Stored value cards are classed exactly the same as paper gift certificates, as that is what they are.
Possibly; however, did you read 18 USC 47 sec 1029? In particular, Subsection e.1:
the term ''access device'' means any card, plate, code, account number, electronic serial number, mobile identification number, personal identification number, or other telecommunications service, equipment, or instrument identifier, or other means of account access that can be used, alone or in conjunction with another access device, to obtain money, goods, services, or any other thing of value, or that can be used to initiate a transfer of funds (other than a transfer originated solely by paper instrument) [Empasis added]
Paper gift certificates, if accessable digitally by an account number, would also seem to be covered here, as well as gift cards.
Of course, you may be right about the legal distinctions between a true stored value card and a debit card; I believe laws on refund of any remaining balance is regulated by the individual states, and rules do vary.
Lois Bujold's best work is the Lord Vorkosigan series. She won a Hugo for one of those in 1992.
The Vor Game, published 1991. Also, Barrayar, 1992; and Mirror Dance, 1995.
But she has to pay the rent, so she cranks out those fantasy novels.
Err... actually, it may also be a function of her having a nifty idea that just won't fit into the Vorkosigan series, such as the marriage ride from "Curse of Challion", inspired by an actual event in Spanish history. Her latest Vorkosigan book was also relatively weak (to praise with faint damns); she may just need some time to play with new toys for a bit, and let the inspiration build up.
The Vorkosigan series is too complex and unsettling for many readers.
I'll agree. When I first bought "Mirror Dance", I returned it to the bookstore. I explained it was good, but the scenes with Baron Ryoval were just a little too much for me at the time. Overall, though, the Vorkosigan series is excellent light space opera, with some deep social thought behind the scenery.
I know people will bash this but why wasn't OotP on the list?
Ummm... because the other books got more nominations? I'd also ask in what sense you think that "Order of the Phoenix" was "better". In sales? Largely irrelevant to whether or not the book is crap, as Ludlum has demonstrated for years. In particular, the character development of Paladin of Souls make it a much more interesting read for the adolescent-or-older audience, although it certainly wouldn't appeal to the youngest edge of Harry Potter's fans.
Have you actually read all of the nominees? I missed the Sawyer book, but caught the others... including the Potter you suggested. (Trust the librarian; the librarian is your freind.) I admit, while Lois Bujold's overtaking Heinlein for "Most Hugos for Best Novel" says more about how bad the competition is lately than how good she is, she is a good writer. OotP was (IMHO) not quite so stellar as some of the previous books in the series, and not up to the quality level of those nominated competitors that I read, so it's not too suprising it didn't get nominated.
Y'know, you really should read some of the books that Slashdot reviews, as well as just Slashdot. Bob Glass has 45 years of experience in software engineering design; I'd tend to trust his expert opinion over most. From what I read of his book (which indirectly can help make a lot of sense of where both Microsoft AND Linux are screwed up), you seem to be wrong on points 1, 2, and especially 3-- testing reduces bugs, but even the best testing cannot completely eliminate them. Point 4 is addressed indirecly, in his points on schedule estimation-- and also seems to say you're sort of wrong, although not as a badly with the others.
Unless you are using mathematically PROVABLE methodologies (got an assignment statement? there goes provability....), there will be the risk of bugs in the code.
Your suggestions are good for REDUCING the number of errors. They won't ELIMINATE errors completely.
How can a perfectly reasonable question like that be "gender biased"?
Well, have you stopped beating your wife yet? It's a perfectly reasonable question... =)
I'll back down if you're someone who's specialized in studying gender bias in engineering (there's three in the department I geek for) or a professional pollster, or in some other way qualifiable as an expert witness in the field of semantic bias. Otherwise, I'd suggest you are probably not qualified to judge whether the question is "perfectly reasonable". Neutral phrasing of questions to avoid bias is a major problem when doing questionaires and other surveys. And given that Slashdot does not select for writing skills, I'm unsuprised if ambiguities and biases creep in.
In this case, the question was phrased ambiguously.
"Is it MIT that's gender biased...or is it WOMEN who don't like math, science, and engineering?" can be readily interpreted in either of two ways.
1) Is MIT biased on gender, or is the bias against MIT as math/science/engineering school on the part of the women who don't like Math &c? [Connotation: the bias by these women is a (possibly artificial) bad thing]
2) Is MIT biased against women, or does it only appear that way because it's the nature of women in general to have a bias against Math &c? [Connotation: the bias by Women is nature not nurture]
Most studies from the last two decades or so that I've read about suggest that girls do as well or better than boys in science/math/engineering up until around early middle school. Thus, if the author was leaning to the former, it's a rather different matter than the latter. The issue is a valid one for questioning (EG, are the changes a result of conditioning by the teachers, or neurological changes due to puberty?), but one needs to endeavor to be precise in phrasing the questions, lest the meaning be misconstrued and the debate diverted to irrelavancies.
The original post was made 13 minutes after the story hit slashdot; this suggests that the author was perhaps "karma whoring" by posting early, and did not give sufficient thought to their phrasing. I'd suggest incompetent writing skills (common in geeks) to be the most likely cause, rather than some overt or covert bias. It is also possible it was intended to be an ambiguous troll; however, most trolls don't have minds that subtle, so I'd lean against that being the explanation.
I'll agree that the lawyers/politicians are a more probable and immediate threat; they can be dangerous without having to think-- which is common enough. The skills necessary to code a well-designed multi-platform rapidly distributing worm are rare, more so when combined with either the carelessness, cluelessness, or viciousness needed to release such a well designed and malicious beastie into wild-- but there may be a non-zero intersection of those traits in the global population. Take a look at Ted Kaczynski's background; before becoming the Unabomber, he was a talented mathematician. Fortunately, he's in jail.
You want to stop nuclear proliferation? How about starting with the United States, Israel, England, France, India...
Ummm... because stopping proliferation means keeping those who don't have nuclear weapons from getting them, which is incidentally easier than it is to get the ones who have them to give them up?
With a atomic clock in a GPS you no longer need to solve for time, so you can get the same quality position with one less satellite.
Is the difference in time-rates between sealevel and orbit (due to gravity well position) enough to cause problems with this, or not? For the current system, all of the GPSes are at about the same depth in the well.
Well, presuming your law is more correct than your language, that still should be "You mayn't" for the possible-but-illegal. Of course, I spend more time working around people who try to teach engineers how to communicate correctly and exactly than any reasonable person ought.
Main Entry: 1 despite
Pronunciation: di-'spIt
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Old French despit, from Latin despectus, from despicere
1 : the feeling or attitude of despising : CONTEMPT
2 : MALICE, SPITE
How can the monopolies commission come down like a ton of bricks on Microsoft for locking people into a technology, when the only way you can legally download music for the iPod is through iTunes?
Because iTunes is available for both Windows and Mac, which leaves only *nix zealots pissy. And, of course, if you legally purchase albums the old fashioned way (CD), you can put any songs you *do* manage to rip to MP3 from them onto an iPod as well.
(No, I'm not an Appleite. I use one at work; I dislike it about as much as I dislike the Windows PC and the Linux PC I use at home. If someone wants to give me a Solaris laptop, I'll be happy to add that to my equal-opportunity despite.)
And to whom would we send feedback about the Microsoft's Music Store lack of interoperability with a Mac (even when using IE), or the tiny problem with the beta.music.msn.com Security Certificate ("The identity certificate issuer is unknown"-- probably a byproduct of the Passport Login)?
Disclaimer: I am not a mathematician, so don't rely on this as advice when counting to ten.
Is my understanding of Gödel wrong?
Bluntly, yes.
Bluntly, no; it seems his understanding of the Reimann hypothesis is.
On the other hand, the Riemann hypothesis is a particular question about a precisely stated function on the precisely defined set of complex numbers. There is only one such function and only one such set of complex numbers, no matter which set theory you are talking about.
To be perhaps marginally more understandable, construction of the complex numbers requires the axioms for construction (and infinite inductive properties) of the Natural numbers, and axioms for construction of addition and multiplication. Complex powers require (briefly) the use of calculus, which merely requires adding axioms for how to take a limit into the mix.
The hypothesis is either true or false: there either exists a zero not on the strip or there doesn't. There is no third option.
...or at least, no third option as long as you work with the axioms describing what any normal mathematician considers the Complex Numbers. One may feel free to construct your own Complex/Real/Integer/Natural Numbers out of your own axioms and belly button lint if you will, but I doubt it will be more interesting than the belly button lint itself.
Of course, proving this degree of axiomatic dependence rigorously is more than I am able to do. This is also left as an exercise for....
No, Cryptography might not die even then, because I for one will not welcome our new alien overlords, even after they wipe out the rest of the human race. I want my notes on driving them off the planet (and, umm... cloning Jeri Ryan for replenishing the species) to be completely unreadable to them until after I've finished implementation.
More seriously, there is also extensive case law as well as statutory law on fair use. (Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569, 114 S.Ct. 1164 (1994) was evidently the last time the issue went up to the Supreme Court, leaving aside Eldred v. Ashcroft's indirect effects via public domain limitations.) Admittedly, case law is far easier to change (one twitch from the legislative branch can do that), but that doesn't mean it's any less important while it exists... and it's usually less frivilously made, so some people tend to think when trying to change it.
Not having met you, I really can't judge how pathetic you might be. However, I'd suggest that the people who would buy and use such a product might be better contenders for the title than the product itself. So, if you're one, then yes, it may be just you that is "the most pathetic thing ever".
I. Library resources should be provided for the interest[...] of all people of the community the library serves.
II. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan[...] disapproval.
III. Libraries should challenge censorship[...]
V. A person's right to use a library should not be denied or abridged because of [...] age [...].
So: If the library has a public internet terminal in its resources, and some kids are interested in porn, the librarians should not only let them have access to the terminal to find what's out there, but also resist any attempts by social conservatives to require filters to prevent this, as a matter of basic library principles. This sends FoxNews conservatives orbital. QED.
I've discussed with one of my freinds who is a reference librarian how she deals with this sort of thing. (Of course, she wasn't always a librarian. In college, she was an oversexed party girl, despite a mousy appearance to the first glance. She has publicly stated that she married her husband because "he's frigging huge and screws like a bunny". She still drinks like a fish most weekends. Librarians are oft loundly debauched party animals once you get outside of the "Quiet Please" library itself.)
She occasionally sees a decidedly under-age patron using one of the public terminals to surf for porn. Her solution is to go up to the kid and say (in a helpful librarian tone at normal librarian volume) "Oh, it looks like you're searching for porn. Is there anything in particular I can help you find?" About one time in ten, the parents haven't abandoned the little weasel to their own devices, perk up their ears, and come running to chew junior out. (If they don't keep an eye on their kids, they must live with the consequences-- see patron management.) Eight of the other ten times the kid goes "no, no, I was just finished"... and leaves. No courage of their convictions, the lot of em.
Once in a while, however, the kid will actually say what he (or rarely she) is looking for. And she helps them find what they're looking for-- that's her job. Of course, she doesn't direct them to goatse.cx or stileproject.com right off; she's familiar with a variety of more tasteful sites, from browsing with her husband. (Under what conditions, I do not inquire, but can easily guess.)
Even those brave ones don't usually let the "how to search for quality pr0n" lessons last long (being freaked out by the association of sex and librarians), and usually are relieved to be referred to a dead-tree book on sex education fairly soon. Not always, though--she mentioned once having an extended conversation with an unhappy girl who was uncertain of her sexual orientation. She helped the girl find some quality material (both factual and fantasy) on the web. She also recommended the girl have a discrete talk with either her parents or the high school's sex ed teacher. And of course, there was the teenage boy who assumed that her being helpful with his finding porn meant she was loose, and tried a pickup line; she provided him with an icy (quiet) earful on the cultural significance of two rings worn on the finger next to the pinky on the left hand, on the mutual disadvantages of sex between the underaged and those significantly older, and on incivility's subtantial anaphrodisiac properties and detrimental effect on one's liason prospects. He left with a copy of "Miss Manner's Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior", with the suggestion that studying it might help his prospects among the opposite sex nearer his age group. =)
I don't really see how one could consider powered air flight "unsustainable". At our current stage of history and technology almost all engines use oil products as energy source but that doesn't have to stay this way.
If energy usage requirements for air flight exceed what can be sustainably produced, it's not sustainable. This may or may not be the case; if large-scale high-quality biodiesel production (from, say, algae), or space-based solar orbital energy production with space-to-ground transmission (such as by beanstalk) and hydrogen fuel storage can be efficiently implemented, it's could well be quite sustainable. If not... then you should make your trips before air travel becomes again the province of the very rich.
In a world where there is not enough energy (of any kind) for powered flight the human civilization would collapse anyway.
Possibly. But where, praytell, do you see the laws of economics or physics precluding the collapse of civilization? It's primarily a "decrease in demand" to economists, and inconsequential to the physicists. "I don't like that, so I won't think about it" is one of the attitudes that got us into this mess with Bush and Iraq.
Find a copy of The Dynamics of Growth in a Finite World, ISBN 0960029443 (1974)
Umm... 1974? That was when the enviromentalists were screaming that the dust in the atmoshere would cause a new ice age and we'll all freeze, right?
True enough. There's still some evidence for the changing albedo which prompted that concern; however, CO2 greenhousing (the impact of which was not known at the time) seems to be having a larger immediate effect on temperature. Secondary effects of decreased received solar flux in the form of reduced plant (EG, food) growth shouldn't show up for quite a while, if at all presuming modern particulate release standards continue. In short, the model (a) neglected an unknown factor, and (b) has been altered by changed policies. While more detailed models have been created (see the non-technical "Groping in the Dark" for pointers to more technical citations), and there have been some minor policy changes, the basic "Dynamics" model remains a good rough approximation.
Also weren't we supposed to run out of oil in 15-20 years, out of nickel in 10-15, out of a whole bunch of other metals in about the same time frame..?
This was an inference drawn by many people doing secondary work (such as attempting to fit specific resource production history data to the model's curves), but I will agree most of the secondary work is a crock of shit whose printing wasted the resources their proponents advocate preserving. The actual Forrester/Meadows model used a more generalized category of "resources", without being so specific as to deal with specific examples-- an approach with the weakness of inspecificity, but the strenght of inevitability. With the default parameters, resource use peaked (IE, things started "running out") around 2040. Things never really run out entirely-- production asymptotically approaches zero due to the cost of production rising beyond sale value except at the very leftmost edge of the demand curve. (As an example from manufacturing, you can still find buggy whips for sale even today.)
Most of the conservative Hubbert curve fit estimates place global oil production peaking (starting to noticably run out) in 2010 to 2025. The deeply pessimistic note that we are at or near peak, and total production has been declining since 2000. However, real world production is never as smooth as the curve used to fit it. Nonetheless, the short term trend here is ominous, especially given the bad long-term prognosis.
Slashdot Mirror
Possibly; however, did you read 18 USC 47 sec 1029? In particular, Subsection e.1:
the term ''access device'' means any card, plate, code, account number, electronic serial number, mobile identification number, personal identification number, or other telecommunications service, equipment, or instrument identifier, or other means of account access that can be used, alone or in conjunction with another access device, to obtain money, goods, services, or any other thing of value, or that can be used to initiate a transfer of funds (other than a transfer originated solely by paper instrument) [Empasis added]
Paper gift certificates, if accessable digitally by an account number, would also seem to be covered here, as well as gift cards.
Of course, you may be right about the legal distinctions between a true stored value card and a debit card; I believe laws on refund of any remaining balance is regulated by the individual states, and rules do vary.
Um.... such Gift Cards appears to be a form of Debit card (and in some cases are exactly that), and would to my casual glance be prosecutable as fraud, and investigated by the Secret Service.
The Vor Game, published 1991. Also, Barrayar, 1992; and Mirror Dance, 1995.
But she has to pay the rent, so she cranks out those fantasy novels.
Err... actually, it may also be a function of her having a nifty idea that just won't fit into the Vorkosigan series, such as the marriage ride from "Curse of Challion", inspired by an actual event in Spanish history. Her latest Vorkosigan book was also relatively weak (to praise with faint damns); she may just need some time to play with new toys for a bit, and let the inspiration build up.
The Vorkosigan series is too complex and unsettling for many readers.
I'll agree. When I first bought "Mirror Dance", I returned it to the bookstore. I explained it was good, but the scenes with Baron Ryoval were just a little too much for me at the time. Overall, though, the Vorkosigan series is excellent light space opera, with some deep social thought behind the scenery.
Ummm... because the other books got more nominations? I'd also ask in what sense you think that "Order of the Phoenix" was "better". In sales? Largely irrelevant to whether or not the book is crap, as Ludlum has demonstrated for years. In particular, the character development of Paladin of Souls make it a much more interesting read for the adolescent-or-older audience, although it certainly wouldn't appeal to the youngest edge of Harry Potter's fans.
Have you actually read all of the nominees? I missed the Sawyer book, but caught the others... including the Potter you suggested. (Trust the librarian; the librarian is your freind.) I admit, while Lois Bujold's overtaking Heinlein for "Most Hugos for Best Novel" says more about how bad the competition is lately than how good she is, she is a good writer. OotP was (IMHO) not quite so stellar as some of the previous books in the series, and not up to the quality level of those nominated competitors that I read, so it's not too suprising it didn't get nominated.
Unless you are using mathematically PROVABLE methodologies (got an assignment statement? there goes provability....), there will be the risk of bugs in the code.
Your suggestions are good for REDUCING the number of errors. They won't ELIMINATE errors completely.
Well, have you stopped beating your wife yet? It's a perfectly reasonable question... =)
I'll back down if you're someone who's specialized in studying gender bias in engineering (there's three in the department I geek for) or a professional pollster, or in some other way qualifiable as an expert witness in the field of semantic bias. Otherwise, I'd suggest you are probably not qualified to judge whether the question is "perfectly reasonable". Neutral phrasing of questions to avoid bias is a major problem when doing questionaires and other surveys. And given that Slashdot does not select for writing skills, I'm unsuprised if ambiguities and biases creep in.
In this case, the question was phrased ambiguously. "Is it MIT that's gender biased...or is it WOMEN who don't like math, science, and engineering?" can be readily interpreted in either of two ways.
Most studies from the last two decades or so that I've read about suggest that girls do as well or better than boys in science/math/engineering up until around early middle school. Thus, if the author was leaning to the former, it's a rather different matter than the latter. The issue is a valid one for questioning (EG, are the changes a result of conditioning by the teachers, or neurological changes due to puberty?), but one needs to endeavor to be precise in phrasing the questions, lest the meaning be misconstrued and the debate diverted to irrelavancies.The original post was made 13 minutes after the story hit slashdot; this suggests that the author was perhaps "karma whoring" by posting early, and did not give sufficient thought to their phrasing. I'd suggest incompetent writing skills (common in geeks) to be the most likely cause, rather than some overt or covert bias. It is also possible it was intended to be an ambiguous troll; however, most trolls don't have minds that subtle, so I'd lean against that being the explanation.
Yes, but will the hacker already have won before your new code is in place?
I'll agree that the lawyers/politicians are a more probable and immediate threat; they can be dangerous without having to think-- which is common enough. The skills necessary to code a well-designed multi-platform rapidly distributing worm are rare, more so when combined with either the carelessness, cluelessness, or viciousness needed to release such a well designed and malicious beastie into wild-- but there may be a non-zero intersection of those traits in the global population. Take a look at Ted Kaczynski's background; before becoming the Unabomber, he was a talented mathematician. Fortunately, he's in jail.
I thought that was just a question of enough bananas, dude!
Because, ultimately, the safety systems at Three Mile Island were able to keep the plant from blowing up, where other nations have not done so well when they had accidents. Nuclear power systems are safest made by advanced technological nations... even leaving aside the number of agressive loons who want nuclear bombs to lob at their obnoxious neighbors. True, even the current guys get it wrong... but the US has 60 years of experience in screwing up, and tends to not make the same engineering mistakes twice. (Political mistakes are another story.) If the developing world gets to use advanced safety designs, even if only by borrowing them rather than having to build them themselves, it's probably safer than them trying to reverse engineer the product and botching it.
You want to stop nuclear proliferation? How about starting with the United States, Israel, England, France, India...
Ummm... because stopping proliferation means keeping those who don't have nuclear weapons from getting them, which is incidentally easier than it is to get the ones who have them to give them up?
Is the difference in time-rates between sealevel and orbit (due to gravity well position) enough to cause problems with this, or not? For the current system, all of the GPSes are at about the same depth in the well.
Well, presuming your law is more correct than your language, that still should be "You mayn't" for the possible-but-illegal. Of course, I spend more time working around people who try to teach engineers how to communicate correctly and exactly than any reasonable person ought.
From Merriam-Webster Online:
Glad I could help build your vocabulary. HAND.
This is Microsoft we're talking about here. Apple's with lemons is more likely.
Because iTunes is available for both Windows and Mac, which leaves only *nix zealots pissy. And, of course, if you legally purchase albums the old fashioned way (CD), you can put any songs you *do* manage to rip to MP3 from them onto an iPod as well.
(No, I'm not an Appleite. I use one at work; I dislike it about as much as I dislike the Windows PC and the Linux PC I use at home. If someone wants to give me a Solaris laptop, I'll be happy to add that to my equal-opportunity despite.)
Disclaimer: I am not a mathematician, so don't rely on this as advice when counting to ten.
Bluntly, no; it seems his understanding of the Reimann hypothesis is.
To be perhaps marginally more understandable, construction of the complex numbers requires the axioms for construction (and infinite inductive properties) of the Natural numbers, and axioms for construction of addition and multiplication. Complex powers require (briefly) the use of calculus, which merely requires adding axioms for how to take a limit into the mix.
The Reimann Zeta function of a complex number is the infinite sum of every integer when taken to the power of the additive inverse of the complex number being considered. The behaviors of this function (such as where it has zeros, as the Reimann hypothesis considers) are therefore only reliant on the axioms necessary for the above constructions. Proof of this is left as an exercise to the student. =)
Of course, proving this degree of axiomatic dependence rigorously is more than I am able to do. This is also left as an exercise for....
But not the one he helped write, the DMCA. =)
(Actually, there is a reference to fair use; 17 USC 12 sec 1201.c.1 says fair use is still legit, but 1201.a means effectively you can't buy a product to exercise those rights.)
More seriously, there is also extensive case law as well as statutory law on fair use. (Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569, 114 S.Ct. 1164 (1994) was evidently the last time the issue went up to the Supreme Court, leaving aside Eldred v. Ashcroft's indirect effects via public domain limitations.) Admittedly, case law is far easier to change (one twitch from the legislative branch can do that), but that doesn't mean it's any less important while it exists... and it's usually less frivilously made, so some people tend to think when trying to change it.
Otherwise, you probably just fall into the "or what" category.
Well, lets take a look at the ALA Library Bill of Rights. Trimming only the most construable pieces:
I. Library resources should be provided for the interest[...] of all people of the community the library serves.
II. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan[...] disapproval.
III. Libraries should challenge censorship[...]
V. A person's right to use a library should not be denied or abridged because of [...] age [...].
So: If the library has a public internet terminal in its resources, and some kids are interested in porn, the librarians should not only let them have access to the terminal to find what's out there, but also resist any attempts by social conservatives to require filters to prevent this, as a matter of basic library principles. This sends FoxNews conservatives orbital. QED.
I've discussed with one of my freinds who is a reference librarian how she deals with this sort of thing. (Of course, she wasn't always a librarian. In college, she was an oversexed party girl, despite a mousy appearance to the first glance. She has publicly stated that she married her husband because "he's frigging huge and screws like a bunny". She still drinks like a fish most weekends. Librarians are oft loundly debauched party animals once you get outside of the "Quiet Please" library itself.)
She occasionally sees a decidedly under-age patron using one of the public terminals to surf for porn. Her solution is to go up to the kid and say (in a helpful librarian tone at normal librarian volume) "Oh, it looks like you're searching for porn. Is there anything in particular I can help you find?" About one time in ten, the parents haven't abandoned the little weasel to their own devices, perk up their ears, and come running to chew junior out. (If they don't keep an eye on their kids, they must live with the consequences-- see patron management.) Eight of the other ten times the kid goes "no, no, I was just finished"... and leaves. No courage of their convictions, the lot of em.
Once in a while, however, the kid will actually say what he (or rarely she) is looking for. And she helps them find what they're looking for-- that's her job. Of course, she doesn't direct them to goatse.cx or stileproject.com right off; she's familiar with a variety of more tasteful sites, from browsing with her husband. (Under what conditions, I do not inquire, but can easily guess.)
Even those brave ones don't usually let the "how to search for quality pr0n" lessons last long (being freaked out by the association of sex and librarians), and usually are relieved to be referred to a dead-tree book on sex education fairly soon. Not always, though--she mentioned once having an extended conversation with an unhappy girl who was uncertain of her sexual orientation. She helped the girl find some quality material (both factual and fantasy) on the web. She also recommended the girl have a discrete talk with either her parents or the high school's sex ed teacher. And of course, there was the teenage boy who assumed that her being helpful with his finding porn meant she was loose, and tried a pickup line; she provided him with an icy (quiet) earful on the cultural significance of two rings worn on the finger next to the pinky on the left hand, on the mutual disadvantages of sex between the underaged and those significantly older, and on incivility's subtantial anaphrodisiac properties and detrimental effect on one's liason prospects. He left with a copy of "Miss Manner's Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior", with the suggestion that studying it might help his prospects among the opposite sex nearer his age group. =)
If the kid is at the library looking f
If energy usage requirements for air flight exceed what can be sustainably produced, it's not sustainable. This may or may not be the case; if large-scale high-quality biodiesel production (from, say, algae), or space-based solar orbital energy production with space-to-ground transmission (such as by beanstalk) and hydrogen fuel storage can be efficiently implemented, it's could well be quite sustainable. If not... then you should make your trips before air travel becomes again the province of the very rich.
Possibly. But where, praytell, do you see the laws of economics or physics precluding the collapse of civilization? It's primarily a "decrease in demand" to economists, and inconsequential to the physicists. "I don't like that, so I won't think about it" is one of the attitudes that got us into this mess with Bush and Iraq.
True enough. There's still some evidence for the changing albedo which prompted that concern; however, CO2 greenhousing (the impact of which was not known at the time) seems to be having a larger immediate effect on temperature. Secondary effects of decreased received solar flux in the form of reduced plant (EG, food) growth shouldn't show up for quite a while, if at all presuming modern particulate release standards continue. In short, the model (a) neglected an unknown factor, and (b) has been altered by changed policies. While more detailed models have been created (see the non-technical "Groping in the Dark" for pointers to more technical citations), and there have been some minor policy changes, the basic "Dynamics" model remains a good rough approximation.
This was an inference drawn by many people doing secondary work (such as attempting to fit specific resource production history data to the model's curves), but I will agree most of the secondary work is a crock of shit whose printing wasted the resources their proponents advocate preserving. The actual Forrester/Meadows model used a more generalized category of "resources", without being so specific as to deal with specific examples-- an approach with the weakness of inspecificity, but the strenght of inevitability. With the default parameters, resource use peaked (IE, things started "running out") around 2040. Things never really run out entirely-- production asymptotically approaches zero due to the cost of production rising beyond sale value except at the very leftmost edge of the demand curve. (As an example from manufacturing, you can still find buggy whips for sale even today.)
Most of the conservative Hubbert curve fit estimates place global oil production peaking (starting to noticably run out) in 2010 to 2025. The deeply pessimistic note that we are at or near peak, and total production has been declining since 2000. However, real world production is never as smooth as the curve used to fit it. Nonetheless, the short term trend here is ominous, especially given the bad long-term prognosis.
American oil production did peak in 1970, and h
Talk about damning with faint praise....