There is some debate on this, supported by observations.

http://science.howstuffworks.c...

I remember when the Death Penalty was reinstated in the US.

The proponents, in the popular media, said that it was necessary for the drug war - and would only be used in extreme cases, for Drug Kingpins, and Serial Killers, where there was no doubt about guilt, because there was overwhelming evidence, and full confession.

As it turns out - this was absolutely not the case.

We don't have shit for a way to replace the fertilizer supply,

. . . I see what you did there.

If the starvation dying doesn't get you, the lack of medical supplies is going to curb another large portion of our population.

Any future speculated "civilization" is going to be very different from our current one, that is for sure. Life is going to be much less convenient. I still believe that "advancement" will be possible.

Your air conditioning and clothes dryer are modern conveniences.

Solar can power modern technology. But a future, speculated civilization will have a much less convenient, and lower standard of living. Just because life is inconvenient, doesn't mean society can't advance. We discovered how to split the atom before we had antibiotics. (antibiotics are not really a necessary component of an advanced, modern civilization. They are a convenience. Yes, it is inconvenient when people die young from preventible diseases. But we can still get to the point where we could - in the future, transition from solar to nuclear; for cases where that scale of electrical power generation is necessary to continue to advance).

The problem with our current civilization is that people have placed convenience (and profitable enterprise enabling hoarding of personal wealth) beyond basic common-sense principles of long-term survival (sustainability). There are really two routes here. We can either choose sustainability over convenience. Or Nature will choose, for us (and we lose both). We may never get convenience back. But I think it's very doable to get sustainability back. Even without ready access to petroleum.

Another huge benefit we've had from petroleum is the advances to agriculture from the Haber-Bosch process. Basically; this converts energy into food (through synthesis of atmospheric Nitrogen into fertilizer). This is what revolutionized agriculture in the early 20th century, and allowed our population to explode like a test-tube full of hearty yeast and grape-juice. Economists argue that that population explosion was necessary for our modern, advanced civilization. I believe that thinking to be biased by short-term thinking. This path has absolutely devastated our options, as far as a sustainable future goes. Eventually, the yeast drown in their own waste (CO2 and alcohol - so fitting). That's what will happen to us. I am thankful that whatever civilization comes after us, will not be permitted by readily-available fossil fuels, to repeat this horrible mistake, because they will need to struggle to peak-out at a global population of 1 Billion. Yes - life will be inconvenient, nasty, brutish, and short. But civilization will remain sustainable.

Well, from my admittedly "selection-biased" perspective, I *do* know some elderly people. Yes, the ones with dementia are quite miserable. The ones who get into a really severe state, generally don't "last" more than a year. (thankfully). I also know a couple of elderly people (in their 90's) (and, I've had some relatives, as well, up in their late-90's) who are totally mentally sharp. They have hobbies, activities, and some health problems, but nothing horrible. I don't even know how people like this die. :)

I've also known a couple of guys who, in their 70's, got cancer . . .
And I've known a couple of people who suffered from strokes, and heart problems.

Unfortunately, strokes and heart problems can lead to dementia SYMPTOMS. (until the heart just quits, of course). Take care of your ticker, and your blood pressure.

Of all these; I'd say cancer was probably the easier death.

But my first choice is "none of the above, and have a happy, full-life into my 90's". Whether I have any friends or family or not.

Dementia would be last on my list of "ways to go peacefully". Maybe 2nd to last, because ALS fucking sucks too. (just ask Stephen Hawking).

"price water properly" is probably a good, and simple solution.
But there are many practical barriers that make this nearly impossible.
For one, there are treaties and water-rights already assigned. These involve multi-state government agreements, and there really is not an authority mechanism in existence that can address these in a unified way.
For two, there are political entanglements (regulatory capture, and officials who are basically corporate AG lapdogs).

This is one of those Utopian Ideals issues, where you think that if some magical authority came in, and put a gun to everyone's head and said: you will give up your advantageous, privileged bargaining position, and now you will pay what everyone else pays for water (and be willing to pull the trigger when they refuse or fight back) - it would solve the problem.

Basically, we need a Stalin. Or a Pol Pot.
Or we need to magically convert into a race of altruists.

I owned a TDI for 10 years. Guess what. You're gonna need garage space to work on it. I guarantee it.

The original material talked about salaries and job titles; it didn't say how much investment it took to develop the skills to get those titles. Some of those skills are things you can add quickly; others take a long time or access to appropriate work environments. (For instance, learning PHP is quick, and Ruby on Rails isn't that hard either. But while you can learn SQL and MySQL pretty quickly, becoming a DBA really needs access to real-world databases and workloads that you're involved in administering.)

I started playing with Arduinos a couple of years ago. You ordered them by mail order at the time. Eventually Radio Shack started carrying them, which made it easier for anybody to pick one up (and while I live in Silicon Valley, if I needed a few resistors or LEDs or simple components to go with them, it was often easier to stop at Radio Shack than Fry's or mailorder.) Now they're fighting over the name, and Radio Shack is going out of business.

Typically the booth babe at RSA's booth at the RSA show is Rivest (I don't think I've seen Shamir or Adleman there.) Usually he's been working on something interesting and is having fun showing it off, but he's also there for fanboi value.

They were a really clear indicator that the occasional companies that hired them seriously didn't understand their audience, and hadn't brought anybody who knew anything technical to their booth, probably not even any marketing people who understood the product, so you could pretty much skip them, because they were pretty much always useless as well as unprofessional.

On the other hand, you can totally bribe us with chocolate or especially coffee, and we might sit through your silly magician act for a raffle ticket for an iThing as long as there was technical content at your booth, and we'll pick up blinky tchotchkes with your logo on them. The woman I'd rather talk to at your booth is the one who developed the cool product, or can explain it well.

When my company's been at trade shows in the area, about half their staff are booth-running professionals, rather than product-related, from the people who set the thing up and make sure all the marketing content is there to the people who herd customers in, figure out what they're interested in (even if it's just at the buzzword level), bring them over to the right part of the booth or find the right person if they need to, scan your contact info, get the speakers on and off the stage, etc., and about half are either main-office or local people who know something about whatever we're trying to sell. They seem to do a good job on the mechanics of it (I've occasionally ended up as local booth staff), and they're seriously good at respecting the audience.

They're the ones over in the NSA booth, showing off the cool Enigma machine, and handing out other spook agency trinkets. Sometimes other groups of Feds are there (Homeland Security or whoever), and they don't understand that, unlike the NSA who are evil but cool, they're evil but not cool.

Never did - here's the Wikipedia about the Indiana Pi Bill. The crackpot proposed a bill that would acknowledge his collection of R33lY k3wl mathematical discoveries and let Indiana schools teach them free (in return for royalties from other user, if I'm reading it right), it snuck past the Indiana House, and a Professor Waldo told the Indiana Senate how bogus it was. It was close to passing there anyway, but one senator pointed out that it's not the Senate's job to establish mathematical truth. And now you know Where Waldo Was.

Back in the 60s, my father-in-law ran a weekly paper in his small town. It eventually got shut down by the police on some bogus excuse; the actual reason was that he wasn't just writing that the mayor was taking bribes, but had the bad taste to say who they were from and what for. Corruption does also exist in the US, and so does censorship. (I didn't see much censorship when I lived in New Jersey, though - just corruption.)

The Iraqis got their chemical weapons from the US for use against Iran. The US still hasn't destroyed their own CBW program products (though they do occasionally retire old unstable chemical weapons, as they've done recently.)

And both the US and Russians still have their hoards of smallpox, pretending they need to keep them to develop vaccines in case the other side uses theirs to attack, even though cowpox ("vaccinia") is good enough for a vaccine and not good enough for a weapon.