Yes, we have technology that can replace any single thing, but as a whole, there is not a solution here that doesn't involve cutting the world's population back to levels we've not seen since the turn of the 19th century. Yea we could go back to THAT era, you'd just have to eliminate the bulk of the population gain since then.
The question was whether you could reboot a technological civilization without fossil fuels. There was no stipulation that the rebooted civilization must have the same population levels as the world currently has. The population would reach the levels that conditions would allow, which might well be a small fraction of the current world population.
I don't see the problem. Switching to e.g. bio-fuels is a problem now because you're diverting established agricultural output from food crops to bio-fuel, reducing the supply of food in the existing market, and driving up prices. If you're "re-booting" civilization, then you don't have an established market to upset, so there aren't the same issues. It might slow things down a bit to have to generate your fuel in renewable ways, but you'd still get there in the end. Burn wood (and re-plant the trees), make ethanol from grain, maybe make the switch to battery power sooner, with solar/hydro/tidal/geothermal sources of energy.
The first electric cars were made in the 1800's, but they didn't get much of a chance then, because fossil fuel powered cars were there. Without fossil fuels, they would probably have been developed faster and become much more significant. Lighter-than-air aircraft were swept aside by fossil fuel powered airplanes, but without the fossil fuels, that type of craft might have developed and prospered, and the skies might be filled with Zeppelins.
Sure, history would take a very different course, but there are plenty of technological paths for human ingenuity to follow without fossil fuels.
Ahh, yes, the early days of software piracy (or my experience of it) - copying Sinclair Spectrum games onto C90 cassettes using twin cassette decks. If you tried, you could fit like ten games on one cassette. Those were the days.
No, meaning that some of the times that the remote pilot got confusing responses, the remote pilot would crash when the local pilot would not.
Possibly true, but there have been plenty of crashes where the on-board pilot was confused by his senses, or in the heat of the moment unable to correctly priotiritize conflicting alarms, where a remote pilot might have better perspective, or more opportunity to as for a second opinion, so I think that could work both ways.
Personally, I would feel safer with a fully automated plane than one that's remotely operated. And that's not even considering the possibility of remotely hijacking the plane or the remote link failing.
On that, we agree. If not fully automated, then at least implement a "refuse to crash" system that just will not allow the pilot to fly a plane into the ground or whatever.
I kind of agree on the monitoring, but then again it is actually exceedingly rare that planes "disappear", and even in those exceedingly rare cases, monitoring alone wouldn't have changed the fate of the flights in question, so there is bound to be some question about the cost/benefit of such a system.
As to your proposed solution, there are obviously a lot of factors to be weighed up. Personally I'd tend to feel that the whole remote-piloting thing might introduce as many problems as it solves; not only do you need to worry about your pilot's ability to control the plane, now you have to worry about whoever has access to the remote piloting facilities. And you have to make whatever communications gear is required on the plane to enable that 100% tamper proof, otherwise you just made it easier for that one pilot (or a hijacker) to take over. Anything is possible, but it's certainly not clear that any given solution is a magic bullet.
Sure, you can't remove all risk. But it's at least possible that the guy in this case did not have the kind of crazy required to be physically attacking people, or looking them in the eye while killing them. He did after all wait for the opportunity to make sure he had the cockpit to himself, and he didn't make threats, or indeed say anything to anyone during the incident, so it doesn't seem to me like he was up for any kind of face-to-face confrontation. Maybe just the fact of having someone else there would have been enough.
I always watch Top Gear, but to be honest, in its current form it's been getting old. Good opportunity to put it to bed for a little while, then re-incarnate it a couple of years down the line in a new form.
Must have been obvious, since I dealt with it in the first line of my reply. You seem to be resistant to the idea that piling way too much food on your plate is a good way to get fat; I'd suggest that's a problem right there. It's not necessary to know exactly the right amount you need. At home, I tend to take very conservative portions. After I've finished my portion, I can take a moment, see how I feel, whether I want to eat more, and what I want to eat more of. I'd suggest this is a better strategy than piling way too much food on your plate in the first place, and then trying to stop yourself from eating it all.
Unless you have more on your plate than you need (in which case there's a better obvious solution to the problem), I don't see where this gets you in terms of calorific intake; eating slowly doesn't change the number of calories on the plate. It might make a difference to the rate of increase of blood glucose, which has its own benefits, but I doubt it will make much difference to that, because its the rate of digestion that's going to determine blood glucose levels.
Plenty of people on this planet rarely if ever go outside; people live indoors, work indoors, shop indoors, and take much of their recreation indoors. So I don't really see the reasoning behind the assumption that we can't colonise another planet without terraforming it. Mars has no magnetic field to divert solar radiation, so even if you did terraform it pretty good, you'd still get fried; KSR solved that in his books by eventually genetically modifying the colonists to be able to self-repair the radiation damage, but who knows when such a solution will be feasible in reality. Build your colony underground as much as possible, and you gain protection from everything that is hostile about the Martian environment; the atmosphere, the temperature, the toxic stuff, and the radiation all become much more controllable. Sure, it's a bit harder building underground, but not nearly as hard as terraforming.
Okay, those numbers that you quoted are very arbitrary, I'd like to see anything to back that up. The near-instantaneous seek time of an SSD compared to a mechanical disk ought to be a major factor when it comes to swap performance, far more so than throughput. In any case, there are many SSD-only systems now, in which case the swap space is on the SDD whether you like it or not, so there's certainly not an unreasonable thing to try.
Very misleading summary (yeah, duh). This is not a study, it is an editorial. Someone's opinion. It says so right at the top. Note at the bottom of the article; "Provenance and peer review: Commissioned; not externally peer reviewed."
It's incredibly misleading to cite this article as a "study", all it is is an opinion piece article, nothing more.
I'd suggest it might be because of the support costs of all those people having trouble logging in, forgetting their passwords etc, or getting compromised because they wrote down their hard-to-remember password, if they went more secure. My bank allows a weak password (plus some nominated characters from a secondary "memorable phrase"), and no requirement to change it ever. TBH I'm pretty cool with that because I can remember both, so if I'm ever caught without access to my password manager, I won't be screwed. In order to add a new payment recipient, they do require a code sent to my registered phone to be entered. I feel it's a reasonable balance between security and convenience.
Content is key whether it is online or in a book. Handing out hardware doesn’t solve the content problem.
Good thing they're not just handing out hardware then.
FTA: "As with Sunward Park, the schools in this new pilot will be using a centralised portal developed by Bramley’s MIB Software for managing tablets and aggregating educational content into a single portal. MIB’s backend pulls in CAPS aligned digital textbooks from the likes of Via Afrika as well as extra resources from around the web."
Just because it's been done wrong in the past doesn't mean it can't be done right in the future, although it doesn't bode well that this particular project appears to have been rushed, and significant questions not answered in detail. However there's nothing wrong with the theory; access to textbooks, collaboration and communications tools, monitoring of students progress while they perform activities (and as the article mentions, monitoring of teachers as well), the list of potential benefits to using tablets or laptops as a central educational tool is long. At some point, someone is going to get it right and actually realize many of the potential advantages.
Of course such people exist. There is no science whatsoever that says that the earth is only 6000 years old, for example, so creationists who believe that are simply denying the science. They don't question the science, they reject it; there's a difference.
I use that as an example because it is more clear-cut than the climate issue, where there are a lot of people who hold a spectrum of views which are probably somewhere between being very skeptical and being outright deniers, but for sure there are those who pretty clearly aren't interested in any science that says man-made climate change might be real.
The whole point of emphasising the difference between an actual sceptic and a denier is that the sceptic questions the science, whereas the denier ignores it entirely. The scientists and others referred to in the article have no problem with the actual sceptics. Questioning the science is fine, disregarding it is not.
The Register is reporting that it's actually a power failure, apparently according to a Heathrow Airport spokesperson.
“There is a power outage at the NATS control centre in Swanwick, which is affecting UK airspace. Flights are currently experiencing delays and we will update passengers as soon as we have more information," said a spokesman from Heathrow as the effects of the outage spread.
You'd think that such systems would have fully redundant power supply infrastructure though, so maybe that's misinformation.
Not only that,but according to the article on The Register last week, they haven't actually got the games yet, they are just hoping that the rights holders are going to come forward and give permission for them to include the games for free. They've sent out a letter to the rights holders, no idea if they've had any replies yet. So even the games are in question.
I think this speaks a lot about how companies and the population are increasingly thinking in rather short terms and how little respect the modern tech elite have for those who came before them. There seems to be this attitude that difficult problems are only unsolved because the 'wrong' people have looked at it and flush with arrogance for solving comparatively simple internet related ones they believe that they are smarter and thus will quickly tackle what those 'researchers' and 'old fogies' could not.
I don't think that accurately reflects the attitude, although it might sometimes seem that way. There is nothing wrong with thinking that coming at old problems from a new direction, with fresh ideas, and bringing the latest science and technology to bear on the problems, might throw up new solutions. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Having respect for "those who came before" doesn't mean assuming that problems can't be solved just because they haven't been solved already.
There is a big difference between an allowance and a loophole; where you are allowed to write down xyx against your tax bill, that is an intended tax allowance by your tax authority, put in play for whatever reason - balancing the tax system, encouraging certain types of spending, buying votes, etc. Such allowances are all part of making sure everyone pays a fair amount of tax, and everyone ultimately benefits.
A loophole however is not intended; a loophole is legal only because governments have not figured out how to close it. Clearly Amazon is expected to pay some tax on its non-US earnings, and it's not. This is not in any way the intent of the governments of the countries in which Amazon operates. Taking advantage of such loopholes benefits nobody except Amazon; taxpayers in the countries that Amazon operates in are deprived of tax revenue that would benefit them directly, and local competitors to Amazon who do pay their taxes are squeezed and put out of business, ultimately again to the detriment of everyone except Amazon.
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Yes, we have technology that can replace any single thing, but as a whole, there is not a solution here that doesn't involve cutting the world's population back to levels we've not seen since the turn of the 19th century. Yea we could go back to THAT era, you'd just have to eliminate the bulk of the population gain since then.
The question was whether you could reboot a technological civilization without fossil fuels. There was no stipulation that the rebooted civilization must have the same population levels as the world currently has. The population would reach the levels that conditions would allow, which might well be a small fraction of the current world population.
I don't see the problem. Switching to e.g. bio-fuels is a problem now because you're diverting established agricultural output from food crops to bio-fuel, reducing the supply of food in the existing market, and driving up prices. If you're "re-booting" civilization, then you don't have an established market to upset, so there aren't the same issues. It might slow things down a bit to have to generate your fuel in renewable ways, but you'd still get there in the end. Burn wood (and re-plant the trees), make ethanol from grain, maybe make the switch to battery power sooner, with solar/hydro/tidal/geothermal sources of energy.
The first electric cars were made in the 1800's, but they didn't get much of a chance then, because fossil fuel powered cars were there. Without fossil fuels, they would probably have been developed faster and become much more significant. Lighter-than-air aircraft were swept aside by fossil fuel powered airplanes, but without the fossil fuels, that type of craft might have developed and prospered, and the skies might be filled with Zeppelins.
Sure, history would take a very different course, but there are plenty of technological paths for human ingenuity to follow without fossil fuels.
Ahh, yes, the early days of software piracy (or my experience of it) - copying Sinclair Spectrum games onto C90 cassettes using twin cassette decks. If you tried, you could fit like ten games on one cassette. Those were the days.
No, meaning that some of the times that the remote pilot got confusing responses, the remote pilot would crash when the local pilot would not.
Possibly true, but there have been plenty of crashes where the on-board pilot was confused by his senses, or in the heat of the moment unable to correctly priotiritize conflicting alarms, where a remote pilot might have better perspective, or more opportunity to as for a second opinion, so I think that could work both ways.
Personally, I would feel safer with a fully automated plane than one that's remotely operated. And that's not even considering the possibility of remotely hijacking the plane or the remote link failing.
On that, we agree. If not fully automated, then at least implement a "refuse to crash" system that just will not allow the pilot to fly a plane into the ground or whatever.
I kind of agree on the monitoring, but then again it is actually exceedingly rare that planes "disappear", and even in those exceedingly rare cases, monitoring alone wouldn't have changed the fate of the flights in question, so there is bound to be some question about the cost/benefit of such a system.
As to your proposed solution, there are obviously a lot of factors to be weighed up. Personally I'd tend to feel that the whole remote-piloting thing might introduce as many problems as it solves; not only do you need to worry about your pilot's ability to control the plane, now you have to worry about whoever has access to the remote piloting facilities. And you have to make whatever communications gear is required on the plane to enable that 100% tamper proof, otherwise you just made it easier for that one pilot (or a hijacker) to take over. Anything is possible, but it's certainly not clear that any given solution is a magic bullet.
It would be even more confusing to a remote pilot.
What, you mean the remote pilot would have crashed harder?
"What am I missing?"
A whack on the head with the clue stick?
Sure, you can't remove all risk. But it's at least possible that the guy in this case did not have the kind of crazy required to be physically attacking people, or looking them in the eye while killing them. He did after all wait for the opportunity to make sure he had the cockpit to himself, and he didn't make threats, or indeed say anything to anyone during the incident, so it doesn't seem to me like he was up for any kind of face-to-face confrontation. Maybe just the fact of having someone else there would have been enough.
I always watch Top Gear, but to be honest, in its current form it's been getting old. Good opportunity to put it to bed for a little while, then re-incarnate it a couple of years down the line in a new form.
Must have been obvious, since I dealt with it in the first line of my reply. You seem to be resistant to the idea that piling way too much food on your plate is a good way to get fat; I'd suggest that's a problem right there. It's not necessary to know exactly the right amount you need. At home, I tend to take very conservative portions. After I've finished my portion, I can take a moment, see how I feel, whether I want to eat more, and what I want to eat more of. I'd suggest this is a better strategy than piling way too much food on your plate in the first place, and then trying to stop yourself from eating it all.
Unless you have more on your plate than you need (in which case there's a better obvious solution to the problem), I don't see where this gets you in terms of calorific intake; eating slowly doesn't change the number of calories on the plate. It might make a difference to the rate of increase of blood glucose, which has its own benefits, but I doubt it will make much difference to that, because its the rate of digestion that's going to determine blood glucose levels.
Plenty of people on this planet rarely if ever go outside; people live indoors, work indoors, shop indoors, and take much of their recreation indoors. So I don't really see the reasoning behind the assumption that we can't colonise another planet without terraforming it. Mars has no magnetic field to divert solar radiation, so even if you did terraform it pretty good, you'd still get fried; KSR solved that in his books by eventually genetically modifying the colonists to be able to self-repair the radiation damage, but who knows when such a solution will be feasible in reality. Build your colony underground as much as possible, and you gain protection from everything that is hostile about the Martian environment; the atmosphere, the temperature, the toxic stuff, and the radiation all become much more controllable. Sure, it's a bit harder building underground, but not nearly as hard as terraforming.
Okay, those numbers that you quoted are very arbitrary, I'd like to see anything to back that up. The near-instantaneous seek time of an SSD compared to a mechanical disk ought to be a major factor when it comes to swap performance, far more so than throughput. In any case, there are many SSD-only systems now, in which case the swap space is on the SDD whether you like it or not, so there's certainly not an unreasonable thing to try.
See this page, which has much more information, graphical breakdown of who gets what, etc.
Ok, now I've seen the link to the study, I take back what I said above. Sorry, I've been drinking.
Very misleading summary (yeah, duh). This is not a study, it is an editorial. Someone's opinion. It says so right at the top. Note at the bottom of the article; "Provenance and peer review: Commissioned; not externally peer reviewed."
It's incredibly misleading to cite this article as a "study", all it is is an opinion piece article, nothing more.
I'd suggest it might be because of the support costs of all those people having trouble logging in, forgetting their passwords etc, or getting compromised because they wrote down their hard-to-remember password, if they went more secure. My bank allows a weak password (plus some nominated characters from a secondary "memorable phrase"), and no requirement to change it ever. TBH I'm pretty cool with that because I can remember both, so if I'm ever caught without access to my password manager, I won't be screwed. In order to add a new payment recipient, they do require a code sent to my registered phone to be entered. I feel it's a reasonable balance between security and convenience.
Content is key whether it is online or in a book. Handing out hardware doesn’t solve the content problem.
Good thing they're not just handing out hardware then.
FTA: "As with Sunward Park, the schools in this new pilot will be using a centralised portal developed by Bramley’s MIB Software for managing tablets and aggregating educational content into a single portal. MIB’s backend pulls in CAPS aligned digital textbooks from the likes of Via Afrika as well as extra resources from around the web."
Just because it's been done wrong in the past doesn't mean it can't be done right in the future, although it doesn't bode well that this particular project appears to have been rushed, and significant questions not answered in detail. However there's nothing wrong with the theory; access to textbooks, collaboration and communications tools, monitoring of students progress while they perform activities (and as the article mentions, monitoring of teachers as well), the list of potential benefits to using tablets or laptops as a central educational tool is long. At some point, someone is going to get it right and actually realize many of the potential advantages.
Of course such people exist. There is no science whatsoever that says that the earth is only 6000 years old, for example, so creationists who believe that are simply denying the science. They don't question the science, they reject it; there's a difference.
I use that as an example because it is more clear-cut than the climate issue, where there are a lot of people who hold a spectrum of views which are probably somewhere between being very skeptical and being outright deniers, but for sure there are those who pretty clearly aren't interested in any science that says man-made climate change might be real.
The whole point of emphasising the difference between an actual sceptic and a denier is that the sceptic questions the science, whereas the denier ignores it entirely. The scientists and others referred to in the article have no problem with the actual sceptics. Questioning the science is fine, disregarding it is not.
The Register is reporting that it's actually a power failure, apparently according to a Heathrow Airport spokesperson.
“There is a power outage at the NATS control centre in Swanwick, which is affecting UK airspace. Flights are currently experiencing delays and we will update passengers as soon as we have more information," said a spokesman from Heathrow as the effects of the outage spread.
You'd think that such systems would have fully redundant power supply infrastructure though, so maybe that's misinformation.
Not only that,but according to the article on The Register last week, they haven't actually got the games yet, they are just hoping that the rights holders are going to come forward and give permission for them to include the games for free. They've sent out a letter to the rights holders, no idea if they've had any replies yet. So even the games are in question.
I think this speaks a lot about how companies and the population are increasingly thinking in rather short terms and how little respect the modern tech elite have for those who came before them. There seems to be this attitude that difficult problems are only unsolved because the 'wrong' people have looked at it and flush with arrogance for solving comparatively simple internet related ones they believe that they are smarter and thus will quickly tackle what those 'researchers' and 'old fogies' could not.
I don't think that accurately reflects the attitude, although it might sometimes seem that way. There is nothing wrong with thinking that coming at old problems from a new direction, with fresh ideas, and bringing the latest science and technology to bear on the problems, might throw up new solutions. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Having respect for "those who came before" doesn't mean assuming that problems can't be solved just because they haven't been solved already.
There is a big difference between an allowance and a loophole; where you are allowed to write down xyx against your tax bill, that is an intended tax allowance by your tax authority, put in play for whatever reason - balancing the tax system, encouraging certain types of spending, buying votes, etc. Such allowances are all part of making sure everyone pays a fair amount of tax, and everyone ultimately benefits.
A loophole however is not intended; a loophole is legal only because governments have not figured out how to close it. Clearly Amazon is expected to pay some tax on its non-US earnings, and it's not. This is not in any way the intent of the governments of the countries in which Amazon operates. Taking advantage of such loopholes benefits nobody except Amazon; taxpayers in the countries that Amazon operates in are deprived of tax revenue that would benefit them directly, and local competitors to Amazon who do pay their taxes are squeezed and put out of business, ultimately again to the detriment of everyone except Amazon.