It's just unfortunate that these companies didn't support Theora (or something comparable) in the first place. I'm sure part of the reason h264 is becoming so widely supported is that Apple threw their weight behind it.
I don't want to discount the quality edge that h264 provides, but often who chooses to support a format can overrule technological superiority when it comes to real-world adoption. And I can't help but feel like, with all the companies involved and all the money at their disposal, they should be able to come up with a free solution if they were properly motivated.
The fact of the matter is that things like this are not (easily) provable in the rigorous scientific sense. You can point to statistics in particular situations, and even identify trends. I'm not disregarding the validity of that.
At the same time, consider this: looking at the fertility rates in African countries in the 70s and 80s, can you tell me what those rates would have been if food was abundant and available but all other factors remained the same?
These things are complicated and it's difficult to be scientific about them. You can't have controlled experiments. That means you can't really make snap judgements based on particular cases, but instead need a lot of painstaking research to isolate all the factors you can think of, and even then you have to wonder whether there are factors you haven't thought of. What I'm really saying is, I don't have enough research at my fingertips to make a real conclusion.
Developed countries have far smaller families that 3rd world countries.
That sounds nice, but doesn't really address the question. Those statistics suggest that if you increase development in 3rd world countries, you might see birthrates drop. It doesn't address what happens if you merely increase the food supply.
And much more importantly, it certainly doesn't address the question of "at what cost?" It's trivially easy to say, "I would like no one to ever starve to death." I can say that right now. I don't want anyone to starve to death.
The problem raised by the GGGP post was that if you constantly focus on increasing production of food without giving any thought to moderating consumption, and the population continues to grow, there must be some point in time at which the population becomes unsustainable. The most serious potential risk is disturbing our ecological balance to the point where human life on this planet in general becomes unsustainable.
Incidentally, this isn't the position I would naturally take in this argument, but I believe it's a point worth considering.
Supporting Theora would lower barriers to entry for competitors running on Windows to compete with them.
Not sure what you mean by that one. Apple's implementation of AAC and MP4 aren't always exactly the same as everyone else's, but they aren't exactly proprietary formats. I'm not sure what competitors you're talking about, but I don't see how Apple's preference for MP4 particularly hurts companies like Dell or Adobe. It hurts Microsoft, but particularly because their formats are more open than the proprietary alternative Microsoft is pushing.
Sometimes you put something into a standard as a way of pressuring people to adopt something. Make it the standard, and if Apple won't adopt it, make a big stink about how Safari isn't really HTML5 compliant.
I suspect that the problem is that companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe have enough influence on the W3C to kill something like this.
I'm not particularly condoning anything or saying I know the best solution. I'm just saying it's not simple. If you're feeling particularly ready to come down hard on one side of the argument, without considering the fallout of all the various implications, then you probably aren't appreciating the complexity of the problem you're addressing.
That sounds good to me. Believe me, I'm not in favor of people starving to brutal population-control. I think education is generally a terrific force for positive change.
Really, I'm just saying that the best solutions to poverty and hunger will probably not as simple as increased production. Having more food available won't keep people from going hungry-- at least not all by itself. Continual and poorly considered increases in production will probably lead to increased overall consumption of natural resources, leaving us all in a terrible situation.
Look at the fertility rates in countries where starvation and famine aren't a problem (Western Europe, US, Japan). Then, compare that with the fertility rates in sub-Saharan Africa.
Yeah, because there are no differences between western countries and sub-Saharan Africa other than the amount of food available. No economic differences, cultural differences, environmental differences, etc. Nice controlled scientific experiment there.
Honestly, the argument the GP is making is that we should, by our inaction, allow some poor people in some far away country to starve to death.
I don't think that is really his argument. From what I can tell, his argument is that rather than trying to continually increase resources which will eventually reach a natural limit, we should try to moderate consumption. The post isn't too specific about how to do that, but population control is only one likely component of a real plan. Others might be lessened consumerism and increased efficiency.
But really, your argument seems to come down to this: any behavior/planning which doesn't lead immediately to feeding poor people in far away countries is immoral, and people who engage in such behavior should kill themselves. So what did you eat yesterday, and why didn't you send that food to sub-Saharan Africa? What are you doing posting on Slashdot today when you could be using that time to make more money to feed poor children?
And another question that always bothers me a little: why should poor people starving in far away countries bother me more than poor people starving in my own country?
humans have always distinguished themselves from most other animals by having fewer children than their environment could support at a subsistence level
Then why are there such food shortages that we have to genetically engineer food to make it more plentiful? If we haven't already surpassed our environment's ability to sustain our current population, then why aren't we already good?
I know, there's some whacky conspiracy where rich people are all trying to starve everyone. Ok, that's at least plausible. But how is genetically engineered tuna going to fix that?
Most of Europe has birthrates below replacement level, and I haven't heard of any food shortages over there.
Still, it's not quite so simple. I remember hearing about a study recently that, all around the world, connected lower birthrates strongly with increased consumption of resources. What they found was basically that, if the amount of resources used per-person was figured to be roughly equivalent to what a 1000-pound animal would consume, than they had roughly the same birthrate as a 1000-pound animal. If they consumed resources at the rate of a 2000-pound animal, then they had the birthrate of a 2000-pound animal. The mechanism hadn't yet been found, but researchers suggested that there must be some kind of natural psychological factor whereby people chose to have fewer children based on a perception of an increased need for resources.
Interesting stuff, but admittedly not very concrete. Still, it raises lots of questions about both population growth and industrialization. If the slower birthrates come at the cost of increased consumption, then it means the solution to scarcity might not be so simple as reallocating our natural resources.
Before you get too self-righteous, it's not necessarily quite that simple. First off, scarcity of food may possibly cause people (consciously or unconsciously) to have fewer children. I don't know the science on that one, but it's possible.
Second, it doesn't mean fewer people starving to death so much as it means more people (perhaps temporarily) not-starving to death-- and there's a difference. The whole point of an argument like the one the GP is making is, if you increase the food supply, the population increases to the point where people start starving to death again. If population growth is otherwise unchecked (e.g. by predators), then a population's numbers will grow until the available resources are not sufficient to support further growth. The two possibilities once that happens is (a) there will be some kind of equilibrium reached; or (b) the population will overuse the existing resources to the point where they basically exterminate themselves.
Would it not make more sense to educate the people taking the pills, instead of banning an effective pain reliever?
Well since lots of these are combination drugs (e.g. Tylenol+oxycontin or Tylenol+codeine), isn't is just as easy to tell the prescribe the prescription painkiller and then inform the patient that they should also take some Tylenol? What's really gained by putting them in one pill anyway?
Part of the problem is that people taking painkillers may not be making great decisions. They may be drug addicts who've gotten the drugs illegally. Even in legit uses, the person taking the drugs are... well... in a lot of pain and on painkillers, and their thinking may be impaired. And what if they want to take some extra pills because their current dosage isn't working. If they're two different pills, it's easy to take a little extra codeine without taking more Tylenol. I think part of the point is, contrary to what you would think, it's the Tylenol portion of these medications that poses a more immediate health concern.
More interesting to me was the idea that schizophrenia shared a genetic basis with multiple sclerosis. As someone who's seen multiple cases of autoimmune diseases and mental illnesses in the same family, it's intriguing to think that it might all be connected.
One doesn't imply the other - people can be inefficient but within a small margin.
I wasn't using one to imply the other, I was stating both as true. Now, I don't have any scientific studies on hand to show that either is true, but I have read about studies into this, besides having observed anecdotal evidence of my own.
If there was really a significant variance - it would show up in a bunch of places
Yeah, and it does. It shows up all over the place where there are people who are rather strict about their diet and are still heavier than others who overeat. It even happens for particular people over time-- someone who's thin at 20 eating whatever he wants may need to be more strict about his diet later in life.
The phenomenon has been observed for a long time, and there isn't any real disagreement about whether it happens. It's just that, since they haven't nailed down all the causes and don't have treatments yet, often the best they can offer is "eat less and exercise more". That's good advice, but it's not the end of the story.
There has been evidence that changes in emotional and psychology states can have an effect on your metabolism. Being stressed out can not only cause you to put on more fat, but it can even cause you to put on fat in different places. There have been studies that suggest that the kind of bacteria in your digestive system has an effect on how many calories you'll absorb from a set amount of food.
So I'm not saying that advising people to exercise more and eat less is bad, but just pointing out that the reality of what goes on in our bodies is much more complicated than "number of calories eaten - number of calories worked off by exercise = number of calories turned into fat". If you see a fat guy and a skinny guy, it's not necessarily true that they skinny guy eats less or exercises more.
Well I know one problem that I had while trying to embed video was getting the behavior I wanted across various browsers and different platforms. Do you want the video to start downloading when you load the page? Do you want it to start playing immediately? Do you want it to show you a preview image until it starts downloading/playing? I assume the "video" tag addresses some of these thing.
Well I'm not particularly a math geek, but 2^10=1KB. 2^20=1MB. 2^30=1GB. And so on. So if you were storing 2^120 bits, it would be basically be a trillion trillion terabytes. Is that right? Someone feel free to check my math.
I mean, that doesn't give an explanation of the problem, so it doesn't really answer your question. But maybe it gives you an idea of scale? I guess by lowering the complexity of the attack by 2^8.5 it means that an encryption key that would take you 300 years to crack, you might now be able to crack it in a year...? I don't know. I'm not an encryption expert.
Also not to be underestimated, stop drinking soda. If you drink a lot of soda, try switching to water. I did it a few years ago, and dropped 15 lbs from that alone.
Adobe's biggest friend right now is probably Microsoft (really).
That's not such a big surprise. Even insofar as Flash and Silverlight are competitors, it's still contrary to both of their interests to see web standards progress so far that there's no need for proprietary platforms. Open formats and open platforms are a threat to both Microsoft and Adobe.
Also, it's noteworthy that, if Adobe ever decided to port their apps to run on Linux, it would be a disaster for Microsoft.
That's a fair observation, but "find a better job" might be more easily said than done. Have you noticed the economic situation we're in? It's not like companies typically showed their employees with respect and consideration in the boom years, so I don't know why they'd start now that employment is more scarce.
I'm sure we'd all love to have great jobs that paid well and allowed us enough free time to work out, have several hobbies, and keep up an active social life. Finding an employer who wants to hire us for such a job may not be so easy for all of us. Sometimes you just have to take what you can get and hope that it somehow leads to something better.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a good point.
It's just unfortunate that these companies didn't support Theora (or something comparable) in the first place. I'm sure part of the reason h264 is becoming so widely supported is that Apple threw their weight behind it.
I don't want to discount the quality edge that h264 provides, but often who chooses to support a format can overrule technological superiority when it comes to real-world adoption. And I can't help but feel like, with all the companies involved and all the money at their disposal, they should be able to come up with a free solution if they were properly motivated.
The fact of the matter is that things like this are not (easily) provable in the rigorous scientific sense. You can point to statistics in particular situations, and even identify trends. I'm not disregarding the validity of that.
At the same time, consider this: looking at the fertility rates in African countries in the 70s and 80s, can you tell me what those rates would have been if food was abundant and available but all other factors remained the same?
These things are complicated and it's difficult to be scientific about them. You can't have controlled experiments. That means you can't really make snap judgements based on particular cases, but instead need a lot of painstaking research to isolate all the factors you can think of, and even then you have to wonder whether there are factors you haven't thought of. What I'm really saying is, I don't have enough research at my fingertips to make a real conclusion.
Developed countries have far smaller families that 3rd world countries.
That sounds nice, but doesn't really address the question. Those statistics suggest that if you increase development in 3rd world countries, you might see birthrates drop. It doesn't address what happens if you merely increase the food supply.
And much more importantly, it certainly doesn't address the question of "at what cost?" It's trivially easy to say, "I would like no one to ever starve to death." I can say that right now. I don't want anyone to starve to death.
The problem raised by the GGGP post was that if you constantly focus on increasing production of food without giving any thought to moderating consumption, and the population continues to grow, there must be some point in time at which the population becomes unsustainable. The most serious potential risk is disturbing our ecological balance to the point where human life on this planet in general becomes unsustainable.
Incidentally, this isn't the position I would naturally take in this argument, but I believe it's a point worth considering.
Supporting Theora would lower barriers to entry for competitors running on Windows to compete with them.
Not sure what you mean by that one. Apple's implementation of AAC and MP4 aren't always exactly the same as everyone else's, but they aren't exactly proprietary formats. I'm not sure what competitors you're talking about, but I don't see how Apple's preference for MP4 particularly hurts companies like Dell or Adobe. It hurts Microsoft, but particularly because their formats are more open than the proprietary alternative Microsoft is pushing.
Sometimes you put something into a standard as a way of pressuring people to adopt something. Make it the standard, and if Apple won't adopt it, make a big stink about how Safari isn't really HTML5 compliant.
I suspect that the problem is that companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe have enough influence on the W3C to kill something like this.
I'm not particularly condoning anything or saying I know the best solution. I'm just saying it's not simple. If you're feeling particularly ready to come down hard on one side of the argument, without considering the fallout of all the various implications, then you probably aren't appreciating the complexity of the problem you're addressing.
That sounds good to me. Believe me, I'm not in favor of people starving to brutal population-control. I think education is generally a terrific force for positive change.
Really, I'm just saying that the best solutions to poverty and hunger will probably not as simple as increased production. Having more food available won't keep people from going hungry-- at least not all by itself. Continual and poorly considered increases in production will probably lead to increased overall consumption of natural resources, leaving us all in a terrible situation.
Look at the fertility rates in countries where starvation and famine aren't a problem (Western Europe, US, Japan). Then, compare that with the fertility rates in sub-Saharan Africa.
Yeah, because there are no differences between western countries and sub-Saharan Africa other than the amount of food available. No economic differences, cultural differences, environmental differences, etc. Nice controlled scientific experiment there.
Honestly, the argument the GP is making is that we should, by our inaction, allow some poor people in some far away country to starve to death.
I don't think that is really his argument. From what I can tell, his argument is that rather than trying to continually increase resources which will eventually reach a natural limit, we should try to moderate consumption. The post isn't too specific about how to do that, but population control is only one likely component of a real plan. Others might be lessened consumerism and increased efficiency.
But really, your argument seems to come down to this: any behavior/planning which doesn't lead immediately to feeding poor people in far away countries is immoral, and people who engage in such behavior should kill themselves. So what did you eat yesterday, and why didn't you send that food to sub-Saharan Africa? What are you doing posting on Slashdot today when you could be using that time to make more money to feed poor children?
And another question that always bothers me a little: why should poor people starving in far away countries bother me more than poor people starving in my own country?
humans have always distinguished themselves from most other animals by having fewer children than their environment could support at a subsistence level
Then why are there such food shortages that we have to genetically engineer food to make it more plentiful? If we haven't already surpassed our environment's ability to sustain our current population, then why aren't we already good?
I know, there's some whacky conspiracy where rich people are all trying to starve everyone. Ok, that's at least plausible. But how is genetically engineered tuna going to fix that?
Most of Europe has birthrates below replacement level, and I haven't heard of any food shortages over there.
Still, it's not quite so simple. I remember hearing about a study recently that, all around the world, connected lower birthrates strongly with increased consumption of resources. What they found was basically that, if the amount of resources used per-person was figured to be roughly equivalent to what a 1000-pound animal would consume, than they had roughly the same birthrate as a 1000-pound animal. If they consumed resources at the rate of a 2000-pound animal, then they had the birthrate of a 2000-pound animal. The mechanism hadn't yet been found, but researchers suggested that there must be some kind of natural psychological factor whereby people chose to have fewer children based on a perception of an increased need for resources.
Interesting stuff, but admittedly not very concrete. Still, it raises lots of questions about both population growth and industrialization. If the slower birthrates come at the cost of increased consumption, then it means the solution to scarcity might not be so simple as reallocating our natural resources.
More so than if you just popped the same dosage of Tylenol along with whatever medication you're taking?
Before you get too self-righteous, it's not necessarily quite that simple. First off, scarcity of food may possibly cause people (consciously or unconsciously) to have fewer children. I don't know the science on that one, but it's possible.
Second, it doesn't mean fewer people starving to death so much as it means more people (perhaps temporarily) not-starving to death-- and there's a difference. The whole point of an argument like the one the GP is making is, if you increase the food supply, the population increases to the point where people start starving to death again. If population growth is otherwise unchecked (e.g. by predators), then a population's numbers will grow until the available resources are not sufficient to support further growth. The two possibilities once that happens is (a) there will be some kind of equilibrium reached; or (b) the population will overuse the existing resources to the point where they basically exterminate themselves.
Which path do we want to take?
Well, but you have to admit the original story was kick-ass. As long as they stay true to that, it will be AWESOME!!
Would it not make more sense to educate the people taking the pills, instead of banning an effective pain reliever?
Well since lots of these are combination drugs (e.g. Tylenol+oxycontin or Tylenol+codeine), isn't is just as easy to tell the prescribe the prescription painkiller and then inform the patient that they should also take some Tylenol? What's really gained by putting them in one pill anyway?
Part of the problem is that people taking painkillers may not be making great decisions. They may be drug addicts who've gotten the drugs illegally. Even in legit uses, the person taking the drugs are... well... in a lot of pain and on painkillers, and their thinking may be impaired. And what if they want to take some extra pills because their current dosage isn't working. If they're two different pills, it's easy to take a little extra codeine without taking more Tylenol. I think part of the point is, contrary to what you would think, it's the Tylenol portion of these medications that poses a more immediate health concern.
More interesting to me was the idea that schizophrenia shared a genetic basis with multiple sclerosis. As someone who's seen multiple cases of autoimmune diseases and mental illnesses in the same family, it's intriguing to think that it might all be connected.
How do you know the government didn't put fake tin into the ground? They do that, you know.
One doesn't imply the other - people can be inefficient but within a small margin.
I wasn't using one to imply the other, I was stating both as true. Now, I don't have any scientific studies on hand to show that either is true, but I have read about studies into this, besides having observed anecdotal evidence of my own.
If there was really a significant variance - it would show up in a bunch of places
Yeah, and it does. It shows up all over the place where there are people who are rather strict about their diet and are still heavier than others who overeat. It even happens for particular people over time-- someone who's thin at 20 eating whatever he wants may need to be more strict about his diet later in life.
The phenomenon has been observed for a long time, and there isn't any real disagreement about whether it happens. It's just that, since they haven't nailed down all the causes and don't have treatments yet, often the best they can offer is "eat less and exercise more". That's good advice, but it's not the end of the story.
There has been evidence that changes in emotional and psychology states can have an effect on your metabolism. Being stressed out can not only cause you to put on more fat, but it can even cause you to put on fat in different places. There have been studies that suggest that the kind of bacteria in your digestive system has an effect on how many calories you'll absorb from a set amount of food.
So I'm not saying that advising people to exercise more and eat less is bad, but just pointing out that the reality of what goes on in our bodies is much more complicated than "number of calories eaten - number of calories worked off by exercise = number of calories turned into fat". If you see a fat guy and a skinny guy, it's not necessarily true that they skinny guy eats less or exercises more.
There are already studies that show correlation, and even theories about what the causal relationship is. I don't remember specifics off-hand, though.
You can make fun of me anyway. It's a dumb mistake to make.
Well I know one problem that I had while trying to embed video was getting the behavior I wanted across various browsers and different platforms. Do you want the video to start downloading when you load the page? Do you want it to start playing immediately? Do you want it to show you a preview image until it starts downloading/playing? I assume the "video" tag addresses some of these thing.
I'm confusing bits and bytes, so I'm wrong already. Oh well.
Well I'm not particularly a math geek, but 2^10=1KB. 2^20=1MB. 2^30=1GB. And so on. So if you were storing 2^120 bits, it would be basically be a trillion trillion terabytes. Is that right? Someone feel free to check my math.
I mean, that doesn't give an explanation of the problem, so it doesn't really answer your question. But maybe it gives you an idea of scale? I guess by lowering the complexity of the attack by 2^8.5 it means that an encryption key that would take you 300 years to crack, you might now be able to crack it in a year...? I don't know. I'm not an encryption expert.
Also not to be underestimated, stop drinking soda. If you drink a lot of soda, try switching to water. I did it a few years ago, and dropped 15 lbs from that alone.
Adobe's biggest friend right now is probably Microsoft (really).
That's not such a big surprise. Even insofar as Flash and Silverlight are competitors, it's still contrary to both of their interests to see web standards progress so far that there's no need for proprietary platforms. Open formats and open platforms are a threat to both Microsoft and Adobe.
Also, it's noteworthy that, if Adobe ever decided to port their apps to run on Linux, it would be a disaster for Microsoft.
That's a fair observation, but "find a better job" might be more easily said than done. Have you noticed the economic situation we're in? It's not like companies typically showed their employees with respect and consideration in the boom years, so I don't know why they'd start now that employment is more scarce.
I'm sure we'd all love to have great jobs that paid well and allowed us enough free time to work out, have several hobbies, and keep up an active social life. Finding an employer who wants to hire us for such a job may not be so easy for all of us. Sometimes you just have to take what you can get and hope that it somehow leads to something better.