So, I'm sure that you'll have no problem coming up with a single concrete example where it's cheaper and easier to do this on, or from the moon, rather than Earth....
The moon is a symbol, but there's no *practical* reason to go there, establish a base, a colony, or a really good restaurant. Near earth orbital stations, in contrast, might be developed profitably for power stations, zero G manufacturing of exotic materials, ubiquitous satellite-based internet, and so on.
The focus on the moon and Mars is just cold war era, retro silliness. We have limited resources to throw at space. This is the time to throw them at something that will give us some return.
As companies grow, it's more profitable to buy legislation then compete. The move to expand the H1-B visa program is a perfect example. The best employee is a slave. The closest we get to that in the USA is an H1-B serf. CEOs across the board will try and purchase legislation that reduces their labor costs by insuring a supply of imported serfs, since remote serfs often prove to be less useful.
That's the reality. Anything coming out of the mouth of a CEO or a media company(s) where that CEO sits on the board, is simply self-serving noise.
For Russia, China or the USA. Economic sanctions imposed on any one of these countries would damage the others. A real land and sea war would soon show just how little extra oil we have to throw around and would use up the remaining cheap, high net energy oil faster. Rising oil prices would again, severely all three economies. If the war continued long enough, this would be a permanent condition.
So, "yay!" to the oil crisis and monetary interdependence. We probably won't have a big shooting war again - just a few minor proxy wars here and there in Asia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Middle East. Of course, this is a definite "Not Yay!" if you happen to live in one of these places.
3,850,000 exajoules. Yes, that's a big number all right. As a humorous aside, the hydrocarbon cornucopians believe that there are 10 trillion barrels of oil left in the hydrocarbon horizon of the Earth. I don't doubt them either, though I know it won't help at all.
The problem with oil is declining energy return and increasing price over time. The problems with solar are line losses, intermittent supply, storage (the big one) and borderline energy return (i.e. about 7:1). Of these, storage is the one we have to solve to keep supply chain viability. Currently the best commercial batteries have about 12 percent of the energy by volume of gasoline. We still can't run an airplane on them. We might, with sufficient panels and good weather, run oceangoing ships. There are higher efficiency panels of course, and better batteries have recently been developed. Both use expensive, rare materials. Moreover, these things have to be manufactured and deployed, a process which takes money and time, both of which will be in short supply by the time this becomes a significant problem.
Cognitively speaking, big numbers hide all the annoying engineering details that make the big numbers meaningless. There are (effectively) an infinite hydrocarbons on Titan and Jupiter, which for obvious reason will never be economically nor energetically profitable to exploit as fuel in our lifetime. Just because there's a lot of sunlight doesn't mean that it can all be exploited in an economically or energetically profitable manner either, not to mention the disastrous ecological consequences of blocking major areas of sunlight, (though this is solvable).
Energy is effectively infinite, but not at a rate that's going to effectively substitute for the 160 exajoules per year currently provided by hydrocarbon energy. While I'm a big fan or renewables, even with a full-on effort at conversion, you're just not going to be able to sustain an interdependent, international supply chain based on *cheap* energy, nor will you feed 7 billion+ humans.
The coming population bottleneck can't be avoided. We will, as a species, one day exist on sustainable energy - all of the remaining 300 to 500 million of us, if we're lucky, and we don't throw too many nukes around to celebrate the transition.
We'll have resources forever.!Jesus and Santa Clause and the EIA said so! There's infinite oil and gas! We find more every year RIGHT HERE IN THE USA, don't we?! And we have infinite water! Infinite phosphates! Infinite free money! Golly gosh-a-rootie, the whole ding dang show will just go on *forever* because we have God and TECHNOLOGY on our side!
Whoo, that was too much sarcasm. I have to lie down now.
1) My error message is meaningful and helpful. Sure. Like, "Can't find file" with no explicit reference ON THE DIALOG as to the the file name you typed in or the path it was supposed to be in, because God knows, we wouldn't want the user to be able to tell IN A SECOND where the problem was. No, let's make the user *dig* for it.
2) It's OK to shove warning and alert dialogs into people's faces. After all, when we're at a restaruant, don't we *all* want the waiter to interrupt every few seconds with the night's special, warnings about peanuts, and the effect of alcohol on pregnant women. It's just as wonderful and helpful in software.
3) It's OK to make users wait. Because users care *so much* about your little issues with processes or your inability to put things into separate threads while you keep the interface alive. I mean, when you're in a restaurant, don't you *love* it when the waiter ignores you because they've got something better to do?
4) It's best to steal input focus from the user. After all, who knows where they'll type? And so what if they're already doing something else, what could be more important than MY little dialog? Modal dialog, of course, because they shouldn't do anything else until they pay attention to ME!
5) We'll help the user by refreshing his whole screen! I mean, there's just nothing better than the waiter who rearranges everything on the table after you've started eating, just to make sure you have everything and the food is truly fresh! Of course, this couldn't be a bad habit of lazy, uncaring programmers who couldn't be bothered to get the screen or list right the first time before presentation. No. Certainly not.
Yup, this sure is a NYT article. Hand wringing by an economically and technically illiterate journalist, asking a question which any 6 year old could answer.
The patriot act. Homeland Security. Secret laws. Secret panels. When you passed this shit, did you all honestly think it would never come back to bite you in the ass?
I'm looking at you, Kathleen Sebelius. The healthcare.gov fiasco is just one obvious symptom. The world depends utterly on science and technology, but is being guided by people who I will describe politely as "technically challenged."
We've seen the results recently, and they're not pretty. I think our democracy itself is going to have to go through a thorough upgrade to remain viable. IQ tests for politicians? No, it's not egalitarian. It's not the American way. It may, however, allow the country to survive in something like its present form over the next century.
Unless it happens to flash into this time period. All the passengers are there now, running from polar bears, avoiding smoke monsters - that sort of thing.
This just shows that replacing Ballmer doesn't solve the fundamental cultural problems at Microsoft. This is classic M$ behavior, as in "We're going to tell you what to do and why you should do it, even it works against your self interest and costs you a lot of time and money."
They did it by not providing an automated migration from VB6 to VB.net They did it by not providing and automated migration from Winforms to ASP or WPF. They're doing it now by not providing and automated migration from Silverlight to WPF. They did it by not providing a useful transition from the Windows 7 interface to Windows 8. They did it by replacing VBScript and Jscript with Powershell instead of providing VBScript.net or Jscript.net while maintaining backward compatibility with old code, or providing and automatic migration.
Seeing a pattern here? Microsoft's answer is always the same one: "Fuck you, learn a brand new language (or OS), recode, and No, we don't care how much it costs you or your clients or if it puts you out of business."
I'm pretty sure that if something like the Zorin distro was a little better, a more MS-like, and ran most MS software under Wine out of the box, that most people would install it and never look back.
"...- there's a difference between good people and qualified people. As a working programmer, when I complain about finding qualified managers, I mean people that can show, in an interview, that they have a basic comprehension of the technologies being used by the people they are attempting to manage."
No. There's no "shortage." There's a shortage of STEM workers who will work for slave wages like all the MBA's and foreign CEOs would like.
Engineers. We're so.... uppity.
Post scarcity means infinite energy and resources
on
Star Trek Economics
·
· Score: 1
We're not *anywhere* near either. We are still laughably dependent on hydrocarbon energy and lack the political will to build enough sustainable nuclear (fission or fusion) to sustain our current industrial society much beyond this century. Without that power, other hard limits like phosphate depletion for agriculture will eventually constrain our ability to feed 7 billion people worldwide.
It's not hopeless. There's a natural, normal population bottleneck coming, as it does for all species as they run themseles out of natural resources. The survivors in the 2150s should start living fairly comfortably as the Earth starts cooling down.
First Guy: Look, I made this incredible communication device! Other Guys: Wow. Cool! Can we use it? First Guy: Sure! Other Guys: OK, but we own it now, OK? First Guy: Uh......
Our society now runs on technology that requires extremely intelligent people to design, build and maintain it.
The politicians who want to regulate or even use this technology are elected by the lowest common denominator of Americans. Moreover, most of those politicians are scientifically illiterate and therefore, incompetent to do so (e.g. Sebellius and the healthcare.gov site) .
It's nice to think that in a democracy, anyone can get elected to office without regard to IQ or education. How's that been working out lately?
I mean, certainly no politician or local police "authority" would ever silence an entire area just to stop the public from filming the latest police atrocity. Heavens, no.
And the tech community says, "Ouchie" and runs back to their offices. I've been lecturing developers on this for years, and gotten little but hostility back. When you tell them "The fucking computer DOES NOT MATTER" they just look at you blankly.
The computer. It's a toaster, OK? It should turn on immediately. Do what the fuck I tell it to do and stay out of my face. It's not even a servant. It's *less* than a servant. It deserves no regard whatsoever.
More to the point, the toaster should not ask me a bunch of questions, steal my input focus, wait for it's little processes to complete in the foreground before moving on, take minutes to start, or stop, refresh my screen randomly, puke out unhelpful pointless error messages that require my attention, and so on. Aside from all of this being a sign of lazy, careless design and programming, all of this will drive consumers to devices that *don't* do this, or do it less. This is one reason among many why Android is taking over the world, while Windows is dying a well deserved death from it's ossified, well preserved stupidity.
Slashdot Mirror
So, I'm sure that you'll have no problem coming up with a single concrete example where it's cheaper and easier to do this on, or from the moon, rather than Earth....
One. Just one real example.
The moon is a symbol, but there's no *practical* reason to go there, establish a base, a colony, or a really good restaurant. Near earth orbital stations, in contrast, might be developed profitably for power stations, zero G manufacturing of exotic materials, ubiquitous satellite-based internet, and so on.
The focus on the moon and Mars is just cold war era, retro silliness. We have limited resources to throw at space. This is the time to throw them at something that will give us some return.
As companies grow, it's more profitable to buy legislation then compete. The move to expand the H1-B visa program is a perfect example. The best employee is a slave. The closest we get to that in the USA is an H1-B serf. CEOs across the board will try and purchase legislation that reduces their labor costs by insuring a supply of imported serfs, since remote serfs often prove to be less useful.
That's the reality. Anything coming out of the mouth of a CEO or a media company(s) where that CEO sits on the board, is simply self-serving noise.
could possibly be as bad as what Microsoft's own management is doing to Microsoft every day.
For Russia, China or the USA. Economic sanctions imposed on any one of these countries would damage the others. A real land and sea war would soon show just how little extra oil we have to throw around and would use up the remaining cheap, high net energy oil faster. Rising oil prices would again, severely all three economies. If the war continued long enough, this would be a permanent condition.
So, "yay!" to the oil crisis and monetary interdependence. We probably won't have a big shooting war again - just a few minor proxy wars here and there in Asia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Middle East. Of course, this is a definite "Not Yay!" if you happen to live in one of these places.
3,850,000 exajoules. Yes, that's a big number all right. As a humorous aside, the hydrocarbon cornucopians believe that there are 10 trillion barrels of oil left in the hydrocarbon horizon of the Earth. I don't doubt them either, though I know it won't help at all.
The problem with oil is declining energy return and increasing price over time. The problems with solar are line losses, intermittent supply, storage (the big one) and borderline energy return (i.e. about 7:1). Of these, storage is the one we have to solve to keep supply chain viability. Currently the best commercial batteries have about 12 percent of the energy by volume of gasoline. We still can't run an airplane on them. We might, with sufficient panels and good weather, run oceangoing ships. There are higher efficiency panels of course, and better batteries have recently been developed. Both use expensive, rare materials. Moreover, these things have to be manufactured and deployed, a process which takes money and time, both of which will be in short supply by the time this becomes a significant problem.
Cognitively speaking, big numbers hide all the annoying engineering details that make the big numbers meaningless. There are (effectively) an infinite hydrocarbons on Titan and Jupiter, which for obvious reason will never be economically nor energetically profitable to exploit as fuel in our lifetime. Just because there's a lot of sunlight doesn't mean that it can all be exploited in an economically or energetically profitable manner either, not to mention the disastrous ecological consequences of blocking major areas of sunlight, (though this is solvable).
Energy is effectively infinite, but not at a rate that's going to effectively substitute for the 160 exajoules per year currently provided by hydrocarbon energy. While I'm a big fan or renewables, even with a full-on effort at conversion, you're just not going to be able to sustain an interdependent, international supply chain based on *cheap* energy, nor will you feed 7 billion+ humans.
The coming population bottleneck can't be avoided. We will, as a species, one day exist on sustainable energy - all of the remaining 300 to 500 million of us, if we're lucky, and we don't throw too many nukes around to celebrate the transition.
We'll have resources forever.!Jesus and Santa Clause and the EIA said so! There's infinite oil and gas! We find more every year RIGHT HERE IN THE USA, don't we?! And we have infinite water! Infinite phosphates! Infinite free money! Golly gosh-a-rootie, the whole ding dang show will just go on *forever* because we have God and TECHNOLOGY on our side!
Whoo, that was too much sarcasm. I have to lie down now.
Here's a short list of interface lies....
1) My error message is meaningful and helpful.
Sure. Like, "Can't find file" with no explicit reference ON THE DIALOG as to the the file name you typed in or the path it was supposed to be in, because God knows, we wouldn't want the user to be able to tell IN A SECOND where the problem was. No, let's make the user *dig* for it.
2) It's OK to shove warning and alert dialogs into people's faces.
After all, when we're at a restaruant, don't we *all* want the waiter to interrupt every few seconds with the night's special, warnings about peanuts, and the effect of alcohol on pregnant women. It's just as wonderful and helpful in software.
3) It's OK to make users wait.
Because users care *so much* about your little issues with processes or your inability to put things into separate threads while you keep the interface alive. I mean, when you're in a restaurant, don't you *love* it when the waiter ignores you because they've got something better to do?
4) It's best to steal input focus from the user.
After all, who knows where they'll type? And so what if they're already doing something else, what could be more important than MY little dialog? Modal dialog, of course, because they shouldn't do anything else until they pay attention to ME!
5) We'll help the user by refreshing his whole screen!
I mean, there's just nothing better than the waiter who rearranges everything on the table after you've started eating, just to make sure you have everything and the food is truly fresh! Of course, this couldn't be a bad habit of lazy, uncaring programmers who couldn't be bothered to get the screen or list right the first time before presentation. No. Certainly not.
Yup, this sure is a NYT article. Hand wringing by an economically and technically illiterate journalist, asking a question which any 6 year old could answer.
The patriot act. Homeland Security. Secret laws. Secret panels. When you passed this shit, did you all honestly think it would never come back to bite you in the ass?
Well, look behind you.
I'm looking at you, Kathleen Sebelius. The healthcare.gov fiasco is just one obvious symptom. The world depends utterly on science and technology, but is being guided by people who I will describe politely as "technically challenged."
We've seen the results recently, and they're not pretty. I think our democracy itself is going to have to go through a thorough upgrade to remain viable. IQ tests for politicians? No, it's not egalitarian. It's not the American way. It may, however, allow the country to survive in something like its present form over the next century.
Unless it happens to flash into this time period. All the passengers are there now, running from polar bears, avoiding smoke monsters - that sort of thing.
This just shows that replacing Ballmer doesn't solve the fundamental cultural problems at Microsoft. This is classic M$ behavior, as in "We're going to tell you what to do and why you should do it, even it works against your self interest and costs you a lot of time and money."
They did it by not providing an automated migration from VB6 to VB.net
They did it by not providing and automated migration from Winforms to ASP or WPF.
They're doing it now by not providing and automated migration from Silverlight to WPF.
They did it by not providing a useful transition from the Windows 7 interface to Windows 8.
They did it by replacing VBScript and Jscript with Powershell instead of providing VBScript.net or Jscript.net while maintaining backward compatibility with old code, or providing and automatic migration.
Seeing a pattern here? Microsoft's answer is always the same one: "Fuck you, learn a brand new language (or OS), recode, and No, we don't care how much it costs you or your clients or if it puts you out of business."
I'm pretty sure that if something like the Zorin distro was a little better, a more MS-like, and ran most MS software under Wine out of the box, that most people would install it and never look back.
I'm not sure what anyone can do for you.
"...- there's a difference between good people and qualified people. As a working programmer, when I complain about finding qualified managers, I mean people that can show, in an interview, that they have a basic comprehension of the technologies being used by the people they are attempting to manage."
No. There's no "shortage." There's a shortage of STEM workers who will work for slave wages like all the MBA's and foreign CEOs would like.
Engineers. We're so.... uppity.
We're not *anywhere* near either. We are still laughably dependent on hydrocarbon energy and lack the political will to build enough sustainable nuclear (fission or fusion) to sustain our current industrial society much beyond this century. Without that power, other hard limits like phosphate depletion for agriculture will eventually constrain our ability to feed 7 billion people worldwide.
It's not hopeless. There's a natural, normal population bottleneck coming, as it does for all species as they run themseles out of natural resources. The survivors in the 2150s should start living fairly comfortably as the Earth starts cooling down.
I suggest reading a book in protest. Voltaire anyone?
First Guy: Look, I made this incredible communication device!
Other Guys: Wow. Cool! Can we use it?
First Guy: Sure!
Other Guys: OK, but we own it now, OK?
First Guy: Uh......
Our society now runs on technology that requires extremely intelligent people to design, build and maintain it.
The politicians who want to regulate or even use this technology are elected by the lowest common denominator of Americans. Moreover, most of those politicians are scientifically illiterate and therefore, incompetent to do so (e.g. Sebellius and the healthcare.gov site) .
It's nice to think that in a democracy, anyone can get elected to office without regard to IQ or education. How's that been working out lately?
I mean, certainly no politician or local police "authority" would ever silence an entire area just to stop the public from filming the latest police atrocity. Heavens, no.
And the tech community says, "Ouchie" and runs back to their offices. I've been lecturing developers on this for years, and gotten little but hostility back. When you tell them "The fucking computer DOES NOT MATTER" they just look at you blankly.
The computer. It's a toaster, OK? It should turn on immediately. Do what the fuck I tell it to do and stay out of my face. It's not even a servant. It's *less* than a servant. It deserves no regard whatsoever.
More to the point, the toaster should not ask me a bunch of questions, steal my input focus, wait for it's little processes to complete in the foreground before moving on, take minutes to start, or stop, refresh my screen randomly, puke out unhelpful pointless error messages that require my attention, and so on. Aside from all of this being a sign of lazy, careless design and programming, all of this will drive consumers to devices that *don't* do this, or do it less. This is one reason among many why Android is taking over the world, while Windows is dying a well deserved death from it's ossified, well preserved stupidity.
Feel free to point to a single employment ad for open source code that "pays well."
Programming. Not "using." Whoosh!