Assuming global warming is real, is human caused, and will get worse, what will people do about it?
Broaden this analysis somewhat.
Let scenario A assume global warming is real, caused by rising CO2 levels, caused by burning fossil fuels.
What should the response be?
Conservation, clean coal, electrification of transportation, wind power, etc.
Now assume scenario B, where whatever is happening is not due to people at all.
What should the response be?
Business as usual on the energy front, try to mitigate the damage if ocean levels rise, etc.
Now ask the questions,
"What happens if we follow the scenario A actions under scenario B?
What happens if we follow the scenario B actions under scenario A?"
I would suggest that following scenario A actions under scenario B
results in somewhat slower economic growth.
But scenario B actions under scenario A is probably a catestrophe.
I know which set of risks I'm in favor of running.
I agree with the electronic part, the technology is almost to the point where we can have an e-book reader that is lightweight, high-resolution, inexpensive, and runs all day on a battery charge. The inexpensive part is important -- they have to be cheap enough that the schools can hand them out to all students, and replace them when the third-grader drops it in a mud puddle.
Have to disagree with you on the free part. However, it should be straightforward to build a "book charge" into the tuition, at all levels. Given the reduction in costs, it should certainly be possible to make the charge significantly less than what current books cost, and still pay the author and publisher a reasonable fee (publishers do provide valuable services, a good editor can make the difference between a mediocre text and a good one).
Re:The problem of nerve impulse conduction
on
An Alternate Human
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This placement minimizes the time lag of neural impulse conduction, by minimizing the necessary length of nerve connecting the sensory organs to the brain.
In addition to this, add that it puts the high-bandwidth inputs -- audio, and particularly vision -- on dedicated "buses" rather than trying to run them through the same system bus (spinal cord) that handles the low-bandwidth signals for muscles. And allows direct connection to the higher brain structures, rather than routing through all that antique brain-stem nonsense.
I met Ori while doing some performance testing of the streaming video technology that VDONet had developed (3D wavelets, heirarchical coding, server automatically adapted down to your available bandwidth). Very cool stuff at the time. Very, very smart guy. And some very smart Russian emigrants to Israel developing the algorithms and software for VDONet.
Given the rate at which new things are being discovered about the properties of materials at nano scales, I would cheerfully bet that there are a number of "big things" still to come.
Is it worth pointing out that the phone company, whose switches and local distribution network all required DC to drive the (first) electromechanical components and (then) electronic ones, never made the switch? Commercial power was (and still is, AFAIK, although I've been out of that business for years) used to charge massive banks of 48V batteries that actually power the central office equipment. Once they made the decision to have UPS on that scale, AC/DC/AC conversions were expensive and hence minimized. Modern conversions are much more efficient than they were in the old days; but unless they're cheaper than the electricity, at some point it makes sense to convert once then distribute DC.
Nope, not in academia. But in the giant corporate labs where I spent most of my career, when the word came down from on high that "This is the standard hardware your people will have starting next year," the managers found the time to make sure that it was adequate for getting the job done -- and pushing back if it wasn't. In my case, much of that time came between 11:00 PM and 1:00 AM after the kids were in bed, the dishes were washed, etc. The first line of "defense" against choosing inadequate hardware has to be the profs. Or should have been the profs, since it sounds like the decision has already been made. Who else is going to answer the question, "Is this hardware adequate for the students to do the work you assign?"
In this case, since the faculty are getting machines a year earlier than students, it would interesting to require the faculty to attempt the work they're going to assign on whichever laptop is selected. If the response is uniformly "My students can't do the work I'm going to assign on a machine this limited," that kind of push-back to the senior administrators is much more compelling than anything else.
We had a CoCo running OS-9, and hacked a serial connector so we could attach a CRT that had been sitting idle at work. There were times when my wife and I were both using it -- at least for something simple like text editing -- at the same time. Had the C compiler, wrote little programs like a text formatter for it, etc.
My favorite old machine, though, was a Cumulus laptop I got at the end of '91. 20 MHz 386SX, 4M of main memory, 60M hard disk. I had Linux running on it early in '92, along with the MGR windowing system (even then, X in 4M required so much swapping as to be unusable). Nearly started a riot one evening on a flight from NJ to Denver when a bunch of geeks realized that I was running what appeared to be UNIX with some sort of windowing on a -- for then -- inexpensive laptop. As I recall, at some point the flight attendents told us that our impromptu Linux seminar in the middle of the aisle was in violation of federal safety regulations...
Interestingly enough, according to this story
the same hospital made a substantial investment in software
to secure the PCs on their network last May.
It seems likely that some group of software engineers
is having a very, very bad week.
Not quite. The US has coal. we have lots of coal. we have an ubsurdly large amount of coal. we have enough coal to not have to worry about centralized generation supplies, ever.
If you use EIA figures from 2000 for US coal reserves and rate of consumption, the reserves were sufficient for 255 years -- not forever, but a long time.
We get about 25% of our total energy use from coal today;
assume that we double our demand due to growth, CTL for transportation fuel, etc;
so call it enough coal for 125 years.
Now apply what we know about producing mineral resources.
We dig up the easy stuff first,
then we get around to the less convenient bits.
It's too deep, it's out of the way, it's lower-quality fuel, and so on.
We've already dug up a considerable amount of the easy high-quality coal.
Consistently, over a wide range of resources,
a good rule of thumb is that the extraction rate will "peak"
when just about half of the resource has been extracted.
Applying that rule,
and making educated guesses about how fast demand will increase and
peak coal production appears to fall somewhere between 2040 and 2060,
more likely sooner rather than later.
So you get to 40 years from now and coal production starts to fall.
Still lots of coal left in the ground,
you just can't dig it up as fast as you might like.
If it happens in 40 years, I just might live to see it.
The issue with Perl isn't that it's particularly hard to do complicated things with simple, legible code (not more so than a lot of other languages, anyway), but that it's very, very easy to do something extremely quickly, which often - but not always - means code that makes sense at the time but isn't necessarily readable, or leads to overly terse code.
When I was a lad, I wrote a bunch of numerical analysis and statistical modeling code in APL. Now there, young Jedi, was a write-only language! Not only was it sometimes easier six months later to start over rather than modifying the existing code, it was almost always easier to start over than to rewrite.
However, in order to say that teaching ID is unconstitutional, the following criteria must be met: 1) ID is religion...
Under current Supreme Court doctrine,
the criterion is whether the action advances a religious purpose.
The motivations of the parties that added ID to the curriculum
are important in determining whether that addition
served such a purpose,
which would make it unconstitutional under the Establishment Clause.
The evidence showed that the members of the school board
that pushed ID had repeatedly made the following public claims:
(1) it was important to teach Bible-based religion in the Dover public schools, and
(2) ID was Biblical creationism in a scientific guise.
In court, their statements were to the effect of "We're only interested in having the students see a more complete picture of speciation theory."
The judge stated explicitly that,
on the basis of the large body of their previous public statements,
he believed they were lying in court.
Whether ID was religion or not, its addition to the curriculum was intended to serve
a religious purpose.
There's some evidence that the Discovery Institute did not want
the Dover case to go to court for
precisely this reason.
The school board had clearly used ID to further a religious purpose,
everyone knew they had done it to further a religious purpose, and
the almost-certain loss in court would reflect badly on the Institute.
My reading of the judge's decision is that he said "ID is not science"
rather than "ID is religion".
The Discovery Institute didn't do themselves any good on this point
when one of their people testified, under oath,
that a definition of science that included ID would also include astrology.
Assignment of frequencies for cable video is a matter of federal regulation.
==========
Please tell me you're joking. The FCC tells the cable company what they can do with what's inside their cable?
No joke.
The FCC brokered (mandated) an agreement between the cable companies and
the Consumer Electronics Association so that there was
a standard assignment of cable channels to frequencies.
The bottom several are required to be compatible with over-the-air frequencies, so
channel 2 occupies the frequencies from 54-60 MHz, and
similarly up through cable channel 125.
This agreement was based on the FCC's decision that
there would be a standard for "cable ready" televisions because
they did not want customers for basic and enhanced basic cable service
to be forced to rent a converter box from the local cable operator.
Channel 2's location sets the dividing point for downstream (>54 MHz) and upstream (<54 MHz) frequencies.
Allowing for amplifier filters restricts the top upstream frequency to about 45 MHz.
Frequencies below about 15 MHz are often unusable due to interference from external sources, so
the 30 MHz from 15-45 is typically all that's guaranteed to be available for upstream.
The cable companies and the CEA are working out
similar agreements for standardizing digital cable (the OpenCable standards),
again by FCC mandate.
Additional information about OpenCable is available at
the CableLabs Web site.
For the many people who complain about the lower bitrates for upstream cable modem service. This is a natural consequence of the limitations of the cable system. A contemporary cable system has about 700 MHz of downstream analog spectrum. Most of that is used for video, of course, but it's straightforward for the operator to set aside 12 or 18 MHz for data. More importantly, the downstream spectrum is quite clean and it is possible to use modulation techniques that deliver several bits per Hertz. A typical system has only about 30 MHz of upstream analog spectrum and runs at least three services on it -- return path for the video service, upstream side of the cable telephony service, and high-speed data. Since each uses a different modulation scheme, spectrum must be dedicated to each (and guardbands must also be provided). The upstream channel is a LOT noisier than than the downstream, so simpler modulation has to be used. Where the system can easily deliver a total exceeding 100 Mbps of downstream capacity, physical reality will restrict it to a total of 3-10 Mbps of upstream capacity. Hence the disparity in the downstream and upstream bit rates.
And no, there's no simple way to reallocate frequencies and have more of it used for upstream capacity. Assignment of frequencies for cable video is a matter of federal regulation.
Ok, so now they teach the "Fact of Evolution" not the "Theory of Evolution"
Parts of evolution are well-demonstrated facts. Under environmental pressure, a particular species of bacteria will evolve, giving us such unfortunate results as antibiotic-resistant gonorrea. Or bacteria that are capable of metabolizing crude oil, so that they could be used to help clean up spills (although no one's been brave enough to actually let them do that outside the lab yet). It is a fact that viral DNA can become linked into cells infected but not killed by the virus, that the included DNA is replicated when the cells reproduce, and that the DNA can be active (eg, produce proteins that cells without the viral DNA do not produce). It is a fact that the total differences in the DNA of two species can be very small -- 98.8% of human and chimp DNA sequences are the same.
Can the accumulation of small DNA differences lead to speciation? The more we understand the underlying mechanisms and all the ways that DNA sequences can be modified, the more likely it seems that the answer is yes. An alternative hypothesis -- eg, ID -- would need to explain why phenomena such as the ability to incorporate viral DNA would be included in the design.
Of course, since age discrimination is supposed to be illegal, I've got to wonder why anyone would even care...
Speaking as a 50+ technologist that took early retirement and am in the process of reinventing myself in the area of public policy, ageism is an interesting subject. Some broad comments:
About the only aspect of employment where people have successfully proven age discrimination in court is in lay-offs and firing.
When I was laid off at age 49
(along with 1700 others who were on the wrong side of a corporate acquisition),
my separation package included lists of all positions that had been eliminated and
the age of the person holding that position.
That's the information that by law the company has to make available to you
if you're 45+ and
in a mass layoff situation.
I didn't bother with statistical analysis -- the company can hire statisticians at least as good as I am, and senior management was bright enough to cover their butts that way.
TTBOMK, no one has ever won an age discrimination lawsuit on the basis of being denied interviews.
They can't discriminate once you're on board, but it's hard to prove that hiring practices are age discriminatory.
This is especially true in high-tech areas where they can make up all kinds of reasons to show preferences for interviewing younger people.
Some of the reasons given for being reluctant to hire older workers are,
at least in some cases,
true.
The cost of company benefits like health insurance are
affected by the company's claims experience.
I have a friend at a small business
(less than 50 people)
who buys her own health insurance --
the company had two very expensive claims last year,
and the premiums for the company group plan are now much higher
than what she can get for herself in the private market.
Some expensive-to-treat conditions like
cancer, heart attack, and stroke
are simply more common among the 50+ crowd.
As others have noted,
many older people who work in IT
end up in government organizations.
The average age of a new hire in the Colorado government last year
was 47.
One newspaper story on that statistic noted that
the state doesn't pay very well,
but the health insurance benefit is pretty good and
the retirement benefits are first rate.
Life cycles for cars in the US are much longer than two years. Some statistics from the federal government on the US automotive fleet: average age of an automobile on the road today, 8 yrs; median time before 50% of a particular model year have been removed from the fleet, 16 yrs; median age of a car when it is scrapped, 17 yrs; average miles driven over a car's liftime, 180,000 miles. These are all consistent with the usual notion that it takes 20 years to effectively "turn over" the entire fleet.
Verdana is also my favorite default. Note that it meets the two characteristics mentioned in the original posting: lower case letters are both relatively tall and have nice open loops. Logos, particularly those that are trademarked, impose restrictions on their owners that are most easily dealt with by using an image. Those at large corporations charged with protecting the trademarked logo have absolutely no sense of humor; the font is specified, the exact color shades are specified, size proportions are specified, etc. Companies that deviate too casually from the registered image can lose their rights to it...
Bingo (sorry, no mod points today)! A $100 laptop (at least if it includes a CD-ROM drive) is hundreds or thousands of different textbooks, agricultural manuals, literature. Suddenly it's possible to deliver copies of dozens of new books by existing mail service, rather than having to arrange shipping for hundreds of pounds of paper. Data networks would make things even better, but to paraphrase some wag's comment, "Never underestimate the bandwidth of mail delivery of a dozen CDRs."
I'm a believer that within ten years, polymer semiconductors are going to change the way we think about e-book capabilities, and what a $100 device can deliver. We could use them in this country, too. I'm tired of visiting grade schools and watching third-grade kids lugging around backpacks with 30 pounds of books.
Ask anyone that has a Mini-DV camcorder and stores videos of their kids on the computer. 100 GB is nothing and a year's worth of video could easily be several TB.
Seriously, I know I don't think in video terms, and I'm trying to understand this and just how common a phenomenon it is or will be (that is, is your "many" 50% of the population, or 1%?). Compressed reasonably, variable-bit-rate home video runs maybe 2.4 Mbps, and may average less (standard-def DVDs peak at 10 Mbps, and average about half that). That's 300 KBps, or just about 1 GB per hour. Then 1 TB is about 1000 hours of home video, or a little over 2.7 hours per day for a year. Put another way, it's the equivalent of about 500 standard-play VHS tapes per year. Are people shooting that much video? Are they storing it using less compression? Are they shifting to high-def and its much higher bit-rate requirements? One of the more interesting questions is, given say 3000 hours of content, how do people find things?
I have around 11TB of disk drives at home. You will too...
When I go through my house, and look at all the different media, I'm not sure that I've even got 11 TB of data (assuming reasonable compression). Not that some people don't, but a half-century of accumulating stuff hasn't added up to that much. Probably says something about the type of media that we favor here. I think about this regularly, and estimate that a 1.2 TB hard disk -- something the size of a paperback book in another couple years -- would be sufficient to hold most of my life: every textbook I ever had, all the fiction on the shelves, every book I ever borrowed from the library, every paper I wrote in a 25-year career, all of the journal articles I tucked away (thinking that someday I would need them), all the e-mail I ever sent and the non-spam e-mail I received, every record or CD I ever owned, every photo I ever took, all of the photos my friends took that included me, all of the photos that were handed down from my parents. The video content might stress it, but another doubling to 2.4 TB and even that would be accommodated easily.
For most of the last 20 years, I've lugged around a little black notebook that holds 8.5x5.5" paper. None of the paper in it goes back the whole time, but there are pages that have been in there for at least 10 years. I am simultaneously elated and terrified to think that a device of comparable size will have sufficient storage to hold a copy of my life, plus a display and enough processing power to do the input and output.
Re:s/Stranger /Moon Is a Harsh Mistress/
on
Top 20 Geek Novels
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Especially since this is "geek novels".
SIASL is a geek fantasy --
grow muscles by thinking them,
beautiful women falling over themselves to have sex with you --
where TMIAHM's leading character is, well, a grown-up geek.
I would be reluctant to lose either of my real arms but
there have certainly been times when jobs would have been easier
if I could just pop on the old "number three arm".
Besides,
the ending of SIASL was obvious and no one really dies.
Two of the central characters don't make it in TMIAHM,
a much more grown-up treatment.
Good luck with that. I'm a Boomer and involuntarily retired -- but that doesn't mean a position opened up. Got caught on the wrong side of some industry consolidation and they eliminated my position (along with 1700 others), I trusted the new owners as far as I could throw the headquarters building, and retirement was the only way to get the pension money and force them to keep me on the health coverage for at least a few years. I'm in the process of re-inventing myself in public policy, and have spent a lot of time with the numbers. As a group, the Boomers have (and are) doing a miserable job of saving for retirement. Defined-benefit pensions are disappearing at a rapid rate. Some are being converted to cash-value plans, and the Boomers typically get screwed when that happens (IBM lost a lawsuit, basically for being too obvious about screwing the Boomers). Some are being lost to bankruptcy, as in the airlines currently, the auto companies next, and before too many years, the old-time telecom companies. I anticipate that ten years from now, instead of seeing massive Boomer retirements, we're more likely to see the Boomers hanging on to those positions tooth and nail.
Indeed.
The governor gives as an example a company that expects to move 90% of its jobs from the US to Asia, and then says the problem is that we're not producing enough math and science PhDs?
I have faith in relatively free markets -- create good-paying engineering jobs in the US, and students will line up to get into the programs at school.
Move those jobs to Asia or elsewhere outside the country and the students will evaporate.
This is not, pardon the expression, rocket science.
Slashdot Mirror
Broaden this analysis somewhat. Let scenario A assume global warming is real, caused by rising CO2 levels, caused by burning fossil fuels. What should the response be? Conservation, clean coal, electrification of transportation, wind power, etc. Now assume scenario B, where whatever is happening is not due to people at all. What should the response be? Business as usual on the energy front, try to mitigate the damage if ocean levels rise, etc. Now ask the questions, "What happens if we follow the scenario A actions under scenario B? What happens if we follow the scenario B actions under scenario A?" I would suggest that following scenario A actions under scenario B results in somewhat slower economic growth. But scenario B actions under scenario A is probably a catestrophe. I know which set of risks I'm in favor of running.
Have to disagree with you on the free part. However, it should be straightforward to build a "book charge" into the tuition, at all levels. Given the reduction in costs, it should certainly be possible to make the charge significantly less than what current books cost, and still pay the author and publisher a reasonable fee (publishers do provide valuable services, a good editor can make the difference between a mediocre text and a good one).
In addition to this, add that it puts the high-bandwidth inputs -- audio, and particularly vision -- on dedicated "buses" rather than trying to run them through the same system bus (spinal cord) that handles the low-bandwidth signals for muscles. And allows direct connection to the higher brain structures, rather than routing through all that antique brain-stem nonsense.
I met Ori while doing some performance testing of the streaming video technology that VDONet had developed (3D wavelets, heirarchical coding, server automatically adapted down to your available bandwidth). Very cool stuff at the time. Very, very smart guy. And some very smart Russian emigrants to Israel developing the algorithms and software for VDONet.
Given the rate at which new things are being discovered about the properties of materials at nano scales, I would cheerfully bet that there are a number of "big things" still to come.
Is it worth pointing out that the phone company, whose switches and local distribution network all required DC to drive the (first) electromechanical components and (then) electronic ones, never made the switch? Commercial power was (and still is, AFAIK, although I've been out of that business for years) used to charge massive banks of 48V batteries that actually power the central office equipment. Once they made the decision to have UPS on that scale, AC/DC/AC conversions were expensive and hence minimized. Modern conversions are much more efficient than they were in the old days; but unless they're cheaper than the electricity, at some point it makes sense to convert once then distribute DC.
Nope, not in academia. But in the giant corporate labs where I spent most of my career, when the word came down from on high that "This is the standard hardware your people will have starting next year," the managers found the time to make sure that it was adequate for getting the job done -- and pushing back if it wasn't. In my case, much of that time came between 11:00 PM and 1:00 AM after the kids were in bed, the dishes were washed, etc. The first line of "defense" against choosing inadequate hardware has to be the profs. Or should have been the profs, since it sounds like the decision has already been made. Who else is going to answer the question, "Is this hardware adequate for the students to do the work you assign?"
In this case, since the faculty are getting machines a year earlier than students, it would interesting to require the faculty to attempt the work they're going to assign on whichever laptop is selected. If the response is uniformly "My students can't do the work I'm going to assign on a machine this limited," that kind of push-back to the senior administrators is much more compelling than anything else.
My favorite old machine, though, was a Cumulus laptop I got at the end of '91. 20 MHz 386SX, 4M of main memory, 60M hard disk. I had Linux running on it early in '92, along with the MGR windowing system (even then, X in 4M required so much swapping as to be unusable). Nearly started a riot one evening on a flight from NJ to Denver when a bunch of geeks realized that I was running what appeared to be UNIX with some sort of windowing on a -- for then -- inexpensive laptop. As I recall, at some point the flight attendents told us that our impromptu Linux seminar in the middle of the aisle was in violation of federal safety regulations...
Interestingly enough, according to this story the same hospital made a substantial investment in software to secure the PCs on their network last May. It seems likely that some group of software engineers is having a very, very bad week.
If you use EIA figures from 2000 for US coal reserves and rate of consumption, the reserves were sufficient for 255 years -- not forever, but a long time. We get about 25% of our total energy use from coal today; assume that we double our demand due to growth, CTL for transportation fuel, etc; so call it enough coal for 125 years. Now apply what we know about producing mineral resources. We dig up the easy stuff first, then we get around to the less convenient bits. It's too deep, it's out of the way, it's lower-quality fuel, and so on. We've already dug up a considerable amount of the easy high-quality coal. Consistently, over a wide range of resources, a good rule of thumb is that the extraction rate will "peak" when just about half of the resource has been extracted. Applying that rule, and making educated guesses about how fast demand will increase and peak coal production appears to fall somewhere between 2040 and 2060, more likely sooner rather than later. So you get to 40 years from now and coal production starts to fall. Still lots of coal left in the ground, you just can't dig it up as fast as you might like. If it happens in 40 years, I just might live to see it.
When I was a lad, I wrote a bunch of numerical analysis and statistical modeling code in APL. Now there, young Jedi, was a write-only language! Not only was it sometimes easier six months later to start over rather than modifying the existing code, it was almost always easier to start over than to rewrite.
Under current Supreme Court doctrine, the criterion is whether the action advances a religious purpose. The motivations of the parties that added ID to the curriculum are important in determining whether that addition served such a purpose, which would make it unconstitutional under the Establishment Clause. The evidence showed that the members of the school board that pushed ID had repeatedly made the following public claims: (1) it was important to teach Bible-based religion in the Dover public schools, and (2) ID was Biblical creationism in a scientific guise. In court, their statements were to the effect of "We're only interested in having the students see a more complete picture of speciation theory." The judge stated explicitly that, on the basis of the large body of their previous public statements, he believed they were lying in court. Whether ID was religion or not, its addition to the curriculum was intended to serve a religious purpose.
There's some evidence that the Discovery Institute did not want the Dover case to go to court for precisely this reason. The school board had clearly used ID to further a religious purpose, everyone knew they had done it to further a religious purpose, and the almost-certain loss in court would reflect badly on the Institute. My reading of the judge's decision is that he said "ID is not science" rather than "ID is religion". The Discovery Institute didn't do themselves any good on this point when one of their people testified, under oath, that a definition of science that included ID would also include astrology.
==========
Please tell me you're joking. The FCC tells the cable company what they can do with what's inside their cable?
No joke. The FCC brokered (mandated) an agreement between the cable companies and the Consumer Electronics Association so that there was a standard assignment of cable channels to frequencies. The bottom several are required to be compatible with over-the-air frequencies, so channel 2 occupies the frequencies from 54-60 MHz, and similarly up through cable channel 125. This agreement was based on the FCC's decision that there would be a standard for "cable ready" televisions because they did not want customers for basic and enhanced basic cable service to be forced to rent a converter box from the local cable operator. Channel 2's location sets the dividing point for downstream (>54 MHz) and upstream (<54 MHz) frequencies. Allowing for amplifier filters restricts the top upstream frequency to about 45 MHz. Frequencies below about 15 MHz are often unusable due to interference from external sources, so the 30 MHz from 15-45 is typically all that's guaranteed to be available for upstream.
The cable companies and the CEA are working out similar agreements for standardizing digital cable (the OpenCable standards), again by FCC mandate. Additional information about OpenCable is available at the CableLabs Web site.
And no, there's no simple way to reallocate frequencies and have more of it used for upstream capacity. Assignment of frequencies for cable video is a matter of federal regulation.
Parts of evolution are well-demonstrated facts. Under environmental pressure, a particular species of bacteria will evolve, giving us such unfortunate results as antibiotic-resistant gonorrea. Or bacteria that are capable of metabolizing crude oil, so that they could be used to help clean up spills (although no one's been brave enough to actually let them do that outside the lab yet). It is a fact that viral DNA can become linked into cells infected but not killed by the virus, that the included DNA is replicated when the cells reproduce, and that the DNA can be active (eg, produce proteins that cells without the viral DNA do not produce). It is a fact that the total differences in the DNA of two species can be very small -- 98.8% of human and chimp DNA sequences are the same.
Can the accumulation of small DNA differences lead to speciation? The more we understand the underlying mechanisms and all the ways that DNA sequences can be modified, the more likely it seems that the answer is yes. An alternative hypothesis -- eg, ID -- would need to explain why phenomena such as the ability to incorporate viral DNA would be included in the design.
Speaking as a 50+ technologist that took early retirement and am in the process of reinventing myself in the area of public policy, ageism is an interesting subject. Some broad comments:
Life cycles for cars in the US are much longer than two years. Some statistics from the federal government on the US automotive fleet: average age of an automobile on the road today, 8 yrs; median time before 50% of a particular model year have been removed from the fleet, 16 yrs; median age of a car when it is scrapped, 17 yrs; average miles driven over a car's liftime, 180,000 miles. These are all consistent with the usual notion that it takes 20 years to effectively "turn over" the entire fleet.
Verdana is also my favorite default. Note that it meets the two characteristics mentioned in the original posting: lower case letters are both relatively tall and have nice open loops. Logos, particularly those that are trademarked, impose restrictions on their owners that are most easily dealt with by using an image. Those at large corporations charged with protecting the trademarked logo have absolutely no sense of humor; the font is specified, the exact color shades are specified, size proportions are specified, etc. Companies that deviate too casually from the registered image can lose their rights to it...
I'm a believer that within ten years, polymer semiconductors are going to change the way we think about e-book capabilities, and what a $100 device can deliver. We could use them in this country, too. I'm tired of visiting grade schools and watching third-grade kids lugging around backpacks with 30 pounds of books.
Seriously, I know I don't think in video terms, and I'm trying to understand this and just how common a phenomenon it is or will be (that is, is your "many" 50% of the population, or 1%?). Compressed reasonably, variable-bit-rate home video runs maybe 2.4 Mbps, and may average less (standard-def DVDs peak at 10 Mbps, and average about half that). That's 300 KBps, or just about 1 GB per hour. Then 1 TB is about 1000 hours of home video, or a little over 2.7 hours per day for a year. Put another way, it's the equivalent of about 500 standard-play VHS tapes per year. Are people shooting that much video? Are they storing it using less compression? Are they shifting to high-def and its much higher bit-rate requirements? One of the more interesting questions is, given say 3000 hours of content, how do people find things?
When I go through my house, and look at all the different media, I'm not sure that I've even got 11 TB of data (assuming reasonable compression). Not that some people don't, but a half-century of accumulating stuff hasn't added up to that much. Probably says something about the type of media that we favor here. I think about this regularly, and estimate that a 1.2 TB hard disk -- something the size of a paperback book in another couple years -- would be sufficient to hold most of my life: every textbook I ever had, all the fiction on the shelves, every book I ever borrowed from the library, every paper I wrote in a 25-year career, all of the journal articles I tucked away (thinking that someday I would need them), all the e-mail I ever sent and the non-spam e-mail I received, every record or CD I ever owned, every photo I ever took, all of the photos my friends took that included me, all of the photos that were handed down from my parents. The video content might stress it, but another doubling to 2.4 TB and even that would be accommodated easily.
For most of the last 20 years, I've lugged around a little black notebook that holds 8.5x5.5" paper. None of the paper in it goes back the whole time, but there are pages that have been in there for at least 10 years. I am simultaneously elated and terrified to think that a device of comparable size will have sufficient storage to hold a copy of my life, plus a display and enough processing power to do the input and output.
Especially since this is "geek novels". SIASL is a geek fantasy -- grow muscles by thinking them, beautiful women falling over themselves to have sex with you -- where TMIAHM's leading character is, well, a grown-up geek. I would be reluctant to lose either of my real arms but there have certainly been times when jobs would have been easier if I could just pop on the old "number three arm". Besides, the ending of SIASL was obvious and no one really dies. Two of the central characters don't make it in TMIAHM, a much more grown-up treatment.
Good luck with that. I'm a Boomer and involuntarily retired -- but that doesn't mean a position opened up. Got caught on the wrong side of some industry consolidation and they eliminated my position (along with 1700 others), I trusted the new owners as far as I could throw the headquarters building, and retirement was the only way to get the pension money and force them to keep me on the health coverage for at least a few years. I'm in the process of re-inventing myself in public policy, and have spent a lot of time with the numbers. As a group, the Boomers have (and are) doing a miserable job of saving for retirement. Defined-benefit pensions are disappearing at a rapid rate. Some are being converted to cash-value plans, and the Boomers typically get screwed when that happens (IBM lost a lawsuit, basically for being too obvious about screwing the Boomers). Some are being lost to bankruptcy, as in the airlines currently, the auto companies next, and before too many years, the old-time telecom companies. I anticipate that ten years from now, instead of seeing massive Boomer retirements, we're more likely to see the Boomers hanging on to those positions tooth and nail.
Indeed. The governor gives as an example a company that expects to move 90% of its jobs from the US to Asia, and then says the problem is that we're not producing enough math and science PhDs? I have faith in relatively free markets -- create good-paying engineering jobs in the US, and students will line up to get into the programs at school. Move those jobs to Asia or elsewhere outside the country and the students will evaporate. This is not, pardon the expression, rocket science.