone either laughing or threatening to firebomb the film studios.
Personally I have been busy lately with a project to archive a large collection of lewd folk songs about hedgehogs. No other format would do.
It was known back in the day. When the ball was actually made of leather, with laces, on a rainy day on a muddy pitch it would be heavy. Footballers who frequently headed the ball would sometimes come down with cumulative brain damage similar to that suffered by boxers. There's a reason 'heid-the-baw' is a Scots term for 'lunatic' to this day.
Nowadays the ball is much lighter, so heading it is a far smaller impact and not likely to be a health risk - at least compared to the far greater hazards associated with giving a man in his teens or early twenties tens of thousands of pounds every week. The human wreckage going by the name of Paul Gascoigne or Diego Maradona has nothing to do with blows to the head.