I've noticed this too, but I think it's a general rule of our society. If you go along and can stay employed and you work for a large company, you'll eventually be promoted to Vice-President of Pre-Disposal Paper Stacking at a six figure salary. If you have an MBA, and can stack the piles in a more complex way, you get a 7 figure salary. There are overwhelming rewards for pretending that you're just like everyone else and out to server the company rather than yourself.
Yes, most of the collegiate coders love to think inside hip new boxes like "Agile" and "Scrum." They swoon over "Patterns." Of course, these things yield zip more often than not, if you use any rational measure of ROI.
I've worked in QA for 15 years and watched a lot of coders. I regret to inform everybody that the coder who gets things done is often some hack in the back who looked up some code on the net, stared at it until he/she understood it, and started the thing from scratch, ignoring algorithm optimization, not using void virtual functions, pretty comments and otherwise ignoring the niceties.
That said, I hate that sort of thing. Not very sustainable. If I ruled the development department, I would put in place a strategy of "define, then refine" where the brilliant hack does his thing, making his or her pretty new algorithm work. Then that code would be delivered to the next guy who would take it, comment it, improve it and otherwise make it presentable.
They appear smarter than chimps, but not as smart as humans, we think.
Cetacean intelligence is so different, I'd be hard put to put an absolute judgment on it. If dolphins were sending small abstract 3-d images to each other that had an abstract meaning, it would be hard to know.
The Catholics should start with dolphins, who are arguably as intelligent as humans, but not tool users, and alien in their thought processes and communications mode. Frankly chimps are close enough to at least spark a debate.
And what of lawyers and politicians? Do they *have* souls? Is it possible?
>make sure your rear is covered if the people that own the software decide to sue.
Which they probably won't, particularly if it's a small company making expensive (i.e. > $10K per seat) with a small customer base. They really don't want the reputation of being the company that sues someone for an extra copy on their notebook.
If they're smart, they'll write their licenses to allow installation and use for one user on 3 computers (work, home, portable) and look the other way if an extra copy or two shows up.
Is this fair or honest? No. It's the right *business* decision, which is a whole different thing.
My sister claims that I can fix a computer just by walking near it or looking over her shoulder when she's about to do something er... creative. Seems my nephew has the same ability.
Well, the closest building material is earth, but why couldn't you build in zero G? Space is pretty chilly. Get enough water from either earth or slowly moved in from an asteroid or wandering comet, heat slowly with mirrors, put it into forms and allow it to refreeze. Water would be a great building material if you could direct enough into near earth orbit.
But the same arguments apply. If we're going to walk first, shouldn't we practice in near-earth orbit before we fiddle about with some dry gravity-cursed rock like the moon or Mars?
Getting to Mars is expensive and essentially pointless. It's a big dry, inhospitable place at the bottom of a f***ing gravity well and farther from the sun than we are. Less power. Less consumables. Less everything that would matter to a human.
Near earth orbit, conversely, could be exploited for power, provide living space in the form of sustainable habitats, and can be used for zero G industries, hospitals, hotels, etc.
So, tell me again, please, aside from some scientific interest, why the F*** does anybody want to spend BILLIONS to explore Mars?
Thought question of the day: If we discovered tomorrow that there was primitive life on Mars, what difference would it make, really?
I think that's correct. It's mostly going to be a hit to transportation systems. There's just nothing as cheap, energy dense, with high EROEI lying around to substitute. Natural gas and liquefied coal would work for a while, but neither will be cheap if we start using them in the quantities we use oil.
The other problem is, the transportation sector is like the bloodstream. Change that, and you change everything else. Right now, for example, it takes oil to get that coal to the power plant, fertilizer to the fields (itself a petroleum product), and food to market. Hell, it takes oil to transport oil. Even a gradual price rise or a series of spikes, is going to play hob with both food supplies, energy supplies and world economies.
What galls me is that this looks so solvable. Conservation plus some major effort to get renewable electricity sources in place. More effort into battery research. Hell, even hydrogen, as horribly inefficient as it is as an energy carrier, might work for transportation if electricity was cheap enough.
Of course, as numerous friends have pointed out, Rome didn't have to fall either. Neither did the Sumerians, the Mayans or those fellows on Easter Island. There were solutions. There are almost always solutions. They failed anyway.
Point taken. It would be more precise to say "At a certain point, it will no longer be possible to extract oil from the ground to be used as a significant energy source."
I expect pumping to go on for quite a long time after oil's use as a major energy source ends. It's too valuable as a precursor to numerous chemicals.
As for energy consumption being directly proportional to economic growth. It's true that there are exceptions, but historically, most economic growth isn't from nonmaterial commodities like software, but from material commodities like buildings, food, automobiles, etc. These fundamentals are what will be under constraint if indeed, oil production has plateaued or on the decline.
If the plastic in computer parts quadruples in prices, and it costs $20 a day for you to get to and from work, and your lunch costs half of your day's salary, your local software company will have quite some new economic constraints, eh?
They are. You just have to follow the economics blogs. Still, you don't hear *much* about it. The physical world appears to be a mere annoyance to the economics crowd.
Frankly, I hope you're right. I'd like to hear it from some petroleum geologists who seem notably absent from the debate with this exception (http://www.utoledo.edu/as/envsciences/pdfs/NEWSLETTER_Winter-08.pdf).
Seriously, do you know of any petroleum geologists who aren't presently working for an oil major who's talking about this one way or the other?
Yes, there's plenty of oil, and there always will be, because we'll end up leaving most of it in the ground.
Those oil shales you mentioned, and the Bakken oil formations a bit farther north, have more oil in them than all of Saudi Arabia, and might as well be on Alpha Centauri, for all the good it'll ever do us.
The problem is this. Regardless of what available technology you choose, the majority of this stuff is neither energy positive, nor economical to produce. It's in *shale.* You know, rock. It's not some nice big pool of spongy liquid you can put a straw in like the Ghawar fields in Saudi. You have to dig the rock, grind the rock, and *heat* the rock to get the oil out. Depending on how much oil is in the rock and how finely you ground it, you may, or more often not, get as much oil energy out of the rock as you put into it.
Which is why all those new finds so breathlessly reported by those with journalism degrees don't mean squat.
A deep water find that only yields sulfur-laden, heavy crude (i.e. tar) in multiple scattered reservoirs is NOT equivalent to some nice little civilized shallow well in porous rock that yields light sweet crude. The first is cheap to get, cheap to process, cheap to ship and it all can be done quickly. The latter is NOTHING like that. The latter is a decade from well to the tank in your car, if then.
Bottom line? Cheap oil is a thing of the past. Our expanding economy depended on an ever expanding supply of cheap, portable energy. That goes away when oil goes away. We will transition, no doubt, but a few, maybe more than a few will starve to death before we do and more than a few governments may fall.
I'm all for drilling for domestic oil. The problem is, if we drilled every damned energy positive, profitable will in the continental US and it's territorial waters, it probably wouldn't hold back peak oil a year (figures on www.theoildrum.com)
Granted, a year is a lot, particularly if your alternative during that year is "starvation."
But as usual, the liberal/conservative conflict is just bugs in a jar being shaken so they'll fight. Oil doesn't care. Physics doesn't care. Argue all you want, but the day it takes a barrel's worth of energy to get a barrel out of the ground (the problem we *really* need to watch, not peak oil, per se), it will start to become a remarkably unpleasant day.
Pretty much. The window of time that a civilization would use radio waves for communication, and that it would be in a form that we would detect as anything but white noise is likely to pretty small.
We'd probably do better to scan the universe for solar to galaxy sized artifacts though we might have a hard time recognizing them as such (A primitive might see the Empire State building as just a mountain). We might look for Dyson spheres or odd formation that couldn't have occurred naturally. If we had a system to for patterns in the casimir force in some very large plate arrays, we might see something there.
The thing is, intelligent life doesn't always involve hardware, or technology. Ask your local dolphin.
You're thinking of the "apathetic" universe where there is no disciplined, rigid linear time and instead things happen all willy nilly in random order. This universe is in the adolescent stage of development, creating galaxies, dieties, science fiction writers and so on more or less at random. It's unwilling to clean up all those black holes unless threatened with having it's latest software taken away.
Slashdot Mirror
I've noticed this too, but I think it's a general rule of our society. If you go along and can stay employed and you work for a large company, you'll eventually be promoted to Vice-President of Pre-Disposal Paper Stacking at a six figure salary. If you have an MBA, and can stack the piles in a more complex way, you get a 7 figure salary. There are overwhelming rewards for pretending that you're just like everyone else and out to server the company rather than yourself.
Yes, most of the collegiate coders love to think inside hip new boxes like "Agile" and "Scrum." They swoon over "Patterns." Of course, these things yield zip more often than not, if you use any rational measure of ROI.
I've worked in QA for 15 years and watched a lot of coders. I regret to inform everybody that the coder who gets things done is often some hack in the back who looked up some code on the net, stared at it until he/she understood it, and started the thing from scratch, ignoring algorithm optimization, not using void virtual functions, pretty comments and otherwise ignoring the niceties.
That said, I hate that sort of thing. Not very sustainable. If I ruled the development department, I would put in place a strategy of "define, then refine" where the brilliant hack does his thing, making his or her pretty new algorithm work. Then that code would be delivered to the next guy who would take it, comment it, improve it and otherwise make it presentable.
They appear smarter than chimps, but not as smart as humans, we think.
Cetacean intelligence is so different, I'd be hard put to put an absolute judgment on it. If dolphins were sending small abstract 3-d images to each other that had an abstract meaning, it would be hard to know.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cetacean_intelligence
The Catholics should start with dolphins, who are arguably as intelligent as humans, but not tool users, and alien in their thought processes and communications mode. Frankly chimps are close enough to at least spark a debate.
And what of lawyers and politicians? Do they *have* souls? Is it possible?
When lobbyists are outlawed, only outlaws will have lobbyists.
>make sure your rear is covered if the people that own the software decide to sue.
Which they probably won't, particularly if it's a small company making expensive (i.e. > $10K per seat) with a small customer base. They really don't want the reputation of being the company that sues someone for an extra copy on their notebook.
If they're smart, they'll write their licenses to allow installation and use for one user on 3 computers (work, home, portable) and look the other way if an extra copy or two shows up.
Is this fair or honest? No. It's the right *business* decision, which is a whole different thing.
My sister claims that I can fix a computer just by walking near it or looking over her shoulder when she's about to do something er... creative. Seems my nephew has the same ability.
It does save so much time.
*Now* I know how to get her heart racing whenever she sees me.
Or is that too hard hearted of me?
Well, the closest building material is earth, but why couldn't you build in zero G? Space is pretty chilly. Get enough water from either earth or slowly moved in from an asteroid or wandering comet, heat slowly with mirrors, put it into forms and allow it to refreeze. Water would be a great building material if you could direct enough into near earth orbit.
I assume you mean Gagarin as in "Yuri" - first cosmonaut. Your point is....?
But the same arguments apply. If we're going to walk first, shouldn't we practice in near-earth orbit before we fiddle about with some dry gravity-cursed rock like the moon or Mars?
Getting to Mars is expensive and essentially pointless. It's a big dry, inhospitable place at the bottom of a f***ing gravity well and farther from the sun than we are. Less power. Less consumables. Less everything that would matter to a human.
Near earth orbit, conversely, could be exploited for power, provide living space in the form of sustainable habitats, and can be used for zero G industries, hospitals, hotels, etc.
So, tell me again, please, aside from some scientific interest, why the F*** does anybody want to spend BILLIONS to explore Mars?
Thought question of the day: If we discovered tomorrow that there was primitive life on Mars, what difference would it make, really?
Let the flames begin!
I think that's correct. It's mostly going to be a hit to transportation systems. There's just nothing as cheap, energy dense, with high EROEI lying around to substitute. Natural gas and liquefied coal would work for a while, but neither will be cheap if we start using them in the quantities we use oil.
The other problem is, the transportation sector is like the bloodstream. Change that, and you change everything else. Right now, for example, it takes oil to get that coal to the power plant, fertilizer to the fields (itself a petroleum product), and food to market. Hell, it takes oil to transport oil. Even a gradual price rise or a series of spikes, is going to play hob with both food supplies, energy supplies and world economies.
What galls me is that this looks so solvable. Conservation plus some major effort to get renewable electricity sources in place. More effort into battery research. Hell, even hydrogen, as horribly inefficient as it is as an energy carrier, might work for transportation if electricity was cheap enough.
Of course, as numerous friends have pointed out, Rome didn't have to fall either. Neither did the Sumerians, the Mayans or those fellows on Easter Island. There were solutions. There are almost always solutions. They failed anyway.
Point taken. It would be more precise to say "At a certain point, it will no longer be possible to extract oil from the ground to be used as a significant energy source."
I expect pumping to go on for quite a long time after oil's use as a major energy source ends. It's too valuable as a precursor to numerous chemicals.
As for energy consumption being directly proportional to economic growth. It's true that there are exceptions, but historically, most economic growth isn't from nonmaterial commodities like software, but from material commodities like buildings, food, automobiles, etc. These fundamentals are what will be under constraint if indeed, oil production has plateaued or on the decline.
If the plastic in computer parts quadruples in prices, and it costs $20 a day for you to get to and from work, and your lunch costs half of your day's salary, your local software company will have quite some new economic constraints, eh?
Note to self. Push for telecommuting.
They are. You just have to follow the economics blogs. Still, you don't hear *much* about it. The physical world appears to be a mere annoyance to the economics crowd.
Frankly, I hope you're right. I'd like to hear it from some petroleum geologists who seem notably absent from the debate with this exception (http://www.utoledo.edu/as/envsciences/pdfs/NEWSLETTER_Winter-08.pdf).
Seriously, do you know of any petroleum geologists who aren't presently working for an oil major who's talking about this one way or the other?
Yes, there's plenty of oil, and there always will be, because we'll end up leaving most of it in the ground.
Those oil shales you mentioned, and the Bakken oil formations a bit farther north, have more oil in them than all of Saudi Arabia, and might as well be on Alpha Centauri, for all the good it'll ever do us.
The problem is this. Regardless of what available technology you choose, the majority of this stuff is neither energy positive, nor economical to produce. It's in *shale.* You know, rock. It's not some nice big pool of spongy liquid you can put a straw in like the Ghawar fields in Saudi. You have to dig the rock, grind the rock, and *heat* the rock to get the oil out. Depending on how much oil is in the rock and how finely you ground it, you may, or more often not, get as much oil energy out of the rock as you put into it.
Which is why all those new finds so breathlessly reported by those with journalism degrees don't mean squat.
A deep water find that only yields sulfur-laden, heavy crude (i.e. tar) in multiple scattered reservoirs is NOT equivalent to some nice little civilized shallow well in porous rock that yields light sweet crude. The first is cheap to get, cheap to process, cheap to ship and it all can be done quickly. The latter is NOTHING like that. The latter is a decade from well to the tank in your car, if then.
Bottom line? Cheap oil is a thing of the past. Our expanding economy depended on an ever expanding supply of cheap, portable energy. That goes away when oil goes away. We will transition, no doubt, but a few, maybe more than a few will starve to death before we do and more than a few governments may fall.
Cheers!
I'm all for drilling for domestic oil. The problem is, if we drilled every damned energy positive, profitable will in the continental US and it's territorial waters, it probably wouldn't hold back peak oil a year (figures on www.theoildrum.com)
Granted, a year is a lot, particularly if your alternative during that year is "starvation."
But as usual, the liberal/conservative conflict is just bugs in a jar being shaken so they'll fight. Oil doesn't care. Physics doesn't care. Argue all you want, but the day it takes a barrel's worth of energy to get a barrel out of the ground (the problem we *really* need to watch, not peak oil, per se), it will start to become a remarkably unpleasant day.
Pretty much. The window of time that a civilization would use radio waves for communication, and that it would be in a form that we would detect as anything but white noise is likely to pretty small.
We'd probably do better to scan the universe for solar to galaxy sized artifacts though we might have a hard time recognizing them as such (A primitive might see the Empire State building as just a mountain). We might look for Dyson spheres or odd formation that couldn't have occurred naturally. If we had a system to for patterns in the casimir force in some very large plate arrays, we might see something there.
The thing is, intelligent life doesn't always involve hardware, or technology. Ask your local dolphin.
Chimps? Heck, I still have trouble throwing even a small dog into orbit.
Well, gosh dang it! Er, I mean... my friend is going to be so disappointed. Ahem. Hrumph.
Clearly, it's because you couldn't rent a Canadian. Wage arbitrage is hell.
If it's been superseded, does that mean the whole homosexuality and/or incest thing is OK? I'm just checking for a friend, of course...
Welcomed our new dough-obsessed avian overlords?
Nonsense. It's a simple question of weight ratios! A five ounce bird could not carry a one pound "decorative architectural ornament."
You're thinking of the "apathetic" universe where there is no disciplined, rigid linear time and instead things happen all willy nilly in random order. This universe is in the adolescent stage of development, creating galaxies, dieties, science fiction writers and so on more or less at random. It's unwilling to clean up all those black holes unless threatened with having it's latest software taken away.