There is plenty of food on this planet, it is just not distributed equitably
You are absolutely right, and you are so bloody wrong. Yes, there is ample food in the world. If the west cut its consumption of said food, the amount that would become available to the starving world would increase by exactly zero percent. Even in the starving world (Africa being the main example) they produce and throw away more food than they need.
People in the third world are, believe it or not, not suffering from our over-consumption. They are suffering for reasons that generally are local.
The most devastating thing the west has been doing to the poor countries is in fact to give them aid. If we want Africa to stop suffering, we can just stop giving them aid. They'll be fine within a decade. Note, this does not apply to emergency aid, only systematic aid.
Sigh. If ignorance is bliss, you must be astonishingly blissful.
The world has seen dramatic drops in starvation rates, not despite of, but because of the US. The most effective measurements for driving down the number of people starving to death in the world has been US companies outsourcing production to poor countries. Countries who have embraced this model has prospered, countries who have shunned the model have fallen behind. In 1970, for example, South Korea was poorer than most countries in Africa. Where are they now? Why?
The western world is the reason starvation rates have been dropping so much, which makes calling the western world a "parasite" somewhat odd. Without the western world these countries would have been far worse off then they are today.
It is also funny to seen dumb-ass statements from ignorant idiots like follows: "Reduce consumption in the blood sucking western world, and everyone else can live just fine". It is such a clueless statement I am not even sure where to begin refuting it. If the US stopped its "blood sucking" activities and significantly reduced consumption it would have two rather immediate effects. Firstly, industrialization in the developing world would hit a brick wall. It would stop dead in its tracks. Secondly, millions upon millions of people in China, Korea, India, Malaysia and other countries would die of starvation.
Companies like Nike and Adidas, long reviled for "exploiting" poor people have saved more people from starvation in a year than all the worlds aid throughout history.
Before ranting and raving about things you have no knowledge about, get an education.
The 5% of the population that the US represents, consumes 25% of world resources, approximately.
I thoroughly despise this statement. I have seen it over and over since I went to school. It is correct, but it is also utterly misleading. There is only one way this can be true, and that is if the US population is five times more efficient at producing resources (resources are produced and consumed, not just consumed). They generally have been.
So, the US isn't gluttonous because it has an insatiable appetite, it is gluttonous because it is so effing good at doing stuff while (in general) the rest of the world are lazy slackers.
Really? Who destabilized the entire Middle East? Your ignorant statement implies that the Middle East was at some point in the past, prior to the Cold War, more stable than it is today. Could you please point to that time period? It was reasonably stable under August Caesar, but since?
No, it isn't. There is no trend showing Catholic countries having more of a population growth than others. Quite the contrary in fact, the countries in Europe with the slowest population growth at the moment tend to be Catholic (Italy. Spain etc). Some of the highest birth rates are in Protestant Norway, but that is a special case.
Remember, a little bit of education on any topic where you have doubts will remove those doubts. Go read about this somewhere and your doubts will go away. You may of course be one of those people who trusts your gut feeling more than science, then I'd recommend you read up on "truthiness".
Actually, no, it isn't. The "rate of acceleration" is dropping dramatically. According to projections it is dropping so fast that we'll reach the max population of less than 10 billion or so some time later this century (around 2075). Then we'll drop a little, and possibly flatten. Assuming that is, that we can find a good way to grow food without phosphates. If we can not, we'll drop significantly in a relatively short time frame after peaking.
Oil we can find alternatives to. Irrigation water we can clean (with some technological advances that we'll most likely make). Land we have aplenty, though there isn't a lot more to find. Phosphates we are running low on and there are no alternatives (probably not even theoretically). Without phosphates we're not going to grow a lot of food. We'll grow some, but we'll have to grow a lot. The phosphates shortage will probably make billions starve.
Phosphates shortage is more critical than gasoline problems. It is more problematic than water purity. It is significantly more dangerous (to people and animals alike) than increases in CO2 levels.
Now, this doesn't mean it's impossible for there to be, for instance, 20 billion people living on the earth without widespread suffering and famine
Well, don't worry, there is never going to be 20 billion people on earth. Current projections indicate we're going to max out at just a little over 10 billion, and then go down a little. This based on growth etc over the past few decades. If we can get a little more wealth and food distributed (no need to make it, we already make plenty for the population we have) to areas where it is needed, we might even see a top just below 10 billion. The UN expects starvation as a systemic problem to be mostly gone outside of Africa within a decade or so. Perhaps a tad more given the current economic down turn.
they're not going to be living like Westerners do today
With some modifications to our lifestyle, that is not correct, given the current production levels. Most of the world could live as comfortably as we do without a need for significant increase in food and goods production. Some areas are not going to be possible, oil consumption for one.
All of this is with our current production, current efficiency and some improvement in transportation and distribution. Slightly exaggerated, but only slightly, as an example, it is mostly easier to travel between two cities in Africa by going through London. That is inefficient and that means "stuff" doesn't get distributed internally in Africa as efficiently as possible. On a side-note, there is enough food produced in Africa to feed the entire African population (even with the drastic drop in efficiency caused by the nutcase Mugabe).
So, everything held as it is today, assuming we can find a reasonable alternative to oil (which seems likely), things do not look to bad.
Sadly, it is not so easy. We're running out of phosphates, which means most of that 10 billion crowd, half or more, will in fact starve to death. Surprisingly not many people are concerned that we are running low on phosphates. Problem with running low on phosphates, there are no alternative substance. Probably not even theoretically.
I... w.i.l.l... t.r.y... t.o.... t.y.p.e... s.l.o.w.l.y... s.o... t.h.a.t... e.v.e.n... y.o.u.... c.a.n.... u.n.d.e.r.s.t.a.n.d.... (a fuck it, have an adult read it to you instead). Yes, the ability to compile code on the fly from within your program is neat. It has existed, as you point out, in Java (ah, you didn't mention that one), some C environments, Lisp, Perl, Ruby, Javascript (eval) and a number of languages for years and years. That includes the.NET platform. Let me repeat that for you, since you seem not to have understood this. The functionality you describe above has also been available in.NET basically since its inception. Hang on to that little nugget of information. It is vital that you understand it before reading on. In other words, the functionality you describe above has basically "always" been available in.NET.
So, since Andres is talking about something new to.NET, one can, if not completely brain dead, surmise that it is not the ability to compile and run code on the fly he is talking about in this case. Now you can go read up on Roslyn, something that is quite new in the industry. Trust me. It is.
VxWorks is used more but it's not based on reliability but rather that VxWorks is a smaller and more compact
Not quite true. VxWorks is bigger because it was always available for a lot of embedded systems. QNX was, for the longest time, only available for x86, which was not a very popular embedded platform. QNX is now cross platform, but it's going to take a while before in will un-seat VxWorks (which is all kinds of crap imho).
years after others have already been mucking about in it for years
Could you provide an example of that? This is not the ability to compile code at runtime,.NET has had that for years. I have several.NET projects where I generate code on the fly, compile and then run it. Have the same for Java. That is not what Roslyn is.
.NET has had "something similar to eval" for a long time. You can easily compile C# code and instantiate the compiled objects today. This is quite different.
What makes you think that I think you must have the UAW? I know quite well that you don't. Still, if you do not have the UAW, the US is even more competitive in terms of labor. Why would they move the production to Finland where labor cost is significantly higher than in the US?
Hahahahahaha. Funny. Rocket science is, in fact, not rocket science. Putting an object into LEO is not a matter of technology, it is a matter of cost. Anyone can do it. Making a quality cell phone requires advanced technology however, and Nokia, failing or not, still makes some of the best cell phones out there (but are having a problem with the software, which is odd given that Linus is Finnish, anywho...).
Using LEO as a measure of how technologically advanced you are made sense some time in the late 1940s, there is nothing fundamentally different (other than scale) from what used to put the space shuttle into space, and the V2, which the Germans finished in 1942.
By all means, there is a lot of advanced technology in the US, but not at NASA. NASA has perfected the inefficient bureaucracy, not much else.
I like your reasoning. They didn't want to deal with the high expenses of doing things in the US, so they located the production in a part of the world were unions are stronger than in the US, labor is more expensive and production cost (like transport) is significantly higher. Yes, you "reasoning" is sound and solid.
I like your reasoning. They didn't want to deal with the UAW so the moved to a part of the world were unions are stronger labor is more expensive and production cost (like transport) is significantly higher. Yes, you "reasoning" is sound and solid.
I have never met a developer that thought Visual Studio is a great IDE. That's probably for the best, as I would laugh in the face of anyone who did.
You need to get out more. I use a highly specialized version of Eclipse for my J2EE dev (we have done quite a few things internally over the years), I use Aptana at home for my Ruby and Rails stuff (most of my personal stuff is in Rails) and I used IntelliJ in my previous J2EE job. None of them come close to Visual Studio in usability. Also, the VS debugger is, by a huge margin, the best debugger around. Now talking about managed languages here, I haven't (thankfully) had to do any C++ for quite a few years.
There are a number of things Microsoft do that are good. C# is what Java might be whenever it grows up. It didn't used to be like that, C# used to be the wannabe little cousin of Java, but in.NET 3.5 and on it has leap-frogged a stale, slow and comity-murdered Java. VS is heads above Eclipse and IntelliJ in usability. MS Office is still (even with the bloody ribbon) heads and shoulders above OO or LO.
It's sad that brainless people like you are so insecure that the only way you think people can disagree with your retarded opinions is if they are shills or paid. Grow a pair dude. You are pathetic.
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There is plenty of food on this planet, it is just not distributed equitably
You are absolutely right, and you are so bloody wrong. Yes, there is ample food in the world. If the west cut its consumption of said food, the amount that would become available to the starving world would increase by exactly zero percent. Even in the starving world (Africa being the main example) they produce and throw away more food than they need.
People in the third world are, believe it or not, not suffering from our over-consumption. They are suffering for reasons that generally are local.
The most devastating thing the west has been doing to the poor countries is in fact to give them aid. If we want Africa to stop suffering, we can just stop giving them aid. They'll be fine within a decade. Note, this does not apply to emergency aid, only systematic aid.
Sigh. If ignorance is bliss, you must be astonishingly blissful.
The world has seen dramatic drops in starvation rates, not despite of, but because of the US. The most effective measurements for driving down the number of people starving to death in the world has been US companies outsourcing production to poor countries. Countries who have embraced this model has prospered, countries who have shunned the model have fallen behind. In 1970, for example, South Korea was poorer than most countries in Africa. Where are they now? Why?
The western world is the reason starvation rates have been dropping so much, which makes calling the western world a "parasite" somewhat odd. Without the western world these countries would have been far worse off then they are today.
It is also funny to seen dumb-ass statements from ignorant idiots like follows: "Reduce consumption in the blood sucking western world, and everyone else can live just fine". It is such a clueless statement I am not even sure where to begin refuting it. If the US stopped its "blood sucking" activities and significantly reduced consumption it would have two rather immediate effects. Firstly, industrialization in the developing world would hit a brick wall. It would stop dead in its tracks. Secondly, millions upon millions of people in China, Korea, India, Malaysia and other countries would die of starvation.
Companies like Nike and Adidas, long reviled for "exploiting" poor people have saved more people from starvation in a year than all the worlds aid throughout history.
Before ranting and raving about things you have no knowledge about, get an education.
The 5% of the population that the US represents, consumes 25% of world resources, approximately.
I thoroughly despise this statement. I have seen it over and over since I went to school. It is correct, but it is also utterly misleading. There is only one way this can be true, and that is if the US population is five times more efficient at producing resources (resources are produced and consumed, not just consumed). They generally have been.
So, the US isn't gluttonous because it has an insatiable appetite, it is gluttonous because it is so effing good at doing stuff while (in general) the rest of the world are lazy slackers.
Really? Who destabilized the entire Middle East? Your ignorant statement implies that the Middle East was at some point in the past, prior to the Cold War, more stable than it is today. Could you please point to that time period? It was reasonably stable under August Caesar, but since?
You have never read a history book, have you?
No, it isn't. There is no trend showing Catholic countries having more of a population growth than others. Quite the contrary in fact, the countries in Europe with the slowest population growth at the moment tend to be Catholic (Italy. Spain etc). Some of the highest birth rates are in Protestant Norway, but that is a special case.
No, it is not. The most efficient contraceptives are education and food/other resources.
Nonsense.
Doubt it
Remember, a little bit of education on any topic where you have doubts will remove those doubts. Go read about this somewhere and your doubts will go away. You may of course be one of those people who trusts your gut feeling more than science, then I'd recommend you read up on "truthiness".
Actually, no, it isn't. The "rate of acceleration" is dropping dramatically. According to projections it is dropping so fast that we'll reach the max population of less than 10 billion or so some time later this century (around 2075). Then we'll drop a little, and possibly flatten. Assuming that is, that we can find a good way to grow food without phosphates. If we can not, we'll drop significantly in a relatively short time frame after peaking.
Oil we can find alternatives to. Irrigation water we can clean (with some technological advances that we'll most likely make). Land we have aplenty, though there isn't a lot more to find. Phosphates we are running low on and there are no alternatives (probably not even theoretically). Without phosphates we're not going to grow a lot of food. We'll grow some, but we'll have to grow a lot. The phosphates shortage will probably make billions starve.
Phosphates shortage is more critical than gasoline problems. It is more problematic than water purity. It is significantly more dangerous (to people and animals alike) than increases in CO2 levels.
Oddly, it seems nobody cares.
Now, this doesn't mean it's impossible for there to be, for instance, 20 billion people living on the earth without widespread suffering and famine
Well, don't worry, there is never going to be 20 billion people on earth. Current projections indicate we're going to max out at just a little over 10 billion, and then go down a little. This based on growth etc over the past few decades. If we can get a little more wealth and food distributed (no need to make it, we already make plenty for the population we have) to areas where it is needed, we might even see a top just below 10 billion. The UN expects starvation as a systemic problem to be mostly gone outside of Africa within a decade or so. Perhaps a tad more given the current economic down turn.
they're not going to be living like Westerners do today
With some modifications to our lifestyle, that is not correct, given the current production levels. Most of the world could live as comfortably as we do without a need for significant increase in food and goods production. Some areas are not going to be possible, oil consumption for one.
All of this is with our current production, current efficiency and some improvement in transportation and distribution. Slightly exaggerated, but only slightly, as an example, it is mostly easier to travel between two cities in Africa by going through London. That is inefficient and that means "stuff" doesn't get distributed internally in Africa as efficiently as possible. On a side-note, there is enough food produced in Africa to feed the entire African population (even with the drastic drop in efficiency caused by the nutcase Mugabe).
So, everything held as it is today, assuming we can find a reasonable alternative to oil (which seems likely), things do not look to bad.
Sadly, it is not so easy. We're running out of phosphates, which means most of that 10 billion crowd, half or more, will in fact starve to death. Surprisingly not many people are concerned that we are running low on phosphates. Problem with running low on phosphates, there are no alternative substance. Probably not even theoretically.
I... w.i.l.l... t.r.y ... t.o. ... t.y.p.e ... s.l.o.w.l.y ... s.o ... t.h.a.t ... e.v.e.n ... y.o.u. ... c.a.n. ... u.n.d.e.r.s.t.a.n.d.... (a fuck it, have an adult read it to you instead). Yes, the ability to compile code on the fly from within your program is neat. It has existed, as you point out, in Java (ah, you didn't mention that one), some C environments, Lisp, Perl, Ruby, Javascript (eval) and a number of languages for years and years. That includes the .NET platform. Let me repeat that for you, since you seem not to have understood this. The functionality you describe above has also been available in .NET basically since its inception. Hang on to that little nugget of information. It is vital that you understand it before reading on. In other words, the functionality you describe above has basically "always" been available in .NET.
So, since Andres is talking about something new to .NET, one can, if not completely brain dead, surmise that it is not the ability to compile and run code on the fly he is talking about in this case. Now you can go read up on Roslyn, something that is quite new in the industry. Trust me. It is.
VxWorks is used more but it's not based on reliability but rather that VxWorks is a smaller and more compact
Not quite true. VxWorks is bigger because it was always available for a lot of embedded systems. QNX was, for the longest time, only available for x86, which was not a very popular embedded platform. QNX is now cross platform, but it's going to take a while before in will un-seat VxWorks (which is all kinds of crap imho).
Futhermore, on the C++ side, the rapid evolution of the C++ language wasn't doing anyone any favours in IDE integration
Shouldn't the word rapid be in quotes here?
years after others have already been mucking about in it for years
Could you provide an example of that? This is not the ability to compile code at runtime, .NET has had that for years. I have several .NET projects where I generate code on the fly, compile and then run it. Have the same for Java. That is not what Roslyn is.
.NET has had "something similar to eval" for a long time. You can easily compile C# code and instantiate the compiled objects today. This is quite different.
What makes you think that I think you must have the UAW? I know quite well that you don't. Still, if you do not have the UAW, the US is even more competitive in terms of labor. Why would they move the production to Finland where labor cost is significantly higher than in the US?
Seems I replied to the wrong post. Sorry.
Hahahahahaha. Funny. Rocket science is, in fact, not rocket science. Putting an object into LEO is not a matter of technology, it is a matter of cost. Anyone can do it. Making a quality cell phone requires advanced technology however, and Nokia, failing or not, still makes some of the best cell phones out there (but are having a problem with the software, which is odd given that Linus is Finnish, anywho...).
Using LEO as a measure of how technologically advanced you are made sense some time in the late 1940s, there is nothing fundamentally different (other than scale) from what used to put the space shuttle into space, and the V2, which the Germans finished in 1942.
By all means, there is a lot of advanced technology in the US, but not at NASA. NASA has perfected the inefficient bureaucracy, not much else.
I like your reasoning. They didn't want to deal with the high expenses of doing things in the US, so they located the production in a part of the world were unions are stronger than in the US, labor is more expensive and production cost (like transport) is significantly higher. Yes, you "reasoning" is sound and solid.
I like your reasoning. They didn't want to deal with the UAW so the moved to a part of the world were unions are stronger labor is more expensive and production cost (like transport) is significantly higher. Yes, you "reasoning" is sound and solid.
I have never met a developer that thought Visual Studio is a great IDE. That's probably for the best, as I would laugh in the face of anyone who did.
You need to get out more. I use a highly specialized version of Eclipse for my J2EE dev (we have done quite a few things internally over the years), I use Aptana at home for my Ruby and Rails stuff (most of my personal stuff is in Rails) and I used IntelliJ in my previous J2EE job. None of them come close to Visual Studio in usability. Also, the VS debugger is, by a huge margin, the best debugger around. Now talking about managed languages here, I haven't (thankfully) had to do any C++ for quite a few years.
There are a number of things Microsoft do that are good. C# is what Java might be whenever it grows up. It didn't used to be like that, C# used to be the wannabe little cousin of Java, but in .NET 3.5 and on it has leap-frogged a stale, slow and comity-murdered Java. VS is heads above Eclipse and IntelliJ in usability. MS Office is still (even with the bloody ribbon) heads and shoulders above OO or LO.
It's sad that brainless people like you are so insecure that the only way you think people can disagree with your retarded opinions is if they are shills or paid. Grow a pair dude. You are pathetic.
So you have never used or seen a Win7 phone. Too bad you have to ramble mindlessly on about something you really have no clue about.