A couple of years ago, I had my AC fail. It was under warranty. When I tried to collect, I found that the company that built it was bankrupt, they didn't build it anymore, and parts were not being made. The company that sold it (who the warranty was with) basically sold the warranty portion to another company that probably specializes in this sort of thing. After finally getting things figured out, the basic gist was: "You had a 5 year Warranty, you have 3 years left on it, thus using a bizarre calculation (Likely the Value of the Unit * Percentage of Warranty left), we calculate your Warranty is actually worth 265.05$. We will send you a check, good day." Never mind what it cost to actually replace the unit... Anyway it really was a take it or leave it, so I was at least happy I got a couple hundred bucks, as it was better than nothing.
So if your 300$ playbook breaks after 2 years on a 3 year warranty, you might get 100$... maybe.
I would recommend going with the classics. Many I remember were curriculum in school anyway. Not only are they usually better than most of the massed produced tripe, but also tend to be very short (120-180 pages, VS the 400-800 page range of modern) which might keep a younger person interested, and also able to introduce to a variety of science fiction in a shorter period of time.
HG Wells and Jules Verne are the grandfathers of science fiction. They only slight problem is that because they were written so long ago, terms and significance can be lost. I know for example that I didn't bother reading "War of the Worlds" still the movie came out recently. So many things in the book are astounding because of when it was written, heat rays, flight, and all sorts of things that didn't really exist in the 1800's.
Past those two, there is a lot of great stuff between 1950-1970 that are really good. "A Wrinkle in Time" "The Day of the Triffids" "The Chrysalids" "The Forever War" Are just a few off the top of my head. I enjoyed the Dune series, and as well as Frank Herbert's other shorter books (earlier works mostly). If my library in front of me I could easily give you dozens of examples. "Left Hand of Darkness" might be another, though its a bit deeper as would "The Dispossessed". Which brings more modern authors, Gibson, Stevenson for example. Neuromancer and Snow Crash to mention two. Anyway tons out there and fans willing to share lists of favorites if you google around. Ray Bradbury, is another, Phillipe K Dick, Heinlein, and on and on...
As for something a bit lighter perhaps, there are 3 that come to mind: Harry Harrison (adventures with Bill), Douglas Adams (hitchhikers guide), and I recall also reading Robert Asprin (Myth Inc.) when I was younger. Short, funny and easy to read, and not too serious or mind bending, basically fun read for younger person.
Yes if movies taught me anything, biometric security will only cause evildoers to cut off your hand, thumb, eyeball to defeat the security. Sometimes when you're alive, sometimes not.
I mean if it is something I remember, at least they have to keep me alive! Of course if you don't tell they might take your daughters nose job away...
It is how I got interested, and I work in IT. I think I started a bit earlier, in that it was a 286 that got me started. Sure I had earlier computers than that, but I was younger, and they were not as game friendly (TRS80, VIC20, never had a C64, had a friend that had one).
But yeah I remember fiddling with batch files, boot disks, memmanger, EMS, XMS memory and the like and all sorts of hacks to get a game to work. Back in the day it was a rare thing to simply install a game and have it work, you had to really fiddle to get things to run (or maybe I was always on the edge of compatibility perhaps). Everything was new, and not everything worked all that well together. Heck I remember upgrading from 5 1/4 to 3.5 to CD-ROM. Bought a copy of MS Flight Sim 4.0 just before CD-ROM came out. It came on like 40 3.5 disks! I remember having to mess with Pools or Radiance and Curse of the Azure Bonds to get them to run, and then when running to get them not to crash.
I also got very heavily into modems soon after. I was a daily users of a host of BBS's so much so that my folks were forced to buy a second phone line (even then there were pickups followed by the mod/demod screeching sound, followed by a 14 year old screeching sound). I even tried briefly to host my own BBS. I even did my co-op placement in highschool in a university IT dept (which really should have showed me what I was in for, too idealistic I guess). Later I got into building, OC, and moding computers for fun. Heck getting "multiplayer" (which was really 2 player) to work over a modem was an experience, but awesome as well. I remember setting up Warcraft (original) and Doom2 over 2400 baud modems in my 1st years residence. The year after that it was all about Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, and Warcraft 2 all, modem good times... I think one of the things that made Starcraft 2 very popular (other than it was a great game) was the fact that it was one of the first games where you actually didn't individually connect to another PC, but to the Internet (Battlenet) and let it do the connection for you. Anyone remember TEN (The Entertainment Network I think it stood for), that was all it was for, to help players connect.
So when I went to university I naturally went into Computer Science (1995), and everyone and their dog seemed to be getting rich making web development or software. Then I graduated in 2000, all ready to make my mark on the world, and the tech bubble burst.
I have however worked in my field for 12 years, and while some of it has been rewarding, much of it hasn't exactly been what I expected when I started all of this so long ago. Then again I never worked for a start up or a small company, I work government, which can be very restrictive, cumbersome, and frustrating at times, but it does have a good pension and benefits and is pretty stable, so the good with the bad I suppose.
But given the history of IT jobs, I don't think it is all that surprising that people are not getting into it in droves. When I did, it was sexy, and the potential to make a very good living, now you are much more likely to be an abused corporate drone with little respect, overwork, and little chance for advancement. Yadda yadda yadda, you want to make real money, go into management. I think the youth see not just all the folks that got rich off the tech bubble, but all of those that missed it, and the result it had on everyone (pretty negative). While in a totally capitalistic sense, everyone in the last 10 years should have been going in to finance, so they can be one of those guys on Wall Street cleaning up.
If I had to do it all over again, I think I would still go into CS, as it is still despite everything a passion and an interest. However I might have looked at doing a joint major in Economics, and then getting the appropriate certification, leveraging my CS into the finance world.
In today' job climate its more like 1-2 = unemployed, 3-15 service related job (McDonalds, Call Centre, Server), 15-19 (middle class jobs), if you roll a natural 20, you get to re-roll, if you get another natural 20 (1%, Wall Street, Banker, CEO)...
Well if you can call that an atmosphere on Mars... that's pretty weak.
I am also not saying that CO2 is exclusively created by breathing complex life, far from it. Things like volcanoes etc... spew out the stuff at a huge rate. I am sure there are numerous sources that CO2 can come from. Venus for example is likely volcanic activity.
At any rate, all I am saying is looking at the numbers over a long period of time it seems that there is a correlation between population growth (of everything that breathes O2, and exhales CO2) and the increase of CO2 in earths atmosphere (and a decrease in obvious CO2 emitters such as volcanic activity over time as earth matures).
Yes there is a cycle involved with plants that seems to mean no net increase. However all these cycles involve balance, and when that balance is thrown off, that is when things start changing. So while everyone seems certain that it us digging up old trees and burning them, I am just saying that if you look over the last 100 years or so (which industrialization is being blamed for everything really), one of the other things besides industrialization was that we didn't just double our population, we quintupled it. In 100 years. In geologic terms 100 years is like half a nanosecond. These cycles are measured not daily (well yes they are all the time, but they last much longer). Such an abrupt change, in addition, we eat more meat, we have also quintupled the number of cows, pigs, etc... all of which snort out CO2 at even faster rates. Combine that with taking down trees and burning them to make room for people, cows, pigs, etc... (so you lose a CO2 absorber + immediately emit that CO2 into atmos), I find it hard to believe why so many people have a hard time seeing that all of the above is a significant factor (digging up old trees and burning them is another) that is equal in need of addressing.
However no one ever wants to discuss overpopulation or population control.
Heck so far as humans are concerned, the only real problem with climate change is that we are going to lose some arable land, which is going to make it hard to feed people, which is really because we have too many already. I mean other than burning dug up trees, likely the SECOND most significant use of those dirty trees, is to convert them into fertilizer, which enables us to grow 4 times the number of plants we could without (in combination with oil powered tractors and the like), which people eat, and continue to exhale CO2, make more babies, etc...
It absolutely baffles me that so many people are hung up on burning coal/oil, when there are so many other factors involved. If you think it is a hard sell to convince people that it is humans doing the burning of oil/coal causing climate change, try arguing that it is the mere existence of people eating and breathing that are making a significant contribution to it.
So the corresponding rise of CO2 along with life on our planet has to do with our increased extraction of of carbon over the past couple of billion years?
I wasn't aware that the technology predated human existence by hundreds of millions of years.
You don't seem to be getting what I am selling. That carbon that's been "sequestered for millions of years" wasn't ALWAYS sequestered for millions of years, and it predates humans, and industrial revelations. At some point that carbon WAS not sequestered. They were trees etc... They used to be part of our environment and the cycles that effect our atmosphere.Try taking a lot longer world view. Hell I bet there is a super long cycle of sequestration and release (one that we are certainly effecting).
Humans digging up former trees and burning it isn't the whole story. People are looking at this from only one perspective.
Nope. The information I saw clearly had a correlation to CO2 and life on the planet, complex life. Basically the premise is the more animals expiring CO2, the more CO2 is present. In the beginning, very few, so not much, over time a ton of complex life develops, much of it exhaling CO2, which is a clear indicator that the rise of these populations in themselves (6 Billion humans maybe) are a big part of the problem, regardless of if kola bears become an industrialized society and start burning wood and coal ejecting CO2 in the air. The simple fact that there are more beings emitting CO2 with every breath I think should be enough for this change. Considering the *explosive* growth in human population over the last 100 years, this isn't something that should be all that surprising. However this has been identified as a problem for decades now, but no one wants to contemplate doing anything about it. Politically it is bad, and most religions do not want either. Population control, or reduction as a solution, isn't a popular one. Hell it is less popular than the whole "control your CO2 emissions wreaking your cheap energy economy" plan...
Anyway what I was trying to point out with my silly example, was that just because FACTS might line up to prove something, it doesn't tell the whole story. For example, the fact that what I described happened over something like 4 billion years which is pretty incalculable even by geologic standards, the fact that it was a gradual (and I don't think our word for gradual has enough oomph for how slow a process it was) process of CO2 rise, not a sharp one, allowing evolution to easily keep up presumably, and the fact that likely a sharp abrupt (at least in the geologic or evolutionary sense) change will likely have much different consequences.
I mean presumably at one point it was mostly plants perhaps "eating" CO2 and producing O2, which created an environment that would give survival advantage to animals that could survive by "eating" O2 while producing CO2, creating the symbiotic cycle we have today. The change was such that it allowed species to adapt, though I am sure many died off in the process. However how quickly can evolution adapt to creatures sucking down more CO2 which is more abundant now? I'll not get into the fact that we intentionally try to exhale our industrial CO2 sources where that CANNOT be absorbed. I have no doubt that through industrialization this process has been accelerated, however explosive population growth on its own is likely attributable to much of this (not to mention all the food animals we now create).
FACT: Earth didn't always have CO2 in atmosphere FACT: Over time CO2 has increased FACT: Earth didn't always have complex life FACT: Over time complex life has increased
THUS: The more CO2 we have in Earth's atmosphere the more abundant and complex life we have.
I'd make you a pretty graph but I'm too lazy, instead I'll describe it: It involves two correlated lines closely mirroring each other upwards.
I was going to say something snarky about the fact that its about finding a signal for another 50,000 dollar grant they don't give out for finding that the problem isn't man and just a natural cycle...
Then I got thinking, you know I bet our current Canadian Prime Minister would give out those grants, by the boatload of 50K grants for science proving this...
So if a whole bunch of Canadian based academic (aka non-industry) scientists getting Canadian grant money write up some papers saying that Climate Change is all a load of bollocks, I'll start believing in the system of scientific method again.
Touch enabled devices does not mean specifically tablets or phones. MS has long seen their demise and plans to corner the touch enabled coffee table market. Truly they are visionaries!
Personally as a member of the human race I think that would be a fairly ignominious way to die off.
Alien Teacher: You see in this example the race of "Humans" actually managed to kill themselves off by creating a common "lily pad" (similar to our Xanopods here on Trellic) that reproduced much too quickly. It quickly choked out all food supplies and eventually the Humans themselves. Alien Kid: But teacher, that is stupid why would they do that? Alien Teacher: Because class, sometimes even very smart people can be stupid when they take cognitive shortcuts. OK class that is all for today, dismissed!
I guess what I am getting at is that as near as the 1950's onwards the US was a bastion of science and modernization.
Now it looks backwater and superstitious. There was a time that the US embraced technology and for the most part religion didn't seem to enter into it. Now it seems there is a religious war on technology, science, advancement, modernity, etc... Which I know is nothing new, however why does it have so much more traction now?
8GB of RAM is 50$ 256GB SSD is 200$ 3.6Ghz Quad i7 is 300$
That is all retail.
So 1649$ gets you 7h of battery, 2880x1800 resolution screen, and a shiny box.
Seriously for the amount of power you put in this thing, could the designers not have put in 16GB of RAM? I mean it is dirt cheap compared to everything. Even if they are hard up for space and have to pay a premium for two 8GB sticks, it is still peanuts (or even one 16GB stick if that exists, of course designing a MB with one memory slot is pretty bad design anyway).
I hate to say it, but when did Apple get cheap? (not that 2199$ is cheap, but selling a 2199$ computer with 8GB RAM is.)
When the Cloud is a bunch a servers that sit in the US which are subject to laws that enable the US to snoop through your private data at will the answer has been, and will continue to be "no".
Not to mention that more of those laws seem to be on the way. I would say that any business/government should find that it is unacceptable and unethical to potentially subject your clients to that (unless already subject to US law by residing there already in which case it doesn't really matter).
Because government is always ahead of private industry in creating cutting edge software!
Sarcasm.
Many people seem to thing government secret technology is like that used in the movie "Enemy of the State".
I really doubt it. There might be a few things technology wise that they might be ahead of the curve, likely military, and likely so expensive it wasn't even worth considering, so unless you are a wealthy nation not worth implementing anyway (and obsolete in a year or two anyway).
I think the rate technology has advanced in recent years, it is impossible for governments to keep up, let alone lead the bleeding edge. I think for the most part they have recognized this and have simply adopted commercial products where possible except for a few niche areas.
Sigh. Been there done that. The guy isn't an idiot, he is likely working within the parameters given to him.
Usually it goes something like this:
Management: I have a problem I need you to solve! Me: OK, it will take A + B + C to do it properly. Management: We have no money, use what resources you have available. Me: Sigh, OK I'll cobble something together.
Usually that means using the standard load out of suite software which is MS Access and Excel. I've put together some ugly things yes, but some end up pretty clever.
The problem with these things is that only the guy that made them knows how they work and function. Once they go, so does whatever functionality those things did. I have also inherited some awful kludges, which trying to figure out what the heck the last guy did can be a real nightmare, usually best to just start over. I have one particular one that uses windows scheduled tasks, bat files, exe files (probably VB6), access, excel, and SFTP via a 3rd party software. It is broke in several ways. One being that whoever wrote the exe file did a wonderful job of hardcoding it to a shared folder on our network rather than use relative path names (so now we are stuck forever with that network location if we want to keep the functionality). I would replace it, but I am not entirely sure all of what it does, and there is no code, let along documentation, and the guy is long gone, and no one remember who did it in the first place. At some point I'll have to reverse engineer the thing, but that will take some time to figure out.
What managers do not understand (or care about perhaps) is that while it might work OK now, down the road when you are dependent on it, it WILL cause problems. Especially if the person who does it moves on.
Slashdot Mirror
No doubt how they are usually handled.
A couple of years ago, I had my AC fail. It was under warranty. When I tried to collect, I found that the company that built it was bankrupt, they didn't build it anymore, and parts were not being made. The company that sold it (who the warranty was with) basically sold the warranty portion to another company that probably specializes in this sort of thing. After finally getting things figured out, the basic gist was: "You had a 5 year Warranty, you have 3 years left on it, thus using a bizarre calculation (Likely the Value of the Unit * Percentage of Warranty left), we calculate your Warranty is actually worth 265.05$. We will send you a check, good day." Never mind what it cost to actually replace the unit... Anyway it really was a take it or leave it, so I was at least happy I got a couple hundred bucks, as it was better than nothing.
So if your 300$ playbook breaks after 2 years on a 3 year warranty, you might get 100$... maybe.
I would recommend going with the classics. Many I remember were curriculum in school anyway. Not only are they usually better than most of the massed produced tripe, but also tend to be very short (120-180 pages, VS the 400-800 page range of modern) which might keep a younger person interested, and also able to introduce to a variety of science fiction in a shorter period of time.
HG Wells and Jules Verne are the grandfathers of science fiction. They only slight problem is that because they were written so long ago, terms and significance can be lost. I know for example that I didn't bother reading "War of the Worlds" still the movie came out recently. So many things in the book are astounding because of when it was written, heat rays, flight, and all sorts of things that didn't really exist in the 1800's.
Past those two, there is a lot of great stuff between 1950-1970 that are really good.
"A Wrinkle in Time"
"The Day of the Triffids"
"The Chrysalids"
"The Forever War"
Are just a few off the top of my head. I enjoyed the Dune series, and as well as Frank Herbert's other shorter books (earlier works mostly). If my library in front of me I could easily give you dozens of examples. "Left Hand of Darkness" might be another, though its a bit deeper as would "The Dispossessed".
Which brings more modern authors, Gibson, Stevenson for example. Neuromancer and Snow Crash to mention two. Anyway tons out there and fans willing to share lists of favorites if you google around. Ray Bradbury, is another, Phillipe K Dick, Heinlein, and on and on...
As for something a bit lighter perhaps, there are 3 that come to mind: Harry Harrison (adventures with Bill), Douglas Adams (hitchhikers guide), and I recall also reading Robert Asprin (Myth Inc.) when I was younger. Short, funny and easy to read, and not too serious or mind bending, basically fun read for younger person.
Yes if movies taught me anything, biometric security will only cause evildoers to cut off your hand, thumb, eyeball to defeat the security. Sometimes when you're alive, sometimes not.
I mean if it is something I remember, at least they have to keep me alive! Of course if you don't tell they might take your daughters nose job away...
"Hey, at least we're not Nokia!" :)
Jeice
http://dragonball.wikia.com/wiki/Jeice
I'm thinking that scene where Raven forces himself on the teen Hiro whilst implanted sedative needles are injected into his unmentionables.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that is going to get cut...
I was led to believe that RISC was going to change everything...
It is how I got interested, and I work in IT. I think I started a bit earlier, in that it was a 286 that got me started. Sure I had earlier computers than that, but I was younger, and they were not as game friendly (TRS80, VIC20, never had a C64, had a friend that had one).
But yeah I remember fiddling with batch files, boot disks, memmanger, EMS, XMS memory and the like and all sorts of hacks to get a game to work. Back in the day it was a rare thing to simply install a game and have it work, you had to really fiddle to get things to run (or maybe I was always on the edge of compatibility perhaps). Everything was new, and not everything worked all that well together. Heck I remember upgrading from 5 1/4 to 3.5 to CD-ROM. Bought a copy of MS Flight Sim 4.0 just before CD-ROM came out. It came on like 40 3.5 disks! I remember having to mess with Pools or Radiance and Curse of the Azure Bonds to get them to run, and then when running to get them not to crash.
I also got very heavily into modems soon after. I was a daily users of a host of BBS's so much so that my folks were forced to buy a second phone line (even then there were pickups followed by the mod/demod screeching sound, followed by a 14 year old screeching sound). I even tried briefly to host my own BBS. I even did my co-op placement in highschool in a university IT dept (which really should have showed me what I was in for, too idealistic I guess). Later I got into building, OC, and moding computers for fun. Heck getting "multiplayer" (which was really 2 player) to work over a modem was an experience, but awesome as well. I remember setting up Warcraft (original) and Doom2 over 2400 baud modems in my 1st years residence. The year after that it was all about Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, and Warcraft 2 all, modem good times... I think one of the things that made Starcraft 2 very popular (other than it was a great game) was the fact that it was one of the first games where you actually didn't individually connect to another PC, but to the Internet (Battlenet) and let it do the connection for you. Anyone remember TEN (The Entertainment Network I think it stood for), that was all it was for, to help players connect.
So when I went to university I naturally went into Computer Science (1995), and everyone and their dog seemed to be getting rich making web development or software. Then I graduated in 2000, all ready to make my mark on the world, and the tech bubble burst.
I have however worked in my field for 12 years, and while some of it has been rewarding, much of it hasn't exactly been what I expected when I started all of this so long ago. Then again I never worked for a start up or a small company, I work government, which can be very restrictive, cumbersome, and frustrating at times, but it does have a good pension and benefits and is pretty stable, so the good with the bad I suppose.
But given the history of IT jobs, I don't think it is all that surprising that people are not getting into it in droves. When I did, it was sexy, and the potential to make a very good living, now you are much more likely to be an abused corporate drone with little respect, overwork, and little chance for advancement. Yadda yadda yadda, you want to make real money, go into management. I think the youth see not just all the folks that got rich off the tech bubble, but all of those that missed it, and the result it had on everyone (pretty negative). While in a totally capitalistic sense, everyone in the last 10 years should have been going in to finance, so they can be one of those guys on Wall Street cleaning up.
If I had to do it all over again, I think I would still go into CS, as it is still despite everything a passion and an interest. However I might have looked at doing a joint major in Economics, and then getting the appropriate certification, leveraging my CS into the finance world.
In today' job climate its more like 1-2 = unemployed, 3-15 service related job (McDonalds, Call Centre, Server), 15-19 (middle class jobs), if you roll a natural 20, you get to re-roll, if you get another natural 20 (1%, Wall Street, Banker, CEO)...
Well if you can call that an atmosphere on Mars... that's pretty weak.
I am also not saying that CO2 is exclusively created by breathing complex life, far from it. Things like volcanoes etc... spew out the stuff at a huge rate. I am sure there are numerous sources that CO2 can come from. Venus for example is likely volcanic activity.
At any rate, all I am saying is looking at the numbers over a long period of time it seems that there is a correlation between population growth (of everything that breathes O2, and exhales CO2) and the increase of CO2 in earths atmosphere (and a decrease in obvious CO2 emitters such as volcanic activity over time as earth matures).
Yes there is a cycle involved with plants that seems to mean no net increase. However all these cycles involve balance, and when that balance is thrown off, that is when things start changing. So while everyone seems certain that it us digging up old trees and burning them, I am just saying that if you look over the last 100 years or so (which industrialization is being blamed for everything really), one of the other things besides industrialization was that we didn't just double our population, we quintupled it. In 100 years. In geologic terms 100 years is like half a nanosecond. These cycles are measured not daily (well yes they are all the time, but they last much longer). Such an abrupt change, in addition, we eat more meat, we have also quintupled the number of cows, pigs, etc... all of which snort out CO2 at even faster rates. Combine that with taking down trees and burning them to make room for people, cows, pigs, etc... (so you lose a CO2 absorber + immediately emit that CO2 into atmos), I find it hard to believe why so many people have a hard time seeing that all of the above is a significant factor (digging up old trees and burning them is another) that is equal in need of addressing.
However no one ever wants to discuss overpopulation or population control.
Heck so far as humans are concerned, the only real problem with climate change is that we are going to lose some arable land, which is going to make it hard to feed people, which is really because we have too many already. I mean other than burning dug up trees, likely the SECOND most significant use of those dirty trees, is to convert them into fertilizer, which enables us to grow 4 times the number of plants we could without (in combination with oil powered tractors and the like), which people eat, and continue to exhale CO2, make more babies, etc...
It absolutely baffles me that so many people are hung up on burning coal/oil, when there are so many other factors involved. If you think it is a hard sell to convince people that it is humans doing the burning of oil/coal causing climate change, try arguing that it is the mere existence of people eating and breathing that are making a significant contribution to it.
So the corresponding rise of CO2 along with life on our planet has to do with our increased extraction of of carbon over the past couple of billion years?
I wasn't aware that the technology predated human existence by hundreds of millions of years.
You don't seem to be getting what I am selling. That carbon that's been "sequestered for millions of years" wasn't ALWAYS sequestered for millions of years, and it predates humans, and industrial revelations. At some point that carbon WAS not sequestered. They were trees etc... They used to be part of our environment and the cycles that effect our atmosphere.Try taking a lot longer world view. Hell I bet there is a super long cycle of sequestration and release (one that we are certainly effecting).
Humans digging up former trees and burning it isn't the whole story. People are looking at this from only one perspective.
By that standard they should have been calling themselves "AA".
But then of course people would be calling for meetings all the time...
Nope. The information I saw clearly had a correlation to CO2 and life on the planet, complex life. Basically the premise is the more animals expiring CO2, the more CO2 is present. In the beginning, very few, so not much, over time a ton of complex life develops, much of it exhaling CO2, which is a clear indicator that the rise of these populations in themselves (6 Billion humans maybe) are a big part of the problem, regardless of if kola bears become an industrialized society and start burning wood and coal ejecting CO2 in the air. The simple fact that there are more beings emitting CO2 with every breath I think should be enough for this change. Considering the *explosive* growth in human population over the last 100 years, this isn't something that should be all that surprising. However this has been identified as a problem for decades now, but no one wants to contemplate doing anything about it. Politically it is bad, and most religions do not want either. Population control, or reduction as a solution, isn't a popular one. Hell it is less popular than the whole "control your CO2 emissions wreaking your cheap energy economy" plan...
Anyway what I was trying to point out with my silly example, was that just because FACTS might line up to prove something, it doesn't tell the whole story. For example, the fact that what I described happened over something like 4 billion years which is pretty incalculable even by geologic standards, the fact that it was a gradual (and I don't think our word for gradual has enough oomph for how slow a process it was) process of CO2 rise, not a sharp one, allowing evolution to easily keep up presumably, and the fact that likely a sharp abrupt (at least in the geologic or evolutionary sense) change will likely have much different consequences.
I mean presumably at one point it was mostly plants perhaps "eating" CO2 and producing O2, which created an environment that would give survival advantage to animals that could survive by "eating" O2 while producing CO2, creating the symbiotic cycle we have today. The change was such that it allowed species to adapt, though I am sure many died off in the process. However how quickly can evolution adapt to creatures sucking down more CO2 which is more abundant now? I'll not get into the fact that we intentionally try to exhale our industrial CO2 sources where that CANNOT be absorbed. I have no doubt that through industrialization this process has been accelerated, however explosive population growth on its own is likely attributable to much of this (not to mention all the food animals we now create).
FACT: Earth didn't always have CO2 in atmosphere
FACT: Over time CO2 has increased
FACT: Earth didn't always have complex life
FACT: Over time complex life has increased
THUS: The more CO2 we have in Earth's atmosphere the more abundant and complex life we have.
I'd make you a pretty graph but I'm too lazy, instead I'll describe it: It involves two correlated lines closely mirroring each other upwards.
There take that!
Is that the whole story? Probably not.
I was going to say something snarky about the fact that its about finding a signal for another 50,000 dollar grant they don't give out for finding that the problem isn't man and just a natural cycle...
Then I got thinking, you know I bet our current Canadian Prime Minister would give out those grants, by the boatload of 50K grants for science proving this...
So if a whole bunch of Canadian based academic (aka non-industry) scientists getting Canadian grant money write up some papers saying that Climate Change is all a load of bollocks, I'll start believing in the system of scientific method again.
sort of. what were talking about again?
So there is one sold. I wonder how many they would need to sell to break even...
Actually, to be honest they probably donated the one for the Super Bowl for publicity....
BTW if you think I am kidding:
http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en/us/default.aspx
A boon for board gamers at least...
Touch enabled devices does not mean specifically tablets or phones. MS has long seen their demise and plans to corner the touch enabled coffee table market. Truly they are visionaries!
Personally as a member of the human race I think that would be a fairly ignominious way to die off.
Alien Teacher: You see in this example the race of "Humans" actually managed to kill themselves off by creating a common "lily pad" (similar to our Xanopods here on Trellic) that reproduced much too quickly. It quickly choked out all food supplies and eventually the Humans themselves.
Alien Kid: But teacher, that is stupid why would they do that?
Alien Teacher: Because class, sometimes even very smart people can be stupid when they take cognitive shortcuts. OK class that is all for today, dismissed!
Love the code wheel! It was way better than those Page 3, Paragraph 2, Word 4 type DRM...
I guess what I am getting at is that as near as the 1950's onwards the US was a bastion of science and modernization.
Now it looks backwater and superstitious. There was a time that the US embraced technology and for the most part religion didn't seem to enter into it. Now it seems there is a religious war on technology, science, advancement, modernity, etc... Which I know is nothing new, however why does it have so much more traction now?
8GB of RAM is 50$
256GB SSD is 200$
3.6Ghz Quad i7 is 300$
That is all retail.
So 1649$ gets you 7h of battery, 2880x1800 resolution screen, and a shiny box.
Seriously for the amount of power you put in this thing, could the designers not have put in 16GB of RAM? I mean it is dirt cheap compared to everything. Even if they are hard up for space and have to pay a premium for two 8GB sticks, it is still peanuts (or even one 16GB stick if that exists, of course designing a MB with one memory slot is pretty bad design anyway).
I hate to say it, but when did Apple get cheap? (not that 2199$ is cheap, but selling a 2199$ computer with 8GB RAM is.)
When the Cloud is a bunch a servers that sit in the US which are subject to laws that enable the US to snoop through your private data at will the answer has been, and will continue to be "no".
Not to mention that more of those laws seem to be on the way. I would say that any business/government should find that it is unacceptable and unethical to potentially subject your clients to that (unless already subject to US law by residing there already in which case it doesn't really matter).
Because government is always ahead of private industry in creating cutting edge software!
Sarcasm.
Many people seem to thing government secret technology is like that used in the movie "Enemy of the State".
I really doubt it. There might be a few things technology wise that they might be ahead of the curve, likely military, and likely so expensive it wasn't even worth considering, so unless you are a wealthy nation not worth implementing anyway (and obsolete in a year or two anyway).
I think the rate technology has advanced in recent years, it is impossible for governments to keep up, let alone lead the bleeding edge. I think for the most part they have recognized this and have simply adopted commercial products where possible except for a few niche areas.
Sigh. Been there done that. The guy isn't an idiot, he is likely working within the parameters given to him.
Usually it goes something like this:
Management: I have a problem I need you to solve!
Me: OK, it will take A + B + C to do it properly.
Management: We have no money, use what resources you have available.
Me: Sigh, OK I'll cobble something together.
Usually that means using the standard load out of suite software which is MS Access and Excel.
I've put together some ugly things yes, but some end up pretty clever.
The problem with these things is that only the guy that made them knows how they work and function. Once they go, so does whatever functionality those things did. I have also inherited some awful kludges, which trying to figure out what the heck the last guy did can be a real nightmare, usually best to just start over. I have one particular one that uses windows scheduled tasks, bat files, exe files (probably VB6), access, excel, and SFTP via a 3rd party software. It is broke in several ways. One being that whoever wrote the exe file did a wonderful job of hardcoding it to a shared folder on our network rather than use relative path names (so now we are stuck forever with that network location if we want to keep the functionality). I would replace it, but I am not entirely sure all of what it does, and there is no code, let along documentation, and the guy is long gone, and no one remember who did it in the first place. At some point I'll have to reverse engineer the thing, but that will take some time to figure out.
What managers do not understand (or care about perhaps) is that while it might work OK now, down the road when you are dependent on it, it WILL cause problems. Especially if the person who does it moves on.