Ah, so everybody who disagrees with your assertions, assertions that are provably wrong, must be a fanatic? What kind of a sad world is it that you are living in?
Warner, which sealed HD-DVDs fate, justified their move based upon the fact that DVD sales were in freefall
Again, you really are just making up your arguments as you go, are you not? Warner never used this argument at all. The industry as such has been using this argument to go HD, but it was not a factor in Warner choosing one HD format over another. That decision was made back in September, and it was based solely on sales of HD media and support of Blu-Ray as a standard. The fact that Warner chose to wait until this year to announce was a business decision and you can fault them for it, but still, it was not based on DVD sales at all. Moving to HD was of course.
compared to freefalling DVDs, Blu-ray is only freefalling just as much...over 30 days
Making up rubbish arguments and then arguing against them is called a "straw man attack". It is childish, immature and indicates a severe lack of cognitive abilities.
The only reason I pulled out the last months sales data for Blu-Ray, which shows a strong growth for the format, was that you claimed the sales were dropping. Considering Nielsen data shows that Blu-Ray increased more than 350% in the quarter after HD DVD went away (number from memory) you assertion that Blu-Ray sales are dropping is absurd in the extreme. I have never claimed that DVD sales are in free-fall, and I must admit I have never seen anyone else claim it either.
If you are not a rabid fanatic it would be odd since your behavior indicates you are. You make up your own arguments, pull "statistics" out of your ass, and in general scream and shout that you are right though a casual inspection of the real world shows you are wrong. I wish you well, but the kind of fanaticism you suffer from is rarely curable.
getting so passionate and defensive about an optical format is just weird
Yeah, pot-kettle-black. I am not passionate about anything, just about people lying their asses off when they argue their points. Your statement was: "find it hard even finding a single Blu-ray player for sale". That's an absurd statement. It can be true only if you find it hard to leave your house. Any electronics chain visited by anyone in the western world or Asia today will have a large number of Blu-Ray players for sale.
You are the one making up ridiculous arguments. Before calling anyone a fanatic, try to be honest, don't lie, take a look at the real data in the real world, and then base your arguments on that. Basing your arguments on paranoid delusions is the trade-mark of the fanatic or the insane.
Sony digital camera on top of all his other Sony shit and that piece of crap that uses some strange video codec
As far as I know, and there is a tiny chance I am wrong here, Sony cameras and camcorders use one of the following codecs: HDV MPEG-2, DV, AVCHD or M-JPEG. These are the standard codecs used by all camera and camcorder manufacturers. Seems like you are blaming Sony for you own inadequacies.
Not a big Sony fan, I own the PS3, but stay with Canon for all my photo and camcorder gear, but bs is bs.
h264 mastered onto a dual layer DVD by the studio would impress all but the most obstinate snob.
Absolutely. That is, until he saw a 1080p movie in it's original aspect ration (wider than 16x9 for most of them) and compared. 480p at an aspect ratio of 2.31:1 is what, 400 scan lines for the movie it self? 380?
I just buy a new hard drive, swap it out and put stuff on it.
I have DVDs that are 10 years old or more. I have created about 50 different DVDs my self, they all have been playing fine when I have tried them, I haven't played the oldest ones in a while though.
Compare this to my HD experience. I have had three HDs god dead on me since August.
I fail to see how HD is a better backup medium than any of the optical media out there.
Blu-ray players have gotten more expensive. In some cases, a lot more expensive
Rubbish. There was a small increase in price on players as the price of blu laser diodes went up, but there has been no consistent or significant increase in Blu-Ray players. Last week you could buy Blu-Ray players in stores for about $299. I would love to see how that is a "a lot more expensive".
Blu-ray sales, paradoxically, have collapsed
Are you just making up your arguments as you go or are you just full of it? Take a look at this one and tell me that Blu-Ray sales are collapsing.
Over the last 30 days Blu sales on Amazon have gone from -70 to -30 or -20 vs standard DVD staying fixed at around -10. I fail to see how that is a "collapse" in sales.
I find it hard even finding a single Blu-ray player for sale.
Blu-Ray has horribly bad and spotty compatability with a hack of putting AVCHD encoded files on a standard DVD-5 disc
And you have tried this? I have authored AVCHD disks for about 4 months now, and my experience is directly opposite of what you are saying. I regularly take authored disks to various places like Circ City and Best Buy to test on a variety of Blu-Ray players, and I have not had a single player not play my menu-based AVCHD disk yet.
You can easily fit HD video on DVD media using H.264 compression
Bzzzt! Wrong! Of course you can't. You don't need 25 or 50G to encode, but you can not encode an HD movie onto a standard DVD with any known or theoretically envisioned codec. 90 minutes of video encoded at 15Mb/s would not fit on a dual layer DVD and 15Mb/s would yield a very poor quality HD result. Good quality HD requires 20-25Mb/s bitrate, which would require media storing 15G or more.
The companies could have come up with a new format using better compression
Please enlighten us oh-wise-one, what encoders would that be, and how would they encode three times better than H.264 or VC-1? Also, if they existed, how would players decode them in real time without adding massively more expensive hardware to the mix?
Now, whether a million years is significant or not...
...
It is VERY significant in the history of any single species.
That's an absurd statement. It depends on how long that species has existed. A specie could, for example have reached space-colonization state for, lets say 100 million years ago. They go ahead and start colonizing. Let's say it takes them about 1000 years to travel and settle (that is a long time) and for the new colony to start colonizing. Assume that the mother planet and all colonies start 10 colonization expeditions every 1000 years. After 100 million years (today) they would have colonized the vast majority of the galaxy and be on their way to Andromeda.
The guy dismisses the possibility that most civilizations evolve in some direction other than midlessly colonizing every star they can reach.
Actually, that wouldn't be mindless at all, and any intelligent species will try to colonize space eventually. They have no choice. Anything else would be suicidal.
Where the article goes wrong is where it assumes that there is some trait we can evolve towards that is the "Great Filter", and that therefore, the Great Filter for life on Mars is in any way relevant for Earth. That is an absurd idea.
The Filter will vary from planet to planet and from species to species. On Mars it was probably (if there was life) environmental. The environment on Mars, and Mars' life's ability to cope with the changing environment has no relevance to any filters on Earth.
Problem is - the most likely Great Filters for advanced civilizations are external, random and completely out of our control. An example would be massive gamma ray bursts. Those suckers can sterilize the life-belt of an entire galaxy, and how we evolve has no bearing on their coming or not.
If survival is our ultimate goal we have to colonize, not only this galaxy but neighboring ones as well (and not Andromeda since it will crash into ours "soon"). Any intelligent species will discover this once they discover optics or their sensory equivalent. Then they will colonize, as will we - even though we temporarily have lost the drive for it, but it's been only 50 years, less than a blink of an eye in our history. And when they colonize they will be discovered.
Why do we not see them? Because these Great Filters are such massive events, probably sterilizing entire galaxies, that there is not enough time between them for a species to develop cross-galaxy colonization capabilities.
What if most evolve beyond physical forms?
They will still need some form of physical "anchor". Even total virtuality requires somewhere to be virtual. If that somewhere gets erased, the virtuals contained within are erased too. Of course, if you can make that "anchor" gamma-ray proof, planet collision proof, galaxy collision proof and eaten-by-a-black-hole proof, then you don't need colonization. I bet it is cheaper to colonize than to build this device though.
What if most lose themselves in virtual realities. What if many simply don't bother leaving their own solar system because the speed of light proves to be unbreakable and they aren't interested in planting colonies that will have little or no contact or impact on their own civilization?
I'm willing to bet the speed of light is unbreakable for us. It doesn't matter though. If we can get to 10%, and that is possible with todays knowledge, then we'll colonize the entire galaxy in a heartbeat (compared to the time the galaxy has existed). Real fast. So, seen from the outside, once we can get to 10% in an economical way, galaxy colonization will be almost instant.
Or what if we just got lucky and got a galaxy to ourselves?
Well, considering it is doomed, we better find a backup real soon.
The best time of my life is in the future, and it always will be.
Unfortunately, there's this horrible thing called aging that makes this inevitably false for everyone
That is assuming that there is something inherently negative about aging, which there isn't, and as long as you are able to avoid the most debilitating maladies, you should still be able to make the future better than the past. Different, and better in different ways, but still better. It's a matter of attitude.
You are correct that using food as fuel has changed this picture somewhat, and this is an excellent example of why a good government is a non-existing government. There is no way to make this profitable without massive government sponsorship, so in a non-regulated society, such a moronic idea would never have caught on.
We can only hope that sanity prevails in this situation and that government poring money into a project that is bad for the environment (net carbon emissions from grain-to-fuel is higher than for petroleum), it is bad for poor people - they starve and it is bad for rich people - their hard-earned tax money is spent on insane projects.
In other words, Ethanol production has no upside and a lot of downsides. Hopefully we'll stop it soon.
Great example of what happens when people listen to the environmental lobby though. Poor people die.
I say take the chance, or risk looking back in ten years and wondering where your life went, seriously.
Amen to that. Unless something terrible befalls you (unlikely) people rarely regret the choices they made and the chances they took. The regrets you have are the chances you never took. The opportunities you had but never caught.
Go to your next reunion and talk to the people who are there. It is usually astonishingly depressing. A huge part of them still remember school as the best time of their life and they always will.
The best time of my life is in the future, and it always will be. Take chances, try new things, and that will always be the case. Don't listen to those who tell you to "be responsible" and "content with what you have". There is only one reason they are giving you this advice. They hate to see you on a new adventure. It reminds them of all the opportunities they passed up in their miserable lives. When you get successful some time in the future, and if you try hard enough you might be, they will tell you about all that they "could have done, only it was... [wife, kids, job, weather, house payments, sick mother - take your pick] that prevented them from becoming successful.
Oh, and BTW, if you succeed, these people will resent you for it.
Remember everybody, to escape poverty, you just have to magically say "I'm outta here!" and just like that *poof* you're living the sweet life.
Sigh. Disingenuous bullshit won't make you right. It will just make you look like a disingenuous bullshitter. Try a little less asinine and a little more insight.
I have never stated that you "just" have to do that, and that "poof" something happens. However, you do have to try, and in many cases, after a lot of work, it happens. No magic. Just hard work. That is the reason we are not still in caves trying to figure out where there is a forest fire so we can get our fire going again.
Now, sitting on your hands, complaining to your loving wife about bad cave management is not going to get the fire started, but banging some flint against something actually might. I'd say you go out and try the flint or a couple of sticks then charge the shit out of the privilege of sitting around the fire. Given that the new fire is now your property, everybody has to pay. Lots! People who sat on their hands complaining about cave management deserve no more - or less.
Your maxim of every single human on earth being able to have a magically successful business while everyone else is the poor consumer confuses me.
Your hallucinations are what is confusing you, not my maxim. Please relate to what I actually say, not to what you think I say. I have, for example, never claimed that all who try will succeed, far from it, the vast majority will fail. Is that a problem? Not at all. It is a good thing. With your attitude nobody will try, and by extension, nobody will succeed. It is better everybody tries and 99.9% fails than that nobody tries and no progress is ever made.
But remember, I'm the communist for acknowledging that > 60% of the wealth lies in < 5% of the populace.
No, you are not. You are because you would prefer that everybody had the same amount of wealth, rather than the current situation, even if that meant that everybody was worse off than today. You see, with your attitude, we'd still live in caves, and the poor bastard who was trying to argue that he thought he could find a way to make fire rather than go out and collect it at the next lightning strike, would be chastised and ostracized, or, in the case of you, pitied as a little strange and told to go back and be happy his wife loved him.
Even more, and far more damaging, when the poor bastard ignored your condescension and actually went out and made fire, you would hate him for charging you for enjoying what he created.
Brother, that is never going to change, it is Pareto Law, the world over!
I don't care. It doesn't matter. In 1980 the number of people starving to death was significantly higher than today (even in absolute numbers, which is astounding given the population increase). Since then the amount of wealth has been collected on even fewer hands, but at the same time, less people live in abject poverty. Less people die of starvation. How can that be? Because wealth is created and since it is created it can be concentrated on few hands while still allowing the poorest to do better.
According to the UN, outside of Africa, starvation as a systemic problem will be solved by some time early (2015-2025) this century and even in Africa it will be mostly gone. For the first time ever. By ever I mean, since we climbed down from the trees, ever. That improvement has nothing to do with UN food aid and everything to do with getting out there and trying to make something happen. Fail and fail again, and in the end the world is a better place.
You must be the American for thinking that everyone has an equal share of the wealth and ability to be the successful businessman.
You must suffer from some rather bizarre hallucinations if you can read that into what I wrote. And, no, I am not an Ameri
I know this is a bad thing that Americans don't like to dwell on but you should be happy you have a solid source of income and work in comfortable environments. Most people outside of the industrialized world can't say that.
I can't believe this is modded "insightful". It is about as insightful as the musings of the old Soviet commies, and about as accurate.
The US, at it's core, is all about being not entirely content with your current situation and then trying to improve it. What more than anything characterizes the US "spirit" is the "can-do" attitude. The idea that I have a given (no, not by any deity, it's just there, like gravity) right to achieve my highest potential (and often way beyond my potential).
Going out and building my own business is the right thing to do. Sitting in a cubicle being all happy that I am not starving to death in Africa is absurd.
Oh, and btw, this attitude has saved more starving children in the poor part of the world than any other activity undertaken by any person or organization. US companies moving to Asia has lifted that region out of massive poverty, and has been the major contributor to the fact that the number of people starving to death in the world today is significantly lower than 30 years ago. Sadly this is being countered currently by our system of farm-subsidies, but that is another story.
If you can't find joy in your job and you can't find another job with comparable income, then find joy in your family.
BZZZZT! WRONG! If you can't find joy in your current job and you can't find a job with a comparable income, go out and make your own company, make it successful, hire lots of people and make the world a better place. By all means, don't listen to this poster.
Generations before you have worked in mills, textile plants, mines, slaughterhouses, etc.
Yes, and the reason these people are not still in mills and on farms and that they have an education and much better jobs, and the reason that less people suffer from starvation and malnutrition today than ever before is because some guy in a mill, or a mine, or on a farm, said "Fuck this shit, I'm outta here" and then he went on to make a better mill, a more efficient engine, a better light bulb or similar. The ones with your attitude stayed put and complained about management mistreatment.
I will disagree with this one just a little bit. It's in bad times that there are opportunities around. If he has the skill and the drive, now is probably a better time than most. Particularly if he wants a complete change. Now is when new ideas start out small and end up as big things 10 years from now. Albeit, in about 0.01% of the cases, but:-)
I understand your dilemma completely, given that you have to have income, quitting your job and starting a new adventure might be a daunting prospect. Giving up your income entirely is hard or impossible depending on your situation. There are many options, but I would (personally) focus on either of the two below.
Join a big company like HP, Cisco or IBM. These companies usually have far more options with regards to career paths than do small companies. Even paths that are entirely outside of technology, well, at least in the day-to-day of things. This is the way I ended up taking after an acquisition, moving from dev, into tech sales and later into a marketing style position.
Start a consulting business doing what you currently do. Talk to your current employer and see if they are willing to hire you on as a part-time consultant rather than a full-time employee. This will cost you your benefits, but if you have a spouse with benefits through her employer, that may not be too bad.
As a part time consultant you should be able to bring in about as much as you do as a full-time employee, and still have time to get your alternate career going.
Word of advice: No matter what new career you get into, it is highly likely that it, after a few years, becomes as routine and boring as is your current career. At that point in time you have an idea about what to do to make the jump again though.
Only partly true since it takes energy to create Ethanol. With the current methods, Ethanol releases more carbon into the atmosphere than does petroleum, which makes this ethanol thing yet another farce drummed through by the green lobby. They rarely get anything right.
I wonder how many people will starve to death before we, with the insistence of the green lobby, stop killing people in the poor world by putting their inexpensive food into our gas tanks thereby making it expensive.
there is a finite amount of wealth in the world. (read money) So what builds wealth for some ALWAYS
BZZT! Wrong. Mostly. Wealth is created not "excavated". The past few hundreds of years the world has improved enormously not because we are better at distributing wealth but because we are better at creating it.
If you, by wealth, mean all the resources in the world exttracted at optimum cost, then yes, there is limited wealth, but all the resources in the world are not excavated or excavatable currently at minimum cost.
The "one pie we all have to share" argument is the socialist argument and it is, was and always has been, wrong. One day, perhaps in a thoursand years when we have created the ultimate technologies, it may be correct.
Hey, the fact that Mozilla 3.0 Beta 5 is about as stable as a house of cards would have been during Hurricane Catrina might be a good reason not to go there yet. Mine crashes many, many, many times a day.
To add to the list - Cathay Pacific also uses Linux, Ubuntu if I remember correctly, for their entertainment system, and I also learned this when the system was having trouble and the nice stewardess rebooted it for me. Good to see the Tux is everywhere.
Hey, thanks for sharing what you learned when educating your self. It seems my stats on the danger of owning a gun is out of date, and I'll update my brain.
Most gun crime is perpetrated by the armed against the unarmed. At a certain critical tipping point, the criminals figure there are enough armed people that it's not worth taking the risk, so crime goes down.
This is mostly incorrect. You are falling into the standard trap that most gun lovers (me being one such but not trapped) do. You seem to think that it is unknown or random criminals that kill people with guns. It is not. In fact, in the US, once you buy a gun your chance of getting shot increases dramatically. This has a simple explanation. if you are a man, these are the people most likely to shoot you (most of the time with your gun):
Your wife
Your son or perhaps your daughter, slightly less
Your father (or less, your mother)
Someone else in your family
Any of your friends
and on and on and on
and way down the list, some general criminal character
Guns don't solve problems, neither do owning them. The callus way most American gun owners handle their guns is a major reason for the gun deaths in the US, not guns nor street criminals. Well, that is, gun crimes against the average citizen. If you are a gang member, things change dramatically. Your gang will then take the place of your family in the list above, and the competing gangs come just below. Gangs don't really have much likelyhood of interacting with you or me however.
I suspect that criminals who learn about guns from TV and get their first weapon as a teenager are largely responsible for the gun crime that does exist.
The criminals, particularly in the inner cities, are a significant portion of the gun criminals, but they are not particularly relevant to you and me. They generally shoot each other, and that's that. They are not a danger to the population in general. The most dangerous person in your life is your spouse, and once you buy your self or her (assuming you are male, this is slashdot after all) a gun, you increase your risk of dying by gun shot many fold. That is, if you are an average American. If you are not, you handle your gun properly. I am amazed at the number of crazy people who have loaded guns easily available in their bedroom though. It's insane.
All the more reason to keep you local shooting range in business.:)
Yeah, but every time I go, after a while I start looking at the bullet holes in the wall beside me, in the wall behind me (!!!), the ceiling above me etc, and I start to wonder... "I don't want to be here when one of those lunatics are here!"
Thanks, that was enlightening, but it still leaves the 2nd open to interpretation (what law isn't). The problem lies in the wording of "well regulated". This appears to imply som sort of organization of sorts, not just a random collection of souls.
I am originally not from the US, and where I come from the regular population was actually armed by the government. There is a standing army and there is the armed population. The difference is that it was organized however. It had ranks, officers the whole shebang. Stashes of weapons and all. In other words, it was "well regulated" but not under central government control.
Interestingly, where I come from there is also more firearms per capita than there is in the US, but significantly less homicides. Go figure.
Don't get me wrong. I fully support the right to bear arms, but I have also spent enough time around guns to know that they are not to be taken lightly. Having a minimum amount of legislation, such as a cooling off period for example, doesn't infringe upon anyones rights. IMHO.
Well, since they already are, sort of, in Texas, that doesn't appear to be the case. That ACLU leaves 2nd amendment cases to the NRA is not a huge issue though, and I would like you to point me to a case where the ACLU claims that there is anything wrong with the 2nd.
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Ah, so everybody who disagrees with your assertions, assertions that are provably wrong, must be a fanatic? What kind of a sad world is it that you are living in?
Again, you really are just making up your arguments as you go, are you not? Warner never used this argument at all. The industry as such has been using this argument to go HD, but it was not a factor in Warner choosing one HD format over another. That decision was made back in September, and it was based solely on sales of HD media and support of Blu-Ray as a standard. The fact that Warner chose to wait until this year to announce was a business decision and you can fault them for it, but still, it was not based on DVD sales at all. Moving to HD was of course.
Making up rubbish arguments and then arguing against them is called a "straw man attack". It is childish, immature and indicates a severe lack of cognitive abilities.
The only reason I pulled out the last months sales data for Blu-Ray, which shows a strong growth for the format, was that you claimed the sales were dropping. Considering Nielsen data shows that Blu-Ray increased more than 350% in the quarter after HD DVD went away (number from memory) you assertion that Blu-Ray sales are dropping is absurd in the extreme. I have never claimed that DVD sales are in free-fall, and I must admit I have never seen anyone else claim it either.
If you are not a rabid fanatic it would be odd since your behavior indicates you are. You make up your own arguments, pull "statistics" out of your ass, and in general scream and shout that you are right though a casual inspection of the real world shows you are wrong. I wish you well, but the kind of fanaticism you suffer from is rarely curable.
Yeah, pot-kettle-black. I am not passionate about anything, just about people lying their asses off when they argue their points. Your statement was: "find it hard even finding a single Blu-ray player for sale". That's an absurd statement. It can be true only if you find it hard to leave your house. Any electronics chain visited by anyone in the western world or Asia today will have a large number of Blu-Ray players for sale.
You are the one making up ridiculous arguments. Before calling anyone a fanatic, try to be honest, don't lie, take a look at the real data in the real world, and then base your arguments on that. Basing your arguments on paranoid delusions is the trade-mark of the fanatic or the insane.
As far as I know, and there is a tiny chance I am wrong here, Sony cameras and camcorders use one of the following codecs: HDV MPEG-2, DV, AVCHD or M-JPEG. These are the standard codecs used by all camera and camcorder manufacturers. Seems like you are blaming Sony for you own inadequacies.
Not a big Sony fan, I own the PS3, but stay with Canon for all my photo and camcorder gear, but bs is bs.
Absolutely. That is, until he saw a 1080p movie in it's original aspect ration (wider than 16x9 for most of them) and compared. 480p at an aspect ratio of 2.31:1 is what, 400 scan lines for the movie it self? 380?
I hope you get your eyes fixed soon.
I have DVDs that are 10 years old or more. I have created about 50 different DVDs my self, they all have been playing fine when I have tried them, I haven't played the oldest ones in a while though.
Compare this to my HD experience. I have had three HDs god dead on me since August.
I fail to see how HD is a better backup medium than any of the optical media out there.
Rubbish. There was a small increase in price on players as the price of blu laser diodes went up, but there has been no consistent or significant increase in Blu-Ray players. Last week you could buy Blu-Ray players in stores for about $299. I would love to see how that is a "a lot more expensive".
Are you just making up your arguments as you go or are you just full of it? Take a look at this one and tell me that Blu-Ray sales are collapsing.
Over the last 30 days Blu sales on Amazon have gone from -70 to -30 or -20 vs standard DVD staying fixed at around -10. I fail to see how that is a "collapse" in sales.
So you never leave your house any more?
And you have tried this? I have authored AVCHD disks for about 4 months now, and my experience is directly opposite of what you are saying. I regularly take authored disks to various places like Circ City and Best Buy to test on a variety of Blu-Ray players, and I have not had a single player not play my menu-based AVCHD disk yet.
Bzzzt! Wrong! Of course you can't. You don't need 25 or 50G to encode, but you can not encode an HD movie onto a standard DVD with any known or theoretically envisioned codec. 90 minutes of video encoded at 15Mb/s would not fit on a dual layer DVD and 15Mb/s would yield a very poor quality HD result. Good quality HD requires 20-25Mb/s bitrate, which would require media storing 15G or more.
Please enlighten us oh-wise-one, what encoders would that be, and how would they encode three times better than H.264 or VC-1? Also, if they existed, how would players decode them in real time without adding massively more expensive hardware to the mix?
That's an absurd statement. It depends on how long that species has existed. A specie could, for example have reached space-colonization state for, lets say 100 million years ago. They go ahead and start colonizing. Let's say it takes them about 1000 years to travel and settle (that is a long time) and for the new colony to start colonizing. Assume that the mother planet and all colonies start 10 colonization expeditions every 1000 years. After 100 million years (today) they would have colonized the vast majority of the galaxy and be on their way to Andromeda.
With apologies for any inaccuracies in maths.
Actually, that wouldn't be mindless at all, and any intelligent species will try to colonize space eventually. They have no choice. Anything else would be suicidal.
Where the article goes wrong is where it assumes that there is some trait we can evolve towards that is the "Great Filter", and that therefore, the Great Filter for life on Mars is in any way relevant for Earth. That is an absurd idea.
The Filter will vary from planet to planet and from species to species. On Mars it was probably (if there was life) environmental. The environment on Mars, and Mars' life's ability to cope with the changing environment has no relevance to any filters on Earth.
Problem is - the most likely Great Filters for advanced civilizations are external, random and completely out of our control. An example would be massive gamma ray bursts. Those suckers can sterilize the life-belt of an entire galaxy, and how we evolve has no bearing on their coming or not.
If survival is our ultimate goal we have to colonize, not only this galaxy but neighboring ones as well (and not Andromeda since it will crash into ours "soon"). Any intelligent species will discover this once they discover optics or their sensory equivalent. Then they will colonize, as will we - even though we temporarily have lost the drive for it, but it's been only 50 years, less than a blink of an eye in our history. And when they colonize they will be discovered.
Why do we not see them? Because these Great Filters are such massive events, probably sterilizing entire galaxies, that there is not enough time between them for a species to develop cross-galaxy colonization capabilities.
What if most evolve beyond physical forms?They will still need some form of physical "anchor". Even total virtuality requires somewhere to be virtual. If that somewhere gets erased, the virtuals contained within are erased too. Of course, if you can make that "anchor" gamma-ray proof, planet collision proof, galaxy collision proof and eaten-by-a-black-hole proof, then you don't need colonization. I bet it is cheaper to colonize than to build this device though.
What if most lose themselves in virtual realities. What if many simply don't bother leaving their own solar system because the speed of light proves to be unbreakable and they aren't interested in planting colonies that will have little or no contact or impact on their own civilization?I'm willing to bet the speed of light is unbreakable for us. It doesn't matter though. If we can get to 10%, and that is possible with todays knowledge, then we'll colonize the entire galaxy in a heartbeat (compared to the time the galaxy has existed). Real fast. So, seen from the outside, once we can get to 10% in an economical way, galaxy colonization will be almost instant.
Or what if we just got lucky and got a galaxy to ourselves?Well, considering it is doomed, we better find a backup real soon.
Unfortunately, there's this horrible thing called aging that makes this inevitably false for everyone
That is assuming that there is something inherently negative about aging, which there isn't, and as long as you are able to avoid the most debilitating maladies, you should still be able to make the future better than the past. Different, and better in different ways, but still better. It's a matter of attitude.
You are correct that using food as fuel has changed this picture somewhat, and this is an excellent example of why a good government is a non-existing government. There is no way to make this profitable without massive government sponsorship, so in a non-regulated society, such a moronic idea would never have caught on.
We can only hope that sanity prevails in this situation and that government poring money into a project that is bad for the environment (net carbon emissions from grain-to-fuel is higher than for petroleum), it is bad for poor people - they starve and it is bad for rich people - their hard-earned tax money is spent on insane projects.
In other words, Ethanol production has no upside and a lot of downsides. Hopefully we'll stop it soon.
Great example of what happens when people listen to the environmental lobby though. Poor people die.
Amen to that. Unless something terrible befalls you (unlikely) people rarely regret the choices they made and the chances they took. The regrets you have are the chances you never took. The opportunities you had but never caught.
Go to your next reunion and talk to the people who are there. It is usually astonishingly depressing. A huge part of them still remember school as the best time of their life and they always will.
The best time of my life is in the future, and it always will be. Take chances, try new things, and that will always be the case. Don't listen to those who tell you to "be responsible" and "content with what you have". There is only one reason they are giving you this advice. They hate to see you on a new adventure. It reminds them of all the opportunities they passed up in their miserable lives. When you get successful some time in the future, and if you try hard enough you might be, they will tell you about all that they "could have done, only it was... [wife, kids, job, weather, house payments, sick mother - take your pick] that prevented them from becoming successful.
Oh, and BTW, if you succeed, these people will resent you for it.
Remember everybody, to escape poverty, you just have to magically say "I'm outta here!" and just like that *poof* you're living the sweet life.
Sigh. Disingenuous bullshit won't make you right. It will just make you look like a disingenuous bullshitter. Try a little less asinine and a little more insight.
I have never stated that you "just" have to do that, and that "poof" something happens. However, you do have to try, and in many cases, after a lot of work, it happens. No magic. Just hard work. That is the reason we are not still in caves trying to figure out where there is a forest fire so we can get our fire going again.
Now, sitting on your hands, complaining to your loving wife about bad cave management is not going to get the fire started, but banging some flint against something actually might. I'd say you go out and try the flint or a couple of sticks then charge the shit out of the privilege of sitting around the fire. Given that the new fire is now your property, everybody has to pay. Lots! People who sat on their hands complaining about cave management deserve no more - or less.
Your maxim of every single human on earth being able to have a magically successful business while everyone else is the poor consumer confuses me.
Your hallucinations are what is confusing you, not my maxim. Please relate to what I actually say, not to what you think I say. I have, for example, never claimed that all who try will succeed, far from it, the vast majority will fail. Is that a problem? Not at all. It is a good thing. With your attitude nobody will try, and by extension, nobody will succeed. It is better everybody tries and 99.9% fails than that nobody tries and no progress is ever made.
But remember, I'm the communist for acknowledging that > 60% of the wealth lies in < 5% of the populace.
No, you are not. You are because you would prefer that everybody had the same amount of wealth, rather than the current situation, even if that meant that everybody was worse off than today. You see, with your attitude, we'd still live in caves, and the poor bastard who was trying to argue that he thought he could find a way to make fire rather than go out and collect it at the next lightning strike, would be chastised and ostracized, or, in the case of you, pitied as a little strange and told to go back and be happy his wife loved him.
Even more, and far more damaging, when the poor bastard ignored your condescension and actually went out and made fire, you would hate him for charging you for enjoying what he created.
Brother, that is never going to change, it is Pareto Law, the world over!
I don't care. It doesn't matter. In 1980 the number of people starving to death was significantly higher than today (even in absolute numbers, which is astounding given the population increase). Since then the amount of wealth has been collected on even fewer hands, but at the same time, less people live in abject poverty. Less people die of starvation. How can that be? Because wealth is created and since it is created it can be concentrated on few hands while still allowing the poorest to do better.
According to the UN, outside of Africa, starvation as a systemic problem will be solved by some time early (2015-2025) this century and even in Africa it will be mostly gone. For the first time ever. By ever I mean, since we climbed down from the trees, ever. That improvement has nothing to do with UN food aid and everything to do with getting out there and trying to make something happen. Fail and fail again, and in the end the world is a better place.
You must be the American for thinking that everyone has an equal share of the wealth and ability to be the successful businessman.
You must suffer from some rather bizarre hallucinations if you can read that into what I wrote. And, no, I am not an Ameri
I can't believe this is modded "insightful". It is about as insightful as the musings of the old Soviet commies, and about as accurate.
The US, at it's core, is all about being not entirely content with your current situation and then trying to improve it. What more than anything characterizes the US "spirit" is the "can-do" attitude. The idea that I have a given (no, not by any deity, it's just there, like gravity) right to achieve my highest potential (and often way beyond my potential).
Going out and building my own business is the right thing to do. Sitting in a cubicle being all happy that I am not starving to death in Africa is absurd.
Oh, and btw, this attitude has saved more starving children in the poor part of the world than any other activity undertaken by any person or organization. US companies moving to Asia has lifted that region out of massive poverty, and has been the major contributor to the fact that the number of people starving to death in the world today is significantly lower than 30 years ago. Sadly this is being countered currently by our system of farm-subsidies, but that is another story.
If you can't find joy in your job and you can't find another job with comparable income, then find joy in your family.BZZZZT! WRONG! If you can't find joy in your current job and you can't find a job with a comparable income, go out and make your own company, make it successful, hire lots of people and make the world a better place. By all means, don't listen to this poster.
Generations before you have worked in mills, textile plants, mines, slaughterhouses, etc.Yes, and the reason these people are not still in mills and on farms and that they have an education and much better jobs, and the reason that less people suffer from starvation and malnutrition today than ever before is because some guy in a mill, or a mine, or on a farm, said "Fuck this shit, I'm outta here" and then he went on to make a better mill, a more efficient engine, a better light bulb or similar. The ones with your attitude stayed put and complained about management mistreatment.
I will disagree with this one just a little bit. It's in bad times that there are opportunities around. If he has the skill and the drive, now is probably a better time than most. Particularly if he wants a complete change. Now is when new ideas start out small and end up as big things 10 years from now. Albeit, in about 0.01% of the cases, but :-)
I understand your dilemma completely, given that you have to have income, quitting your job and starting a new adventure might be a daunting prospect. Giving up your income entirely is hard or impossible depending on your situation. There are many options, but I would (personally) focus on either of the two below.
Join a big company like HP, Cisco or IBM. These companies usually have far more options with regards to career paths than do small companies. Even paths that are entirely outside of technology, well, at least in the day-to-day of things. This is the way I ended up taking after an acquisition, moving from dev, into tech sales and later into a marketing style position.
Start a consulting business doing what you currently do. Talk to your current employer and see if they are willing to hire you on as a part-time consultant rather than a full-time employee. This will cost you your benefits, but if you have a spouse with benefits through her employer, that may not be too bad.
As a part time consultant you should be able to bring in about as much as you do as a full-time employee, and still have time to get your alternate career going.
Word of advice: No matter what new career you get into, it is highly likely that it, after a few years, becomes as routine and boring as is your current career. At that point in time you have an idea about what to do to make the jump again though.
Only partly true since it takes energy to create Ethanol. With the current methods, Ethanol releases more carbon into the atmosphere than does petroleum, which makes this ethanol thing yet another farce drummed through by the green lobby. They rarely get anything right.
I wonder how many people will starve to death before we, with the insistence of the green lobby, stop killing people in the poor world by putting their inexpensive food into our gas tanks thereby making it expensive.
BZZT! Wrong. Mostly. Wealth is created not "excavated". The past few hundreds of years the world has improved enormously not because we are better at distributing wealth but because we are better at creating it.
If you, by wealth, mean all the resources in the world exttracted at optimum cost, then yes, there is limited wealth, but all the resources in the world are not excavated or excavatable currently at minimum cost.
The "one pie we all have to share" argument is the socialist argument and it is, was and always has been, wrong. One day, perhaps in a thoursand years when we have created the ultimate technologies, it may be correct.
I wonder if there is a "no bloody sense of humor" gene.
Hey, the fact that Mozilla 3.0 Beta 5 is about as stable as a house of cards would have been during Hurricane Catrina might be a good reason not to go there yet. Mine crashes many, many, many times a day.
To add to the list - Cathay Pacific also uses Linux, Ubuntu if I remember correctly, for their entertainment system, and I also learned this when the system was having trouble and the nice stewardess rebooted it for me. Good to see the Tux is everywhere.
Hey, thanks for sharing what you learned when educating your self. It seems my stats on the danger of owning a gun is out of date, and I'll update my brain.
This is mostly incorrect. You are falling into the standard trap that most gun lovers (me being one such but not trapped) do. You seem to think that it is unknown or random criminals that kill people with guns. It is not. In fact, in the US, once you buy a gun your chance of getting shot increases dramatically. This has a simple explanation. if you are a man, these are the people most likely to shoot you (most of the time with your gun):
Guns don't solve problems, neither do owning them. The callus way most American gun owners handle their guns is a major reason for the gun deaths in the US, not guns nor street criminals. Well, that is, gun crimes against the average citizen. If you are a gang member, things change dramatically. Your gang will then take the place of your family in the list above, and the competing gangs come just below. Gangs don't really have much likelyhood of interacting with you or me however.
The criminals, particularly in the inner cities, are a significant portion of the gun criminals, but they are not particularly relevant to you and me. They generally shoot each other, and that's that. They are not a danger to the population in general. The most dangerous person in your life is your spouse, and once you buy your self or her (assuming you are male, this is slashdot after all) a gun, you increase your risk of dying by gun shot many fold. That is, if you are an average American. If you are not, you handle your gun properly. I am amazed at the number of crazy people who have loaded guns easily available in their bedroom though. It's insane.
Yeah, but every time I go, after a while I start looking at the bullet holes in the wall beside me, in the wall behind me (!!!), the ceiling above me etc, and I start to wonder... "I don't want to be here when one of those lunatics are here!"
Thanks, that was enlightening, but it still leaves the 2nd open to interpretation (what law isn't). The problem lies in the wording of "well regulated". This appears to imply som sort of organization of sorts, not just a random collection of souls.
I am originally not from the US, and where I come from the regular population was actually armed by the government. There is a standing army and there is the armed population. The difference is that it was organized however. It had ranks, officers the whole shebang. Stashes of weapons and all. In other words, it was "well regulated" but not under central government control.
Interestingly, where I come from there is also more firearms per capita than there is in the US, but significantly less homicides. Go figure.
Don't get me wrong. I fully support the right to bear arms, but I have also spent enough time around guns to know that they are not to be taken lightly. Having a minimum amount of legislation, such as a cooling off period for example, doesn't infringe upon anyones rights. IMHO.
Well, since they already are, sort of, in Texas, that doesn't appear to be the case. That ACLU leaves 2nd amendment cases to the NRA is not a huge issue though, and I would like you to point me to a case where the ACLU claims that there is anything wrong with the 2nd.