6.9 billion, perhaps. We're nearly to 6.8 billion right now and the high UN projection is to hit 9 billion around 2030. Medium projection is 9 billion around 2050, and low is never reaching it. (Source)
The solution is simple -- before fucking with the planet and spending billions of dollars on green efforts, work to limit the population growth.
The good news is that we can actually do multiple things at once. There's no need to completely ignore one issue just because there's another one that you see as more pressing.
Unbelievably, one innocent traveler made it home with 90 grams of explosives, and had his flat surrounded by the police and bomb squad.
What do you mean unbelievably? I'd hope to most people that the ability to get through security with a bomb is completely unsurprising. Surely to anyone capable of critical thought and has been through an airport security checkpoint.
A test is a class assignment. A paper is a class assingment. Turing notes into a class assignment--and especially mandating a specific format for notes--is counter-productive: it prevents students from taking notes in a format conducive to their learning. Notes are not a paper or a test: they're things for the student's reference.Requiring that a student takes notes is rarely harmful--I've known a few people who do can't focus on the lecture and take notes at the same time, but most people would surely benefit--but mandating that they take notes in your format hinders students in taking notes in a way most beneficial to the entire point to taking notes.Your analogies completely miss the entire purpose of taking notes, and so did the professor. Complaining that the professor should be fired was definitely an immature way of dealing with it, but that doesn't take away from the fact that the requirement was very misguided.
I've had a couple classes where the professors wanted to see students' notes, just to make sure we were taking them and paying attention. I provided the notes, but with a warning to them that my notes are going to be filled with the occasional shorthand, foreign word, or unexplained reference. If the professor needed me to rewrite my notes in a readable format, that meant an extra writing assignment for each day of class, as I couldn't take notes that are both legible to others and useful to myself fast enough by hand (and at the time I had no laptop). Demanding that I write notes in their format in class would be tantamount to demanding that I don't pay attention to half the lecture. How is that sane?
That was through reductions in child mortality, not extending the life of people who manage to live to adulthood. See this chart for specifics. Newborns have an extra ~30 years, but 65-year-olds only have an extra ~5, on average.
but I have never, ever heard it as a racial slur before today, so if it has been one in the past, it sure hasn't been very common.
Alternative explanation: you haven't been paying the least bit of attention. Perhaps you should look up prior usage on Google. I'm finding plentyofcitations.
I mean its cool and all, but I'm not sure I see where this is going.
That's how basic research works. You don't know where it's going to lead until suddenly you discover germs, or electricity, or proteins, or vitamins, or x-rays. Or just a better understanding of how the universe works--that's pretty valuable in its own right.
Vaccinations are a social responsibility. If you don't vaccinate your kid, you're putting everyone's kids at risk (and adults, of course, but mostly kids and old folks).
Similarly, the suggestion that pharmaceutical companies make vaccines hoping to pocket huge profits is ludicrous to Offit. Vaccines, after all, are given once or twice or three times in a lifetime. Diabetes drugs, neurological drugs, Lipitor, Viagra, even Rogaine — stuff that a large number of people use every day — that’s where the money is.
That’s not to say vaccines aren’t profitable: RotaTeq costs a little under $4 a dose to make, according to Offit. Merck has sold a total of more than 24 million doses in the US, most for $69.59 a pop — a 17-fold markup. Not bad, but pharmaceutical companies do sell a lot of vaccines at cost to the developing world and in some cases give them away. Merck committed $75 million in 2006 to vaccinate all children born in Nicaragua for three years. In 2008, Merck’s revenue from RotaTeq was $665 million. Meanwhile, a blockbuster drug like Pfizer’s Lipitor is a $12 billion-a-year business.
Vaccines save lives. Anti-vaxxers use lies and bullying to kill people and promote their pseudoscientific nonsense. It's a shame they won this battle, and people will die as a result. If there's one area of science and technology that needs an army of Slashdotters defending it today, it's vaccines and science-based medicine in general. Fight back.
I can't see the people that are really hooked on the intarwebs rioting.
I'd riot. Shutting down the Internet would kill the economy. Technologic regressions are never really a viable option, and losing the Internet would be a huge one, especially as far as the economy is concerned.
One second thought, no, I wouldn't riot. If they turned off the Internet, I'd just turn it back on again, with the help of the other millions of tech-savvy people who like having jobs, to say nothing of food, electricity, running water, etc.Yes, we survived without the Internet. We also survived without agriculture. But that doesn't mean we can do that with todays needs.
Asimov said it quite well in Science Past--Science Future:
Faced with that cold fact, only scattered individuals here and there have ever returned to the "simple life." No matter how much they urged it on others, the population generally could not follow; they literally could not. No farming community in history, anywhere, at any time, has voluntarily and en masse abandoned farming and resumed food gathering. It is not possible to make such a change.
(And this holds true for every important technological advance. Any retreat to a previous level must mean a large reduction in man's range or his numbers or both--and this is a catastrophe men will not accept voluntarily.)
Losing the Internet might not dramatically reduce our range or numbers, but it would catastrophically reduce our wealth (read: quality of life).
They still don't use SSL (though it looks like if you tell it to, it will--most people won't. Most people don't even know how.) or anything other than your username and password.
People (hopefully) use strong passwords for their online banking, and banking sites add additional possibly-helpful (though often not really) authentication methods. I doubt people guard their Twitter passwords so jealously (or that Twitter takes security as seriously as the banks).
One principle of security: if security is important, avoid relying on external systems any more than necessary, especially relatively low-security. Using email is for stuff is a necessary evil. Using Twitter is not. I guard my email account jealously, because I know you can use it to access dozens of my accounts.
'The people' have already paid for the BBC via their TV license fees, it is in no way 'free'.
Why should they pay again just because Murdoch doesn't like the competition?
Way to completely miss the point. Everyone in the UK (with a TV?) is forced to pay for the BBC. News Corporation doesn't get the option of forcing everyone to pay them. Therefore, the BBC has an unfair advantage, which is anti-competitive and may damage the news market.
Of course, the reality is that the BBC is providing a valuable public service that the competitive market refuses to fill: objective, mature reporting. And News Corporation fails the worst.
1998 was the year of the strongest El Nino of the century. No one is saying (or no expert is saying--no telling what random activists will claim) that every year with be successively hotter than the last, any more than each successive day in December is colder than the last. Global warming is a global trend, and needs to be considered as a trend. Here's a good debunking of this particularly bad GW-skeptic argument.
(I realized that with the Winter analogy I just cued the 'it's a natural cycle and therefore humans have no effect' people. But scientists didn't just somehow overlook that possibility. Maybe they're not a bunch of absent-minded bumblers after all?)
As any sane person would expect, and thirty seconds on Google would confirm, the browser asks permission before sending the location data. Screenshot. No privacy is being taken away.
Lesson of the day: don't make nutty assumptions, and don't post knee-jerk reactions based on them.
Slashdot Mirror
xkcd: Sheeple
6.9 billion, perhaps. We're nearly to 6.8 billion right now and the high UN projection is to hit 9 billion around 2030. Medium projection is 9 billion around 2050, and low is never reaching it. (Source)
The good news is that we can actually do multiple things at once. There's no need to completely ignore one issue just because there's another one that you see as more pressing.
What do you mean unbelievably? I'd hope to most people that the ability to get through security with a bomb is completely unsurprising. Surely to anyone capable of critical thought and has been through an airport security checkpoint.
A test is a class assignment. A paper is a class assingment. Turing notes into a class assignment--and especially mandating a specific format for notes--is counter-productive: it prevents students from taking notes in a format conducive to their learning. Notes are not a paper or a test: they're things for the student's reference.Requiring that a student takes notes is rarely harmful--I've known a few people who do can't focus on the lecture and take notes at the same time, but most people would surely benefit--but mandating that they take notes in your format hinders students in taking notes in a way most beneficial to the entire point to taking notes.Your analogies completely miss the entire purpose of taking notes, and so did the professor. Complaining that the professor should be fired was definitely an immature way of dealing with it, but that doesn't take away from the fact that the requirement was very misguided.
I've had a couple classes where the professors wanted to see students' notes, just to make sure we were taking them and paying attention. I provided the notes, but with a warning to them that my notes are going to be filled with the occasional shorthand, foreign word, or unexplained reference. If the professor needed me to rewrite my notes in a readable format, that meant an extra writing assignment for each day of class, as I couldn't take notes that are both legible to others and useful to myself fast enough by hand (and at the time I had no laptop). Demanding that I write notes in their format in class would be tantamount to demanding that I don't pay attention to half the lecture. How is that sane?
That was through reductions in child mortality, not extending the life of people who manage to live to adulthood. See this chart for specifics. Newborns have an extra ~30 years, but 65-year-olds only have an extra ~5, on average.
It wasn't implied that the problem was that they were free. It was implied that because they're free, complaints are unwarranted.
The counter-point is that they have a hidden cost, and that's what the court cases were about. He wasn't trolling; he was answering a question.
I'm guessing that's what icebraining was referring to, but no one had suggested being free was the problem.
What does 'that' refer to? No one has suggested a problem for it to not be.
Repeat after me: for-profit companies are run by people, not an infallible profit-maximizing robot.
Kill current livestock v. kill current livestock after breeding them so we can kill more in the future.
How is PETA wrong in choosing the former, again?
0.00001 * 300 000 000 = 3 000.
Alternative explanation: you haven't been paying the least bit of attention. Perhaps you should look up prior usage on Google. I'm finding plenty of citations.
Have you looked at the ratings lately? I believe the only things beating Fox are the Daily Show and the Colbert Report.
I've been looking for a viable hash for years. I can't perform an md5sum in my head.
That's how basic research works. You don't know where it's going to lead until suddenly you discover germs, or electricity, or proteins, or vitamins, or x-rays. Or just a better understanding of how the universe works--that's pretty valuable in its own right.
Has President Obama and other high-level politicians, powerful elites, etc, along with their families, taken the H1N1 vaccine?
If no, there's the answer right there regarding its safety.
Because they're definitely the people with the highest risk of infection.
How can you have a positive slant vaccine article?
"Man gets immunized, doesn't get the sniffles..."
You expand the scale. You report on where's being hit by the targeted disease (and there are many) or not being hit hard--whether it be at the national level, state level, city level, or school level--and look at the immunization rates in these places.
Since the general population hates math and prefers personal stories, you can always focus on a particular unvaccinated child who died as a result. Report on how some kids can't be vaccinated (and on whom the vaccine just doesn't take) and are at risk because other kids who could be vaccinated weren't.
Vaccinations are a social responsibility. If you don't vaccinate your kid, you're putting everyone's kids at risk (and adults, of course, but mostly kids and old folks).
(Source -- definitely worth reading)
Vaccines save lives. Anti-vaxxers use lies and bullying to kill people and promote their pseudoscientific nonsense. It's a shame they won this battle, and people will die as a result. If there's one area of science and technology that needs an army of Slashdotters defending it today, it's vaccines and science-based medicine in general. Fight back.
I'd riot. Shutting down the Internet would kill the economy. Technologic regressions are never really a viable option, and losing the Internet would be a huge one, especially as far as the economy is concerned.
One second thought, no, I wouldn't riot. If they turned off the Internet, I'd just turn it back on again, with the help of the other millions of tech-savvy people who like having jobs, to say nothing of food, electricity, running water, etc.Yes, we survived without the Internet. We also survived without agriculture. But that doesn't mean we can do that with todays needs.
Asimov said it quite well in Science Past--Science Future:
Losing the Internet might not dramatically reduce our range or numbers, but it would catastrophically reduce our wealth (read: quality of life).
They still don't use SSL (though it looks like if you tell it to, it will--most people won't. Most people don't even know how.) or anything other than your username and password.
People (hopefully) use strong passwords for their online banking, and banking sites add additional possibly-helpful (though often not really) authentication methods. I doubt people guard their Twitter passwords so jealously (or that Twitter takes security as seriously as the banks).
One principle of security: if security is important, avoid relying on external systems any more than necessary, especially relatively low-security. Using email is for stuff is a necessary evil. Using Twitter is not. I guard my email account jealously, because I know you can use it to access dozens of my accounts.
Like IE.
Way to completely miss the point. Everyone in the UK (with a TV?) is forced to pay for the BBC. News Corporation doesn't get the option of forcing everyone to pay them. Therefore, the BBC has an unfair advantage, which is anti-competitive and may damage the news market.
Of course, the reality is that the BBC is providing a valuable public service that the competitive market refuses to fill: objective, mature reporting. And News Corporation fails the worst.
1998 was the year of the strongest El Nino of the century. No one is saying (or no expert is saying--no telling what random activists will claim) that every year with be successively hotter than the last, any more than each successive day in December is colder than the last. Global warming is a global trend, and needs to be considered as a trend. Here's a good debunking of this particularly bad GW-skeptic argument.
(I realized that with the Winter analogy I just cued the 'it's a natural cycle and therefore humans have no effect' people. But scientists didn't just somehow overlook that possibility. Maybe they're not a bunch of absent-minded bumblers after all?)
I'm 27 and my dad bought his first computer the year before I was born.
As any sane person would expect, and thirty seconds on Google would confirm, the browser asks permission before sending the location data. Screenshot. No privacy is being taken away.
Lesson of the day: don't make nutty assumptions, and don't post knee-jerk reactions based on them.