This is pretty much precisely what people were saying to anti-doomsayers in 1975. In the mean time, population has doubled, the population growth rate has slowed dramatically, and fewer people are hungry (not just fewer in proportion, fewer in absolute numbers).
Soemtimes it's fun being old. I may not have as much hair, but it doesn't catch fire near as often.
There's a point to this you don't make clear: the increase in price will automatically lead to overall conservation, and the exploitation of new possible resources. $60/bbl oil makes oil sands feasible, and makes the various biological-source things, like turkey guts, much more profitable. Somewhere before $100/bbl, biomass ethanol starts looking interesting. Improve the efficiency of photovoltaics another 50 percent and they start replacing electricity generation, at least in the Southwest. Somewhere in there, methane clathrates (the "frozen methane" mentioned above, actually am ice with trapped methane) become interesting, and there's a lot of that.
The point is, price increases act as a natural feedback mechanism that causes the problem to "solve itself".
You know, I remember simulations like that. No more than 5-10 more years, then oil and various other commodities would run out, there would be riots, starvation, caztastrophe.
Problem is, it was around 1975.
In the mean time, out here in the real world, the Saudis are ramping up production 50 percent in the next several years, and oil shale and tar sands are economically viable.
Uh. Huh. Let's see... an egg is, oh, say 50 grams. So it takes 50 calories to raise the temp of the egg by 1C. and a hard-boiled egg is more or less at equilibrium with boiling water, so the minimum would be something like 70×50 calories, and 4.2 joules/calorie, so its going to take MINIMUM 14,700 joules.
60 joules to the watt-minute. 720 joules in 12 watt-minutes. 720 joules < 14,700 joules.
Check: it takes about 1 minute for my 700 watt microwave to cook 1 egg. 700 watt-minutes is 42,000 joules. 720 joules < 42,000 joules.
Guy, get a grip. You're violently agreeing with my point, while quibbling with the wording "decode" --- which, it happens, I adopted when I took "Advanced Computer Architecture" from Fred Brooks. The Fred Brooks.
That's a pretty subtle distinction you're drawing for it to deserve an exclamation point.
I'm not saying that modern chips are exactly the same as microcode in previous generations; I'm saying that the notion that it's not a complex instruction set because it's decoded into a simple instruction set is mistaken.
The whole point of the 801 was to show that you could make a simple, very small (801 didn't even have a multiply instruction) completely wired instruction set and do the instruction decoding in the compiler. If the instruction set size is large, and the instructions are decoded into internal micro-operations, whether they're run through a microcode interpreter loop or sliced longways like VLIW, it's still a Ccomplex Instruction Set Computer.
That's pretty much the way CISC has been implemented since the IBM 360. John Cocke started the RISC thing with the IBM 801 because he believed the microcode interpreter loop could be replaced wwith better compilation.
First of all, the guy who told you this is a moron just asking for a lawsuit.
But beyond that, as someone who does way too many interviews every year, I've got to say, I wish I saw more people of any race, sex, or whatever who were good strong people. Not many CS grads are black, for reasons that escape me. Not many are female. If anything, a qualified black or female will get a little bit more consideration, just because they're unusual.
But you use them as if them had some evidentiary value in the discussion; neither of them do. They're just ways of turning the discussion from the points at issue to people (ergo "ad hominem")who also hold those positions. (Hell, no one even mentioned Crichton.)
As to the respect issue, I'd say you've disproven that self-referentially.
I don't know a tonne about the implementation -- back when Tom Love and Stepstone were pushing it, I was in grad school and far preferred C++, because it didn't cost money. But Objective C did depend on a runtime library to do things like, eg, garbage collection. Basically, if you look at Objective C, everything that had to be translated into C was indicated with @keyword structures, or between [square brackets].
Oh, one other thing: I was wrong to agree that C++ is a preprocessor language in quite the same way, at least since (I think) cfront 1.1. Sometime around cfront 2.0, it became a compiler that compiled to C as the target language. The distinction there is that a "preprocessor" passes some code through unchanged, like ratfor and iftran did, while a C-targeted compiler parses the whole program into an abstract syntax representation and then generates code.
The problem here is that while the idea that there's some climate change going on is probably strongly supported, that's not the only aspect of the argument.
First of all, there's the "well, duh" aspect: sure the climate is changing, the climate is always changing. But is the climate changing in an unusual way? With only about a 200 year baseline of any kind of direct data, it has to be established through statistical modeling of a bunch of secondary indicators, like tree rings. That statistical study is extremely sensitive to method selection and the way the data sets are chosen and massaged (which makes sense, since climate models are almost trivially sensitive to initial condition.)
Second, there's the question of whether the warming is anthropogenic, ie, caused by humanity, and if so, to what degree? This has to be explored through modeling, and models have a terrible tendency to show what the modeler expects. The current collection of models isn't very well tested, and certainly isn't well tested in the predictive sense. There's also the problem that Mars appears to be experiencing global warming in the same sort of magnitude of the Earth; the notion that global climate change is anthropogenic is dramatically weakened by that observation, but its one that generally doesn't get much attention. So whether climate change is primarily anthropogenic is, or ought to be, pretty controversial still. That it's not appears to have more to do with politics and funding than with the condition of the science. (There's a guy up in Fort Collins (at Colorado State) who is constantly dealing with people who demand he profess his faith in anthropogenic global warming because he estimates that anthropogenic factors only account for 30 percent of the total change.)
Third, there's the question of whether the anthopogenic changes are really driving the climate beyond its control loop limits. If what's happening is that we're simply driving the system a hundred or so years ahead, that's way different from Lovelock's fever crisis.
And fourth, we don't know what the climate would be doing otherwise. Some models suggest we should be going into an ice age now. Is anthropogenic global warming keeping us from having glaciers covering northern New York State? If so, do we really want to fix it. (I wouldn't mind losing Rochester, but Ithaca's kind of nice.)
yeah, and some other subtleties. #define for NULL was another annoying one, as I remember. (And one of the reasons behind needing templates, as I vaguely recall.) The point was that making C++ a proper superset of C was always a goal, but never completely achieved. The keyword one was the first one that came to mind, but I tend to write either straight C (kernel code) or Common Lisp now and couldn't think of a fancier one.
Uh, the last I recall (it's been a LONG time since I was having Æsop fables read to me), the kid was a shepherd and the people from the village were coming to protect the sheep.
Wolves do eat sheep.
On the other point, the thing is that, yes, catastrophes can happen. They don't seem to be near as easy to get as people like to propose. But the lesson of the "boy who cried wolf" is that you don't want to get a reputation for warning without justification.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a use of the word "worked" with which I have hitherto been unfamiliar.
This is pretty much precisely what people were saying to anti-doomsayers in 1975. In the mean time, population has doubled, the population growth rate has slowed dramatically, and fewer people are hungry (not just fewer in proportion, fewer in absolute numbers).
Soemtimes it's fun being old. I may not have as much hair, but it doesn't catch fire near as often.
There's a point to this you don't make clear: the increase in price will automatically lead to overall conservation, and the exploitation of new possible resources. $60/bbl oil makes oil sands feasible, and makes the various biological-source things, like turkey guts, much more profitable. Somewhere before $100/bbl, biomass ethanol starts looking interesting. Improve the efficiency of photovoltaics another 50 percent and they start replacing electricity generation, at least in the Southwest. Somewhere in there, methane clathrates (the "frozen methane" mentioned above, actually am ice with trapped methane) become interesting, and there's a lot of that.
The point is, price increases act as a natural feedback mechanism that causes the problem to "solve itself".
Elderly lawyers.
You know, I remember simulations like that. No more than 5-10 more years, then oil and various other commodities would run out, there would be riots, starvation, caztastrophe.
Problem is, it was around 1975.
In the mean time, out here in the real world, the Saudis are ramping up production 50 percent in the next several years, and oil shale and tar sands are economically viable.
Right, but it takes some minutes at a lower temp. Equilibrium seems like a good back of envelope estimate.
Seems way unlikely that it would be two orders of magnitude less, anyway.
12 watt-minutes is 2 cell phones × 2 watts × 3 minutes.
Hah.
Uh. Huh. Let's see ... an egg is, oh, say 50 grams. So it takes 50 calories to raise the temp of the egg by 1C. and a hard-boiled egg is more or less at equilibrium with boiling water, so the minimum would be something like 70×50 calories, and 4.2 joules/calorie, so its going to take MINIMUM 14,700 joules.
60 joules to the watt-minute. 720 joules in 12 watt-minutes. 720 joules < 14,700 joules.
Check: it takes about 1 minute for my 700 watt microwave to cook 1 egg. 700 watt-minutes is 42,000 joules. 720 joules < 42,000 joules.
I call bullshit.
Um, you're dead too.
Slashdotted and Dugg. The squirrels are unionizing.
Maybe it doesn't scream financial success to you, but the something like a call-center job is pretty good compared to a lot of small-town jobs.
Guy, get a grip. You're violently agreeing with my point, while quibbling with the wording "decode" --- which, it happens, I adopted when I took "Advanced Computer Architecture" from Fred Brooks. The Fred Brooks.
That's a pretty subtle distinction you're drawing for it to deserve an exclamation point.
I'm not saying that modern chips are exactly the same as microcode in previous generations; I'm saying that the notion that it's not a complex instruction set because it's decoded into a simple instruction set is mistaken.
The whole point of the 801 was to show that you could make a simple, very small (801 didn't even have a multiply instruction) completely wired instruction set and do the instruction decoding in the compiler. If the instruction set size is large, and the instructions are decoded into internal micro-operations, whether they're run through a microcode interpreter loop or sliced longways like VLIW, it's still a Ccomplex Instruction Set Computer.
They talk about that at WaPo. What you're seeing is the outcome AFTER they spent hours trying to delete the worst stuff as fast as it ws coming in.
That's pretty much the way CISC has been implemented since the IBM 360. John Cocke started the RISC thing with the IBM 801 because he believed the microcode interpreter loop could be replaced wwith better compilation.
First of all, the guy who told you this is a moron just asking for a lawsuit.
But beyond that, as someone who does way too many interviews every year, I've got to say, I wish I saw more people of any race, sex, or whatever who were good strong people. Not many CS grads are black, for reasons that escape me. Not many are female. If anything, a qualified black or female will get a little bit more consideration, just because they're unusual.
Only if you make an argument with them. Other than in a Pythonesque sense, of course.
But you use them as if them had some evidentiary value in the discussion; neither of them do. They're just ways of turning the discussion from the points at issue to people (ergo "ad hominem")who also hold those positions. (Hell, no one even mentioned Crichton.)
As to the respect issue, I'd say you've disproven that self-referentially.
I don't know a tonne about the implementation -- back when Tom Love and Stepstone were pushing it, I was in grad school and far preferred C++, because it didn't cost money. But Objective C did depend on a runtime library to do things like, eg, garbage collection. Basically, if you look at Objective C, everything that had to be translated into C was indicated with @keyword structures, or between [square brackets].
Oh, one other thing: I was wrong to agree that C++ is a preprocessor language in quite the same way, at least since (I think) cfront 1.1. Sometime around cfront 2.0, it became a compiler that compiled to C as the target language. The distinction there is that a "preprocessor" passes some code through unchanged, like ratfor and iftran did, while a C-targeted compiler parses the whole program into an abstract syntax representation and then generates code.
Look up "ad hominem (circumstantial)", poopsie.
(1) "What won't lead the pack is a book by a harvard-educated fiction-writing non-physician."
(2) "That is, unless you're the sort of person who considers Intelligent Design vs Evolution a genuine debate."
And speak politely to your betters.
Uhm, so? All I was pointing out was that if you have a good C compiler, you can get to Objective C easily.
Ooh, nice. Two ad hominems in a paragraph.
The problem here is that while the idea that there's some climate change going on is probably strongly supported, that's not the only aspect of the argument.
First of all, there's the "well, duh" aspect: sure the climate is changing, the climate is always changing. But is the climate changing in an unusual way? With only about a 200 year baseline of any kind of direct data, it has to be established through statistical modeling of a bunch of secondary indicators, like tree rings. That statistical study is extremely sensitive to method selection and the way the data sets are chosen and massaged (which makes sense, since climate models are almost trivially sensitive to initial condition.)
Second, there's the question of whether the warming is anthropogenic, ie, caused by humanity, and if so, to what degree? This has to be explored through modeling, and models have a terrible tendency to show what the modeler expects. The current collection of models isn't very well tested, and certainly isn't well tested in the predictive sense. There's also the problem that Mars appears to be experiencing global warming in the same sort of magnitude of the Earth; the notion that global climate change is anthropogenic is dramatically weakened by that observation, but its one that generally doesn't get much attention. So whether climate change is primarily anthropogenic is, or ought to be, pretty controversial still. That it's not appears to have more to do with politics and funding than with the condition of the science. (There's a guy up in Fort Collins (at Colorado State) who is constantly dealing with people who demand he profess his faith in anthropogenic global warming because he estimates that anthropogenic factors only account for 30 percent of the total change.)
Third, there's the question of whether the anthopogenic changes are really driving the climate beyond its control loop limits. If what's happening is that we're simply driving the system a hundred or so years ahead, that's way different from Lovelock's fever crisis.
And fourth, we don't know what the climate would be doing otherwise. Some models suggest we should be going into an ice age now. Is anthropogenic global warming keeping us from having glaciers covering northern New York State? If so, do we really want to fix it. (I wouldn't mind losing Rochester, but Ithaca's kind of nice.)
Right. GCC can compile Objective C but it was defined — by Stepstone, specifically — as a preprocessor language. Just as I said.
yeah, and some other subtleties. #define for NULL was another annoying one, as I remember. (And one of the reasons behind needing templates, as I vaguely recall.) The point was that making C++ a proper superset of C was always a goal, but never completely achieved. The keyword one was the first one that came to mind, but I tend to write either straight C (kernel code) or Common Lisp now and couldn't think of a fancier one.
Uh, the last I recall (it's been a LONG time since I was having Æsop fables read to me), the kid was a shepherd and the people from the village were coming to protect the sheep.
Wolves do eat sheep.
On the other point, the thing is that, yes, catastrophes can happen. They don't seem to be near as easy to get as people like to propose. But the lesson of the "boy who cried wolf" is that you don't want to get a reputation for warning without justification.