Actually, China lags far behind in two ways. CO2 per dollar GDP. I'm using different numbers from what you are, since you didn't indicate what source you used. I'm using http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/contents.html for my data.
US GDP, 2003 (estimated): 11.0T USD China GDP, 2004 (estimated): 1.65T USD India GDP, 2003 (estimated): 0.56T USD
US CO2 emissions, 2002 (est): 5796M tons China CO2 emissions, 2003 (est): 3541M tons India CO2 emissions, 2002 (est): 1026M tons
I'll go ahead and list GDP/CO2 like you did, as opposed to CO2/GDP:
US $GDP/ton CO2: 1898 China $GDP/ton CO2: 466 India $GDP/ton CO2: 546 (For reference, with the data I used, EU $GDP/ton CO2 is 2762. That's CO2 emissions in 2002 and GDP in 2003.)
Another thing to look at is the CO2 emissions per unit energy consumed.
US tons CO2/billion BTU: 58.96 China tons CO2/billion BTU: 77.82 India tons CO2/billion BTU: 73.28 EU tons CO2/billion BTU: 54.42
The difference in this number between the US and the EU is likely from the higher rate of adoption of nuclear power in the EU (France, Germany, and the UK all have higher rates of nuclear power generation than the US, and while Italy has no nuclear power plants, it uses more hydro power and less coal power than the US). However, the US's power generation is roughly as clean as that of the EU.
As for the difference between the US and the EU in GDP/CO2, I honestly don't know what could cause that large a difference. A couple possible contributors: The US is bigger, and the major population centers are on opposite sides of the country, so fuel costs for shipping are higher. Also, large consumer automobiles are far more common in the US than the EU. (Note that I'm all in favor of measures to encourage the use of smaller cars in the US.)
However, the numbers for China and India, both of which have about three times the GDP growth rate of the US or EU, should be of much more concern. The increased oil consumption of these two countries is largely responsible for the increase in oil prices this year, yet neither one is considered even an Annex I country under the UNFCCC/Kyoto Protocol, meaning they are both exempt from the CO2 reduction requirements.
IMO, incredible amounts of computing power is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for solving the AI "problem".
The real question is how much will be needed - how far down do we have to dig when simulating a biological intelligence? Will stopping at the algorithmic or procedural level suffice? Do we have to simulate neurons, and if we do, do we only need to simulate frequency-domain behavior, or do we have to go with a full-blown Hodgkin-Huxley-esque model of neuronal activity?
Or, perish the thought, is even that not sufficient, and do we have to start simulating intracellular or even molecular activity?
The only people who stand to lose are the people who have large investments in current, inefficient technologies.
That'd be most transportation, utility, and manufacturing companies. And the effect of "losing" is that the cost of production of their goods goes up during the changeover to cleaner production methods. That means that everyone is paying more - a lot more - for the same goods they bought last year, without a corresponding increase in wages. Sales decrease, so profits decrease, so people lose jobs.
All that "extra money" goes into producing equipment that doesn't add anything to the growth of the economy, unless the new methods of production also happen to be more efficient cost-wise (which they aren't, and I think that's the failing in your logic - "cleaner" and "more efficient" don't overlap given technology today, while you were assuming they do).
If, as you say, "an aggressive move to energy efficient technologies would create new jobs and growth, and would lower operating costs," then why aren't developing nations jumping at the opportunity to create this new growth? The reason the US didn't sign Kyoto is because developing nations were made exempt from the conditions of the treaty. They were made exempt because they were viewed as being less able to afford such changes. That flies in the face of your statement that changing technologies is a boon to a nation's economy.
They sure do, because the message we are sending right now is that we want to limit them while continuing our wasteful energy use, since our negotiating position is to use our current, wasteful usage as the basis for future budgets. I suspect developing nations would easily agree to a uniform global per-capita energy and fossil fuel budget.
Of course they would, because it uses a faulty metric that's in their benefit. A better measure of what's being done with one's energy consumption isn't per-capita, it's per-dollar-GDP. With that measure, the US is far more efficient than (for example) China and India, whose ability to claim decent per-capita energy consumption is entirely due to the tremendous difference between their urban middle and upper classes and their gigantic rural farming lower class.
Furthermore, if you think you can't "afford" that level of change, what do you think loss of what is probably going to be 50% of the currently inhabited area of the US is going to do to quality of life? Because that's what's going to happen if the trend continues.
The US eastern seaboard isn't just going to roll off into the ocean all in one day, any more than the US is going to switch to nuclear power all in one day. What's more, it's unlikely that, if coastal flooding is going to occur, the US can do anything to stop it. A possible solution is to slowly begin encouraging people to move their homes and businesses inland (we have a lot of space), while building a newer energy infrastructure (nuclear power) as we make that move. The key here is slowly. As long as things are done gradually, the new jobs created by such a program won't be completely swamped by the jobs lost from suddenly shutting off the old infrastructure.
There's one important difference between the abuse of PDF and the abuse of Flash: nobody tries to do site navigation entirely in PDF.
On the other hand, you'll see sites chock full of Flash widgets that form the navigational structure of the entire site. Some use a zillion widgets, each of which has a stupid animation when you mouse over it and which only does one other thing, namely, send you to a particular URL when you click on it. You can do the same thing with an animated GIF and a Javascript function, if you really need to do it at all. And some of them use one gigantic widget that loads everything into one place. That means that you are stuck using whatever Flash navigation they provide, rendering basic browser functions like Back, Forward, Reload, and View Source completely useless.
I'm probably just as entertained as you are by the Flash widgets that serve a useful purpose (whatever the latest Flash meme is, etc.). But the misuses of Flash are so egregious that I cringe at the thought of what this new company will do to "enhance" the functionality of a perfectly good program like Acrobat.
Not just an ally, but a potential source of financial support during grad school, especially if the same grant funding the research that your senior project is a part of continues past your graduation date.
It's the same way all over TV. I'm sure you've seen those overlay ads where a cable TV network will advertise other shows they are running (TNT, TBS, FX, and ABC Family are notorious). Well, apparently, a GIGANTIC AD on top of your favorite TV shows isn't good enough - they also put in sound effects. Like during baseball season, TBS advertises Braves games by having the sound effect of bat hitting ball, fans cheering, and then showing a ball come in and hit the screen, accompanied by a cracking noise and a huge overlay of shattered glass preventing you from watching your show.
You might think, hey, it worked - he remembered it was TBS and a Braves game. Well, yeah. I remember it because it makes me never want to watch TBS ever again.
Sadly, I haven't seen classic Dr. Who run on my local PBS stations for nearly two decades. I think it got pulled across most of the country around that time. Fortunately, the Beeb has a group that's touching up the old eps and transferring them to DVD, and sloooowly they're being released in the States (many more eps have been released in the UK - I have no idea why the release schedules aren't even remotely similar).
Doesn't that still cost them money? They could save even more money by allowing almost all of the incurred bandwidth to become the consumers' responsibility (which is what BitTorrent does, of course).
Hollywood hasn't learned a thing. Sure, they do worldwide releases of movies because the distribution infrastructure makes it possible now, and a World-Wide Spectacular Extravaganza surrounding the release of Lame-Ass Supposed Teenagers Getting Chainsawed In The Back While Having Sex On A Camping Trip XII makes for better publicity and better numbers.
But then when it comes time for Lame-Ass XII to be released on DVD, who knows when (for example) Australia or New Zealand is going to get it. And if they try to order it overseas from the U.S. from Amazon, they'd better have a Region I player if they don't want to use the disc as a drink coaster. And there's no reason for that. If the worldwide distribution infrastructure is in place for the initial release, then it can be in place for the DVD release as well.
That seems like a problem answerable by irreducible complexity, if you discount the assumption that's being made here that homochirality is a necessity for the beginnings of life rather than a convenience. Why is this assumption being made - what justification is there for believing it to be true?
Once self-propagating chemical systems form, they are likely to produce chemicals of the same chirality. Fast-forward a billion years, and the various chemicals that remain naturally occurring on Earth are all of the same chirality, because self-propagating systems have been making more of those, while the other chirality hasn't had the same benefit.
In fact, you could have systems (or organisms) of each chirality coexisting when the building block molecules were found in both chiralities. All it takes is one evolutionary breakthrough in one organism to have its population skyrocket and take up all the resources that the other organisms are trying to use. Better yet, if one organism happens to develop an enzyme for breaking down molecules of the opposite chirality, it easily kills off half the competition.
One big difference, however, is that people who are playing the game are just playing. People farming gold and items are working - and not just working, but also earning a wage paid from a foreign country. The Chinese government will probably turn a blind eye toward the gold farmers in their country, and I wouldn't be surprised if they actually encouraged it as well.
Yes, there may be cultural mores (and certainly, Beijing cites those when creating policies such as this) surrounding computer and video games, but I think there's a more practical government objective at work here as well.
One thing to consider is that China is going to suffer from a self-inflicted "top-heavy" population demographic in coming years (similar to the U.S. baby boom generation, or the rather elderly, on average, population of Japan) because of their baby boom in the 1960s and the subsequent one-child policy.
It's in the best interests of China to ensure that as their baby boomers grow older, their upcoming youth population is taught a strong work ethic so that when the economy is overburdened with their elderly population, they at least have a strong working age population to support them. Marathon gaming sessions are contrary to such a work ethic, so it's not surprising that the Chinese government would try to prevent games from occupying more than a superficial place in the lives of their people.
Actually, I think Spitzer is one of those folks who has demonstrated a calling in life, and being governor of New York or PotUS isn't it. He'd make a great chair of the SEC or a great US Attorney General.
Along the same lines, I'd love to see Al Gore as EPA chief or Ralph Nader heading up the FTC, because they've both demonstrated a passion for the kind of work involved. But I wouldn't (and didn't) vote for either one for President.
...but sometimes you find that the original source for some material is in a text published thirty (or sixty, or even more) years ago that simply cannot be found online. While you may be able to hit the online journals for current research, there's no substitute for citing the fundamentals, and you can't honestly cite a work without even taking a moment to skim through it first.
So, until a university scans all of its book collection for online perusal, this is a step in the wrong direction.
In a house where I lived with four other people, we had an old old Linux box set up as a gateway for dialing in to teh Intarweb. It also functioned as our print server. Anyway, one day, I wanted to print something out, but upon inspection of the box, someone had unhooked the printer cable from the ISA hard drive controller/serial port/parallel port card. So, I picked up the cable and started hooking it back to the parallel port connector.
What I didn't realize was that somebody had also neglected to use a mounting screw to hold that card in place, and the force I was applying pushed one side of the ISA card up and out of the slot. The box started beeping like crazy, and I went "OH CRAP!" and quickly slammed home the card. Looking up at the screen, I saw a couple dozen error messages from the Linux kernel, but I tried a few commands at the prompt and discovered that not only had nothing burned out, but everything was still running just fine.
If it doesn't advertise something, then it's not really spam. So, if it's a subscription or account creation verification e-mail that doesn't include ads, and it's sent in good faith (meaning that somebody did put your e-mail address in their form, whether it was you or not, and they are actually and honestly trying to verify that you wanted an account or subscription), then nothing's wrong.
If, on the other hand, they include advertisements or send e-mails claiming to be verification e-mails but that are really just mass e-mails to bulk address lists to surreptitiously advertise their website, then it's spam.
Never mind the 20 years versus 10 years thing. The article confusingly refers to temperature change "over the next decade", but then mentions that they actually plan to analyze data from 1998 to 2017, or about 20 years. I maintain my point about Lindzen's specificity of skepticism, however.
Note that, per your quote, Lindzen is a skeptic of human activity causing climate change. Note also that he said he was willing to wager that temperatures would drop over 20 years rather than 10.
That doesn't mean that he doesn't believe that climate change isn't occurring. Asking for 50-1 odds on a bet that doesn't really factor in the particulars of his beliefs only means that he thinks there's at least 50-1 odds that the earth will still warm in the next ten years, regardless of the cause.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, and my reference for the exemption of developing countries:
w ork_Convention_on_Climate_Change
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Frame
Actually, China lags far behind in two ways. CO2 per dollar GDP. I'm using different numbers from what you are, since you didn't indicate what source you used. I'm using http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/contents.html for my data.
US GDP, 2003 (estimated): 11.0T USD
China GDP, 2004 (estimated): 1.65T USD
India GDP, 2003 (estimated): 0.56T USD
US CO2 emissions, 2002 (est): 5796M tons
China CO2 emissions, 2003 (est): 3541M tons
India CO2 emissions, 2002 (est): 1026M tons
I'll go ahead and list GDP/CO2 like you did, as opposed to CO2/GDP:
US $GDP/ton CO2: 1898
China $GDP/ton CO2: 466
India $GDP/ton CO2: 546
(For reference, with the data I used, EU $GDP/ton CO2 is 2762. That's CO2 emissions in 2002 and GDP in 2003.)
Another thing to look at is the CO2 emissions per unit energy consumed.
US tons CO2/billion BTU: 58.96
China tons CO2/billion BTU: 77.82
India tons CO2/billion BTU: 73.28
EU tons CO2/billion BTU: 54.42
The difference in this number between the US and the EU is likely from the higher rate of adoption of nuclear power in the EU (France, Germany, and the UK all have higher rates of nuclear power generation than the US, and while Italy has no nuclear power plants, it uses more hydro power and less coal power than the US). However, the US's power generation is roughly as clean as that of the EU.
As for the difference between the US and the EU in GDP/CO2, I honestly don't know what could cause that large a difference. A couple possible contributors: The US is bigger, and the major population centers are on opposite sides of the country, so fuel costs for shipping are higher. Also, large consumer automobiles are far more common in the US than the EU. (Note that I'm all in favor of measures to encourage the use of smaller cars in the US.)
However, the numbers for China and India, both of which have about three times the GDP growth rate of the US or EU, should be of much more concern. The increased oil consumption of these two countries is largely responsible for the increase in oil prices this year, yet neither one is considered even an Annex I country under the UNFCCC/Kyoto Protocol, meaning they are both exempt from the CO2 reduction requirements.
IMO, incredible amounts of computing power is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for solving the AI "problem".
The real question is how much will be needed - how far down do we have to dig when simulating a biological intelligence? Will stopping at the algorithmic or procedural level suffice? Do we have to simulate neurons, and if we do, do we only need to simulate frequency-domain behavior, or do we have to go with a full-blown Hodgkin-Huxley-esque model of neuronal activity?
Or, perish the thought, is even that not sufficient, and do we have to start simulating intracellular or even molecular activity?
The only people who stand to lose are the people who have large investments in current, inefficient technologies.
That'd be most transportation, utility, and manufacturing companies. And the effect of "losing" is that the cost of production of their goods goes up during the changeover to cleaner production methods. That means that everyone is paying more - a lot more - for the same goods they bought last year, without a corresponding increase in wages. Sales decrease, so profits decrease, so people lose jobs.
All that "extra money" goes into producing equipment that doesn't add anything to the growth of the economy, unless the new methods of production also happen to be more efficient cost-wise (which they aren't, and I think that's the failing in your logic - "cleaner" and "more efficient" don't overlap given technology today, while you were assuming they do).
If, as you say, "an aggressive move to energy efficient technologies would create new jobs and growth, and would lower operating costs," then why aren't developing nations jumping at the opportunity to create this new growth? The reason the US didn't sign Kyoto is because developing nations were made exempt from the conditions of the treaty. They were made exempt because they were viewed as being less able to afford such changes. That flies in the face of your statement that changing technologies is a boon to a nation's economy.
They sure do, because the message we are sending right now is that we want to limit them while continuing our wasteful energy use, since our negotiating position is to use our current, wasteful usage as the basis for future budgets. I suspect developing nations would easily agree to a uniform global per-capita energy and fossil fuel budget.
Of course they would, because it uses a faulty metric that's in their benefit. A better measure of what's being done with one's energy consumption isn't per-capita, it's per-dollar-GDP. With that measure, the US is far more efficient than (for example) China and India, whose ability to claim decent per-capita energy consumption is entirely due to the tremendous difference between their urban middle and upper classes and their gigantic rural farming lower class.
Furthermore, if you think you can't "afford" that level of change, what do you think loss of what is probably going to be 50% of the currently inhabited area of the US is going to do to quality of life? Because that's what's going to happen if the trend continues.
The US eastern seaboard isn't just going to roll off into the ocean all in one day, any more than the US is going to switch to nuclear power all in one day. What's more, it's unlikely that, if coastal flooding is going to occur, the US can do anything to stop it. A possible solution is to slowly begin encouraging people to move their homes and businesses inland (we have a lot of space), while building a newer energy infrastructure (nuclear power) as we make that move. The key here is slowly. As long as things are done gradually, the new jobs created by such a program won't be completely swamped by the jobs lost from suddenly shutting off the old infrastructure.
There's one important difference between the abuse of PDF and the abuse of Flash: nobody tries to do site navigation entirely in PDF.
On the other hand, you'll see sites chock full of Flash widgets that form the navigational structure of the entire site. Some use a zillion widgets, each of which has a stupid animation when you mouse over it and which only does one other thing, namely, send you to a particular URL when you click on it. You can do the same thing with an animated GIF and a Javascript function, if you really need to do it at all. And some of them use one gigantic widget that loads everything into one place. That means that you are stuck using whatever Flash navigation they provide, rendering basic browser functions like Back, Forward, Reload, and View Source completely useless.
I'm probably just as entertained as you are by the Flash widgets that serve a useful purpose (whatever the latest Flash meme is, etc.). But the misuses of Flash are so egregious that I cringe at the thought of what this new company will do to "enhance" the functionality of a perfectly good program like Acrobat.
My point is, how is botting the parts of WoW that you don't find fun any less lazy than botting poker?
Not just an ally, but a potential source of financial support during grad school, especially if the same grant funding the research that your senior project is a part of continues past your graduation date.
In this case, I see the bots as a failure on Blizzard's part to keep the game interesting, and item drops common.
Why is botting in online poker just laziness on the part of the botter, but in WoW it's Blizzard's fault? A bit of a double standard there.
It's the same way all over TV. I'm sure you've seen those overlay ads where a cable TV network will advertise other shows they are running (TNT, TBS, FX, and ABC Family are notorious). Well, apparently, a GIGANTIC AD on top of your favorite TV shows isn't good enough - they also put in sound effects. Like during baseball season, TBS advertises Braves games by having the sound effect of bat hitting ball, fans cheering, and then showing a ball come in and hit the screen, accompanied by a cracking noise and a huge overlay of shattered glass preventing you from watching your show.
You might think, hey, it worked - he remembered it was TBS and a Braves game. Well, yeah. I remember it because it makes me never want to watch TBS ever again.
Sadly, I haven't seen classic Dr. Who run on my local PBS stations for nearly two decades. I think it got pulled across most of the country around that time. Fortunately, the Beeb has a group that's touching up the old eps and transferring them to DVD, and sloooowly they're being released in the States (many more eps have been released in the UK - I have no idea why the release schedules aren't even remotely similar).
Doesn't that still cost them money? They could save even more money by allowing almost all of the incurred bandwidth to become the consumers' responsibility (which is what BitTorrent does, of course).
Hollywood hasn't learned a thing. Sure, they do worldwide releases of movies because the distribution infrastructure makes it possible now, and a World-Wide Spectacular Extravaganza surrounding the release of Lame-Ass Supposed Teenagers Getting Chainsawed In The Back While Having Sex On A Camping Trip XII makes for better publicity and better numbers.
But then when it comes time for Lame-Ass XII to be released on DVD, who knows when (for example) Australia or New Zealand is going to get it. And if they try to order it overseas from the U.S. from Amazon, they'd better have a Region I player if they don't want to use the disc as a drink coaster. And there's no reason for that. If the worldwide distribution infrastructure is in place for the initial release, then it can be in place for the DVD release as well.
That seems like a problem answerable by irreducible complexity, if you discount the assumption that's being made here that homochirality is a necessity for the beginnings of life rather than a convenience. Why is this assumption being made - what justification is there for believing it to be true?
Once self-propagating chemical systems form, they are likely to produce chemicals of the same chirality. Fast-forward a billion years, and the various chemicals that remain naturally occurring on Earth are all of the same chirality, because self-propagating systems have been making more of those, while the other chirality hasn't had the same benefit.
In fact, you could have systems (or organisms) of each chirality coexisting when the building block molecules were found in both chiralities. All it takes is one evolutionary breakthrough in one organism to have its population skyrocket and take up all the resources that the other organisms are trying to use. Better yet, if one organism happens to develop an enzyme for breaking down molecules of the opposite chirality, it easily kills off half the competition.
Don't feel bad. Most of us Americans have a hard time speaking it. ;)
One big difference, however, is that people who are playing the game are just playing. People farming gold and items are working - and not just working, but also earning a wage paid from a foreign country. The Chinese government will probably turn a blind eye toward the gold farmers in their country, and I wouldn't be surprised if they actually encouraged it as well.
Yes, there may be cultural mores (and certainly, Beijing cites those when creating policies such as this) surrounding computer and video games, but I think there's a more practical government objective at work here as well.
One thing to consider is that China is going to suffer from a self-inflicted "top-heavy" population demographic in coming years (similar to the U.S. baby boom generation, or the rather elderly, on average, population of Japan) because of their baby boom in the 1960s and the subsequent one-child policy.
It's in the best interests of China to ensure that as their baby boomers grow older, their upcoming youth population is taught a strong work ethic so that when the economy is overburdened with their elderly population, they at least have a strong working age population to support them. Marathon gaming sessions are contrary to such a work ethic, so it's not surprising that the Chinese government would try to prevent games from occupying more than a superficial place in the lives of their people.
Actually, I think Spitzer is one of those folks who has demonstrated a calling in life, and being governor of New York or PotUS isn't it. He'd make a great chair of the SEC or a great US Attorney General.
Along the same lines, I'd love to see Al Gore as EPA chief or Ralph Nader heading up the FTC, because they've both demonstrated a passion for the kind of work involved. But I wouldn't (and didn't) vote for either one for President.
...but sometimes you find that the original source for some material is in a text published thirty (or sixty, or even more) years ago that simply cannot be found online. While you may be able to hit the online journals for current research, there's no substitute for citing the fundamentals, and you can't honestly cite a work without even taking a moment to skim through it first.
So, until a university scans all of its book collection for online perusal, this is a step in the wrong direction.
I'll give him this, though: his shenanigans were a helluva lot funnier than Ontrack's top 10.
In a house where I lived with four other people, we had an old old Linux box set up as a gateway for dialing in to teh Intarweb. It also functioned as our print server. Anyway, one day, I wanted to print something out, but upon inspection of the box, someone had unhooked the printer cable from the ISA hard drive controller/serial port/parallel port card. So, I picked up the cable and started hooking it back to the parallel port connector.
What I didn't realize was that somebody had also neglected to use a mounting screw to hold that card in place, and the force I was applying pushed one side of the ISA card up and out of the slot. The box started beeping like crazy, and I went "OH CRAP!" and quickly slammed home the card. Looking up at the screen, I saw a couple dozen error messages from the Linux kernel, but I tried a few commands at the prompt and discovered that not only had nothing burned out, but everything was still running just fine.
Boucher and Lofgren on the same side of an IP bill as Berman and Coble? Incredible.
If it doesn't advertise something, then it's not really spam. So, if it's a subscription or account creation verification e-mail that doesn't include ads, and it's sent in good faith (meaning that somebody did put your e-mail address in their form, whether it was you or not, and they are actually and honestly trying to verify that you wanted an account or subscription), then nothing's wrong.
If, on the other hand, they include advertisements or send e-mails claiming to be verification e-mails but that are really just mass e-mails to bulk address lists to surreptitiously advertise their website, then it's spam.
Never mind the 20 years versus 10 years thing. The article confusingly refers to temperature change "over the next decade", but then mentions that they actually plan to analyze data from 1998 to 2017, or about 20 years. I maintain my point about Lindzen's specificity of skepticism, however.
They plan to start the analysis with data recorded in 1998, and end the analysis with data to be recorded a bit over 10 years from now, in 2017.
The "over the next decade" thing is evidently a poor choice of words, however true those words might be, on the part of the article's author.
Note that, per your quote, Lindzen is a skeptic of human activity causing climate change. Note also that he said he was willing to wager that temperatures would drop over 20 years rather than 10.
That doesn't mean that he doesn't believe that climate change isn't occurring. Asking for 50-1 odds on a bet that doesn't really factor in the particulars of his beliefs only means that he thinks there's at least 50-1 odds that the earth will still warm in the next ten years, regardless of the cause.