You have some basic facts and you've drawn some basic conclusions... then you've made the mistake of thinking you know enough that you have an accurate idea of how climate and climate cycles work and can judge mankind's relative influence.
The good news is, with that level of ignorance you have plenty of room in your brain to handle learning new things should you choose to do so.
It's going to be a fun fight, but I suspect the initial discrimination will be against the modified, not the unmodified.
But if I can open up a catalog and choose the best designer genes to have edited into my future child so they're healthy and strong (and smart, if we figure out the rats' nest of interconnected genes influencing intelligence), damn right I'd buy every 'upgrade' I could.
>I'm not sure what you were expecting beyond the 3 major networks, I assure you that's all we had in the standard-def "rabbit ears" broadcast days.
Ha! I'm from the 'burbs of Toronto, and got stations from Hamilton, Toronto, and Buffalo. 10 base channels: 5 CBLT (CBC) / 9 CFTO / 11 CHCH / 19 CICO (TVO) / 41 CIII (Global) / 47 CFMT / 57(prev. 79) CITY from Canada, then 19 and 23 (American PBS), and 29 Fox.
Maybe more, those are just the ones I can remember. But you know what? I still remember going around and around the dial looking for something to watch that wasn't an ad.
>I've got to give it my grudging respect. Not only has it lasted a lot longer than I (or most people) thought it would,
Amway still exists, too. I can't respect Bitcoin for the economic theory, I can't respect it technically, I can't respect the people who promote it, trade in it, or whatever.
It's an interesting but flawed solution to a problem that is impossible to solve in practice. Nobody will ever create a practical trustless distributed ledger that is more efficient than other solutions.
Anyone with even a bit of a critical mind should realize fairly quickly that Bitcoin can't work in wide use or long term (and the more use, the shorter the life).
Anyone with even a bit of common sense and the ability to read some economic theory should figure out the financial theory behind Bitcoin is crap and won't work.
Anyone with any understanding of human nature and business should know instantly that centralization and fraud was all that would come of it.
But there's another sucker born every minute, and the Internet lets the con artists reach them so much more efficiently than in the old days. And then the backfire effect kicks in and they dig in their heels even if you try to help them.
I went from curious, to attempting to help those who were being drawn in, to teasing the nut cases... and now I'm at the point of schadenfreude - I just love it when idiots get scammed.
My only problem with it all now is that just because their are rubes to fleece doesn't make it OK to fleece them, nor does it make being a con artist acceptable.
>this is getting me more and more wanting a front and back viewing camera for my car.
They're dirt cheap (compared to the price of a car, insurance, or even a dozen tanks of gas) if you buy one from China. It's a pain to wire them in, but worth it.
Just make sure you get one with a good, low lux rating and a wide viewing angle. GPS tagging is also nice, as is an inertial sensor so it can detect an impact and protect the recording. And you're going to want to look into how easy it is to export a particular model's video... I haven't looked, but I suspect based on my experiences with other cameras that a lot of them are going to be proprietary formats.
Also remember that it's recording evidence against YOU, too. It won't care if its owner is at fault, it'll still report.
If you can't pull your eyes away from your phone long enough to safely cross a street... whoever hits you is helping Darwin and they're the one and only person getting my sympathy.
Legislation SHOULD be passed... freeing the motorist from liability.
>And scientists are just starting to create designer humans.
The problem with Na'vi (beyond their impossible weird psychic hair-link with trees) is that only an adult would consider altering themselves to be a giant blue North American Indian analog, but it looks very much like any kind of macroscopic change needs to be done when you're just a single cell... so that kind of change is for your kids.
I think we can argue about engineering healthier, stronger, longer-living, smarter, more emotionally stable children (mostly on a religious vs. practical reality basis), but almost everyone should agree that making your offspring into a giant blue smurf would be a form of abuse.
> Triangulating from cell towers is Hollywood fantasy and due to the uncertainty of signal strength due to things like weather, terrain, time of day etc, cell triangulation by cell tower is usually only grossly accurate (something like a 300m radius)
Water is pretty flat (save for the curvature of the Earth) and clear of obstructions... and 300m accuracy is fine when you're looking at the intersection of three or more towers' position estimates.
On water, 300m is CLOSE. Maybe not good enough in heavy seas, but it's still closer than you'd ever get based on a person's position estimate from landmarks.
>Nice fantasy world you live in. I wouldn't ever rely on emergency services to know my position from my cellphone.
On land, you absolutely shouldn't.
GPS can take time to get a fix, or get it wrong. Or not get through at all, even though your phone's fine. In an urban setting it can be horribly imprecise simply because there's so much around you and to interfere with GPS. After all, you're probably not in the middle of the street with a clear view of the sky, right?
If you want help, you need to know where you are with enough accuracy to guide someone to you. That's why it's a good habit to remember street signs as you pass them, at least until you get to the next one, and why I personally take note of highway mile markers. And yes, I've used that when calling 911 to report an accident.
However, we're talking marine use. It's unusually for a boat in distress to be hidden inside a building, and vehicle density on the water (especially in situations where there's a mayday in play) is extremely low.
Either your GPS will place you more than accurately enough, or even the most inaccurate multi-tower fix will show you're not actually on the water.
>I think what this is really about is people calling in on VHF (marine) radio, not a phone.
In which case I think they need to invest in some triangulation equipment. We've been doing radio triangulation since WWII, it isn't particularly difficult.
In fact, today there's an organization pushing radio bracelets for people with dementia and a radio triangulation system to go with it that is more affordable and reliable than GPS trackers. (Though admittedly GPS trackers just tell you where they are instead of needing to be found...)
I'm surprised that triangulation equipment didn't become standard long ago for marine use anyway. I mean, you're looking for someone who is lost (or about to be) lost at sea. Depending on the victim to accurately describe their location so you can find them visually when there's a nice, strong radio beacon to track seems foolish.
The phone companies are mandated to provide emergency services with position information, and if GPS isn't available that's cell tower triangulation... and so far as I am aware that data is added to the stream AFTER the call, so you can't easily spoof it unless you've hacked the phone system itself.
That data comes in a second or two after the initial phone connection is made, it's not like you need a warrant and have to get through to a person at the phone company to process the request.
And may the Internet have mercy on my soul if I've messed those numbers up... but even if I have, the underlying argument is sound. We are not pumping valuable atoms into space in any significant quantities.
Earth loses 9x10^4 kg of atmosphere daily. It escapes Earth's gravity due to a combination of heating and the solar wind. Don't worry too much, we have around 5x10^19 kg of it, and there are processes that replenish it somewhat. In fact, we're expecting Earth will have enough atmosphere to keep life happy right up to the point where the Sun cooks the planet and makes the atmosphere more or less pointless anyway.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 uses about 4.9x10^4 kg of fuel, which sounds like every launch adds about 50% to that day's natural atmospheric losses... until you realize that almost all that fuel is used within the atmosphere, pointing downward. Most of the remaining fuel is ALSO thrust towards the Earth.
In short, we're ultimately losing an insignificant fraction of the daily natural losses, which is already an insignificant fraction of our atmosphere.
If you want 'affordable' access to the Solar system, it looks like you're going to be going through SpaceX to get it.
That's not really worth much right now, because they haven't actually delivered it yet. You might think the expense of a rocket isn't a big deal because satellites and other things we want to get into space are expensive enough to justify the rocket's cost... but have you considered that the reason we're shipping expensive things out of our gravity well is because the rockets' costs mean less expensive items can't be justified?
If space access is inexpensive enough, we'll find more to do. Asteroid retrieval will get a massive kick in the ass (which will have massively disruptive effects on Earth but be really good for us in the long run). Space stations will be less expensive, enabling more research into keeping humans healthy off Earth. Lunar and Mars missions will be less expensive, giving us more capability to prep for humans to permanently occupy those bodies and see if we can make self-sufficient operations there.
There's a lot of really, really hard work to do to get there, but most of it is pointless if we can't even affordably reach Earth orbit. SpaceX is our current hope for getting us to the point that all that other work becomes meaningful.
I had adequate math education; better than adequate in fact and I absorbed it, too.
On the other hand, perhaps it wasn't a math error but an English error. I think my English teachers would be completely onboard with that being the more likely scenario.
> The problem is getting that top notch care to every single person
You cannot. Society's ability to provide medical care is finite, and there is a range of medical care (graded by expense) possible.
You have a choice:
1) Pay or die. You have money and live, or don't and die.
2) Eliminate any care you can't afford to provide for all. The poor do OK on average, others die unnecessarily because you're restricting their options.
3) Blend it - have a basic level of tax-funded universal care for all, let the rich get better care if it exists.
Honestly, if you're not on board with option 3... you're a complete asshole and I don't have much time for you.
At a minimum universal medical care should be provided in all cases where the expense to society of NOT providing it is higher than providing it. I mean, that's just common sense, right?
Then you have to decide how much you're willing to pay in tax dollars for additional care. How much are you willing to socialize medicine despite it not having a direct and easily measurable economic benefit? That's a cultural question, and thus up for much debate.
I think the problem is we're greedy at every level of society.
Individually, we want 'stuff', so we put off kids (sometimes forever) because they crimp our lifestyles. This causes the birthrate to drop below replacement rate. Societally, we want an ever-expanding economy as we've structured pretty much everything to depend on there being more people in the future, and things start to fall apart if that doesn't happen.
So... immigration from places with high birth rates when we really should be content to let our populations shrink so we don't consume as many resources.
Really... why is a stagnant (or even shrinking!) population such a bad thing? No additional housing or extension of infrastructure is required. No ever-increasing issues with pollution, food production, or whatever. No ever-denser urban centers.
In a world with 700 million people instead of 7 billion, our available resources would stretch 10x further and we'd still be far from any threat of depopulating ourselves to extinction.
>All the idiots who won't get their kids vaccinated will see their genetic line die off. Those with vaccinations will be OK.
You need to read up on herd immunity. Vaccines aren't 100% effective (and some people simply can't have them for medical reasons), so just having your shot isn't enough, you need to have everyone else have their shots so it's unlikely an infected person will even come into contact with a vulnerable person.
>All we're missing is giving the drones a renewable form of ammunition
If you're OK with a bright purple line identifying your drone's location... and you have one HELL of a power source... you could use a pair of UV lasers to ionize conductive channels in the air and then run a taser-like system through them.
Tasers, properly tuned, can cause skeletal muscle paralysis, intense pain, or heart attacks.
>people not looking for work... are not part of workforce. it would be a "lie" to include those that don't want/cant work as well!!
Except most employment stats (at least the ones governments tout) don't include people who'd really like a full time position but have grabbed a part time job just to keep from losing everything. And when things are in the shitter and the unemployment rate would otherwise be high... people give up and drop out and suddenly the 'unemployment rate' improves. Well... not really.
On the other hand, the economy changes and guaranteeing everyone their preferred job at the pay they want for however long they want just isn't practical... the job market changes and people have to change with it, so a guy who wants to get top pay for a job that doesn't exist anymore really isn't 'unemployed', he's 'too picky'.
I don't think its an easy thing to measure honestly (and that may not even be possible without massive error bars), but governments tend to adjust the metrics to make themselves look better and that's why people tend not to trust the reported rate.
I'm old and tired of learning every new thing that comes along (though not so old I'm not learning everything that holds any real degree of interest to me).
I've heard there's a snipping tool in the MS Office suite now, but honestly I do it so rarely and it's so bloody easy to Alt-Print Scrn and just crop in MS Paint if required that I can't be bothered to worry about a newer method even if it is easier. And MS Paint (and Wordpad) are on pretty much every Windows machine.
> There have been many articles on the ethics and morals of self driving cars and unavoidable accidents.
Mostly silly whining, in my opinion.
> Will cars make the decision on who to hit and who to avoid?
If necessary, yes. But it's unlikely that a "Trolley Problem" will occur. And since there's good reason to suspect that self-driving cars will be much, much safer than human-driven ones, you'd probably treat them like seatbelts and airbags; yes, they occasionally cause harm, but statistically they save far more lives than they take, so we roll the dice.
It's been too primitive to be very useful for much more than cropping screencaps for some time.
If it doesn't also soften, scale (without artifact generation), remove noise, adjust contrast, saturation, tint, and brightness, handle at least text as a separate, editable layer, and do blending colour replacement along with handling transparency... meh. It's also handy if it can directly handle multi-frame GIFs and ICO files.
Still, to this very day I use MSPaint for cropping screencaps because most of the workstations I end up on don't have any graphics software at all.
Slashdot Mirror
You have some basic facts and you've drawn some basic conclusions... then you've made the mistake of thinking you know enough that you have an accurate idea of how climate and climate cycles work and can judge mankind's relative influence.
The good news is, with that level of ignorance you have plenty of room in your brain to handle learning new things should you choose to do so.
So's clean water. It's unfortunate, but life isn't fair. We can try to improve it, but it's never going to be perfect.
It's going to be a fun fight, but I suspect the initial discrimination will be against the modified, not the unmodified.
But if I can open up a catalog and choose the best designer genes to have edited into my future child so they're healthy and strong (and smart, if we figure out the rats' nest of interconnected genes influencing intelligence), damn right I'd buy every 'upgrade' I could.
>I'm not sure what you were expecting beyond the 3 major networks, I assure you that's all we had in the standard-def "rabbit ears" broadcast days.
Ha! I'm from the 'burbs of Toronto, and got stations from Hamilton, Toronto, and Buffalo. 10 base channels: 5 CBLT (CBC) / 9 CFTO / 11 CHCH / 19 CICO (TVO) / 41 CIII (Global) / 47 CFMT / 57(prev. 79) CITY from Canada, then 19 and 23 (American PBS), and 29 Fox.
Maybe more, those are just the ones I can remember. But you know what? I still remember going around and around the dial looking for something to watch that wasn't an ad.
I don't miss FTA anymore than I miss cable.
>I've got to give it my grudging respect. Not only has it lasted a lot longer than I (or most people) thought it would,
Amway still exists, too. I can't respect Bitcoin for the economic theory, I can't respect it technically, I can't respect the people who promote it, trade in it, or whatever.
It's an interesting but flawed solution to a problem that is impossible to solve in practice. Nobody will ever create a practical trustless distributed ledger that is more efficient than other solutions.
Anyone with even a bit of a critical mind should realize fairly quickly that Bitcoin can't work in wide use or long term (and the more use, the shorter the life).
Anyone with even a bit of common sense and the ability to read some economic theory should figure out the financial theory behind Bitcoin is crap and won't work.
Anyone with any understanding of human nature and business should know instantly that centralization and fraud was all that would come of it.
But there's another sucker born every minute, and the Internet lets the con artists reach them so much more efficiently than in the old days. And then the backfire effect kicks in and they dig in their heels even if you try to help them.
I went from curious, to attempting to help those who were being drawn in, to teasing the nut cases... and now I'm at the point of schadenfreude - I just love it when idiots get scammed.
My only problem with it all now is that just because their are rubes to fleece doesn't make it OK to fleece them, nor does it make being a con artist acceptable.
>this is getting me more and more wanting a front and back viewing camera for my car.
They're dirt cheap (compared to the price of a car, insurance, or even a dozen tanks of gas) if you buy one from China. It's a pain to wire them in, but worth it.
Just make sure you get one with a good, low lux rating and a wide viewing angle. GPS tagging is also nice, as is an inertial sensor so it can detect an impact and protect the recording. And you're going to want to look into how easy it is to export a particular model's video... I haven't looked, but I suspect based on my experiences with other cameras that a lot of them are going to be proprietary formats.
Also remember that it's recording evidence against YOU, too. It won't care if its owner is at fault, it'll still report.
If you can't pull your eyes away from your phone long enough to safely cross a street... whoever hits you is helping Darwin and they're the one and only person getting my sympathy.
Legislation SHOULD be passed... freeing the motorist from liability.
>And scientists are just starting to create designer humans.
The problem with Na'vi (beyond their impossible weird psychic hair-link with trees) is that only an adult would consider altering themselves to be a giant blue North American Indian analog, but it looks very much like any kind of macroscopic change needs to be done when you're just a single cell... so that kind of change is for your kids.
I think we can argue about engineering healthier, stronger, longer-living, smarter, more emotionally stable children (mostly on a religious vs. practical reality basis), but almost everyone should agree that making your offspring into a giant blue smurf would be a form of abuse.
> Triangulating from cell towers is Hollywood fantasy and due to the uncertainty of signal strength due to things like weather, terrain, time of day etc, cell triangulation by cell tower is usually only grossly accurate (something like a 300m radius)
Water is pretty flat (save for the curvature of the Earth) and clear of obstructions... and 300m accuracy is fine when you're looking at the intersection of three or more towers' position estimates.
On water, 300m is CLOSE. Maybe not good enough in heavy seas, but it's still closer than you'd ever get based on a person's position estimate from landmarks.
>Nice fantasy world you live in. I wouldn't ever rely on emergency services to know my position from my cellphone.
On land, you absolutely shouldn't.
GPS can take time to get a fix, or get it wrong. Or not get through at all, even though your phone's fine. In an urban setting it can be horribly imprecise simply because there's so much around you and to interfere with GPS. After all, you're probably not in the middle of the street with a clear view of the sky, right?
If you want help, you need to know where you are with enough accuracy to guide someone to you. That's why it's a good habit to remember street signs as you pass them, at least until you get to the next one, and why I personally take note of highway mile markers. And yes, I've used that when calling 911 to report an accident.
However, we're talking marine use. It's unusually for a boat in distress to be hidden inside a building, and vehicle density on the water (especially in situations where there's a mayday in play) is extremely low.
Either your GPS will place you more than accurately enough, or even the most inaccurate multi-tower fix will show you're not actually on the water.
>I think what this is really about is people calling in on VHF (marine) radio, not a phone.
In which case I think they need to invest in some triangulation equipment. We've been doing radio triangulation since WWII, it isn't particularly difficult.
In fact, today there's an organization pushing radio bracelets for people with dementia and a radio triangulation system to go with it that is more affordable and reliable than GPS trackers. (Though admittedly GPS trackers just tell you where they are instead of needing to be found...)
I'm surprised that triangulation equipment didn't become standard long ago for marine use anyway. I mean, you're looking for someone who is lost (or about to be) lost at sea. Depending on the victim to accurately describe their location so you can find them visually when there's a nice, strong radio beacon to track seems foolish.
Trace the damn phones!
The phone companies are mandated to provide emergency services with position information, and if GPS isn't available that's cell tower triangulation... and so far as I am aware that data is added to the stream AFTER the call, so you can't easily spoof it unless you've hacked the phone system itself.
That data comes in a second or two after the initial phone connection is made, it's not like you need a warrant and have to get through to a person at the phone company to process the request.
And may the Internet have mercy on my soul if I've messed those numbers up... but even if I have, the underlying argument is sound. We are not pumping valuable atoms into space in any significant quantities.
Earth loses 9x10^4 kg of atmosphere daily. It escapes Earth's gravity due to a combination of heating and the solar wind. Don't worry too much, we have around 5x10^19 kg of it, and there are processes that replenish it somewhat. In fact, we're expecting Earth will have enough atmosphere to keep life happy right up to the point where the Sun cooks the planet and makes the atmosphere more or less pointless anyway.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 uses about 4.9x10^4 kg of fuel, which sounds like every launch adds about 50% to that day's natural atmospheric losses... until you realize that almost all that fuel is used within the atmosphere, pointing downward. Most of the remaining fuel is ALSO thrust towards the Earth.
In short, we're ultimately losing an insignificant fraction of the daily natural losses, which is already an insignificant fraction of our atmosphere.
No worries.
If you want 'affordable' access to the Solar system, it looks like you're going to be going through SpaceX to get it.
That's not really worth much right now, because they haven't actually delivered it yet. You might think the expense of a rocket isn't a big deal because satellites and other things we want to get into space are expensive enough to justify the rocket's cost... but have you considered that the reason we're shipping expensive things out of our gravity well is because the rockets' costs mean less expensive items can't be justified?
If space access is inexpensive enough, we'll find more to do. Asteroid retrieval will get a massive kick in the ass (which will have massively disruptive effects on Earth but be really good for us in the long run). Space stations will be less expensive, enabling more research into keeping humans healthy off Earth. Lunar and Mars missions will be less expensive, giving us more capability to prep for humans to permanently occupy those bodies and see if we can make self-sufficient operations there.
There's a lot of really, really hard work to do to get there, but most of it is pointless if we can't even affordably reach Earth orbit. SpaceX is our current hope for getting us to the point that all that other work becomes meaningful.
I had adequate math education; better than adequate in fact and I absorbed it, too.
On the other hand, perhaps it wasn't a math error but an English error. I think my English teachers would be completely onboard with that being the more likely scenario.
> The problem is getting that top notch care to every single person
You cannot. Society's ability to provide medical care is finite, and there is a range of medical care (graded by expense) possible.
You have a choice:
1) Pay or die. You have money and live, or don't and die.
2) Eliminate any care you can't afford to provide for all. The poor do OK on average, others die unnecessarily because you're restricting their options.
3) Blend it - have a basic level of tax-funded universal care for all, let the rich get better care if it exists.
Honestly, if you're not on board with option 3... you're a complete asshole and I don't have much time for you.
At a minimum universal medical care should be provided in all cases where the expense to society of NOT providing it is higher than providing it. I mean, that's just common sense, right?
Then you have to decide how much you're willing to pay in tax dollars for additional care. How much are you willing to socialize medicine despite it not having a direct and easily measurable economic benefit? That's a cultural question, and thus up for much debate.
I think the problem is we're greedy at every level of society.
Individually, we want 'stuff', so we put off kids (sometimes forever) because they crimp our lifestyles. This causes the birthrate to drop below replacement rate. Societally, we want an ever-expanding economy as we've structured pretty much everything to depend on there being more people in the future, and things start to fall apart if that doesn't happen.
So... immigration from places with high birth rates when we really should be content to let our populations shrink so we don't consume as many resources.
Really... why is a stagnant (or even shrinking!) population such a bad thing? No additional housing or extension of infrastructure is required. No ever-increasing issues with pollution, food production, or whatever. No ever-denser urban centers.
In a world with 700 million people instead of 7 billion, our available resources would stretch 10x further and we'd still be far from any threat of depopulating ourselves to extinction.
>All the idiots who won't get their kids vaccinated will see their genetic line die off. Those with vaccinations will be OK.
You need to read up on herd immunity. Vaccines aren't 100% effective (and some people simply can't have them for medical reasons), so just having your shot isn't enough, you need to have everyone else have their shots so it's unlikely an infected person will even come into contact with a vulnerable person.
>All we're missing is giving the drones a renewable form of ammunition
If you're OK with a bright purple line identifying your drone's location... and you have one HELL of a power source... you could use a pair of UV lasers to ionize conductive channels in the air and then run a taser-like system through them.
Tasers, properly tuned, can cause skeletal muscle paralysis, intense pain, or heart attacks.
>people not looking for work... are not part of workforce. it would be a "lie" to include those that don't want/cant work as well!!
Except most employment stats (at least the ones governments tout) don't include people who'd really like a full time position but have grabbed a part time job just to keep from losing everything. And when things are in the shitter and the unemployment rate would otherwise be high... people give up and drop out and suddenly the 'unemployment rate' improves. Well... not really.
On the other hand, the economy changes and guaranteeing everyone their preferred job at the pay they want for however long they want just isn't practical... the job market changes and people have to change with it, so a guy who wants to get top pay for a job that doesn't exist anymore really isn't 'unemployed', he's 'too picky'.
I don't think its an easy thing to measure honestly (and that may not even be possible without massive error bars), but governments tend to adjust the metrics to make themselves look better and that's why people tend not to trust the reported rate.
I'm old and tired of learning every new thing that comes along (though not so old I'm not learning everything that holds any real degree of interest to me).
I've heard there's a snipping tool in the MS Office suite now, but honestly I do it so rarely and it's so bloody easy to Alt-Print Scrn and just crop in MS Paint if required that I can't be bothered to worry about a newer method even if it is easier. And MS Paint (and Wordpad) are on pretty much every Windows machine.
> There have been many articles on the ethics and morals of self driving cars and unavoidable accidents.
Mostly silly whining, in my opinion.
> Will cars make the decision on who to hit and who to avoid?
If necessary, yes. But it's unlikely that a "Trolley Problem" will occur. And since there's good reason to suspect that self-driving cars will be much, much safer than human-driven ones, you'd probably treat them like seatbelts and airbags; yes, they occasionally cause harm, but statistically they save far more lives than they take, so we roll the dice.
It's been too primitive to be very useful for much more than cropping screencaps for some time.
If it doesn't also soften, scale (without artifact generation), remove noise, adjust contrast, saturation, tint, and brightness, handle at least text as a separate, editable layer, and do blending colour replacement along with handling transparency... meh. It's also handy if it can directly handle multi-frame GIFs and ICO files.
Still, to this very day I use MSPaint for cropping screencaps because most of the workstations I end up on don't have any graphics software at all.