Whilst it makes intuitive sense that there must be some limit, it also makes sense that this limit would itself be fluid -
Actually, no. The ultimate bottleneck for human population growth is the amount of available phosphorous. There are theoretical work-arounds for every other limiting factor, but the phosphorous limit would require mass-scale transmutation of matter to get past. Assuming we strip mine the entire solar system for phosphorous, the upper bounds for the human population on Earth is 10e22.
So therefore: the world will never suffer population collapse.
No, merely that doomsayers need evidence stronger than, "If we extrapolate the trendline, it shows we're all doomed," before it's worth listening to them.
What I'm worried about is a perfect storm for a disease to hit.
A perfect storm for a disease is what happened when Cortes met the Aztecs. There appear to have been very few or no diseases in Precolumbian America, so once European diseases were introduced, they ripped through the native population with an estimated 90% lethality rate. For a perfect storm to occur again, you'd need a completely virgin population, which doesn't exist in the modern world.
Its theorized that diseases that hit a high population tend to mutate into more lethal forms because it helps them spread more easily.
Just the opposite -- a disease that starts as highly lethal and highly contagious will evolve to being higly lethal, but not very contagious, or very contagious but not very lethal. Being highly lethal is an unstable niche unless the disease takes a long time to kill, as with HIV. Viruses and bacteria, like all forms of life, tend to evolve towards an equilibrium with their environment (i.e., us), so killing everyone is a bad idea for them. Diseases start out as lethal when introduced to a new population that has no immunity, as with the Americas after first contact, and Europe during the Black Death, but then settle into a steady state with much lower death-rates. Common equilibria for diseases tend to be, (A) minor annoyances like the cold and chronic conditions like herpes, which make people sick, but not so much so that they don't go out and spread it, (B) more significant annoyances like the flu, which can lay people up, but is generally non-lethal to anyone but the elderly, (C) long term chronic diseases like HIV that take years to kill, and (D) childhood diseases like chicken pox, where the adult population has aquired an immunity and the disease has no one to infect but children.
As populations grow out of control, lack of food and resources in some parts of the world will limit population growth, and as diseases and virus' change, our antibiotics are becoming less effective
Thank you, Malthus, but in the 210 years since you first made that prediction, it hasn't come true.
People have been saying that since Malthus and predicting a massive population collapse. The funny thing is, civilization keeps finding ways to accommodate larger numbers.
You should also note that most industrialized countries are pretty close to zero-population growth without immigration -- Europe is a little below ZPG, America a little above. You want to stabilize the population, focus on industrializing the Third World.
The interesting part of the patent is not that they interrupt the video to show a commercial (surely there is prior art on that), but rather than the commercial breaks are determined automatically by analyzing the video and audio (detecting scene changes for example).
That's prior art, as well. TV networks use software that looks for completely black frames as a marker for where ads go. When Joss Whedon did Firefly, he wanted to have a full second of blank screen at the end of an act so the story had time to breathe before going into commercial, but the software would always cut it out and start the commercial immediately. His solution was to use a leather-patterned frame instead of pure black, which fooled the program.
No, actually they can't You think they can, but that's because you can determine patterns in human behaviors, something computers can't do very well, yet.
The problem with the Turing Test is there's such a wide variety of human intellect. I've encountered some trolls on Usenet that were so simple minded and repetitive that I wouldn't be surprised if they were someone's doctoral project in AI. But there's no evidence that they're anything but people with too much time on their hands.
He does make it clear in the History of Middle Earth series that the chapter that had to be pretty much written from the ground up was the Fall of Doriath.
Not only that, but HoME contains the manuscripts they used to construct the book, so if you want, you can verify that every word is from JRRT's pen.
And what happens when Hank Scorpio reveals he's really running Google, and he tells you to pay him a hundred dollars if you want access to your data?
Hyperbolic scenario, perhaps, but trusting your data to a third party for storage is daft -- always back it up, even if your primary storage is a bomb proof crypt in Yucca Flats, using a RAID with doubleplusgood error correction.
As for the ground vehicles, they have names like explosive ordinance disposal vehicle, remote reconnaissance system, and so forth. Nobody calls them robots except for the soldiers
So when the media talks about the police using a bomb-disposal robot to investigate a suspicious package, the reporters are soldiers? It's pretty common parlance to refer to remotely operated vehicles as robots.
What wikipedia should do is try to hit up the private sector for some rich sponsors looking to make donations to a tax-free charity.
Yeah, that's a lot better than advertising. "Yes, Archer Daniels Midland would love to give $100,000 to Wikimedia. But we want you to remove the criticism section from the article on us."
One of the important things that make wikpedia is that there is no advertising.
I hate to break it to you, but not everyone values the same things as you do. I couldn't care less whether Wikipedia puts AdSense on their site, and I suspect that most people who use it feel the same way.
can't they just do what pbs and npr do? get corporations to "sponsor" and put really unobtrusive advertising...
So basically there'd be a big flash ad atop every page informing you that Archer Daniels Midlands paid for this article, and then a pop-up would come up begging you to donate, otherwise great articles like "Danger Mouse Episode Guide" will disappear forever.
ebooks are NOT, repeat are NOT superior to wood pulp. sure you can use them in low light situations, but they aren't as durable and they require batteries
That's a problem with ebook readers, not the ebooks themselves.
What the publishers need to do is make an agreement with a few distribution channels to get their books out there in PDF format incredibly cheap
Please, no. PDFs should be reserved for files where the layout is important. With ebooks, I don't care if the pagination matches that of the dead-tree version. I'd much rather have some form of text markup language where the software can rewrap to make optimal use of my screen space.
Slashdot Mirror
People have been saying that since Malthus and predicting a massive population collapse. The funny thing is, civilization keeps finding ways to accommodate larger numbers.
You should also note that most industrialized countries are pretty close to zero-population growth without immigration -- Europe is a little below ZPG, America a little above. You want to stabilize the population, focus on industrializing the Third World.
No, other religions have expunged the part of the record that shows they originated as a money making venture.
Why would he want to be known as "Delete"?
Jews in Space without lasers would be mighty boring.
$5000 to rewrite an article? I'll do it for $.10/word.
And what happens when Hank Scorpio reveals he's really running Google, and he tells you to pay him a hundred dollars if you want access to your data?
Hyperbolic scenario, perhaps, but trusting your data to a third party for storage is daft -- always back it up, even if your primary storage is a bomb proof crypt in Yucca Flats, using a RAID with doubleplusgood error correction.