If the premise is the overcrowding of the planet and the availability of local food and housing is nonexistent, then interstellar travel will always be cheaper.
You think we'll have zero grain but plenty of spaceships lying around? Food and housing will never be nonexistent, just more scarce relative to the number of people (I'm not sure that will actually happen, but the scenario being envisioned assumes it). The cost of cramming a second person into a tiny house is still less than building them a spaceship, and it's not like the homeless and starving are going to be building their own.
No, this is great, I'm glad you mentioned Sasser, because you already made my point for me.
Sasser, and many of the recent big-bad-worms came from Microsoft releasing the vulnerability notice along with their fix. Not from someone covertly analyzing the source code. Security through obscurity would have actually helped here. Not that I'm actually suggesting the policy, I'm just saying that these worms were created because Microsoft publically released details, not because they hid them.
Acutally, the evidence I'm referring to is personal experience. I am happier when I have sex. I am happier when I have money. I am happier when drinking fine wine.
I have limited faith in psychological studies, and even less faith in the interpretations most people (in this case, you) derive from those studies. I have a great deal of faith in personally observed data. Of course, YMMV, which is why I said "maybe mine's broken." I guess it's possible that in a sea of billions of people all desperately seeking sex and money, I'm the only one who actually enjoys those things.
The problem with this theory, the "let's solve over-population through space-colonization" theory, is that it requires the cost of transporting someone through space to be less than the cost of feeding and housing them. Right now we're leaning the other way by a HUGE margin. I'm not saying we shouldn't seek to colonize other planets, I'm just saying we aren't going to solve any population problems by putting 3 billion people on a ship.
To be honest the first bots will be likely be for things such as hair loss, sexual disfunction, maybe cosmetic age reversal. The manufacturers will not want to jeopardize the profits of existing surgeons. Over time, as fewer surgeons are trained, the useful bots will be manufactured.
I agree that this is the way that it will go, but I disagree it's for the benefit of existing surgeons and I disagree that this isn't the "useful" treatment. I'd rather live 100 years in a 25 year-old body than 300 years in a body that ages normally, and I suspect the vast majority of the population feels the same way. Perfectly legitimate customer demand will drive anti-wrinkle treatments beyond anti-heart-attack treatments. To call life-extension more "useful" than life-enhancement implies you have some sort of purpose, which a vast population is somehow useful for. I'm curious what that is.
The barrier for everyone having a flying car is not the technology, it's the practicality.
But that is the point. When people make these crazy predictions about what life will be like in 20 years, they're looking only at the technology research, not at the scores of practical factors that actually make up society. For example, there's fear. Look at the reaction people have to genetically enhanced foods and tell me that everyone will be clamoring to fill their body with tiny robots.
In the 50's they weren't saying that one company would be capable of producing a car that flew. They were envisioning a society in which everyone flew in passenger vehicles like tiny planes and nobody needed to drive on the roads anymore. Similarly, I believe that in 25 years, scientists very well may have developed a nano-technology based treatment that fixes several currently existing medical problems. But I don't believe that everyone will be popping a pill. Maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong, but these predictions are ludicrous.
perhaps you might consider the gigantic mountain of evidence you see everywhere around you on a daily basis that tells you that the Good Life has within epsilon of nothing to do with Fine Wine, Money, and Orgasms.
That's funny, I'm looking at the gigantic mountain of evidence, but it seems to be saying the opposite. Maybe mine's broken?
Re:Is the magic pill available in a bundle with
on
Nano Body Building
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The parent-poster's point (which I agree with) isn't that we shouldn't be doing this research or conceiving of possibilities; we should. The point is that predictions like "in twenty years we'll all be eating nano-puff cereal and we'll be able to breathe water and live forever" are as ridiculous as all the "in the crazy future of 1980 we'll all have flying cars and in 1990 people will be living on the moon" predictions in the past. They're taking research which has recently made a leap, assuming that it will continue to have breakthroughs with the same constant speed, and ignoring scores of hurdles.
By all means, announce the new breakthroughs, tell us what you're working on next, but please spare us the 25 year forecast.
The guy is a President of an Engineering University. Is enrollment is down between 20-50% based on nationwide trends. Of course he is going to push a positive forecast to push enrollment up.
slashdot posters, or at least slashdot moderators, need to look up "Ad Hominem" before they continue to mod posts like this up.
If you actually disagree with the points in the article, say so. Provide useful information, statistics, citations, or even just opinion-based counterpoints. But this sort of "well of course HE would say that" stuff is just sad.
MP3, AAC, and WMA do VBR as well. I'm not really sure why anyone would choose 256k CBR over VBR, but most people choose 128k CBR 'cause that's what's common, it's usually default, it's what they're used to, and it's fairly small. File size shouldn't matter to people playing off their 100 gig hard drives, but for people with 128MB flash players it matters, and for places like iTunes Music Store, doubling file size means paying a whole lot more for bandwidth.
Add to the fact that it's just been posted on slashdot, so 10,000 geeks will pick ogg as soon as they can, regardless of whether it's better or not.
That would be a legitimate concern, but I saw the phrase "double blind" on his page. I assume (having not actually taken the test myself, since I'm at work with no speakers) that you're given a reference file, then a file or files which aren't labeled based on their codec. You send your ratings back to this guy, and he or his machine matches them back up with which codec they were.
I agree that 128kbps isn't great. I personally use VBR at top-quality setting and I'd love to see tests of this quality. But I have to admit, I'm in the minority here. The vast majority of people listening to MP3, AAC, and WMA files are encoding them at 128k. So a test which differentiates the best codec for that bitrate is much more useful than one which differentiates the best one at really high quality levels.
If you're a real audiophile, either use a lossless codec or do your own tests. In the meantime, there's millions of people out there who just use the 128k files, who might want to know which flavor will sound best.
Why do capitalists use growth rates to determine recessions/boom/etc instead of unemployment rates or poverty levels or things like that?
Because that's what does determine a recession or a boom. This isn't a "your philosophy rewards different criteria" kind of thing, it's a "trying to build houses with water instead of bricks doesn't work" kind of thing. Getting 100% employment or 0% poverty is so easy as to be trivial. All you do is calculate the minimum amount of work needed to feed, house, and clothe everyone, hire people to do that, and hire everyone else to move rocks back and forth all day. Then distribute the resources to everyone. Voila! 100% employment, 0% poverty, and a horrible society to live in!
These numbers, like GDP, growth rates, inflation, they aren't just made up by people obsessed with green paper. Building a house has value, because people can live in it. If you have two people do the same job that one of them could have done alone, that second person's work doesn't have actual value, even if you give him a job and pay him as much as the first person.
"Jobs" aren't a resource. "Jobs" don't house people, feed them, cure them of disease. If you do something of real value to someone, then they'll trade you something that is of real value to you for it. That's what a job should be. By all means, we should have more of those. But gains in efficiency which eliminate current jobs while increasing acutal productivity (again, not an imaginary word. productivity = houses, clothes, food, transportation, entertainment, medicine, ACTUAL USEFUL ACHIEVEMENTS) are a good thing. There will always be useful things to be done, even if everyone is fed and housed. More and more people in the world are fed and housed today than fifty years ago. That came from growth, not from employment percentages. If it takes me working all day to feed myself, then I make an improvement so that working all day feeds two people, that's GROWTH. That's what we're talking about when we talk about growth, increasing the actual stuff that's being achieved. Not some abstract sense of how fat the figure representing Walmart is in a political cartoon.
But the other point that you're obscuring is that while growth is important for the economy at large, that doesn't mean large companies growing and eliminating smaller ones. If every company was matched by a new company of that size, without any existing companies growing, that would still be 100% growth of the economy.
Yes, but that wasn't scientifically proven any more than global warming has been.
Oratory isn't the same as evidence, but see Michael's Crichton's speech on the two subjects for a point of view which is usually absent. Which is to say, rigorous science.
You've been out of the PC market for about a decade then, if you've never heard of PCI-Express. It's been proposed and talked about and raved about for years, but it's just now finally coming to market.
He must have been out of the market for a decade, to have never heard of something which is only just now in the market? What?
I've been half way out of the market for about five years, and I only recently heard of PCI-Express, and I didn't have many details about it. Researching new, not yet marketed technologies isn't the same as "being in the market".
But you are missing the point of the web entirely.
No, I think you are. The "point of the web" isn't to please developers and admins with happy-friendly standards. It's to deliver content to its users. Flash gives it some new abilities to do that. Most users like it, so it gets used pretty often. It's not the right tool for every job, (thank all that is holy for Google not being a Flash app) but that doesn't mean "there is nothing worse for the web than flash."
Regardless, personally, i think the biggest porblem with Flash is how hard it is for machines to get data from it. As soon as google starts giving me results for Flash based content, maybe i will change my mind.
This is an excellent point. However, it just means that Flash is better suited to animation and navigation than it is to data delivery. That said, I'd be a lot happier if text could be easily selected and copied from Flash, and if Google was indexing it.
I'm sick of hearing people complain about the money they make.
Then give them more money. Saying "You have no right to complain" almost never stops people from complaining.
The fact that you make less than they do doesn't improve their quality of life. Focus your energies on improving your situation, not on criticizing people who want to improve theirs.
Furthermore, if what you are saying were true (which it isn't), companies would ALWAYS reinvest or buy back stock. That is, they will NEVER pay dividends. Yet, they DO pay dividends.
This is not only untrue, it's not what the parent was arguing. You're setting up strawmen.
A finite penalty is a disincentive, not a prohibition. It will make people less likely to do something, not prevent them from doing it entirely.
If you want to rebut arguments, employ a little intellectual discipline. If you just want to call your opponent stupid, then just call him stupid.
If you are a pure capitalist and want to eliminate taxes, just say it. Stop coming up with all sorts of bogus arguments...
Suggestion that a particular tax structure leads to problems is not the same as trying to eliminate all taxes. Please resist the urge to paint your opponent into a simplistic box so that you can ignore his statements. If his arguments are bogus, simply point out their flaws, don't try to attack him personally for making them in the first place.
Taxes that are taken off one area are usually moved to another one (or matched with a cut in spending). Yes, this isn't always the case, as the last four years make apparent. But the overspending right now will have to be paid back eventually. That doesn't mean we shouldn't seek to change the tax structure for the better, seeking to encourage certain things and discourage others. Admittedly, dividend taxes, along with other factors, discourage companies from adopting a model of "become medium sized, continue to do good business and pay our profits out as dividends." On the other hand, I'm not sure if the alternative is better.
Companies have little real incentive to pay dividends, thus most don't, instead churning money back into themselves.
Right, that one was his argument.
No, the rise of the megacorps was inevitable. It's a product of a broken system whereby corporations have too many rights and are too unregulated.
I agree that it was inevitable, but the rest of your statement seems to presume that the very existence of megacorps is worse than a decrease in rights and an increase in regulation, a premise that I don't agree with. Especially since we've seen that with increased globalization, most corporations respond to regulation and taxation by moving more of their functions to less regulated countries. It's naive at best to tell corporations that they're the root of all evil, tax them, tell them what they can and can't do, then complain when they choose to take their business elsewhere.
Lastly, I think you left out the significance of branding and lock-in. People don't buy McDonalds or Sony or Microsoft more often just because there happens to be more of it out there. They buy those products because they are familiar with the brands, or because it will work with all their other Sony and Microsoft stuff. I'm not saying this contradicts your other reasons, simply that it should be added to your list.
Bottom line, I agree that corporations will tend to get larger, in that same laws-of-physics way that rocks tend to roll down hill. The only way to change that is repeated intervention - picking the rocks up and carrying them somewhere else, or picking individual companies and splitting them up by force of law. I personally think that intervention is a terrible idea.
Actually, it probably does. Moore's Law is about number of transistors, not speed. I would imagine the number of transistors in cars has been roughly consistent with Moore's Law.
Gee, I wonder if someone in the proprietary software business is backing these De Toqueville folks -- Microsoft, perhaps?
Well duh. I've got the tinfoil briefing memo right here, and it clearly states that anyone who says closed-source software is better than open-source software is being paid by Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
If the premise is the overcrowding of the planet and the availability of local food and housing is nonexistent, then interstellar travel will always be cheaper.
You think we'll have zero grain but plenty of spaceships lying around? Food and housing will never be nonexistent, just more scarce relative to the number of people (I'm not sure that will actually happen, but the scenario being envisioned assumes it). The cost of cramming a second person into a tiny house is still less than building them a spaceship, and it's not like the homeless and starving are going to be building their own.
No, this is great, I'm glad you mentioned Sasser, because you already made my point for me.
Sasser, and many of the recent big-bad-worms came from Microsoft releasing the vulnerability notice along with their fix. Not from someone covertly analyzing the source code. Security through obscurity would have actually helped here. Not that I'm actually suggesting the policy, I'm just saying that these worms were created because Microsoft publically released details, not because they hid them.
Acutally, the evidence I'm referring to is personal experience. I am happier when I have sex. I am happier when I have money. I am happier when drinking fine wine.
I have limited faith in psychological studies, and even less faith in the interpretations most people (in this case, you) derive from those studies. I have a great deal of faith in personally observed data. Of course, YMMV, which is why I said "maybe mine's broken." I guess it's possible that in a sea of billions of people all desperately seeking sex and money, I'm the only one who actually enjoys those things.
Doesn't really seem likely though.
The problem with this theory, the "let's solve over-population through space-colonization" theory, is that it requires the cost of transporting someone through space to be less than the cost of feeding and housing them. Right now we're leaning the other way by a HUGE margin. I'm not saying we shouldn't seek to colonize other planets, I'm just saying we aren't going to solve any population problems by putting 3 billion people on a ship.
I've never met anybody male or female who cares if others are bald
You really haven't met many people then... Particularly not many " Americans and their obsession with hair"
To be honest the first bots will be likely be for things such as hair loss, sexual disfunction, maybe cosmetic age reversal. The manufacturers will not want to jeopardize the profits of existing surgeons. Over time, as fewer surgeons are trained, the useful bots will be manufactured.
I agree that this is the way that it will go, but I disagree it's for the benefit of existing surgeons and I disagree that this isn't the "useful" treatment. I'd rather live 100 years in a 25 year-old body than 300 years in a body that ages normally, and I suspect the vast majority of the population feels the same way. Perfectly legitimate customer demand will drive anti-wrinkle treatments beyond anti-heart-attack treatments. To call life-extension more "useful" than life-enhancement implies you have some sort of purpose, which a vast population is somehow useful for. I'm curious what that is.
The barrier for everyone having a flying car is not the technology, it's the practicality.
But that is the point. When people make these crazy predictions about what life will be like in 20 years, they're looking only at the technology research, not at the scores of practical factors that actually make up society. For example, there's fear. Look at the reaction people have to genetically enhanced foods and tell me that everyone will be clamoring to fill their body with tiny robots.
In the 50's they weren't saying that one company would be capable of producing a car that flew. They were envisioning a society in which everyone flew in passenger vehicles like tiny planes and nobody needed to drive on the roads anymore. Similarly, I believe that in 25 years, scientists very well may have developed a nano-technology based treatment that fixes several currently existing medical problems. But I don't believe that everyone will be popping a pill. Maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong, but these predictions are ludicrous.
perhaps you might consider the gigantic mountain of evidence you see everywhere around you on a daily basis that tells you that the Good Life has within epsilon of nothing to do with Fine Wine, Money, and Orgasms.
That's funny, I'm looking at the gigantic mountain of evidence, but it seems to be saying the opposite. Maybe mine's broken?
The parent-poster's point (which I agree with) isn't that we shouldn't be doing this research or conceiving of possibilities; we should. The point is that predictions like "in twenty years we'll all be eating nano-puff cereal and we'll be able to breathe water and live forever" are as ridiculous as all the "in the crazy future of 1980 we'll all have flying cars and in 1990 people will be living on the moon" predictions in the past. They're taking research which has recently made a leap, assuming that it will continue to have breakthroughs with the same constant speed, and ignoring scores of hurdles.
By all means, announce the new breakthroughs, tell us what you're working on next, but please spare us the 25 year forecast.
The guy is a President of an Engineering University. Is enrollment is down between 20-50% based on nationwide trends. Of course he is going to push a positive forecast to push enrollment up.
slashdot posters, or at least slashdot moderators, need to look up "Ad Hominem" before they continue to mod posts like this up.
If you actually disagree with the points in the article, say so. Provide useful information, statistics, citations, or even just opinion-based counterpoints. But this sort of "well of course HE would say that" stuff is just sad.
MP3, AAC, and WMA do VBR as well. I'm not really sure why anyone would choose 256k CBR over VBR, but most people choose 128k CBR 'cause that's what's common, it's usually default, it's what they're used to, and it's fairly small. File size shouldn't matter to people playing off their 100 gig hard drives, but for people with 128MB flash players it matters, and for places like iTunes Music Store, doubling file size means paying a whole lot more for bandwidth.
Add to the fact that it's just been posted on slashdot, so 10,000 geeks will pick ogg as soon as they can, regardless of whether it's better or not.
That would be a legitimate concern, but I saw the phrase "double blind" on his page. I assume (having not actually taken the test myself, since I'm at work with no speakers) that you're given a reference file, then a file or files which aren't labeled based on their codec. You send your ratings back to this guy, and he or his machine matches them back up with which codec they were.
I agree that 128kbps isn't great. I personally use VBR at top-quality setting and I'd love to see tests of this quality. But I have to admit, I'm in the minority here. The vast majority of people listening to MP3, AAC, and WMA files are encoding them at 128k. So a test which differentiates the best codec for that bitrate is much more useful than one which differentiates the best one at really high quality levels.
If you're a real audiophile, either use a lossless codec or do your own tests. In the meantime, there's millions of people out there who just use the 128k files, who might want to know which flavor will sound best.
Why do capitalists use growth rates to determine recessions/boom/etc instead of unemployment rates or poverty levels or things like that?
Because that's what does determine a recession or a boom. This isn't a "your philosophy rewards different criteria" kind of thing, it's a "trying to build houses with water instead of bricks doesn't work" kind of thing. Getting 100% employment or 0% poverty is so easy as to be trivial. All you do is calculate the minimum amount of work needed to feed, house, and clothe everyone, hire people to do that, and hire everyone else to move rocks back and forth all day. Then distribute the resources to everyone. Voila! 100% employment, 0% poverty, and a horrible society to live in!
These numbers, like GDP, growth rates, inflation, they aren't just made up by people obsessed with green paper. Building a house has value, because people can live in it. If you have two people do the same job that one of them could have done alone, that second person's work doesn't have actual value, even if you give him a job and pay him as much as the first person.
"Jobs" aren't a resource. "Jobs" don't house people, feed them, cure them of disease. If you do something of real value to someone, then they'll trade you something that is of real value to you for it. That's what a job should be. By all means, we should have more of those. But gains in efficiency which eliminate current jobs while increasing acutal productivity (again, not an imaginary word. productivity = houses, clothes, food, transportation, entertainment, medicine, ACTUAL USEFUL ACHIEVEMENTS) are a good thing. There will always be useful things to be done, even if everyone is fed and housed. More and more people in the world are fed and housed today than fifty years ago. That came from growth, not from employment percentages. If it takes me working all day to feed myself, then I make an improvement so that working all day feeds two people, that's GROWTH. That's what we're talking about when we talk about growth, increasing the actual stuff that's being achieved. Not some abstract sense of how fat the figure representing Walmart is in a political cartoon.
But the other point that you're obscuring is that while growth is important for the economy at large, that doesn't mean large companies growing and eliminating smaller ones. If every company was matched by a new company of that size, without any existing companies growing, that would still be 100% growth of the economy.
We've talked for years about a "nuclear winter"
Yes, but that wasn't scientifically proven any more than global warming has been.
Oratory isn't the same as evidence, but see Michael's Crichton's speech on the two subjects for a point of view which is usually absent. Which is to say, rigorous science.
You've been out of the PC market for about a decade then, if you've never heard of PCI-Express. It's been proposed and talked about and raved about for years, but it's just now finally coming to market.
He must have been out of the market for a decade, to have never heard of something which is only just now in the market? What?
I've been half way out of the market for about five years, and I only recently heard of PCI-Express, and I didn't have many details about it. Researching new, not yet marketed technologies isn't the same as "being in the market".
They don't have to explain to alumni why they spent a million rupees on frivolous software.
Pffft. Eveybody knows you can't spend a million rupees. Even with the Giant's Wallet you can only get 500.
But you are missing the point of the web entirely.
No, I think you are. The "point of the web" isn't to please developers and admins with happy-friendly standards. It's to deliver content to its users. Flash gives it some new abilities to do that. Most users like it, so it gets used pretty often. It's not the right tool for every job, (thank all that is holy for Google not being a Flash app) but that doesn't mean "there is nothing worse for the web than flash."
Regardless, personally, i think the biggest porblem with Flash is how hard it is for machines to get data from it. As soon as google starts giving me results for Flash based content, maybe i will change my mind.
This is an excellent point. However, it just means that Flash is better suited to animation and navigation than it is to data delivery. That said, I'd be a lot happier if text could be easily selected and copied from Flash, and if Google was indexing it.
I'm sick of hearing people complain about the money they make.
Then give them more money. Saying "You have no right to complain" almost never stops people from complaining.
The fact that you make less than they do doesn't improve their quality of life. Focus your energies on improving your situation, not on criticizing people who want to improve theirs.
Furthermore, if what you are saying were true (which it isn't), companies would ALWAYS reinvest or buy back stock. That is, they will NEVER pay dividends. Yet, they DO pay dividends.
This is not only untrue, it's not what the parent was arguing. You're setting up strawmen.
A finite penalty is a disincentive, not a prohibition. It will make people less likely to do something, not prevent them from doing it entirely.
If you want to rebut arguments, employ a little intellectual discipline. If you just want to call your opponent stupid, then just call him stupid.
If you are a pure capitalist and want to eliminate taxes, just say it. Stop coming up with all sorts of bogus arguments...
Suggestion that a particular tax structure leads to problems is not the same as trying to eliminate all taxes. Please resist the urge to paint your opponent into a simplistic box so that you can ignore his statements. If his arguments are bogus, simply point out their flaws, don't try to attack him personally for making them in the first place.
Taxes that are taken off one area are usually moved to another one (or matched with a cut in spending). Yes, this isn't always the case, as the last four years make apparent. But the overspending right now will have to be paid back eventually. That doesn't mean we shouldn't seek to change the tax structure for the better, seeking to encourage certain things and discourage others. Admittedly, dividend taxes, along with other factors, discourage companies from adopting a model of "become medium sized, continue to do good business and pay our profits out as dividends." On the other hand, I'm not sure if the alternative is better.
A couple quick notes:
Companies have little real incentive to pay dividends, thus most don't, instead churning money back into themselves.
Right, that one was his argument.
No, the rise of the megacorps was inevitable. It's a product of a broken system whereby corporations have too many rights and are too unregulated.
I agree that it was inevitable, but the rest of your statement seems to presume that the very existence of megacorps is worse than a decrease in rights and an increase in regulation, a premise that I don't agree with. Especially since we've seen that with increased globalization, most corporations respond to regulation and taxation by moving more of their functions to less regulated countries. It's naive at best to tell corporations that they're the root of all evil, tax them, tell them what they can and can't do, then complain when they choose to take their business elsewhere.
Lastly, I think you left out the significance of branding and lock-in. People don't buy McDonalds or Sony or Microsoft more often just because there happens to be more of it out there. They buy those products because they are familiar with the brands, or because it will work with all their other Sony and Microsoft stuff. I'm not saying this contradicts your other reasons, simply that it should be added to your list.
Bottom line, I agree that corporations will tend to get larger, in that same laws-of-physics way that rocks tend to roll down hill. The only way to change that is repeated intervention - picking the rocks up and carrying them somewhere else, or picking individual companies and splitting them up by force of law. I personally think that intervention is a terrible idea.
Oh, sure. You're only disagreeing with me so you have an excuse to say that.
Moore's Law does not apply to the automobile!
Actually, it probably does. Moore's Law is about number of transistors, not speed. I would imagine the number of transistors in cars has been roughly consistent with Moore's Law.
Gee, I wonder if someone in the proprietary software business is backing these De Toqueville folks -- Microsoft, perhaps?
Well duh. I've got the tinfoil briefing memo right here, and it clearly states that anyone who says closed-source software is better than open-source software is being paid by Microsoft.