> one in three people aged 16 to 24 in the UK would not give up their mobile phone for a million pounds.
Okay, so I don't live in the UK and I'm over 24, but nonetheless... I'm pleased to say I don't have a cellular phone, and I don't think I'd be willing to start carrying one for a million pounds. Maybe if I only had to keep it for a very short time (a few weeks at most), but otherwise forget it.
It's bad enough I live in a house that has land-line phones in it.
If there's anything more annoying than a ringing phone, I'm sure I don't know what it is.
If they'll take a money order, the quick and easy fix is to go to the nearest post office and get a money order. This doesn't cost very much, and you don't have to involve a bank. Trusting the USPS (that issues the money order) is not substantially different from trusting the treasury (that issues the cash).
Yes, there *is* a small cost for the money order, but you have to weigh that against the cost of your time, calling up the housing department dude's superior, and his superior, and giving them one earful after another until they hate you, and so on and so forth -- all of which may get the problem resolved, or may not. Or the cost of a lawyer, which is even more.
BTW, the USPS is the most cost-effective place to get a money order. Everyplace else charges at least as much, often more.
Here's a free clue for you, Microsoft: I'm planning to phase out the last of the Windows 98 SE systems at work later this year. Hopefully. Then all the Windows workstations will be XP.
As far as Vista, there is at this point absolutely zero reason for us to want to deploy it, as far as I'm concerned. The reason I deploy any version of Windows is because people are already familiar with it. Otherwise there are other systems I would prefer to support, because they're easier to maintain -- but they are unfamiliar to people. I deploy Windows XP in many cases because it cuts down on user training and support, because people are already comfortable with it. If I were willing to give that up, I wouldn't be buying Microsoft. So Vista needs to be out for at _least_ two years, preferably three, before I want anything to do with deploying it.
Then there's the situation on the home front. My family is still using Windows 98 SE, and I have talked to them about upgrading, and they want no part of it. As far as my mom is concerned, anything that changes the computer's OS in any way is distilled evil. She was not, at the time, very happy with the move from DOS 6 to Windows 98 SE, even though she only ever learned three or four things to type at the command prompt (none of which she now remembers I'm sure). It has taken her years to learn how to use Windows 98. She doesn't like when dad changes the wallpaper, because she gets confused about where the icons are that haven't even moved. I'm afraid the OS on that computer is almost certainly going to stay the same until the computer physically gets replaced. (Which will probably not be very many more years, but we'll put it off as long as we reasonably can.)
The long and short of it is, we wouldn't upgrade to Vista right now even if Microsoft paid us $100 per computer to do so. Naturally, they'd prefer to charge us for the upgrade. They can go to Redmond. We don't want it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm looking forward to Vista. There are some significant improvements there, not least UAC. I'll be happy to replace XP with Vista, when it's practical to do so, i.e., when the users are as comfortable with Vista as they are with XP. But that's going to be a while, so chill out, Microsoft. Learn some patience. We've certainly been patient enough with you, listening to your Longhorn announcements for five years or so now, waiting for it to actually materialize. Time for you to return the favor.
> If these downloads manifested into regular Safari users,
Umm, yeah, because we all know that most of the people who download a new software release the first week it's available are regular users -- not, say, people who pay close attention to tech news because it's their job. No way could this be 10% of the world's web developers saying, "Oh, hey, I should grab that and test my stuff in it."
I'm not saying Safari *won't* end up being adopted by end users, but the first few days it's available? Come on, end users haven't even heard it's available yet. 90% of those downloads are from people who found out by scanning or even reading coverage of WWDC. Practically all of them keep multiple browsers around all the time. The first week's download numbers are an indication of interest in the tech community, but that's all.
You want to see if regular users are picking it up, wait until the developer rush dies off and *then* look at the download numbers. You want to see if people are starting to use it as their regular browser, you don't look at download numbers, but at access logs and so forth -- and you compare against the same week/month/quarter of the previous year, at the same sample of sites.
As someone who has done a lot of memorization (specifically, a national-level Bible quizzer -- we memorize whole books until we can quote chapter after chapter; as you can imagine, there is a substantial time investment involved), I could have told you that forgetting is an important part of remembering.
You can't permanently memorize something in one go. Well, maybe if you've got an extremely unusual photographic memory or savant syndrome you can, but most of us cannot. We have to take it in multiple passes.
First, you go over a short section until you know it to the point where you can repeat it back on the spot. This is very much short-term memory, and a few minutes later you won't be able to repeat it. Which is fine. You repeat this a couple of times, over the course of a day or so, and after about the third time (give or take, depending on the length of the passage and your ability level) you can retain it for a few minutes -- while going over another short section -- and still go back and repeat it. When you can do that, you are on your way to actually memorizing it.
The next step then is to start stretching the timeframe. You go for a few minutes at first, but you work your way up to hours and days. Each time you remember it slightly imperfectly, but you correct yourself. If your memorization ability is average, you'll probably mess up each and every word at least once at some point or another, before you get to the point where, coming back after several days since the last time you looked at it, you can say the thing perfectly.
Even then, you still have to review, because you eventually forget. But each time you can go a bit longer than the previous time between review sessions. Eventually you get to the point where you can recite it verbatim, easily, once a year or so, and that's enough to keep it. Even then, if you totally stop reviewing altogether, it will eventually start to fade.
Of course, if you do let it fade beyond the point where you can recall it, all you have to do is rememorize it. And rememorizing something you've once had really solidly memorized is MUCH easier and faster than memorizing it in the first place.
With all of that said, I'm not sure this is really what the article was talking about. I think it was talking more about filtering (i.e., choosing *what* to remember in the first place) than about forgetting. Nonetheless, both points (the one in the headline and the one in the article) are valid.
It is also worth pointing out that memorization is very much a learned skill. There _is_ a certain amount of natural ability, which makes the skill easier to learn for some people, but this matters a lot less than you might think. Someone who starts out having a rather hard time of it can put in a few dozen hours of memorization time and get to the point where they memorize faster than someone who started out being naturally fairly good at it. (There are, of course, always a few exceptional people -- on both ends of the spectrum -- but they are the exception, rather than the rule.)
> At my last job, I got a lot of telemarketing calls trying to sell me toner cartridges.
Oh, man, those people are the scum on the bottom of the telemarketing tank. NOTHING you can tell them will make them stop calling. Physically harming them doesn't work either, because for every one you disable three more spring up. If they get your number, the only solution is to cancel your phone service.
> All you ever need to say is "please take us off your list, thank you."
That would be boring and, worse, would minimize the cost to the telemarketing firm's client. And it would NOT result in a significant reduction in the number of incoming unsolicited junk calls. (The specific telemarketing firm in question might quit calling, but if so there are an infinite number of telemarketing firms.) Quite aside from that, it's what everyone who's ever worked in telemarketing tells you to do, and that in itself is, as far as I'm concerned, more than reason enough not to do it.
I prefer to pay absolutely no attention to what they're saying, but let them listen to themselves talk, while I continue to do whatever I was doing. When they pause for an answer, say something highly noncommittal (like "Hmmm" or "I see"), ask vague questions (like "What do you think?" or "How's that?"), or some similar technique that requires no brain activity on the callee's part and keeps the caller on the line for a while. This technique causes the telemarketing employee to have to give the same speeches over and over that he's sick of, and additionally it increases the amount of time that his employer will bill to the client. These are both positive outcomes for victims of direct marketing everywhere.
This is, of course, if I don't need the phone or my left ear for a few minutes, and don't need to concentrate on something to the point where the background droning would be a distraction. If I do, then I either put the telemarketer on hold or transfer the call to voice mail.
> The survey found that more than one-third of IT professionals admit they could still access their > company's network once they'd left their current job
Did they say why, or was it a yes-or-no question?
If it were a yes-or-no question, stated along the lines of "If you left your job, would you subsequently still have the ability to access your employer's network?", then I would have to answer "yes", but this has nothing to do with my being a snoop and everything to do with my employer not having anyone else on staff who understands security AT ALL.
As an IT guy (_the_ IT guy, actually -- we're small), I understand the value of passwords, but my coworkers view them as an impediment to convenience (which, granted, they are) and little more (which is a mistake). If I quit, there is absolutely ZERO possibility they would change the passwords. Two or three years ago there was a certain password that we knew for certain had been compromised and was being actively abused, and it took me upwards of six months to finally get permission to change it -- and when I did... well, you have never heard such whining as then ensued.
There's also the small matter of password quality. If it weren't for me, most of the passwords would be short dictionary words strongly related to the nature of the organization.
In my experience, the IT department is the only portion of the organization that knows or cares ANYTHING about security. This has nothing to do with the IT department being snoops and everything to do with the perspective of everyone else in the organization.
And it's absolutely not just because non-IT people don't understand computers. Computer-systems security is not the only kind of security they don't understand. Think in terms of locking the money in a safe every night and then keeping the safe key in a desk drawer ten feet away and NEVER EVER changing where it is kept, not in the entire time I have worked there. They did finally start locking the office door most nights (but NOT every night, because certain mornings there's nobody there with a key, and they HAVE to be able to get in there) after there were two unexplained thefts, which might or might not have been inside jobs, it was never determined. (I suspect they were probably NOT inside jobs, because it's been months now and no repeats. A thief usually can't stop stealing, so that probably means it's someone from outside the organization and they've moved on to steal elsewhere. But that's a guess.) And the staff were never careful about letting the general public see where the money was put at night when they were getting ready to close up. (Put the money away AFTER closing? Heck, no, that would mean the employees would have to stay in the building after closing for an extra thirty seconds.)
I don't expect non-IT people to understand about arcane technical details, like what a firewall does or how a worm differs from a virus. That's why you HAVE an IT department. But a total lack of interest in anything vaguely related to any kind of security as another matter entirely. If that's the environment, then of COURSE the IT people are going to be able to get in (to the computers, to the building, to the money, to whatever) after leaving, not because the IT people are snoops, but because no precautions are taken against it.
And I said I would still be *able*, if I leave (or am fired), to get into the network. I didn't say I'd DO it. You have to watch out for that sort of thing in the wording of questions too, because IT people take things fairly literally. How you ask the question actually matters.
> 1 and 2 seem to cancel each other out, as in if #1 is an issue for you, #2 probably wouldn't be.
The author does not express himself well, but I think what he's really getting at with these two is that MySQL is not available under the BSD license, so you can't build it into a proprietary product without paying licensing fees. There might be some scenarios in which this situation would cause you to go with Postgres instead.
And if you *are* willing to pay licensing fees, then you have to compare MySQL against the various proprietary options, not just Postgres.
If you're planning to GPL your product anyway, then this is all totally not an issue for you. It's also not an issue if you're not building the database into a product that ships, but just using it internally as a database.
When it's all said and done, these two articles add up to a whole lot of nothing. MySQL has always had lots of people saying good and bad things about it. Postgres has fewer people talking about it, but it's all good: I've never heard anyone say anything bad about it. Oracle is the industry leader: it costs a lot of money, but that's its big drawback. Choosing Oracle is largely a matter of budget: either what you're doing is sufficiently lucrative that using Oracle gains you more than it costs, or not.
The other biggie is MS SQL Server. Having used it at work, the most positive thing I can say about it is that it's significantly less expensive than Oracle. The main scenario in which you would choose it is if you're pretty much an all-Microsoft shop, using NT-style "domain"-based networking, Visual Studio, Exchange, and the whole nine yards. (We didn't choose it. We have it because an ISV chose it to build their product around. We chose that product because it was quoted to us ten thousand dollars cheaper than the next lowest, and at the time we were making the decision we were looking at upcoming budget cuts of unknown severity.)
Actually, it's a known issue. Comes up practically every time someone mentions Firefox on slashdot, and is widely discussed in other places as well, including b.m.o. The term "memory leaks" is technically a misidentification of the problem, but the observed behavior is almost identical to what you would see if there _were_ substantial memory leaks. The issue is well known and widely documented. What Firefox is actually doing is extensive in-memory cacheing, trading RAM for other things, like improved back-button performance. On systems with enough RAM to support it, this is a Good Thing(TM).
You can turn it off in about:config, but I forget the exact pref name.
Ideally I think Firefox should try to do a better job of automagically figuring out how much RAM it can use this way without creating performance problems, but that's not entirely trivial to accomplish. (It's not enough to know how much physical RAM the computer has, which I think is what Firefox currently does. It would also have to determine how much RAM other apps are using, among other things.)
Much of that "urban" population lives in smaller cities and towns, not in the large megalopoles most people think of when you say "urban". For every city of a million people, there are ten cities of a hundred thousand people. For every city of a hundred thousand people, there are fifty cities of ten thousand. And for every city of ten thousand, there are twenty or thirty smaller towns and villages. Taken individually, their population is small, but there are a lot of them.
These kinds of surveys count them all as "urban", because the residents don't live on farms, but they are, culturally speaking, nothing like the big cities.
> Now, I think this is a completely crappy way to run a network, and I think we just need to get rid of the > idea of firewalls completely (at least as a generic cureall, I'm all for retaining them for specific > applications); security needs to be at the client level, not at the network-gateway level; as more and > more devices become mobile, they cannot and should not ever assume that their local network is secure.
Firewalls are not a generic cureall, of course. They really only stop worms, for the most part (and make certain other kinds of much less common attacks rather harder). You still need other measures to deal with other kinds of threats. Nonetheless, the notion of doing away with them is completely unrealistic. Quite the opposite, we need to get to the point where everybody has one, including home users.
And yes, it is certainly true that the client device should not assume that the local network is secure. That has always been true, and assuming otherwise has always been a problem. (The now thoroughly aged book "Takedown" discusses an instance where trusting other systems on the local network allowed an attacker in from outside, and that was way before NAT became popular.) This does not in any way diminish the value of firewalls, however. You want to have multiple layers of security -- defense in depth, if you will -- because any one layer is likely to fail.
This is why if you have Windows XP systems on a network that's behind an IP Tables firewall, you still want to have SP2 and turn on the software firewall included with the OS. But doing so does not negate the value of the IP Tables firewall. That firewall that's built into Windows XP can fail and let something in that it shouldn't -- but it will have *different* failure properties from the IP Tables firewall, and a worm that wants to get at your workstations will need to get through *both*. The two measures strengthen one another. There are various other measures you can take as well, not least of which is avoiding client software with a very bad security record, e.g., Outlook.
Find a small or medium sized vendor, preferably headquartered in your area, that carries a good small-name brand, store brand, or whitebox lineup. Ideally you want systems composed entirely of bog-standard interchangeable off-the-shelf hardware components.
In Ohio, for example, there's an outfit called Microcenter, with locations in Columbus and Cleveland. They carry big-name computers like HP and so forth, but they also carry a whitebox brand called PowerSpec. After I discovered this brand we quit buying Dell and HP and so forth where I work.
I got tired of having a computer that's six months out of warrantee have a part go bad (a CD-ROM drive, say) and not being able to replace the part because it was non-standard in some way (e.g., designed to fit behind a non-standard case front). All the big international brands pull those sorts of schenanighans, for no good reason, and it leaves you with computers you can't service the minute they're out of warrantee and therefore must replace entirely when even a cheap component dies. Oops, I can't replace the power supply because it has a special connector for that weird fan in the front of the case. Oops, there's a case fan making a racket and I can't replace it because it has a non-standard mounting form factor. These are the sort of unpleasant surprises you can expect with the big brands. Usually you discover it about two months after the warrantee expires.
Do yourself a favor. Avoid the big international brands that like to have a new non-standard "feature" for each model line. Instead find a brand that uses 100% standard off-the-shelf components.
January 2017, according to my Windows Vienna Development Timeline. However, this all-64-bit announcement was not something I anticipated. The next thing my timeline was looking for at this point was an announcement about the filesystem, and not until fourth quarter this year. It remains to be seen what significance this announcement will have, and whether it will place Vienna development ahead of schedule (versus my timeline projections) or simply turn out to be a detail I did not forsee.
> The problem is you keep talking about a single port city, but sea levels are *global*. If sea levels > rise, that affects all port cities everywhere. There's no rising sea level scenario where you're only > talking about one city.
Do you really believe all the major port cities in the world are built at exactly the same elevation? I will just say that if I understand you correctly, I find this position untenable to the point of absurdity.
> Water is peculiar in that frozen water has a *smaller volume* than liquid water. > So even if an iceberg is floating in water, if it melts, there is a net increase in the volume of > water. Add to inland glaciers melting ( the whole continent of Antartica) and the ice shelves, and > you're talking about much higher sea levels.
Yes, I had third grade "science" class too. The problem is, there is currently a *LOT* less ice over the polar regions than there was in 1600 (less than half as much in the northern hemisphere), but the ocean levels are, so far as any one can tell, pretty much exactly the same. Almost all of the observed changes in coastline positions within recorded history (excepting the edges of the icepacks, which have retreated considerably) are due to inherently local phenomena, e.g., erosion and deposition (notably around river deltas), volcanic activity, human activity (such as the construction of polders), and so forth. All that meltwater is going somewhere, but the oceans aren't rising much.
All of which is neither here nor there to my primary argument. Even assuming the meltwater immediately stops going anywhere except directly into rising ocean levels, the change would still be quite gradual.
> Okay, but is it enough time to move *all* port operations of every major port city, all around the world?
If it's enough time for one city, why would it not be enough time for another?
> What about the intense competition for construction equipment and building material.
Yes, prices would increase. This would be most noticeable in the cost of new housing.
> What about the fact that we couldn't ship anything in or out of these sea-logged ports?
What, you think the port industries would wait until it became impossible to ship anything before they did anything about it? Industries exist to make money, man. If the sea level rises enough inches that goods cannot be shipped in or out of a certain port at high tide, 10% of the day, something would be done about it, LONG before it got to the point where nothing could be shipped at all.
I'm beginning to think you don't know what the word "gradual" means at all. You say "decades", but I am not sure you understand how long that is. A lot happens over the course of decades. Three decades ago, most people in North America had never seen a computer except on science fiction movies and television. Three decades ago the average number of motor vehicles per _household_ in the US was about what it is now per capita. In the three decades from 1970 to 2000, there was a net population increase of over a hundred thousand people in New York City, and that is just in the city proper (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island) -- the growth in the whole metropolitan area was much larger. The scientific wisdom about which gasses in the atmosphere are causing global warming changes approximately once per decade.
> Pompei was still encased in volcanic ash until we dug it out recently.
How did I know you were going to bring up Pompei? Maybe because it is the most famous example.
Yes, it does happen. But it is a small minority case. There are a handful of such cases, but there are hundreds of the other kind. There are ruins buried beneath practically every city more than 1500 years old, from Belfast to London to Paris to Venice to Istanbul to Corinth to Antioch to Beirut to Jericho to Jerusalem to Alexandria to Tehran to Tashkent to New Delhi to Beijing to Angkor Thom.
No. They're ambivalent about it in principle, and if it creates performance or usability problems then they definitely don't want it.
> Non-geeks surely must not like the idea of the "data not being in the box under the desk" and instead > in some California datacenter.
Non-geeks don't think about where their data is stored. They think phenomenologically, i.e., if they were taught to look in My Documents to find their files, then they think their files are there, but if they were taught to use File->Open to access them, then they think the files are stored in the application. They don't think about where the application is stored. It's on the computer.
By the way, Google and Yahoo are on the computer too. If you ask them a question geared to get them to actually *think* about it, most people realize that Google and Yahoo are coming from outside the computer more or less in realtime, but ordinarily they don't think about this. It's on the computer. See? Right there on the screen.
The popularity of webmail proves that software as a service *can* work for (at least) a very significant minority of users. In principle.
In practice, however, creating a web-based office suite that *will* work for a lot of users is a difficult problem. There are going to be some hard-to-solve performance and usability issues there.
It's bad enough we have a landline in the house. One of my life goals is to someday live in a house with *no* telephone. For the time being, though, we do have a landline. Actually, it's funny the article summary should mention rotary, since we have a rotary phone hanging on the kitchen wall. It's not the only phone, of course, just the oldest one we've got. We also have three touch-tone phones of various vintages in three other rooms, which as far as I'm concerned is *entirely* too many. The newest is even cordless, which naturally means it's the one that doesn't work when the power goes out. There's progress for you.
As for cellphones, I cannot imagine wanting one. Nothing people might want to call me about is so all-fired urgent that it can't wait until I'm home. I'm just a computer guy, not an EMT or something. It can wait. It's not like I'm out wandering around town and country all that much anyway. I do occasionally go for walks, but when I do it's precisely because I want to get away from chattering people and other such distractions and be able to hear myself think for a while. Taking a phone along with me is the last thing I'd want.
Yeah, call me a wrinkled old curmudgeon. I'm all of 20 years old. (Okay, okay, that's actually 0x20. Still.)
> Well, if it happens faster than 100 years, then it will be too fast for us to deal with in our major port cities.
You keep saying this, but (other than your extremely dubious assertion about the vital importance of skyscrapers to a functioning port) you never offer any actual reason why this would be the case. It's balderdash. Ten years would be more than enough time to move the essential port industries of any given city inland, if it were *necessary* to move them that fast (which is highly unlikely in the kind of scenario we're talking about).
> Populations do shift, but only if there is an impetus to do so. If you have a perfectly good life in Ireland, > why would you leave? Well, you would if there were, say, a potato famine and you were starving. Otherwise, > people live in the same cities they have for thousands of years.
This is sort of true, but you exaggerate the importance of catastrophe as an impetus. There are other empeti. Thousands of people move to New York City every year just because of the things that are there, that are philosophically attractive to them, e.g., the Statue of Liberty, Broadway, and so forth. Thousands of people also move *out* of the city, to get away from things they don't like, e.g., crime, overcrowding, and smog. Thousands of people move to Florida every year from the northern US, mostly for the weather. Others move north. Many college graduates every year move to a different part of the country just to be farther away from their parents. There are lots of reasons.
It's not the middle ages anymore. Transportation is cheap now. People move.
If there's a major impetus, like rising ocean levels turning the state of Florida into an archipelago over the course of three decades, then everyone will be moving in more or less the same direction (inland) rather than all in different directions. (As I think I indicated, I think six centuries is a vastly more likely timeframe, given the extreme slowness, to the point of imperceptibility, of any purported rises of ocean levels thus far. Nonetheless, three decades would be a lot of time for people -- and businesses -- to move.)
> Right, but my point is that it will take time to build them, it will take decades to get them up to > the capacity that they currently operate,
Why? Why would it take decades? Nothing that is required to operate a port takes more than a few months to build.
> and rebuilding will be hindered if we suddenly can't import materials in our underwater ports.
There's that word "suddenly" again.
> If you need a new job, you move to the next major metropolis. You don't go a few miles down the > street and build a cabin. If New York sank, people would move to the nearby metropolises, like > Buffalo, Toronto, or Philadelphia, where they already have the housing and infrastructure that > they are used to.
This would be true if New York sank in one day.
If, however, the ocean levels over the course of a few months rose just enough that at high tide a dozen or two of the lowest buildings in New York became largely unusable, do you think the rest of the city would be abandoned? Quite the contrary, it would countinue to grow, on the inland side.
> Nobody would take the time and energy to build a new city a few miles outside of New York; > they would migrate to an existing city where they would already be building new houses and apartments.
It's already there. It's called New Jersey.
> Look at what happened in New Orleans.
Upwards of a third of the city became unusable in under a week, and it was obvious to all concerned that the rest of the city was a risky place to be as well -- immediately, not in some projected long-term future. That's not even vaguely the same kind of situation.
> That may be true of small towns in Florida, but look at new Orleans. We haven't seen a major > metropolis migrate in the history of the planet.
No, Wikipedia is meant to be an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias are by definition tertiary sources, i.e., not authoritative at all, but very much more convenient to reach for and use than an original source. Usually the people compiling an encyclopedia don't even *look* at authoritative sources directly, but at mostly secondary sources that in turn cite the primary sources, and in some cases even at other tertiary sources.
However, I have looked at a lot of Wikipedia articles, on a wide variety of topics, and only once or twice have I found articles that were not really legible to the laity, assuming a you have at least a general education. You certainly don't have to be a professional in the field in question in order to understand most of the science articles on Wikipedia. Granted, it's not really a children's encyclopedia either, but I find the complaint that "no non-expert can understand" to be largely without merit, for the overwhelming majority of Wikipedia articles.
There is one trend on Wikipedia that has started to bother me lately: little "citation needed" tags on sentences that clearly do not need a citation. I saw one just the other day on the statement regarding the timeframe when the Berlin Wall came down. Hello? It was all over the news for weeks. Something like half the population of the western world remembers it vividly. You can ask random people on the street, if they're over the age of thirty, and many of them can tell you where they were and what they were doing when they got wind of it. If that doesn't qualify as common knowledge, what on earth would?
Not that I'm against citing sources when it's appropriate, mind you, but marking stuff like that as "citation needed" is just extremely bizarre.
> I believe it's silly to think that the modern world is somehow immune from the natural disasters that > caused so much suffering documented in history
I don't believe that. There are lots of things that can happen, and some that almost certainly will at some point.
However, ocean levels rising is too gradual to be a major catastrophe at that level. People like you have been concerned about it since may parents were in gradeschool and to date the anticipated ocean level rises have pretty much entirely failed to materialize. I'm not saying they can't or won't, but I'm saing hat it only happens very slooowly. You said yourself "decades". I suspect more like centuries, but even if it's decades, that's a long time for the kind of thing you're talking about. Populations shift quite a bit in that amount of time, naturally, even without something like the ocean coming along and making the original location less habitable.
There are specific countries that might become non-viable, notably the Netherlands (which is sinking relative to the land around them, at least partly because draining the water out of the ground reduces its volume and lowers its surface), but civilization as we know it is not going to be ended by a two hundred foot increase in ocean levels over several decades. If it happened over the course of several days, maybe, but that's entirely a different and more catastrophic kind of scenario.
> If we depend on our port cities to feed ourselves with food from around the world.
Actually, virtually every first-world country is a net exporter of food. It's one of the key socio-economic features that macroeconomists look at. It's very hard for developing countries to make any real progress toward a healthy economy unless they can first figure out how to feed their own people without importing food.
And if the ocean levels rise, there will still be port cities. Just as many of them. They'll just be in slightly different places.
> Instead of NY being the financial capitol, it might be Philadelphia or Denver.
People aren't that bright. They'll move a few miles inland (at a time) if they have to, not a few hundred miles. If the new location then gets flooded a few years later, then they'll move a few more miles inland. You can see this behavior in places where there are recurring river floods, or in the southeastern US (notably Florida) where hurricanes regularly wipe out enough homes to keep the construction industry operating all the time at a rather higher level than population growth alone could support.
So there would still *be* a New York City, it would just not be in quite the same place.
And yes, all that building would be a significant drain on the economy (in that it would consume a significant portion of the GDP), but most first-world countries (certainly all of western Europe and North America) at this point spend more than half the GDP on extremely frivolous things (entertainment, recreation, and so forth), so a little financial hardship is not going to strain things so badly that civilization crumbles.
> The skylines we see today are the result of 100 years of constant building. > Port cities are the key here, because they are what creates "the world as we know it today".
You're really hung up on the importance of skyscrapers, aren't you. Let me let you in on a little secret: a major port city can operate without a single building more than three stories tall. Skyscrapers are built because the land in an area is valuable, due to crowding, not because having them fundamentally enables anything that wouldn't otherwise be possible. The "hundreds of years of building" you refer to is actually hundreds of years of population growth in and, especially, migration toward the cities. The buildings are only built as fast as they need to be to accommodate the needs. They actually *could* be built rather faster -- well, actually, more like more of them at a time (this is analagous to the differen
> It would be the end of the current world as we know it.
You should work in Hollywood.
Global warming is not some kind of enormous earthquake, volcano, asteroid, or alien invasion that's going to sweep in over the course of a long weekend, wipe out 75% of the population and 95% of the infrastructure, and leave us in the stone age. As you point out yourself, ocean levels, if they rise at all, will take decades to do so. It is not even a foregone conclusion that the water will rise significantly. I am not aware of any strong evidence that ocean levels are significantly higher today than they were in 1622 when the Bosphorus froze, though we're pretty sure the earth was colder then and the ice caps a good deal larger. It is possible that the ocean levels will rise -- gradually, but while it would be inconvenient to have to move things inland, it would certainly not be the end of the world as we know it.
> We can't migrate skyscrapers.
We can build new skyscrapers, if we need them. (I am not, personally, convinced they're really such a terribly good idea anyhow, but that's another matter for another thread.) Yes, the owners of the current skyscrapers would lose billions of dollars if they had to be abandoned, but calling that "the end of the world" is just overly dramatic. Furthermore there are *lots* of skyscrapers at elevations out of reach for even the most dire global-warming-flood predictions (discounting the movie Waterworld, which also features a man with gills and seas *much* too calm for there supposedly being not much land to block the winds and currents, not to mention precise navigation, down to specific coordinates, with no landmarks for dead reckoning, no star charts, and no accurate clocks).
> It would be the end of the historical era, and a thousand years from now, archaeologists would be scanning > the sea floors for the ancient lost cities of what might be called the 'modern era'.
Right, because there are no major cities at high enough altitudes to survive a couple hundred extra feet of ocean depth, and all the technology and almost all the people, especially the educated people, are in the major cities. If you're not in New York or L.A., there's pretty much nothing but cornfields and deserts in the rest of the world. Yeah, I almost fell for that line of reasoning. Would have done, if I'd forgotten to wake up my brain this morning. Like I said, you should work in Hollywood. You'd fit right in.
> hello big oil shutting down refineries for maintenance right after coming off of > maintenance cycles to decrease production
Does that violate some law I'm not aware of? I would have guessed, if no one told me otherwise, that they would probably be allowed to shut down one of their refineries just because they decide they want to shut it down. I realise people might not *like* them doing that, but if it's illegal, I am not aware of the law that makes it illegal.
I was thinking that. Cold is much easier to defend against than heat. All you need is low-tech stuff: clothing, blankets, food, shelter, and if you're really desperate fire. Excess heat is another matter. If the power (and thus the air conditioning) goes out, you've got a real problem.
Slashdot Mirror
> one in three people aged 16 to 24 in the UK would not give up their mobile phone for a million pounds.
Okay, so I don't live in the UK and I'm over 24, but nonetheless... I'm pleased to say I don't have a cellular phone, and I don't think I'd be willing to start carrying one for a million pounds. Maybe if I only had to keep it for a very short time (a few weeks at most), but otherwise forget it.
It's bad enough I live in a house that has land-line phones in it.
If there's anything more annoying than a ringing phone, I'm sure I don't know what it is.
If they'll take a money order, the quick and easy fix is to go to the nearest post office and get a money order. This doesn't cost very much, and you don't have to involve a bank. Trusting the USPS (that issues the money order) is not substantially different from trusting the treasury (that issues the cash).
Yes, there *is* a small cost for the money order, but you have to weigh that against the cost of your time, calling up the housing department dude's superior, and his superior, and giving them one earful after another until they hate you, and so on and so forth -- all of which may get the problem resolved, or may not. Or the cost of a lawyer, which is even more.
BTW, the USPS is the most cost-effective place to get a money order. Everyplace else charges at least as much, often more.
Here's a free clue for you, Microsoft: I'm planning to phase out the last of the Windows 98 SE systems at work later this year. Hopefully. Then all the Windows workstations will be XP.
As far as Vista, there is at this point absolutely zero reason for us to want to deploy it, as far as I'm concerned. The reason I deploy any version of Windows is because people are already familiar with it. Otherwise there are other systems I would prefer to support, because they're easier to maintain -- but they are unfamiliar to people. I deploy Windows XP in many cases because it cuts down on user training and support, because people are already comfortable with it. If I were willing to give that up, I wouldn't be buying Microsoft. So Vista needs to be out for at _least_ two years, preferably three, before I want anything to do with deploying it.
Then there's the situation on the home front. My family is still using Windows 98 SE, and I have talked to them about upgrading, and they want no part of it. As far as my mom is concerned, anything that changes the computer's OS in any way is distilled evil. She was not, at the time, very happy with the move from DOS 6 to Windows 98 SE, even though she only ever learned three or four things to type at the command prompt (none of which she now remembers I'm sure). It has taken her years to learn how to use Windows 98. She doesn't like when dad changes the wallpaper, because she gets confused about where the icons are that haven't even moved. I'm afraid the OS on that computer is almost certainly going to stay the same until the computer physically gets replaced. (Which will probably not be very many more years, but we'll put it off as long as we reasonably can.)
The long and short of it is, we wouldn't upgrade to Vista right now even if Microsoft paid us $100 per computer to do so. Naturally, they'd prefer to charge us for the upgrade. They can go to Redmond. We don't want it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm looking forward to Vista. There are some significant improvements there, not least UAC. I'll be happy to replace XP with Vista, when it's practical to do so, i.e., when the users are as comfortable with Vista as they are with XP. But that's going to be a while, so chill out, Microsoft. Learn some patience. We've certainly been patient enough with you, listening to your Longhorn announcements for five years or so now, waiting for it to actually materialize. Time for you to return the favor.
> If these downloads manifested into regular Safari users,
Umm, yeah, because we all know that most of the people who download a new software release the first week it's available are regular users -- not, say, people who pay close attention to tech news because it's their job. No way could this be 10% of the world's web developers saying, "Oh, hey, I should grab that and test my stuff in it."
I'm not saying Safari *won't* end up being adopted by end users, but the first few days it's available? Come on, end users haven't even heard it's available yet. 90% of those downloads are from people who found out by scanning or even reading coverage of WWDC. Practically all of them keep multiple browsers around all the time. The first week's download numbers are an indication of interest in the tech community, but that's all.
You want to see if regular users are picking it up, wait until the developer rush dies off and *then* look at the download numbers. You want to see if people are starting to use it as their regular browser, you don't look at download numbers, but at access logs and so forth -- and you compare against the same week/month/quarter of the previous year, at the same sample of sites.
As someone who has done a lot of memorization (specifically, a national-level Bible quizzer -- we memorize whole books until we can quote chapter after chapter; as you can imagine, there is a substantial time investment involved), I could have told you that forgetting is an important part of remembering.
You can't permanently memorize something in one go. Well, maybe if you've got an extremely unusual photographic memory or savant syndrome you can, but most of us cannot. We have to take it in multiple passes.
First, you go over a short section until you know it to the point where you can repeat it back on the spot. This is very much short-term memory, and a few minutes later you won't be able to repeat it. Which is fine. You repeat this a couple of times, over the course of a day or so, and after about the third time (give or take, depending on the length of the passage and your ability level) you can retain it for a few minutes -- while going over another short section -- and still go back and repeat it. When you can do that, you are on your way to actually memorizing it.
The next step then is to start stretching the timeframe. You go for a few minutes at first, but you work your way up to hours and days. Each time you remember it slightly imperfectly, but you correct yourself. If your memorization ability is average, you'll probably mess up each and every word at least once at some point or another, before you get to the point where, coming back after several days since the last time you looked at it, you can say the thing perfectly.
Even then, you still have to review, because you eventually forget. But each time you can go a bit longer than the previous time between review sessions. Eventually you get to the point where you can recite it verbatim, easily, once a year or so, and that's enough to keep it. Even then, if you totally stop reviewing altogether, it will eventually start to fade.
Of course, if you do let it fade beyond the point where you can recall it, all you have to do is rememorize it. And rememorizing something you've once had really solidly memorized is MUCH easier and faster than memorizing it in the first place.
With all of that said, I'm not sure this is really what the article was talking about. I think it was talking more about filtering (i.e., choosing *what* to remember in the first place) than about forgetting. Nonetheless, both points (the one in the headline and the one in the article) are valid.
It is also worth pointing out that memorization is very much a learned skill. There _is_ a certain amount of natural ability, which makes the skill easier to learn for some people, but this matters a lot less than you might think. Someone who starts out having a rather hard time of it can put in a few dozen hours of memorization time and get to the point where they memorize faster than someone who started out being naturally fairly good at it. (There are, of course, always a few exceptional people -- on both ends of the spectrum -- but they are the exception, rather than the rule.)
> At my last job, I got a lot of telemarketing calls trying to sell me toner cartridges.
Oh, man, those people are the scum on the bottom of the telemarketing tank. NOTHING you can tell them will make them stop calling. Physically harming them doesn't work either, because for every one you disable three more spring up. If they get your number, the only solution is to cancel your phone service.
> All you ever need to say is "please take us off your list, thank you."
That would be boring and, worse, would minimize the cost to the telemarketing firm's client. And it would NOT result in a significant reduction in the number of incoming unsolicited junk calls. (The specific telemarketing firm in question might quit calling, but if so there are an infinite number of telemarketing firms.) Quite aside from that, it's what everyone who's ever worked in telemarketing tells you to do, and that in itself is, as far as I'm concerned, more than reason enough not to do it.
I prefer to pay absolutely no attention to what they're saying, but let them listen to themselves talk, while I continue to do whatever I was doing. When they pause for an answer, say something highly noncommittal (like "Hmmm" or "I see"), ask vague questions (like "What do you think?" or "How's that?"), or some similar technique that requires no brain activity on the callee's part and keeps the caller on the line for a while. This technique causes the telemarketing employee to have to give the same speeches over and over that he's sick of, and additionally it increases the amount of time that his employer will bill to the client. These are both positive outcomes for victims of direct marketing everywhere.
This is, of course, if I don't need the phone or my left ear for a few minutes, and don't need to concentrate on something to the point where the background droning would be a distraction. If I do, then I either put the telemarketer on hold or transfer the call to voice mail.
> The survey found that more than one-third of IT professionals admit they could still access their
> company's network once they'd left their current job
Did they say why, or was it a yes-or-no question?
If it were a yes-or-no question, stated along the lines of "If you left your job, would you subsequently still have the ability to access your employer's network?", then I would have to answer "yes", but this has nothing to do with my being a snoop and everything to do with my employer not having anyone else on staff who understands security AT ALL.
As an IT guy (_the_ IT guy, actually -- we're small), I understand the value of passwords, but my coworkers view them as an impediment to convenience (which, granted, they are) and little more (which is a mistake). If I quit, there is absolutely ZERO possibility they would change the passwords. Two or three years ago there was a certain password that we knew for certain had been compromised and was being actively abused, and it took me upwards of six months to finally get permission to change it -- and when I did... well, you have never heard such whining as then ensued.
There's also the small matter of password quality. If it weren't for me, most of the passwords would be short dictionary words strongly related to the nature of the organization.
In my experience, the IT department is the only portion of the organization that knows or cares ANYTHING about security. This has nothing to do with the IT department being snoops and everything to do with the perspective of everyone else in the organization.
And it's absolutely not just because non-IT people don't understand computers. Computer-systems security is not the only kind of security they don't understand. Think in terms of locking the money in a safe every night and then keeping the safe key in a desk drawer ten feet away and NEVER EVER changing where it is kept, not in the entire time I have worked there. They did finally start locking the office door most nights (but NOT every night, because certain mornings there's nobody there with a key, and they HAVE to be able to get in there) after there were two unexplained thefts, which might or might not have been inside jobs, it was never determined. (I suspect they were probably NOT inside jobs, because it's been months now and no repeats. A thief usually can't stop stealing, so that probably means it's someone from outside the organization and they've moved on to steal elsewhere. But that's a guess.) And the staff were never careful about letting the general public see where the money was put at night when they were getting ready to close up. (Put the money away AFTER closing? Heck, no, that would mean the employees would have to stay in the building after closing for an extra thirty seconds.)
I don't expect non-IT people to understand about arcane technical details, like what a firewall does or how a worm differs from a virus. That's why you HAVE an IT department. But a total lack of interest in anything vaguely related to any kind of security as another matter entirely. If that's the environment, then of COURSE the IT people are going to be able to get in (to the computers, to the building, to the money, to whatever) after leaving, not because the IT people are snoops, but because no precautions are taken against it.
And I said I would still be *able*, if I leave (or am fired), to get into the network. I didn't say I'd DO it. You have to watch out for that sort of thing in the wording of questions too, because IT people take things fairly literally. How you ask the question actually matters.
Wouldn't that turn off the *whole* memory cache?
I was talking about the pref that just turns off the newer RAM-eating rendered page caching feature.
> 1 and 2 seem to cancel each other out, as in if #1 is an issue for you, #2 probably wouldn't be.
The author does not express himself well, but I think what he's really getting at with these two is that MySQL is not available under the BSD license, so you can't build it into a proprietary product without paying licensing fees. There might be some scenarios in which this situation would cause you to go with Postgres instead.
And if you *are* willing to pay licensing fees, then you have to compare MySQL against the various proprietary options, not just Postgres.
If you're planning to GPL your product anyway, then this is all totally not an issue for you. It's also not an issue if you're not building the database into a product that ships, but just using it internally as a database.
When it's all said and done, these two articles add up to a whole lot of nothing. MySQL has always had lots of people saying good and bad things about it. Postgres has fewer people talking about it, but it's all good: I've never heard anyone say anything bad about it. Oracle is the industry leader: it costs a lot of money, but that's its big drawback. Choosing Oracle is largely a matter of budget: either what you're doing is sufficiently lucrative that using Oracle gains you more than it costs, or not.
The other biggie is MS SQL Server. Having used it at work, the most positive thing I can say about it is that it's significantly less expensive than Oracle. The main scenario in which you would choose it is if you're pretty much an all-Microsoft shop, using NT-style "domain"-based networking, Visual Studio, Exchange, and the whole nine yards. (We didn't choose it. We have it because an ISV chose it to build their product around. We chose that product because it was quoted to us ten thousand dollars cheaper than the next lowest, and at the time we were making the decision we were looking at upcoming budget cuts of unknown severity.)
Actually, it's a known issue. Comes up practically every time someone mentions Firefox on slashdot, and is widely discussed in other places as well, including b.m.o. The term "memory leaks" is technically a misidentification of the problem, but the observed behavior is almost identical to what you would see if there _were_ substantial memory leaks. The issue is well known and widely documented. What Firefox is actually doing is extensive in-memory cacheing, trading RAM for other things, like improved back-button performance. On systems with enough RAM to support it, this is a Good Thing(TM).
You can turn it off in about:config, but I forget the exact pref name.
Ideally I think Firefox should try to do a better job of automagically figuring out how much RAM it can use this way without creating performance problems, but that's not entirely trivial to accomplish. (It's not enough to know how much physical RAM the computer has, which I think is what Firefox currently does. It would also have to determine how much RAM other apps are using, among other things.)
Much of that "urban" population lives in smaller cities and towns, not in the large megalopoles most people think of when you say "urban". For every city of a million people, there are ten cities of a hundred thousand people. For every city of a hundred thousand people, there are fifty cities of ten thousand. And for every city of ten thousand, there are twenty or thirty smaller towns and villages. Taken individually, their population is small, but there are a lot of them.
These kinds of surveys count them all as "urban", because the residents don't live on farms, but they are, culturally speaking, nothing like the big cities.
> Now, I think this is a completely crappy way to run a network, and I think we just need to get rid of the
> idea of firewalls completely (at least as a generic cureall, I'm all for retaining them for specific
> applications); security needs to be at the client level, not at the network-gateway level; as more and
> more devices become mobile, they cannot and should not ever assume that their local network is secure.
Firewalls are not a generic cureall, of course. They really only stop worms, for the most part (and make certain other kinds of much less common attacks rather harder). You still need other measures to deal with other kinds of threats. Nonetheless, the notion of doing away with them is completely unrealistic. Quite the opposite, we need to get to the point where everybody has one, including home users.
And yes, it is certainly true that the client device should not assume that the local network is secure. That has always been true, and assuming otherwise has always been a problem. (The now thoroughly aged book "Takedown" discusses an instance where trusting other systems on the local network allowed an attacker in from outside, and that was way before NAT became popular.) This does not in any way diminish the value of firewalls, however. You want to have multiple layers of security -- defense in depth, if you will -- because any one layer is likely to fail.
This is why if you have Windows XP systems on a network that's behind an IP Tables firewall, you still want to have SP2 and turn on the software firewall included with the OS. But doing so does not negate the value of the IP Tables firewall. That firewall that's built into Windows XP can fail and let something in that it shouldn't -- but it will have *different* failure properties from the IP Tables firewall, and a worm that wants to get at your workstations will need to get through *both*. The two measures strengthen one another. There are various other measures you can take as well, not least of which is avoiding client software with a very bad security record, e.g., Outlook.
HP? Dell? Avoid, avoid, avoid.
Find a small or medium sized vendor, preferably headquartered in your area, that carries a good small-name brand, store brand, or whitebox lineup. Ideally you want systems composed entirely of bog-standard interchangeable off-the-shelf hardware components.
In Ohio, for example, there's an outfit called Microcenter, with locations in Columbus and Cleveland. They carry big-name computers like HP and so forth, but they also carry a whitebox brand called PowerSpec. After I discovered this brand we quit buying Dell and HP and so forth where I work.
I got tired of having a computer that's six months out of warrantee have a part go bad (a CD-ROM drive, say) and not being able to replace the part because it was non-standard in some way (e.g., designed to fit behind a non-standard case front). All the big international brands pull those sorts of schenanighans, for no good reason, and it leaves you with computers you can't service the minute they're out of warrantee and therefore must replace entirely when even a cheap component dies. Oops, I can't replace the power supply because it has a special connector for that weird fan in the front of the case. Oops, there's a case fan making a racket and I can't replace it because it has a non-standard mounting form factor. These are the sort of unpleasant surprises you can expect with the big brands. Usually you discover it about two months after the warrantee expires.
Do yourself a favor. Avoid the big international brands that like to have a new non-standard "feature" for each model line. Instead find a brand that uses 100% standard off-the-shelf components.
January 2017, according to my Windows Vienna Development Timeline. However, this all-64-bit announcement was not something I anticipated. The next thing my timeline was looking for at this point was an announcement about the filesystem, and not until fourth quarter this year. It remains to be seen what significance this announcement will have, and whether it will place Vienna development ahead of schedule (versus my timeline projections) or simply turn out to be a detail I did not forsee.
> The problem is you keep talking about a single port city, but sea levels are *global*. If sea levels
> rise, that affects all port cities everywhere. There's no rising sea level scenario where you're only
> talking about one city.
Do you really believe all the major port cities in the world are built at exactly the same elevation? I will just say that if I understand you correctly, I find this position untenable to the point of absurdity.
> Water is peculiar in that frozen water has a *smaller volume* than liquid water.
> So even if an iceberg is floating in water, if it melts, there is a net increase in the volume of
> water. Add to inland glaciers melting ( the whole continent of Antartica) and the ice shelves, and
> you're talking about much higher sea levels.
Yes, I had third grade "science" class too. The problem is, there is currently a *LOT* less ice over the polar regions than there was in 1600 (less than half as much in the northern hemisphere), but the ocean levels are, so far as any one can tell, pretty much exactly the same. Almost all of the observed changes in coastline positions within recorded history (excepting the edges of the icepacks, which have retreated considerably) are due to inherently local phenomena, e.g., erosion and deposition (notably around river deltas), volcanic activity, human activity (such as the construction of polders), and so forth. All that meltwater is going somewhere, but the oceans aren't rising much.
All of which is neither here nor there to my primary argument. Even assuming the meltwater immediately stops going anywhere except directly into rising ocean levels, the change would still be quite gradual.
> Okay, but is it enough time to move *all* port operations of every major port city, all around the world?
If it's enough time for one city, why would it not be enough time for another?
> What about the intense competition for construction equipment and building material.
Yes, prices would increase. This would be most noticeable in the cost of new housing.
> What about the fact that we couldn't ship anything in or out of these sea-logged ports?
What, you think the port industries would wait until it became impossible to ship anything before they did anything about it? Industries exist to make money, man. If the sea level rises enough inches that goods cannot be shipped in or out of a certain port at high tide, 10% of the day, something would be done about it, LONG before it got to the point where nothing could be shipped at all.
I'm beginning to think you don't know what the word "gradual" means at all. You say "decades", but I am not sure you understand how long that is. A lot happens over the course of decades. Three decades ago, most people in North America had never seen a computer except on science fiction movies and television. Three decades ago the average number of motor vehicles per _household_ in the US was about what it is now per capita. In the three decades from 1970 to 2000, there was a net population increase of over a hundred thousand people in New York City, and that is just in the city proper (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island) -- the growth in the whole metropolitan area was much larger. The scientific wisdom about which gasses in the atmosphere are causing global warming changes approximately once per decade.
> Pompei was still encased in volcanic ash until we dug it out recently.
How did I know you were going to bring up Pompei? Maybe because it is the most famous example.
Yes, it does happen. But it is a small minority case. There are a handful of such cases, but there are hundreds of the other kind. There are ruins buried beneath practically every city more than 1500 years old, from Belfast to London to Paris to Venice to Istanbul to Corinth to Antioch to Beirut to Jericho to Jerusalem to Alexandria to Tehran to Tashkent to New Delhi to Beijing to Angkor Thom.
I hear Solaris is going to die next. Then we can all use VMS.
> Do people really want this? Seriously?
No. They're ambivalent about it in principle, and if it creates performance or usability problems then they definitely don't want it.
> Non-geeks surely must not like the idea of the "data not being in the box under the desk" and instead
> in some California datacenter.
Non-geeks don't think about where their data is stored. They think phenomenologically, i.e., if they were taught to look in My Documents to find their files, then they think their files are there, but if they were taught to use File->Open to access them, then they think the files are stored in the application. They don't think about where the application is stored. It's on the computer.
By the way, Google and Yahoo are on the computer too. If you ask them a question geared to get them to actually *think* about it, most people realize that Google and Yahoo are coming from outside the computer more or less in realtime, but ordinarily they don't think about this. It's on the computer. See? Right there on the screen.
The popularity of webmail proves that software as a service *can* work for (at least) a very significant minority of users. In principle.
In practice, however, creating a web-based office suite that *will* work for a lot of users is a difficult problem. There are going to be some hard-to-solve performance and usability issues there.
I am so glad I have never owned a cellphone.
It's bad enough we have a landline in the house. One of my life goals is to someday live in a house with *no* telephone. For the time being, though, we do have a landline. Actually, it's funny the article summary should mention rotary, since we have a rotary phone hanging on the kitchen wall. It's not the only phone, of course, just the oldest one we've got. We also have three touch-tone phones of various vintages in three other rooms, which as far as I'm concerned is *entirely* too many. The newest is even cordless, which naturally means it's the one that doesn't work when the power goes out. There's progress for you.
As for cellphones, I cannot imagine wanting one. Nothing people might want to call me about is so all-fired urgent that it can't wait until I'm home. I'm just a computer guy, not an EMT or something. It can wait. It's not like I'm out wandering around town and country all that much anyway. I do occasionally go for walks, but when I do it's precisely because I want to get away from chattering people and other such distractions and be able to hear myself think for a while. Taking a phone along with me is the last thing I'd want.
Yeah, call me a wrinkled old curmudgeon. I'm all of 20 years old. (Okay, okay, that's actually 0x20. Still.)
> Well, if it happens faster than 100 years, then it will be too fast for us to deal with in our major port cities.
You keep saying this, but (other than your extremely dubious assertion about the vital importance of skyscrapers to a functioning port) you never offer any actual reason why this would be the case. It's balderdash. Ten years would be more than enough time to move the essential port industries of any given city inland, if it were *necessary* to move them that fast (which is highly unlikely in the kind of scenario we're talking about).
> Populations do shift, but only if there is an impetus to do so. If you have a perfectly good life in Ireland,
> why would you leave? Well, you would if there were, say, a potato famine and you were starving. Otherwise,
> people live in the same cities they have for thousands of years.
This is sort of true, but you exaggerate the importance of catastrophe as an impetus. There are other empeti. Thousands of people move to New York City every year just because of the things that are there, that are philosophically attractive to them, e.g., the Statue of Liberty, Broadway, and so forth. Thousands of people also move *out* of the city, to get away from things they don't like, e.g., crime, overcrowding, and smog. Thousands of people move to Florida every year from the northern US, mostly for the weather. Others move north. Many college graduates every year move to a different part of the country just to be farther away from their parents. There are lots of reasons.
It's not the middle ages anymore. Transportation is cheap now. People move.
If there's a major impetus, like rising ocean levels turning the state of Florida into an archipelago over the course of three decades, then everyone will be moving in more or less the same direction (inland) rather than all in different directions. (As I think I indicated, I think six centuries is a vastly more likely timeframe, given the extreme slowness, to the point of imperceptibility, of any purported rises of ocean levels thus far. Nonetheless, three decades would be a lot of time for people -- and businesses -- to move.)
> Right, but my point is that it will take time to build them, it will take decades to get them up to
> the capacity that they currently operate,
Why? Why would it take decades? Nothing that is required to operate a port takes more than a few months to build.
> and rebuilding will be hindered if we suddenly can't import materials in our underwater ports.
There's that word "suddenly" again.
> If you need a new job, you move to the next major metropolis. You don't go a few miles down the
> street and build a cabin. If New York sank, people would move to the nearby metropolises, like
> Buffalo, Toronto, or Philadelphia, where they already have the housing and infrastructure that
> they are used to.
This would be true if New York sank in one day.
If, however, the ocean levels over the course of a few months rose just enough that at high tide a dozen or two of the lowest buildings in New York became largely unusable, do you think the rest of the city would be abandoned? Quite the contrary, it would countinue to grow, on the inland side.
> Nobody would take the time and energy to build a new city a few miles outside of New York;
> they would migrate to an existing city where they would already be building new houses and apartments.
It's already there. It's called New Jersey.
> Look at what happened in New Orleans.
Upwards of a third of the city became unusable in under a week, and it was obvious to all concerned that the rest of the city was a risky place to be as well -- immediately, not in some projected long-term future. That's not even vaguely the same kind of situation.
> That may be true of small towns in Florida, but look at new Orleans. We haven't seen a major
> metropolis migrate in the history of the planet.
> Wiki is meant to be authoritive
No, Wikipedia is meant to be an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias are by definition tertiary sources, i.e., not authoritative at all, but very much more convenient to reach for and use than an original source. Usually the people compiling an encyclopedia don't even *look* at authoritative sources directly, but at mostly secondary sources that in turn cite the primary sources, and in some cases even at other tertiary sources.
However, I have looked at a lot of Wikipedia articles, on a wide variety of topics, and only once or twice have I found articles that were not really legible to the laity, assuming a you have at least a general education. You certainly don't have to be a professional in the field in question in order to understand most of the science articles on Wikipedia. Granted, it's not really a children's encyclopedia either, but I find the complaint that "no non-expert can understand" to be largely without merit, for the overwhelming majority of Wikipedia articles.
There is one trend on Wikipedia that has started to bother me lately: little "citation needed" tags on sentences that clearly do not need a citation. I saw one just the other day on the statement regarding the timeframe when the Berlin Wall came down. Hello? It was all over the news for weeks. Something like half the population of the western world remembers it vividly. You can ask random people on the street, if they're over the age of thirty, and many of them can tell you where they were and what they were doing when they got wind of it. If that doesn't qualify as common knowledge, what on earth would?
Not that I'm against citing sources when it's appropriate, mind you, but marking stuff like that as "citation needed" is just extremely bizarre.
> I believe it's silly to think that the modern world is somehow immune from the natural disasters that
> caused so much suffering documented in history
I don't believe that. There are lots of things that can happen, and some that almost certainly will at some point.
However, ocean levels rising is too gradual to be a major catastrophe at that level. People like you have been concerned about it since may parents were in gradeschool and to date the anticipated ocean level rises have pretty much entirely failed to materialize. I'm not saying they can't or won't, but I'm saing hat it only happens very slooowly. You said yourself "decades". I suspect more like centuries, but even if it's decades, that's a long time for the kind of thing you're talking about. Populations shift quite a bit in that amount of time, naturally, even without something like the ocean coming along and making the original location less habitable.
There are specific countries that might become non-viable, notably the Netherlands (which is sinking relative to the land around them, at least partly because draining the water out of the ground reduces its volume and lowers its surface), but civilization as we know it is not going to be ended by a two hundred foot increase in ocean levels over several decades. If it happened over the course of several days, maybe, but that's entirely a different and more catastrophic kind of scenario.
> If we depend on our port cities to feed ourselves with food from around the world.
Actually, virtually every first-world country is a net exporter of food. It's one of the key socio-economic features that macroeconomists look at. It's very hard for developing countries to make any real progress toward a healthy economy unless they can first figure out how to feed their own people without importing food.
And if the ocean levels rise, there will still be port cities. Just as many of them. They'll just be in slightly different places.
> Instead of NY being the financial capitol, it might be Philadelphia or Denver.
People aren't that bright. They'll move a few miles inland (at a time) if they have to, not a few hundred miles. If the new location then gets flooded a few years later, then they'll move a few more miles inland. You can see this behavior in places where there are recurring river floods, or in the southeastern US (notably Florida) where hurricanes regularly wipe out enough homes to keep the construction industry operating all the time at a rather higher level than population growth alone could support.
So there would still *be* a New York City, it would just not be in quite the same place.
And yes, all that building would be a significant drain on the economy (in that it would consume a significant portion of the GDP), but most first-world countries (certainly all of western Europe and North America) at this point spend more than half the GDP on extremely frivolous things (entertainment, recreation, and so forth), so a little financial hardship is not going to strain things so badly that civilization crumbles.
> The skylines we see today are the result of 100 years of constant building.
> Port cities are the key here, because they are what creates "the world as we know it today".
You're really hung up on the importance of skyscrapers, aren't you. Let me let you in on a little secret: a major port city can operate without a single building more than three stories tall. Skyscrapers are built because the land in an area is valuable, due to crowding, not because having them fundamentally enables anything that wouldn't otherwise be possible. The "hundreds of years of building" you refer to is actually hundreds of years of population growth in and, especially, migration toward the cities. The buildings are only built as fast as they need to be to accommodate the needs. They actually *could* be built rather faster -- well, actually, more like more of them at a time (this is analagous to the differen
> It would be the end of the current world as we know it.
You should work in Hollywood.
Global warming is not some kind of enormous earthquake, volcano, asteroid, or alien invasion that's going to sweep in over the course of a long weekend, wipe out 75% of the population and 95% of the infrastructure, and leave us in the stone age. As you point out yourself, ocean levels, if they rise at all, will take decades to do so. It is not even a foregone conclusion that the water will rise significantly. I am not aware of any strong evidence that ocean levels are significantly higher today than they were in 1622 when the Bosphorus froze, though we're pretty sure the earth was colder then and the ice caps a good deal larger. It is possible that the ocean levels will rise -- gradually, but while it would be inconvenient to have to move things inland, it would certainly not be the end of the world as we know it.
> We can't migrate skyscrapers.
We can build new skyscrapers, if we need them. (I am not, personally, convinced they're really such a terribly good idea anyhow, but that's another matter for another thread.) Yes, the owners of the current skyscrapers would lose billions of dollars if they had to be abandoned, but calling that "the end of the world" is just overly dramatic. Furthermore there are *lots* of skyscrapers at elevations out of reach for even the most dire global-warming-flood predictions (discounting the movie Waterworld, which also features a man with gills and seas *much* too calm for there supposedly being not much land to block the winds and currents, not to mention precise navigation, down to specific coordinates, with no landmarks for dead reckoning, no star charts, and no accurate clocks).
> It would be the end of the historical era, and a thousand years from now, archaeologists would be scanning
> the sea floors for the ancient lost cities of what might be called the 'modern era'.
Right, because there are no major cities at high enough altitudes to survive a couple hundred extra feet of ocean depth, and all the technology and almost all the people, especially the educated people, are in the major cities. If you're not in New York or L.A., there's pretty much nothing but cornfields and deserts in the rest of the world. Yeah, I almost fell for that line of reasoning. Would have done, if I'd forgotten to wake up my brain this morning. Like I said, you should work in Hollywood. You'd fit right in.
> hello big oil shutting down refineries for maintenance right after coming off of
> maintenance cycles to decrease production
Does that violate some law I'm not aware of? I would have guessed, if no one told me otherwise, that they would probably be allowed to shut down one of their refineries just because they decide they want to shut it down. I realise people might not *like* them doing that, but if it's illegal, I am not aware of the law that makes it illegal.
I was thinking that. Cold is much easier to defend against than heat. All you need is low-tech stuff: clothing, blankets, food, shelter, and if you're really desperate fire. Excess heat is another matter. If the power (and thus the air conditioning) goes out, you've got a real problem.