If you want to keep the population of the Earth steady, then you need to send off a hundred thousand people every day. Where do you want the resource for commissioning a generation ship (or even orbital settlement) every year to come from? And do you expect that the people in the ships will stop breeding?
Overpopulation can be dealt with by moving people to other planets.
No it can't. At current birth rates, you'd need to move about a million people off planet every week. To put that in perspective, every day roughly 100K people get on planes at London Heathrow. That means that your spaceport would have slightly more departures to space then Heathrow has to terrestrial destinations, every day. Most travellers at Heathrow have under 20Kg of luggage: you're talking about permanent emigration, where people would need a lot more. Let's be conservative and say 100Kg of baggage allowance per person, making a total of about 100Kg. The energy cost to geosync orbit is 50 MJ/Kg. Assuming that in your future world, you have a 100% energy efficient solution (and you have a magical space drive to take them somewhere else), that's 10,000MJ (10GJ) per person, or 10PJ per week.
Now, to put that in perspective, that's about a tenth of the total world energy production currently, just to lift these people and a modest amount of baggage to orbit, using an unfeasibly efficient system and assuming that your magical space elevator is a sunk cost. This sounds almost feasible, but it has a number of unfeasible assumption. Current power beaming (the method of choice for powering a space elevator) is 0.5% efficient and scientists hope to get it up to 2%. That multiplies your energy cost by 50 and means that you're now talking about using five times the current total world power output just to lift people to orbit.
Now, you might say, if you have a space elevator then you could power it using photovoltaics in Earth orbit. Okay, let's look at that. We'll assume 40% efficient solar panels (about the theoretical maximum for photovoltaics). That gives us 400W/m^2. To get our 500PJ/week, we need a constant supply of around 825GW, or a square of solar panels 45km on each side, along with all of the associated cabling and infrastructure. That might just about be possible to build, once you have the space elevator running (though assuming 1Kg per square metre panel, with estimated costs of space elevator operation, it would cost around $400bn in today's dollars, so not exactly a cheap project).
And that's just to get people up to orbit. If you want to actually get them to another planet, you're going to need enough interplanetary ships to carry them somewhere else. And then there's the question of where you send them. Mars? Even if you terraform it, it has the same land mass as Earth, so even if you ignore the children of the colonists then it will fill up in about the time it would take the population of the Earth to double, so that's only going to buy you a few decades.
Since we're talking future hypotheticals, let's say that we find exoplanets with a compatible biosphere and develop a faster-than-light drive (and we'll not even think about the energy costs of that). Unless you reduce the birth rate, the human population is still going to keep doubling every few decades, so all of those newly colonised planets are going to start exporting people soon too. You'll need to double the number of human colonies every few decades and unless human-friendly planets are startlingly common, that's not sustainable. And if you do manage to reduce birth rates to a manageable amount, then the need to export people from Earth goes away.
stupid Desktop behavior ("I index everything I see -- oh, shiny! a media file: I'll throw that over to gstreamer")
The real issue here is that the indexer plugins don't run in an unprivileged sandbox. An indexer should have the rights to read the file that it's indexing, to write the metadata back via IPC to the parent process, and nothing else. It's insane that anyone would create a system that runs on untrusted data without any kind of privilege separation.
There isn't really an excuse for GStreamer still running in-process. Putting the encoded packets and the decoded memory buffers in shared memory and running the decode in another process doesn't add human-detectable latency on a modern system and means that you can strip the gstreamer process of privilege entirely, so a compromise can't hurt anything. The only issue is with GPU-assisted decoding of video, because any process that has access to the GPU has a massive attack surface of buggy GPU drivers and hardware to exploit and escape from the sandbox.
Bush inherited a growing economy, enacted a bunch of legislation to remove regulations (a big plank of the GOP) and boom - we have the 2007 recession
I'm no fan of Bush, but he inherited the tail end of the dot-com bubble, which was in process of bursting, and a banking industry that had had a lot of regulations removed by the Clinton administration.
It's not even that. An hypothesis is the thing that you get after observation. Observing that chimpanzees are not monogamous and that sexual intercourse between chimpanzees (and bonobos and many other primates) that are not monogamous lasts a few seconds would lead you to a very different hypothesis.
As humans realize that marriage is more likely going to result in divorce
There are only two ways for marriage to end: divorce (or an equivalent, such as annulment) or death. If people live longer, marriages are more likely to end in divorce.
The hypothesis doesn't really make sense. Chimpanzees do not practice monogamy, yet sex between chimps lasts a few seconds. In a pack or herd animal, the difference between spending a few seconds and spending a few minutes penetrating a female makes a negligible difference to that female's general availability: the male is still not going to be inside her for hours of the day. Oh, and chimpanzees do have a baculum, so the correlation is simply not there between longer intercourse and existence of a baculum.
It was the same with the electoral reform referendum: Do you want to keep our current crappy FPTP system, or do you want the worst of all of the proportional representation systems? A lot of people voted FPTP because they thought that it would be impossible to change the electoral system twice in a lifetime and they wanted something that was actually good. With the EU referendum, there were two bad choices: Do you want to keep the status quo, or do you want some unspecified other thing? The question boils down to 'are you doing pretty well at the moment?'
I feel sorry for the people who voted leave because they were tired of special interest groups having too much control over the political system, only to see those same groups take control over the exit negotiations and having government funding cut in their already-empoverished communities to pay for it.
Do you think the statist socialist places weren't doing socialism hard enough, or will you make a 'no true Scottsman' argument and claim they weren't doing it right?
In the case of the USSR, they started by doing it far too much and then gave up really doing it at all. Immediately devolving control to the soviets when they had absolutely no idea how to run the industries and agriculture suddenly under their control was a disaster. It wasn't even an unexpected one: even Marx pointed out that you need to have a gradual change to get to that end goal. A couple of African countries have made a similar mistake, taking land from white farmers and giving it to black people without bothering to give them any training in how to run a farm and then acting surprised when agriculture collapses. After that, the USSR moved to a centrally controlled model, which is pretty much the antithesis of the socialist ideal of those that do the work being in control of (and gaining the rewards from) that work. It's possible (though by no means certain) that a centrally planned economy could work now, with modern analytics and data gathering (if you could somehow avoid corruption distorting the data too badly), but it definitely couldn't work almost a century ago.
It's further complicated by the fact that one of the Nazi party's chief contenders for public support during their rise were the Sparticists, and their successors. To counter this, the Nazis adopted various bits of communist rhetoric, without ever intending to actually implement any of these plans.
The freedom of movement within the EU also has some negative effects. Most people in the UK learn at least some either French or German at school, but often not to a standard required to work in either country, and even if they do then that's only one other country where they can work. Almost everyone in the EU learns enough English to work low-skill jobs in the UK. At the opposite end, most high-skill jobs in the EU only require English. This means that freedom of movement creates opportunities for the high-skill workers in the UK, but increases competition for the lower-skilled jobs. The better-off people have benefitted from the freedom of movement, but the worse-off have not (though the amount to which they've suffered from it has been exaggerated by certain parts of the media).
The difference between Intel and AMD is the number of concurrent designs that they have underway. Intel starts a processor design with around 30 teams working independently and then gradually culls them. This meant that, once it was clear that Netburst as a disaster, they could go back to some of the other teams and prioritise them.
I'm also British, and while a lot of racists have taken the leave vote to be a license to come out of the closet, a lot of people who voted to leave are simply fed up with the status quo. Look at the map of voters: in places with strong economies, the vote was for remain, in places with large amounts of poverty the vote was to leave. The core issue is that a significant percentage of the population is fed up with constantly being shafted by those in power. The only tragedy is that they decided to rebel by voting to give more power to the people responsible for those policies.
Not quite, they began as a supplier for IBM. IBM insisted on a second source for all of the components of the IBM PC and wouldn't buy from Intel if Intel didn't license the 8088 designs to AMD and allow them to produce compatible chips. If they'd had the same foresight with respect to the operating system, the next few decades might have been very different.
both times, Intel crushed them so bad, they almost didn't recover. Once due to illegal market pressure and the second time by revamping the cpu to blow AMD out of the water in specs. Intel has AMD's 64 bit tech now.
In the second case, it was more that AMD didn't realise that power consumption had become important. The market shifted and AMD didn't have competing products. Laptops went from a niche to the largest market segment and server purchasers started to care about their air conditioning costs more than raw compute.
If nuclear is so cheap, then why does the British government have to guarantee a minimum price of £92.50/MWh to get Hinkley Point C built? For reference, the wholesale price of electricity in the UK is currently £45/MWh, so a brand new nuclear plant is only economical to build with a government guarantee that you can sell the power for double market value for 35 years.
The grim truth is that we can no longer take it for granted that people believe in science, facts and knowledge.
Part of the blame for that goes to people who talk about 'believing in' science. So much science teaching preaches facts, without emphasising the importance of the scientific method in the pursuit of knowledge. It's hard to blame people who grow up thinking that science is just a rival religion.
I'm not sure it's that clear cut. I spent about five years living somewhere very cheap, so I only needed to do paid consulting about 1-2 days a month to cover my cost of living and fill up my tax-free savings allowance. I spent a lot of the rest of the time contributing to open source projects, but I found that it was quite hard to find the motivation to completely finish something (without being distracted by the next project) if no one was paying for it. I took a few 'jobs' where I'd quote well below the odds to work on something that was high on my to-do list anyway, just so that I'd have an externally imposed deadline to finish it. I probably got 80-90% through it at about the same speed as I would have doing it for fun, but the last 10-20% was far easier to finish when you know it matters to someone else. The money doesn't really matter, it's just the easiest way of proving that the work has value to someone else.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to keep the population of the Earth steady, then you need to send off a hundred thousand people every day. Where do you want the resource for commissioning a generation ship (or even orbital settlement) every year to come from? And do you expect that the people in the ships will stop breeding?
Overpopulation can be dealt with by moving people to other planets.
No it can't. At current birth rates, you'd need to move about a million people off planet every week. To put that in perspective, every day roughly 100K people get on planes at London Heathrow. That means that your spaceport would have slightly more departures to space then Heathrow has to terrestrial destinations, every day. Most travellers at Heathrow have under 20Kg of luggage: you're talking about permanent emigration, where people would need a lot more. Let's be conservative and say 100Kg of baggage allowance per person, making a total of about 100Kg. The energy cost to geosync orbit is 50 MJ/Kg. Assuming that in your future world, you have a 100% energy efficient solution (and you have a magical space drive to take them somewhere else), that's 10,000MJ (10GJ) per person, or 10PJ per week.
Now, to put that in perspective, that's about a tenth of the total world energy production currently, just to lift these people and a modest amount of baggage to orbit, using an unfeasibly efficient system and assuming that your magical space elevator is a sunk cost. This sounds almost feasible, but it has a number of unfeasible assumption. Current power beaming (the method of choice for powering a space elevator) is 0.5% efficient and scientists hope to get it up to 2%. That multiplies your energy cost by 50 and means that you're now talking about using five times the current total world power output just to lift people to orbit.
Now, you might say, if you have a space elevator then you could power it using photovoltaics in Earth orbit. Okay, let's look at that. We'll assume 40% efficient solar panels (about the theoretical maximum for photovoltaics). That gives us 400W/m^2. To get our 500PJ/week, we need a constant supply of around 825GW, or a square of solar panels 45km on each side, along with all of the associated cabling and infrastructure. That might just about be possible to build, once you have the space elevator running (though assuming 1Kg per square metre panel, with estimated costs of space elevator operation, it would cost around $400bn in today's dollars, so not exactly a cheap project).
And that's just to get people up to orbit. If you want to actually get them to another planet, you're going to need enough interplanetary ships to carry them somewhere else. And then there's the question of where you send them. Mars? Even if you terraform it, it has the same land mass as Earth, so even if you ignore the children of the colonists then it will fill up in about the time it would take the population of the Earth to double, so that's only going to buy you a few decades.
Since we're talking future hypotheticals, let's say that we find exoplanets with a compatible biosphere and develop a faster-than-light drive (and we'll not even think about the energy costs of that). Unless you reduce the birth rate, the human population is still going to keep doubling every few decades, so all of those newly colonised planets are going to start exporting people soon too. You'll need to double the number of human colonies every few decades and unless human-friendly planets are startlingly common, that's not sustainable. And if you do manage to reduce birth rates to a manageable amount, then the need to export people from Earth goes away.
stupid Desktop behavior ("I index everything I see -- oh, shiny! a media file: I'll throw that over to gstreamer")
The real issue here is that the indexer plugins don't run in an unprivileged sandbox. An indexer should have the rights to read the file that it's indexing, to write the metadata back via IPC to the parent process, and nothing else. It's insane that anyone would create a system that runs on untrusted data without any kind of privilege separation.
There isn't really an excuse for GStreamer still running in-process. Putting the encoded packets and the decoded memory buffers in shared memory and running the decode in another process doesn't add human-detectable latency on a modern system and means that you can strip the gstreamer process of privilege entirely, so a compromise can't hurt anything. The only issue is with GPU-assisted decoding of video, because any process that has access to the GPU has a massive attack surface of buggy GPU drivers and hardware to exploit and escape from the sandbox.
Bush inherited a growing economy, enacted a bunch of legislation to remove regulations (a big plank of the GOP) and boom - we have the 2007 recession
I'm no fan of Bush, but he inherited the tail end of the dot-com bubble, which was in process of bursting, and a banking industry that had had a lot of regulations removed by the Clinton administration.
Communism didn't fail because there wasn't enough computational power around
I said central planning failed, not communism. A centrally planned economy was what the Soviet Union ended up with when they gave up on communism.
It's not even that. An hypothesis is the thing that you get after observation. Observing that chimpanzees are not monogamous and that sexual intercourse between chimpanzees (and bonobos and many other primates) that are not monogamous lasts a few seconds would lead you to a very different hypothesis.
As humans realize that marriage is more likely going to result in divorce
There are only two ways for marriage to end: divorce (or an equivalent, such as annulment) or death. If people live longer, marriages are more likely to end in divorce.
Uh, what? Nothing I said was proof (or even evidence) that the Nazi party was left wing.
The hypothesis doesn't really make sense. Chimpanzees do not practice monogamy, yet sex between chimps lasts a few seconds. In a pack or herd animal, the difference between spending a few seconds and spending a few minutes penetrating a female makes a negligible difference to that female's general availability: the male is still not going to be inside her for hours of the day. Oh, and chimpanzees do have a baculum, so the correlation is simply not there between longer intercourse and existence of a baculum.
It was the same with the electoral reform referendum: Do you want to keep our current crappy FPTP system, or do you want the worst of all of the proportional representation systems? A lot of people voted FPTP because they thought that it would be impossible to change the electoral system twice in a lifetime and they wanted something that was actually good. With the EU referendum, there were two bad choices: Do you want to keep the status quo, or do you want some unspecified other thing? The question boils down to 'are you doing pretty well at the moment?'
I feel sorry for the people who voted leave because they were tired of special interest groups having too much control over the political system, only to see those same groups take control over the exit negotiations and having government funding cut in their already-empoverished communities to pay for it.
Conflict of interest doesn't have to be illegal for it to be a problem.
Do you think the statist socialist places weren't doing socialism hard enough, or will you make a 'no true Scottsman' argument and claim they weren't doing it right?
In the case of the USSR, they started by doing it far too much and then gave up really doing it at all. Immediately devolving control to the soviets when they had absolutely no idea how to run the industries and agriculture suddenly under their control was a disaster. It wasn't even an unexpected one: even Marx pointed out that you need to have a gradual change to get to that end goal. A couple of African countries have made a similar mistake, taking land from white farmers and giving it to black people without bothering to give them any training in how to run a farm and then acting surprised when agriculture collapses. After that, the USSR moved to a centrally controlled model, which is pretty much the antithesis of the socialist ideal of those that do the work being in control of (and gaining the rewards from) that work. It's possible (though by no means certain) that a centrally planned economy could work now, with modern analytics and data gathering (if you could somehow avoid corruption distorting the data too badly), but it definitely couldn't work almost a century ago.
It's further complicated by the fact that one of the Nazi party's chief contenders for public support during their rise were the Sparticists, and their successors. To counter this, the Nazis adopted various bits of communist rhetoric, without ever intending to actually implement any of these plans.
No, he actually meant facist (someone who discriminates based on faces).
The freedom of movement within the EU also has some negative effects. Most people in the UK learn at least some either French or German at school, but often not to a standard required to work in either country, and even if they do then that's only one other country where they can work. Almost everyone in the EU learns enough English to work low-skill jobs in the UK. At the opposite end, most high-skill jobs in the EU only require English. This means that freedom of movement creates opportunities for the high-skill workers in the UK, but increases competition for the lower-skilled jobs. The better-off people have benefitted from the freedom of movement, but the worse-off have not (though the amount to which they've suffered from it has been exaggerated by certain parts of the media).
The difference between Intel and AMD is the number of concurrent designs that they have underway. Intel starts a processor design with around 30 teams working independently and then gradually culls them. This meant that, once it was clear that Netburst as a disaster, they could go back to some of the other teams and prioritise them.
I'm also British, and while a lot of racists have taken the leave vote to be a license to come out of the closet, a lot of people who voted to leave are simply fed up with the status quo. Look at the map of voters: in places with strong economies, the vote was for remain, in places with large amounts of poverty the vote was to leave. The core issue is that a significant percentage of the population is fed up with constantly being shafted by those in power. The only tragedy is that they decided to rebel by voting to give more power to the people responsible for those policies.
AMD began as a supplier for Intel
Not quite, they began as a supplier for IBM. IBM insisted on a second source for all of the components of the IBM PC and wouldn't buy from Intel if Intel didn't license the 8088 designs to AMD and allow them to produce compatible chips. If they'd had the same foresight with respect to the operating system, the next few decades might have been very different.
both times, Intel crushed them so bad, they almost didn't recover. Once due to illegal market pressure and the second time by revamping the cpu to blow AMD out of the water in specs. Intel has AMD's 64 bit tech now.
In the second case, it was more that AMD didn't realise that power consumption had become important. The market shifted and AMD didn't have competing products. Laptops went from a niche to the largest market segment and server purchasers started to care about their air conditioning costs more than raw compute.
If nuclear is so cheap, then why does the British government have to guarantee a minimum price of £92.50/MWh to get Hinkley Point C built? For reference, the wholesale price of electricity in the UK is currently £45/MWh, so a brand new nuclear plant is only economical to build with a government guarantee that you can sell the power for double market value for 35 years.
The grim truth is that we can no longer take it for granted that people believe in science, facts and knowledge.
Part of the blame for that goes to people who talk about 'believing in' science. So much science teaching preaches facts, without emphasising the importance of the scientific method in the pursuit of knowledge. It's hard to blame people who grow up thinking that science is just a rival religion.
I am sure we can find a correlation between number of vegetarians and Methane gasses
You are correct. The fewer people who eat cows, the fewer cows are farmed and the less methane is released into the atmosphere.
I'm not sure it's that clear cut. I spent about five years living somewhere very cheap, so I only needed to do paid consulting about 1-2 days a month to cover my cost of living and fill up my tax-free savings allowance. I spent a lot of the rest of the time contributing to open source projects, but I found that it was quite hard to find the motivation to completely finish something (without being distracted by the next project) if no one was paying for it. I took a few 'jobs' where I'd quote well below the odds to work on something that was high on my to-do list anyway, just so that I'd have an externally imposed deadline to finish it. I probably got 80-90% through it at about the same speed as I would have doing it for fun, but the last 10-20% was far easier to finish when you know it matters to someone else. The money doesn't really matter, it's just the easiest way of proving that the work has value to someone else.
There's an old saying: money doesn't buy happiness, but it makes misery a lot more comfortable.
You can live very comfortably on $20k/year if you own your home outright.