"There would be no incentive for companies to make their drivers Free Software."
On the contrary, I believe there would be incentive. A hardware vendor wants to sell hardware, but not support hardware as support costs money. It wouldn't be long before hardware vendors realized that they could save some significant green by allowing th community to take care of itself, or perhaps provide some basic skeletal framework for a driver and allowing the community to roll their own.
In either case, a hardare vendor would benefit significantly from opening their drivers. But first, a hardware vendor needs to see that their is significant demand for their product. Companies are fixed in their ways, and are wary of change, especially when that change is constantly demanding the release of their source.
"There would be no way to fix bugs in the drivers which would cause Linux to crash more often."
You're making assumptions. There is no rason to believe that a third party cannot write just as good drivers as any other members of the OSS community. And as I stated above, a vendor would be keenly interested on keeping the community happy if they wanted to continue sales. Or the OSS community could reverse engineer and write up a driver themselves.
Regardless, I think linux needs to do more to get vendors on board. The companies are uneasy about releasing source, so provide an avenue where they don't have to right away. Once they realize that they have an entire community who'll run support and fix bugs FOR FREE, they'll open up.
"There would be no way to verify that the drivers were free from security flaws (e.g. buffer overflows), nor would there be a way to check for malicious behavior (e.g. rootkits, like the Sony CD driver)"
Even the best programmers in the world will miss buffer overruns and the like. That being said, their are always ways to detect problems. Access to the source won't necessarily make it any more obvious, especially if the programmer(s) went out of their way to hide malicious behavior.
And again, it would be in a vendors best interest not to have malcious code and exploits when dealing with a well informed computer community. If they are found, you can be sure the turnaround would be fairly quick. If not, then the community would just not use the product.
The key here is getting the vendors comfortable with this community, which is sometimes portrayed with a "make everything free" type of zealotry. Once they're comfortable, I believe that both linux and and the vendors will share a very beneficial relationship.
"There would be greater vendor hardware support"
That's the general idea.
"In other words, it would turn Linux into the same kind of piece of shit that Windows is, and defeat the entire purpose of using it!"
I think you're missing the point of using Linux. I'd use linux because it's a good operating system and allows a greater freedom of choice. The opinion that it's better than 'dows is subjective. After all, if windows does everything that someone wants and linux doesn't, then to that user windows is better.
Anyway, that's another discussion. The point here is that I believe that companies need a bit of reassurance FIRST, before jumping right into OSS. I think a binary driver API would be a convenient way of doing this. Perhaps make the API with protection to prevent kernel panics and such.
But seeing how Linus seems firmly against this, it seems unlikely that something like this will happen. Which means (in this day an age of IP fears) vendors won't support linux well, if at all. Which means, for most users, windows will still win.
XML == Big fat files. Binary == Little compact files.
Plus add the parser, schema, etc. and you got yourself a big chunk of bloat. A simple RIFF style binary file with GOOD coding practices will be much smaller and more efficient.
Good example: At a past employer, we wrote software that would generate output data files. They used to be binary, and were roughly 25 to 30 KB in size. Then the whole XML hype set in and our customers just had to have it all in XML. Now output files are between 1 and 2 MB, plus roughly 8 MB of support files (Xalan/Xerces), and they're slower to load. We could have rolled our own, but try justifying the extra cost to the customer.
Don't get me wrong, XML has its uses. But fast, efficient data storage isn't one of them.
BTW, there is nothing wrong with using pointers. You just need to know what you're doing. Programmers who write shoddy code with pointers says more about the programmer than the concept.
First thing that popped into my head was fitting these things with small lenses (or a good short FL Zeiss lens) and cheap CCD astroimagers.
1. Wide to Telephoto CPU based camera lens (18-70mm). 2. Electronic shutter for lens system protection. 2. Cheap CCD astroimager (think Meade or something). 3. Micro gyro. (for orientation) 4. Micro board with embedded OS and controllers. (Flash drive for storage). 5. Low power transciever. 6. Small array of solar cells for power. 7. Small rechargeable Li+ batteries for power storage.
The computer board controlls the camera lens. The CCD is fixed in place.
Most of the housing would be comprised out of a aluminum (heat disspation) and durable thermo-plastic. The solar cells would charge the batteries and power the main system.
Focusing would be handled by algorthims on board.
The CCD imager would most likely be in the 640x480 size range. A 12-bit raw compressed losslessly would give around 690 KB. At 10 Kb/s and a 7 minute window, you could get about 1 image per pass. With HQ JPEG compression, images would probably be 70 KB, so each pass would give you ten images.
Sure 70mm isn't a lot of aperature, but couple this with no visual obstructions (atmosphere), no vibrational problems (wind, ground vibration), and having five of these things at different points around the planet, you've got a pretty good astroscope. It isn't the hubble, but it's not bad for 1/10000 the cost.
So instead you think it's fair that copyright last's the lifetime of the author + 99 yeras?
How is that encouraging creativity? How does this encourage innovation? How is that helping out the community?
It isn't. And if the megacorps get their way, they never will. The gov either needs to repeal copyright length back to reasonable levels, or something needs to be put in place to encourage copyright dictators^H^H^H^H^H^H^H holders to release older material into the public domain.
A tax on your photo's would amount to a few bucks tops. The taxes for the huge amount of IP that Sony music owns would be a chunk of change.
So taxation might not solve the problem. However it is unlikely congress will do anything that will cut itself off from the money pigs. Any other suggestions?
If they're going to treat copyrighted material as property, then it should have the same consequences as property.
It should be taxed. Not just income tax, but property tax. A maitenance/registration fee should be imposed to maintain the copyright as well.
Non-commercial copyrights would be immune to such fees and taxes. Thus free software, a poem you wrote, etc. would still be free as long as you didn't try to sell it.
Commercial copyrights however are treated just like any other asset. It doesn't matter if the book/software/movie makes money or not, the entity that owns the copyright must still pay property taxes and whatever fees go with it. If the copyrighted material is being sold, then it is no longer non-commercial.
This would force companies to dump their copyrighted materials into the public domain once the property was costing more to maintain than it was bringing in. Either that, or the companies would be forced to innovate in order to keep the copyright profitable.
This would be a win-win situation in the end. But we all know the true colors of the megacorps, and something like this would be killed even before reaching committee.
What I thought was fscking stupid was that the fire department is preventing the construction of a hydrogen fuel station for this guy due to "explosive" concerns.
I thought these guys were supposed to be educated about fire and explosives. Hydrogen is a combustible gas to be sure, but it dissipates quickly in the atmosphere. It burns, but doesn't explode (unless you have atank full of O2 next to it). It's also completely harmlss o the environment.
As opposed to gasoline, which hangs around, produces noxious fumes, packs 1000 times the wallop in chemical energy, and is a hazardous material to boot.
One cup of liquified hydrogen that is vaporised and ignited makes a orange flame ball that wooshes out in second. One cup of gasoline vaporised and ignited is equivalent to a stick of dynamite.
Which would you rather have by your house?
And just to jump the gun on those "Hindenberg" types, that disaster was the result of the hull being made of extrememly flammable materials (magnesium fires are a bitch to put out). Since they were filled with hydrogen, the hydrogen just burned itself out or dissipated into the atmosphere. In comparison, if it had been filled with vaporized gasoline the effect would have been similar to the military ordinace known as a Daisy Cutter, a fuel bomb with a very big boom.
Not that a zepplin filled with gasoline vapors would have flown anywhere.:P
When I started out in the game industry, I was put on gameboy/gameboy color. The whole thing is programmed in a stripped down z80 assembler, very limited memory, cpu, and graphics.
Best damn programming experience in the world. Nothing like practically writing your own OS from scratch for programming experience.:)
It should be noted that every decision at MS is not necessarily Billy Boy's decision. Bill Gates is a public figure, the public knows him. But companies are not just one man shows, especially ones as large as MS.
No, they don't. But if they did, the numbers would be worse.
We're depleting our main carbon consumers (forests and related habitats), while in 50 years or so world population will reach into the 7-8 billions in this century (on the other hand, if global warming continues then possibly depletion of the forests will be replaced by the greening of the tundras and the algael blooms in the oceans). More farms, more animals, more methane, more people, more energy, more cars, more travel.
An increase in fuel economy will be met by an even larger increase in fuel needs. Our fuel eficiency has a limit, while our needs for energy do not.
But my numbers were overstating te CO2 levels. That assumed that all the oil would be used as fuel. However, only 88% of oil is used as fuels (heating, gasoline, jet fuels). The rest is used for lubricants, asphalts, plastics, etc. .
Regardless, I'm hoping for a breakthrough in solar tech or fusion. We can't keep pumping crud into our atmosphere for another century.
In 50 years at our current rates of increase of burning oil, the CO2 content of the atmosphere will be around 10%, as opposed to the.038% tht it's at now, along with a nice helping of CO, NO2 and various other byproducts.
I don't doubt we'll come up with new technology. I just hope it happens fast enough. I also hope the oil lobbyists don't help in setting up roadblocks to keep oil on top.
Regardless, within the next century things will have change pretty quickly. We'll have to wait and see how corporate power, politics, and tech plays out.
"Hundreds of years worth at 2000 levels if all the known Shale, Tar Sands and Rock Oil is added up."
Except it is more expensive to extract useable oil from these forms. And these might not be conveniently located in a friendly nation, so you have to add in the costs of aggressive negotiations, bribes, regime changes, etc..
Now, if we are talking proven oil reserves, the top 10 producing countries have a total of 1.092 trillion barrels left according to some quick googling. World oil consumption in 2000, again according to some quick googling, was roughly 75 million barrels a day.
That gives us about 39.89 years left, if oil consumption rates stay the same. But they aren't. They are increasing quite a bit with countries like China and India rapidly industrializing. So as far as the world's proven oil reserves are concerned, the future is pretty bleak. And this isn't even saying anything about the trillions of tons of CO2 we'd be dumping into the atmosphere.
Okay, so lets say we have all this oil locked up in other forms. Lets use a nice number like 200 years worth of oil. Well, that would mean that 5.46 trillion barrels of oil are locked up.
According to the Wiki, there's about 1.6 trillion barrels of oil locked up in the world's oil shale. That'd buy about another 59 years. However, to get the oil out requires a process called pyrolisis, which as the name implies requires heat (450-500 C). That takes a bit of energy to do, but that's only the beginning of the problems. The byproducts are extremely toxic with various carcinogens thrown into the mix for good measure. It also requires a 3 to 1 ratio in water. On the plus side, shale becomes economical at barrel prices above $40.
Alright, were at 100 years worth of oil. Now lets see what else there is. Tar sands. Again according to the great Wiki, we've got an estimated 5.25 trillion barrels locked up. That gives 193 years more, burning at 2000 levels. And again we've got more bad environmental impacts. But with rising oil prices, it's becoming to economically feasible.
That's a grand total of 252 years of oil at 2000 levels. Hundreds is a little much, but technically you are correct.
Now to throw some cold water on this party. According to the DOE, even if we extract all this lovely oil, at the current growth rates the high estimate is that production will peak around mid century, and fall off rather quickly, dropping to almost nothing by early next century. So there goes the "hundreds of years". If we're lucky, we'll make it to the next century.
What about the environment? Trillions upon trillions of tons of toxic wastes will be generated from extraction of hard oil reserves. Even in-situ methods aren't clean. And then there's the tremendous amount of water needed to process this stuff.
And last but not least, our old friend CO2. At 83.2% carbon and an average weight of 1 metric ton per 7.3 barrels, burning all that oil would add about 1 trillion metric tons of CO2, not including the CO2 that comes from everywhere else and our diminishing flora that reclaims it. That's enough to raise the CO2 content of our atmosphere (assuming a 100km cieling) by.24 kg/m^3. The density of air at sea level is 1.2 kg/m^3, thus yielding an atmospheric content of about 20% CO2, or about the same as when the dinosaurs roamed the planet.
Back then, the average planet wide temps were around the century mark (deg F), enough to comfortably bake most modern day species, including ourselves.
At this point, I guess I don't even need to mention the other noxious gases that would constitue significant fractions of our atmosphere at that point. Eventually, the planet would recover after we die off, as it always recovers from such disasters.
Even if we had trillions of barrels just ready for the taking, I'd push for renewable energy. Burning oil for the next 100 years or so is not only completely stupid, but also incredibly dangerous (from a human perspective, the planet could really care less).
Mine is the Goldbach Conjecture. It's decievingly simple and yet no has developed a solid proof.
"Every even number greater than 2 is the sum of two primes".
This has held to numbers of really large size. But no one has a proof. In essence, you are trying to prove that the set of primes is a generating set for the even numbers (if I remember my abstract algebra correctly).
I vaguely remember that omeone was trying to prove it using probabilities, and one mathematician managed to prove every even is the sum of one prime and one other number.
I think the bounty on this problem is $1 million. but I'm not sure.
Accoring to the Osama video, even most of the hijackers didn't know they were going for trip to the towers. Only the team leaders were informed.
I suppose it's easier to manage that way. Less likely for one of them to say "We're gonna do what? Uh yeah, sure, right....I'll be there at 8AM sharp *click*"
~X~
Re:Actually, he has a point ...
on
Google Terror Threat
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Oh in the name of all that's stupid.....
When the hell are people going to get OVER the TERRORISTS? If someone is intent on doing you harm, they will find a way. Period. End of freakin' story. It doesn't matter how many draconian laws you pass, or how much information you hide.
Seems like the enitre world has reached new heights in unsubstantited paranoia. Yes terrorist attacks happen. Yes they suck. But you have more of a chance of being struck by lightening than you do being struck down by terrorists.
Live in fear, and you have built your own cage. And the terrorists win.
And no, thanks to GWB, we have more to worry about from terrorists because now they attack people who are less able to prevent/defend against them and are less educated and are more religious (always a very dangerous combination). People are more willing to join them because they don't like the US and would rather be the "Devil's" right hand than in his path. Fear works.
AH! Don't put that on the web! It can be used by terrorist! AH! Don't do that! The terrorist will get ideas! AH! Don't say that! The terrorists might hear you!
It's repulsive. It's stupid.
Backpack nukes? Sheesh. Study the mechanics of a real nuke and see just how infeasible a backpack nuke is.
Fearmongering at its best. I thought we left this sh*t back in the 50's and 60's. Only then it was communism.
But on the bright side, we should be able to feed the starving with all this red herring.
Slashdot Mirror
"There would be no incentive for companies to make their drivers Free Software."
On the contrary, I believe there would be incentive. A hardware vendor wants to sell hardware, but not support hardware as support costs money. It wouldn't be long before hardware vendors realized that they could save some significant green by allowing th community to take care of itself, or perhaps provide some basic skeletal framework for a driver and allowing the community to roll their own.
In either case, a hardare vendor would benefit significantly from opening their drivers. But first, a hardware vendor needs to see that their is significant demand for their product. Companies are fixed in their ways, and are wary of change, especially when that change is constantly demanding the release of their source.
"There would be no way to fix bugs in the drivers which would cause Linux to crash more often."
You're making assumptions. There is no rason to believe that a third party cannot write just as good drivers as any other members of the OSS community. And as I stated above, a vendor would be keenly interested on keeping the community happy if they wanted to continue sales. Or the OSS community could reverse engineer and write up a driver themselves.
Regardless, I think linux needs to do more to get vendors on board. The companies are uneasy about releasing source, so provide an avenue where they don't have to right away. Once they realize that they have an entire community who'll run support and fix bugs FOR FREE, they'll open up.
"There would be no way to verify that the drivers were free from security flaws (e.g. buffer overflows), nor would there be a way to check for malicious behavior (e.g. rootkits, like the Sony CD driver)"
Even the best programmers in the world will miss buffer overruns and the like. That being said, their are always ways to detect problems. Access to the source won't necessarily make it any more obvious, especially if the programmer(s) went out of their way to hide malicious behavior.
And again, it would be in a vendors best interest not to have malcious code and exploits when dealing with a well informed computer community. If they are found, you can be sure the turnaround would be fairly quick. If not, then the community would just not use the product.
The key here is getting the vendors comfortable with this community, which is sometimes portrayed with a "make everything free" type of zealotry. Once they're comfortable, I believe that both linux and and the vendors will share a very beneficial relationship.
"There would be greater vendor hardware support"
That's the general idea.
"In other words, it would turn Linux into the same kind of piece of shit that Windows is, and defeat the entire purpose of using it!"
I think you're missing the point of using Linux. I'd use linux because it's a good operating system and allows a greater freedom of choice. The opinion that it's better than 'dows is subjective. After all, if windows does everything that someone wants and linux doesn't, then to that user windows is better.
Anyway, that's another discussion. The point here is that I believe that companies need a bit of reassurance FIRST, before jumping right into OSS. I think a binary driver API would be a convenient way of doing this. Perhaps make the API with protection to prevent kernel panics and such.
But seeing how Linus seems firmly against this, it seems unlikely that something like this will happen. Which means (in this day an age of IP fears) vendors won't support linux well, if at all. Which means, for most users, windows will still win.
~X~
XML == Big fat files.
Binary == Little compact files.
Plus add the parser, schema, etc. and you got yourself a big chunk of bloat. A simple RIFF style binary file with GOOD coding practices will be much smaller and more efficient.
Good example: At a past employer, we wrote software that would generate output data files. They used to be binary, and were roughly 25 to 30 KB in size. Then the whole XML hype set in and our customers just had to have it all in XML. Now output files are between 1 and 2 MB, plus roughly 8 MB of support files (Xalan/Xerces), and they're slower to load. We could have rolled our own, but try justifying the extra cost to the customer.
Don't get me wrong, XML has its uses. But fast, efficient data storage isn't one of them.
BTW, there is nothing wrong with using pointers. You just need to know what you're doing. Programmers who write shoddy code with pointers says more about the programmer than the concept.
~X~
Have you seen my new planet? It's made out of MAGIC!!!
~X~
I think we could do quite a bit with a pico.
First thing that popped into my head was fitting these things with small lenses (or a good short FL Zeiss lens) and cheap CCD astroimagers.
1. Wide to Telephoto CPU based camera lens (18-70mm).
2. Electronic shutter for lens system protection.
2. Cheap CCD astroimager (think Meade or something).
3. Micro gyro. (for orientation)
4. Micro board with embedded OS and controllers. (Flash drive for storage).
5. Low power transciever.
6. Small array of solar cells for power.
7. Small rechargeable Li+ batteries for power storage.
The computer board controlls the camera lens. The CCD is fixed in place.
Most of the housing would be comprised out of a aluminum (heat disspation) and durable thermo-plastic. The solar cells would charge the batteries and power the main system.
Focusing would be handled by algorthims on board.
The CCD imager would most likely be in the 640x480 size range. A 12-bit raw compressed losslessly would give around 690 KB. At 10 Kb/s and a 7 minute window, you could get about 1 image per pass. With HQ JPEG compression, images would probably be 70 KB, so each pass would give you ten images.
Sure 70mm isn't a lot of aperature, but couple this with no visual obstructions (atmosphere), no vibrational problems (wind, ground vibration), and having five of these things at different points around the planet, you've got a pretty good astroscope. It isn't the hubble, but it's not bad for 1/10000 the cost.
~X~
So instead you think it's fair that copyright last's the lifetime of the author + 99 yeras?
How is that encouraging creativity? How does this encourage innovation? How is that helping out the community?
It isn't. And if the megacorps get their way, they never will. The gov either needs to repeal copyright length back to reasonable levels, or something needs to be put in place to encourage copyright dictators^H^H^H^H^H^H^H holders to release older material into the public domain.
A tax on your photo's would amount to a few bucks tops. The taxes for the huge amount of IP that Sony music owns would be a chunk of change.
So taxation might not solve the problem. However it is unlikely congress will do anything that will cut itself off from the money pigs. Any other suggestions?
~X~
If they're going to treat copyrighted material as property, then it should have the same consequences as property.
It should be taxed. Not just income tax, but property tax. A maitenance/registration fee should be imposed to maintain the copyright as well.
Non-commercial copyrights would be immune to such fees and taxes. Thus free software, a poem you wrote, etc. would still be free as long as you didn't try to sell it.
Commercial copyrights however are treated just like any other asset. It doesn't matter if the book/software/movie makes money or not, the entity that owns the copyright must still pay property taxes and whatever fees go with it. If the copyrighted material is being sold, then it is no longer non-commercial.
This would force companies to dump their copyrighted materials into the public domain once the property was costing more to maintain than it was bringing in. Either that, or the companies would be forced to innovate in order to keep the copyright profitable.
This would be a win-win situation in the end. But we all know the true colors of the megacorps, and something like this would be killed even before reaching committee.
~X~
"Obesity is huge"
-1 Redundant
~X~
What I thought was fscking stupid was that the fire department is preventing the construction of a hydrogen fuel station for this guy due to "explosive" concerns.
:P
I thought these guys were supposed to be educated about fire and explosives. Hydrogen is a combustible gas to be sure, but it dissipates quickly in the atmosphere. It burns, but doesn't explode (unless you have atank full of O2 next to it). It's also completely harmlss o the environment.
As opposed to gasoline, which hangs around, produces noxious fumes, packs 1000 times the wallop in chemical energy, and is a hazardous material to boot.
One cup of liquified hydrogen that is vaporised and ignited makes a orange flame ball that wooshes out in second. One cup of gasoline vaporised and ignited is equivalent to a stick of dynamite.
Which would you rather have by your house?
And just to jump the gun on those "Hindenberg" types, that disaster was the result of the hull being made of extrememly flammable materials (magnesium fires are a bitch to put out). Since they were filled with hydrogen, the hydrogen just burned itself out or dissipated into the atmosphere. In comparison, if it had been filled with vaporized gasoline the effect would have been similar to the military ordinace known as a Daisy Cutter, a fuel bomb with a very big boom.
Not that a zepplin filled with gasoline vapors would have flown anywhere.
~X~
In Sony Corporation, our CDs PWNS J00!
~X~
" If they've lost executives, maybe they should have Steve checking under chairs."
:P
*Whoooooooooosh* *CRASH!!!*
Nice suggestion, dumbass.
~X~
I suppose it's a given that you never want to play musical chairs with Ballmer. :P
~X~
When I started out in the game industry, I was put on gameboy/gameboy color. The whole thing is programmed in a stripped down z80 assembler, very limited memory, cpu, and graphics.
:)
Best damn programming experience in the world. Nothing like practically writing your own OS from scratch for programming experience.
~X~
Seriously, did anyone even think for a second that THIS WOULDN'T HAPPEN??? To all those supporters of the PATRIOT ACT:
WE TOLD YOU SO!
And do you know what's going change? Nothing. Apathy is going to kill this nation.
~X~
"Three days is more than I can usually handle without my brain going into a fit of chaos."
:)
You don't have kids, do you?
~X~
We'll by the time they can do a mission to Mars, the solution will be present:
Virtual Valerie, a fully interactive holographic sex goddess. You want three boobs, you get three boobs.
For the women, from what I hear, they're happy just with this thing called a "Rabbit" right now.
~X~
It should be noted that every decision at MS is not necessarily Billy Boy's decision. Bill Gates is a public figure, the public knows him. But companies are not just one man shows, especially ones as large as MS.
~X~
No, they don't. But if they did, the numbers would be worse.
We're depleting our main carbon consumers (forests and related habitats), while in 50 years or so world population will reach into the 7-8 billions in this century (on the other hand, if global warming continues then possibly depletion of the forests will be replaced by the greening of the tundras and the algael blooms in the oceans). More farms, more animals, more methane, more people, more energy, more cars, more travel.
An increase in fuel economy will be met by an even larger increase in fuel needs. Our fuel eficiency has a limit, while our needs for energy do not.
But my numbers were overstating te CO2 levels. That assumed that all the oil would be used as fuel. However, only 88% of oil is used as fuels (heating, gasoline, jet fuels). The rest is used for lubricants, asphalts, plastics, etc. .
Regardless, I'm hoping for a breakthrough in solar tech or fusion. We can't keep pumping crud into our atmosphere for another century.
~X~
In 50 years at our current rates of increase of burning oil, the CO2 content of the atmosphere will be around 10%, as opposed to the .038% tht it's at now, along with a nice helping of CO, NO2 and various other byproducts.
I don't doubt we'll come up with new technology. I just hope it happens fast enough. I also hope the oil lobbyists don't help in setting up roadblocks to keep oil on top.
Regardless, within the next century things will have change pretty quickly. We'll have to wait and see how corporate power, politics, and tech plays out.
~X~
"Hundreds of years worth at 2000 levels if all the known Shale, Tar Sands and Rock Oil is added up."
.24 kg/m^3. The density of air at sea level is 1.2 kg/m^3, thus yielding an atmospheric content of about 20% CO2, or about the same as when the dinosaurs roamed the planet.
Except it is more expensive to extract useable oil from these forms. And these might not be conveniently located in a friendly nation, so you have to add in the costs of aggressive negotiations, bribes, regime changes, etc..
Now, if we are talking proven oil reserves, the top 10 producing countries have a total of 1.092 trillion barrels left according to some quick googling. World oil consumption in 2000, again according to some quick googling, was roughly 75 million barrels a day.
That gives us about 39.89 years left, if oil consumption rates stay the same. But they aren't. They are increasing quite a bit with countries like China and India rapidly industrializing. So as far as the world's proven oil reserves are concerned, the future is pretty bleak. And this isn't even saying anything about the trillions of tons of CO2 we'd be dumping into the atmosphere.
Okay, so lets say we have all this oil locked up in other forms. Lets use a nice number like 200 years worth of oil. Well, that would mean that 5.46 trillion barrels of oil are locked up.
According to the Wiki, there's about 1.6 trillion barrels of oil locked up in the world's oil shale. That'd buy about another 59 years. However, to get the oil out requires a process called pyrolisis, which as the name implies requires heat (450-500 C). That takes a bit of energy to do, but that's only the beginning of the problems. The byproducts are extremely toxic with various carcinogens thrown into the mix for good measure. It also requires a 3 to 1 ratio in water. On the plus side, shale becomes economical at barrel prices above $40.
Alright, were at 100 years worth of oil. Now lets see what else there is. Tar sands. Again according to the great Wiki, we've got an estimated 5.25 trillion barrels locked up. That gives 193 years more, burning at 2000 levels. And again we've got more bad environmental impacts. But with rising oil prices, it's becoming to economically feasible.
That's a grand total of 252 years of oil at 2000 levels. Hundreds is a little much, but technically you are correct.
Now to throw some cold water on this party. According to the DOE, even if we extract all this lovely oil, at the current growth rates the high estimate is that production will peak around mid century, and fall off rather quickly, dropping to almost nothing by early next century. So there goes the "hundreds of years". If we're lucky, we'll make it to the next century.
What about the environment? Trillions upon trillions of tons of toxic wastes will be generated from extraction of hard oil reserves. Even in-situ methods aren't clean. And then there's the tremendous amount of water needed to process this stuff.
And last but not least, our old friend CO2. At 83.2% carbon and an average weight of 1 metric ton per 7.3 barrels, burning all that oil would add about 1 trillion metric tons of CO2, not including the CO2 that comes from everywhere else and our diminishing flora that reclaims it. That's enough to raise the CO2 content of our atmosphere (assuming a 100km cieling) by
Back then, the average planet wide temps were around the century mark (deg F), enough to comfortably bake most modern day species, including ourselves.
At this point, I guess I don't even need to mention the other noxious gases that would constitue significant fractions of our atmosphere at that point. Eventually, the planet would recover after we die off, as it always recovers from such disasters.
Even if we had trillions of barrels just ready for the taking, I'd push for renewable energy. Burning oil for the next 100 years or so is not only completely stupid, but also incredibly dangerous (from a human perspective, the planet could really care less).
But you were right about the oil.
~X~
Eh, I think I'm misremembering that. :P
You can type in Goldbach Conjecture in google and find out the work that has been done on this. I find it interesting, anyway.
~X~
Mine is the Goldbach Conjecture. It's decievingly simple and yet no has developed a solid proof.
"Every even number greater than 2 is the sum of two primes".
This has held to numbers of really large size. But no one has a proof. In essence, you are trying to prove that the set of primes is a generating set for the even numbers (if I remember my abstract algebra correctly).
I vaguely remember that omeone was trying to prove it using probabilities, and one mathematician managed to prove every even is the sum of one prime and one other number.
I think the bounty on this problem is $1 million. but I'm not sure.
~X~
*blurb blurb blurb blurb blurb blurb*
*whoooooooooooooooooooooooooo.......*
What?
~X~
Accoring to the Osama video, even most of the hijackers didn't know they were going for trip to the towers. Only the team leaders were informed.
I suppose it's easier to manage that way. Less likely for one of them to say "We're gonna do what? Uh yeah, sure, right....I'll be there at 8AM sharp *click*"
~X~
Oh in the name of all that's stupid.....
When the hell are people going to get OVER the TERRORISTS? If someone is intent on doing you harm, they will find a way. Period. End of freakin' story. It doesn't matter how many draconian laws you pass, or how much information you hide.
Seems like the enitre world has reached new heights in unsubstantited paranoia. Yes terrorist attacks happen. Yes they suck. But you have more of a chance of being struck by lightening than you do being struck down by terrorists.
Live in fear, and you have built your own cage. And the terrorists win.
And no, thanks to GWB, we have more to worry about from terrorists because now they attack people who are less able to prevent/defend against them and are less educated and are more religious (always a very dangerous combination). People are more willing to join them because they don't like the US and would rather be the "Devil's" right hand than in his path. Fear works.
AH! Don't put that on the web! It can be used by terrorist! AH! Don't do that! The terrorist will get ideas! AH! Don't say that! The terrorists might hear you!
It's repulsive. It's stupid.
Backpack nukes? Sheesh. Study the mechanics of a real nuke and see just how infeasible a backpack nuke is.
Fearmongering at its best. I thought we left this sh*t back in the 50's and 60's. Only then it was communism.
But on the bright side, we should be able to feed the starving with all this red herring.
~X~
I, for one, welcome our new Alfen wave grass-sourly reduced increased fueled overlords.
~X~