No, it's not beside the point. Working hard is a relative definition, and you completely ignore that. If you're going to call someone an idiot for suggesting that we work as hard today as others did in the past then you had best be prepared to defend that position. My point was that the old "hard work" definition needs to be examined in terms of more than simple physical stresses. Not many suicides in the old days where I come from. Far too many of them now.
Ever talk to one of those hard workers? I ask because I do - several times a year I talk to small-boat fishermen who also, in the old days, used to spend winters working either in a mine or a logging camp, and you know what? The fellas who worked the hardest loved it the most. I would suggest that in a lot of cases the people who worked really, really, hard did so not solely to provide and advance their family's fortunes but because there is a genuine, evolutionarily-driven joy in hard physical labour that has a reward at its end. Mentally difficult work, while it has its own set of rewards and diminished physical risks, is no less gruelling on its own level, and certainly if you put your grandfather down in front of a computer at the age of 50 and told him he was constrained to work there all day except when he was politicking with people whose agendas are permanently in flux and clouded by design, he would go completely mad.
Maybe the old days were still harder, but the gap is hardly all one way.
Does anyone else get the image of a wind tunnel data centre with passive coolers dissipating directly into gale-force winds? Not that the idea's bad, exactly. I just wonder how much power they're consuming for AC when the wind-powered notion could probably be taken more directly for a significant portion of the running costs (ie cooling).
It wasn't that important; the discussion of supply and demand is tangential. But to make the point more clearly: Given the political and social will to make it happen and the technical expertise to back them up, supply and demand are not a one-dimensional balance beam for oil. Every other energy source plays into the market, as do the political conditions of other countries. Oil just happens to be the one where the primary incentive is economic and the primary disincentive is a relative surety that prolonged use is going to lead to some really huge problems. Supply and demand don't track that factor, but it remains a major basis for the shift away from oil. That, and the fact that Peak Oil is a mathematical certainty in the next 10 years.
Several makes of fully electric vehicles ramping up for pre-production offer similar ranges. It doesn't have to be exactly equivalent, as long as it's at least a couple hundred kilometres and you can charge up quickly. Fast charge technology (5-10 minutes) is pretty well-understood at this point, and electrical service is probably more ubiquitous than gas distribution at this point.
I'm not sure what the math is on trucks, but I've a feeling that they'll prove an engineering rather than a physics challenge. Several industrial ship designs using electrical power have surfaced, after all.
Oil is almost 10:1 consumed for fuel versus other uses. We may never get away from it in the general case, but that says absolutely nothing about getting away from the use of oil as fuel. Of course, other things make it less necessary when it comes to other considerations - an IC engine needs vastly more lubricant than an electric thanks to the relatively fewer moving parts. And of course plastics can be and are recycled in whole or in part, and we can get better at that as time goes by given an industry that has to compete on the basis of the cost of plastics hydrocarbons as a first-rank product versus a cheap byproduct of a vast and lucrative empire. I know a few chem profs that would pay a handsome price to get the muck that goes into the first distiller at refineries if it came down to it.
Demand and supply don't really follow economic "laws". Supply/demand curves are useful abstractions, but we're not talking about physics here - this is not the same thing as a body in freefall in a vacuum versus the same body in freefall in air. It's more like a body in freefall in a vacuum versus the same body in a turbulent liquid that is denser than itself - the behaviour observed has only limited correlation to the theory. The forces may apply, but the overwhelming influences are not the ones described by the ideal case.
IANAE, but my dad is. This has been the subject of many a discussion.
Oil is one size fits none. We're pretty sure about this one at this point. Everyone wants it, because it's the "best" choice economically. What do you do if everyone wants what everyone cannot have? Solomon's choice, that.
For "sustainable" (ie we have a long term supply that we can't imagine exhausting) non-fusion-based energy, we're pulling the energy out of the ecosystem regardless. Solar and wind have more or less the same impacts, albeit at different points in the cycle. Wind impacts are problem more friendly than solar simply because the cross-section is vertical and blocks very little sunlight, whereas solar is largely lateral and therefore can't be implemented where there's a significant amount of vegetation without massive non-energy-consuption-related impacts.
If you're familiar with chaotic mathematics, you know it's almost certain that pulling increasing volumes of power out of the planet's energy will have significant impacts simply due to the fact that there are always going to be incalculable tipping points present in any complex system. We can't operate based on fear rather than knowledge. The world really is more complex than we can manage in any real sense. Doesn't mean we don't take care of the obvious things - global warming seems pretty clear-cut - but we can't cut ourselves off completely. Industry and citizen both need to become more efficient if possible, because that will mitigate the threat as effectively as switching sources, but switching sources still counts as a good option.
Today, a million is almost what is expected or you're considered sub-par.
Not by anyone who has, for example, looked at the chart posted higher in this very thread IE any responsible businessperson. There are less than half a dozen million-strong MMOGs according to that summary, and there is one very obvious winner and a whole bunch of very distant second-placers. If your business assets aren't aware of those facts they are not people with whom you should be dealing.
Re:Why is this review on /. ?
on
Space Vulture
·
· Score: 1
Just assume all the other books are good, what could possibly go wrong?
A hundred Microsofts could conspire with one Venezuela. Or a dozen oil companies could conspire with one United States. You think money doesn't kill? Try looking at a newspaper.
So you think that action via legal apparatus will have the effect without requiring the institution of censorship? Then we're in perfect agreement, and we can go on. We agree that there doesn't need to be a censor, just a good legal system that prosecutes criminals as defined by the hard-fought precedents set in that free and (relatively) equal system. I happen to choose to differentiate that from censorship, much the same as I might choose to differentiate prosecuting a black man for murder from a policy of imprisoning all men of color.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's not beside the point. Working hard is a relative definition, and you completely ignore that. If you're going to call someone an idiot for suggesting that we work as hard today as others did in the past then you had best be prepared to defend that position. My point was that the old "hard work" definition needs to be examined in terms of more than simple physical stresses. Not many suicides in the old days where I come from. Far too many of them now.
Ever talk to one of those hard workers? I ask because I do - several times a year I talk to small-boat fishermen who also, in the old days, used to spend winters working either in a mine or a logging camp, and you know what? The fellas who worked the hardest loved it the most. I would suggest that in a lot of cases the people who worked really, really, hard did so not solely to provide and advance their family's fortunes but because there is a genuine, evolutionarily-driven joy in hard physical labour that has a reward at its end. Mentally difficult work, while it has its own set of rewards and diminished physical risks, is no less gruelling on its own level, and certainly if you put your grandfather down in front of a computer at the age of 50 and told him he was constrained to work there all day except when he was politicking with people whose agendas are permanently in flux and clouded by design, he would go completely mad.
Maybe the old days were still harder, but the gap is hardly all one way.
Exactly!
Does anyone else get the image of a wind tunnel data centre with passive coolers dissipating directly into gale-force winds? Not that the idea's bad, exactly. I just wonder how much power they're consuming for AC when the wind-powered notion could probably be taken more directly for a significant portion of the running costs (ie cooling).
I can't help but wonder whether a recumbent, shell-enclosed pedal-powered machine could help improve those numbers.
It wasn't that important; the discussion of supply and demand is tangential. But to make the point more clearly: Given the political and social will to make it happen and the technical expertise to back them up, supply and demand are not a one-dimensional balance beam for oil. Every other energy source plays into the market, as do the political conditions of other countries. Oil just happens to be the one where the primary incentive is economic and the primary disincentive is a relative surety that prolonged use is going to lead to some really huge problems. Supply and demand don't track that factor, but it remains a major basis for the shift away from oil. That, and the fact that Peak Oil is a mathematical certainty in the next 10 years.
Several makes of fully electric vehicles ramping up for pre-production offer similar ranges. It doesn't have to be exactly equivalent, as long as it's at least a couple hundred kilometres and you can charge up quickly. Fast charge technology (5-10 minutes) is pretty well-understood at this point, and electrical service is probably more ubiquitous than gas distribution at this point.
I'm not sure what the math is on trucks, but I've a feeling that they'll prove an engineering rather than a physics challenge. Several industrial ship designs using electrical power have surfaced, after all.
Oil is almost 10:1 consumed for fuel versus other uses. We may never get away from it in the general case, but that says absolutely nothing about getting away from the use of oil as fuel. Of course, other things make it less necessary when it comes to other considerations - an IC engine needs vastly more lubricant than an electric thanks to the relatively fewer moving parts. And of course plastics can be and are recycled in whole or in part, and we can get better at that as time goes by given an industry that has to compete on the basis of the cost of plastics hydrocarbons as a first-rank product versus a cheap byproduct of a vast and lucrative empire. I know a few chem profs that would pay a handsome price to get the muck that goes into the first distiller at refineries if it came down to it.
Demand and supply don't really follow economic "laws". Supply/demand curves are useful abstractions, but we're not talking about physics here - this is not the same thing as a body in freefall in a vacuum versus the same body in freefall in air. It's more like a body in freefall in a vacuum versus the same body in a turbulent liquid that is denser than itself - the behaviour observed has only limited correlation to the theory. The forces may apply, but the overwhelming influences are not the ones described by the ideal case.
IANAE, but my dad is. This has been the subject of many a discussion.
So's eugenics from that perspective. Freed from considerations of ethical restraint, lots of hideously stupid, evil things become attractive.
Oil is one size fits none. We're pretty sure about this one at this point. Everyone wants it, because it's the "best" choice economically. What do you do if everyone wants what everyone cannot have? Solomon's choice, that.
For "sustainable" (ie we have a long term supply that we can't imagine exhausting) non-fusion-based energy, we're pulling the energy out of the ecosystem regardless. Solar and wind have more or less the same impacts, albeit at different points in the cycle. Wind impacts are problem more friendly than solar simply because the cross-section is vertical and blocks very little sunlight, whereas solar is largely lateral and therefore can't be implemented where there's a significant amount of vegetation without massive non-energy-consuption-related impacts. If you're familiar with chaotic mathematics, you know it's almost certain that pulling increasing volumes of power out of the planet's energy will have significant impacts simply due to the fact that there are always going to be incalculable tipping points present in any complex system. We can't operate based on fear rather than knowledge. The world really is more complex than we can manage in any real sense. Doesn't mean we don't take care of the obvious things - global warming seems pretty clear-cut - but we can't cut ourselves off completely. Industry and citizen both need to become more efficient if possible, because that will mitigate the threat as effectively as switching sources, but switching sources still counts as a good option.
"You make an excellent point, but your overall case suffers because you stole the 60 inch plasma screen and the family dog."
So the leet-speak phonetic translation of that codename is "spazzes", yes?
iDontFuckPleaseHelpMe
First they boiled the oceans, but I'd given up drinking water, so I didn't speak up...
Rick Nebel = Nick Rebel? You decide!
Today, a million is almost what is expected or you're considered sub-par.
Not by anyone who has, for example, looked at the chart posted higher in this very thread IE any responsible businessperson. There are less than half a dozen million-strong MMOGs according to that summary, and there is one very obvious winner and a whole bunch of very distant second-placers. If your business assets aren't aware of those facts they are not people with whom you should be dealing.
Just assume all the other books are good, what could possibly go wrong?
I think you need to read this.
A hundred Microsofts could conspire with one Venezuela. Or a dozen oil companies could conspire with one United States. You think money doesn't kill? Try looking at a newspaper.
I should mention, however, that I don't think that "colluded" means whatever you think it does.
Then we've got nothing more to discuss. Have a good one!
And you won't be doing your society any favours by doing so.
So you think that action via legal apparatus will have the effect without requiring the institution of censorship? Then we're in perfect agreement, and we can go on. We agree that there doesn't need to be a censor, just a good legal system that prosecutes criminals as defined by the hard-fought precedents set in that free and (relatively) equal system. I happen to choose to differentiate that from censorship, much the same as I might choose to differentiate prosecuting a black man for murder from a policy of imprisoning all men of color.