As bad as that is, it was apparently far worse in the past. See "The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence In History And Its Causes" by Pinker.

The need to go to space is because life has to outgrow this little rock.

If we stay here we will, eventually, die out. "Sustainability" is a myth.

If we had the resources to build giant contained cities, we could let the planet go back to nature. Urbanisation reduces cruelty and violence and civilises people. But we are not even half urbanised. We need more resources, be it using space rocks, to build the giant self contained cities. Then you can let nature flourish undisturbed.

The alternative is we go back to burning dung in mud huts and slaughtering every animal we can get our hands on. That's what we used to do. We were very good at it, hence our numbers grew and grew and we came to dominate the planet. Dismantling industrial society would only send us back to that, and we'd have to tear up the planet again a second time, because the mentality of people living in villages and tribes is much more brutal than what modern people have, and once your situation is back to that, your mentality goes back to that too in a dozen generations. There's a reason the "desert religions" were so brutal -- people were tribal and killing others was basically the only way to resolve things.

We have one chance now, in the 21st century, one window to get to space for real. If we don't do it now it is a downward spiral, and we won't have the resources from this planet to try industrialising again, so we will all hit the wall again, and slowly we'll poison everything, in our millions of warring tribes, and even nature won't really survive.

Either we get off this planet and figure out how to grab our materials from the lifeless solar system, or we slowly perish in a downward spiral of crises, violence, competition, wars, pollution and global extinction, taking this garden of nature down with us.

Like an oil rig on top of government owned land or sea? Anyway, it may be something about energy density.

It seems rational but the causality is not simple. Your body can "decide" what to do with the energy you eat. It can burn it or store it. If it decides to burn it, your metabolic rate goes up (in my case I felt hot a lot) and you can have more impulse to move around. But equally your body could decide to store that energy, in which case you get fat, you feel tired (the energy has been stored already) and you metabolism goes down. That's what confuses a lot of the arguments, which direction does the causality go? Imagine you have a machine that has a chip that runs a program that decides whether to feed the fuel to the engine or to the batteries for charging. If the program is in "charge" mode then your batteries will get fat and you won't move no matter how much fuel you put in. That's the point about the "child eats more because he's growing" rather than "child grows because he eats more".

Your example with lab rats is very misleading because in the experiment the own control mechanism of rat's organism was artificially overridden. This matters to healthy organisms who don't receive additional insulin exactly how? Right, not at all.

That's the point –– eating carbs artificially drives up your insulin.

We never used to have access to pasta and bread. But you could bring down an animal and gorge on its substantial fat tissue.

Anyway there are lots of details in the information and arguments both ways. Only reason I'm posting it here is because I found in the last 3 years it has worked so well for me, and that's not just an anecdote, at some point any doctor has to ask the patient, how are you feeling? I eat less than 40 gm of carbs a day and my energy and mental clarity and weight and sound sleep has never been so good. It really amazed me as I wasn't expecting it. Of course your body may be different. The Taubes arguments are interesting but I only took interest because they proved to have effect with my body.

The energy balance equation of, food eaten equals fat stored minus exercise, is used in a very misleading way. Most assume you can manipulate it yourself by eating less and exercising more. But that ignores entirely the body's own control system. There are some lab rats that were starved to death by underfeeding, in an experiment, and whilst they starved to death they were gaining fat and died obese. Why? Because they were also receiving insulin and this told their bodies to store fat no matter what, even if they were not being fed, so they converted their muscle and organs into fat and stored that instead. They died of weak heart mucles and heart failure.

It is like a child eats extra to grow but he doesn't grow because he's eating extra, he eats extra and grows because the body's hormones are controlling things and telling the body to eat more and grow. It is all about hormones. Why do diabetics take insulin? To CONTROL their blood sugar. That's what insulin does. Insulin decides that you have to lower that blood sugar. And how does it control it and get it out of the blood stream? It tells fat cells to open up and absorb it. That's what "lowers" your blood sugar. The insulin decides to store it. And as it is storing it, your normal metabolism is still hungry. So the energy equation is used wrong. You don't get fat because you overeat, you overeat because you're getting fat.

What drives up insulin levels beyond normal, beyond what our 100,000 year old bodies are used to? Carbohydrates. You can eat fat and that'll be converted to energy and you'll want to move more. But eat carbs in the massive unusual quantities that we do, like pasta, pizza, bread, potatoes, and sugared drinks, and it all turns to sugar and insulin has to be produced in huge quantities to deal with it. Your normal blood sugar is one teaspoon of sugar. That's it. That's all we're made to deal with. So insulin goes nuts trying to deal with all that "healthy slow release energy" and eventually you get obese and you get diabetes.

The food pyramid was a huge shift towards grains (bird food) and away from fat. The fat / heart disease / lipid hypothesis was wrong 50 years ago and by committee "we have to tell the politicians what to regulate even if we aren't sure ourselves" consensus opinion ended up dominating and it is still wrong today. Eating a low fat high carb diet is a recipe not only for obesity but also depression. Just try switching to a genuine low carb high fat diet (see Sweden's latest magazine, "LCHF") and try it for yourself. After a month carbs just don't look like food anymore. Sleep better, feel lighter, feel satiated all the time (fat is filling, whilst carbs increase appetite or make you sleepy) and have more mental clarity. YMMV but that's been my experience to my surprise.

There are so many things wrong with the current dogma around the food pyramid that you have to undo many issues before you can wade your way to some clarity. But the best thing is to actually try it for a period, and see if what the proponents of LCHF and paleo say is true. Your own body can tell you.

Go and check what that research about bad fat and heart disease was actually based on, how they've repeatedly failed to show in good controlled studies that eating low fat is good for you, or that counting calories and exercising lets you lose wight. Those studies keep failing but the advocates keep hoping the next big study will show it. The start in rise in obesity coincided with the start of that advice about fat being the devil and to make most of your food plate carbs (sugar) instead. It has been a massive experiment on the public and it has gone catastrophically wrong, but rather than say that they just call people weak willed and lazy. All those carbs and sugar simply drive up your hunger whilst storing it as fat and keeping you tired.

My point is, I think a highly sophisticated enough robot could function at 100% human level. Therefore humans as we are, don't neeeeed to be sentient to be humans.

My point is, nature could have humans doing human stuff, like chimps and dogs do their stuff, without humans needing any sentience, or anything needing any sentience -- everything could just process data inputs and run sophisticated behaviour programs. As I said, a sophisticated camera could process images and identify objects and speak words.

Yet we are ALSO sentient. Matter doesn't need sentience.

Yeah, I'm fairly atheist myself, it is the materialist side that I'm questioning. The thread is sorta, we might be living in The Matrix, and how could we tell? How do we know our memories are not implanted, as you say. That's what makes consciousness itself quite different, and not easily reducible to being a "side effect" of matter. Descartes sorta did this questioning, he thought that everything could be The Matrix and his senses could be entirely a simulation, the whole reality fed to him as a simulation, so he could not truly trust any of out, but what he could not doubt was that he was aware, that existence was happening, that he was experiencing. (He's usually quoted as "I think therefore I am" but apparently the proper translation was "Existence, therefore being") If consciousness was a side effect of the simulation, we could't even trust consciousness, yet, you are aware, and there is no denying that. I experience. I am present. It is beyond any question. That's what makes consciousness so irreducible to anything else. Even notions about God and souls and all that, they are just thoughts and beliefs and they are equally just as suspect as anything else that happens to be coming up within the simulation. But the awareness itself, the feeling of existing, simply knowing you exist, that isn't reducible to anything else. It is very simple but often overlooked. But of course, we know the brain is a material phenomenon and it seems to affect what people experience, like losing memories, vision loss, etc. But awareness itself, that seems to be in a category of its own.

I think the real trouble and problem comes up considering consciousness. The eye and brain are analogous to a camera with a lens, a CCD and a CPU processing images. A really advanced CPU could even start describing in words what it is looking at. But at no point does the camera experience the image it is capturing. That's the difficult issue with sentience. What is this ability to experience, as opposed to just mechanistically reacting by processing inputs and outputs? Why are we not just human robots, acting in an environment -- a sophisticated robot could act behaviourally in complex ways that match human complexity, yet would not require sentience, it can just process data on a high enough level -- but no sentience would be needed -- it would be 100% asleep, just a sophisticated "sleepwalking" robot -- so why do we, in addition to being biological human machines, also sentiently experience? And as you say, the hallucination starts right from the beginning, although we might not remember a lot, and who knows, at that point why limit the dream to one instant, or one day, or one lifetime? Our everyday consciousness is beyond weird. Yet the ability to create experience is the most basic nature of our existence. It isn't just "self-awareness" in the sense of having a mental concept of myself as a human with a name. It is sentience that is experiencing everything, whether I know my name or not. Plus, we seem to acknowledge that there are many many sentient beings, all experiencing their own hallucination but nevertheless, interconnected in some way, which is in some way the physical reality, even though, each of us only creates our own dream of that reality -- for is there an objective thing called "red" ? or is "red" a dream phenomenon, whereas in reality "out there" there is merely some sort of vibration -- so how does a vibration become "redness"? how do beings convert that vibration into experiences of "pink" and "red" and "the aroma of roses"?

One way is that the precautionary Principle says you should act before you have sufficient evidence, just in case, for some objectively calculated and totally impartial measure of "sufficient" /sarc. So people can say it is science, but the PP says the science can be quite incomplete. Not 99% incomplete, not 95% incomplete, but just some feeling for how much you'd like to believe you have the answer. An answer about the future of a complex system which behaves chaotically in the short term but is assumed to behave predictably on a long term average, and assumed that the bits we don't understand are not that important (cloud cover) and assumed that the feedbacks drive in one direction and not the other (CO2 -> water, not water -> CO2), and so on. Anyway, the biggest thing to disagree over isn't the science -- science is self correcting and that's why we tend to trust it, although self-correcting can take decades -- the biggest issue is the response to the perceived problem, and that's where it becomes intensely political. That's where you see that what the "deniers" are really "denying" is the notion that you can globally regulate the planet and its people in some sort of quasi-magical order that will make it better for everyone. If the answer to global warming was less regulation the right nuts would be all over it. But the "answer" is for some reason, always posed as being about more regulation, more control, reducing consumption, "reducing greed" as one environmentalist put it to me, and THAT is a political ideology and that's where global warming becomes political, and not about "The Science". That is where it becomes "religious" (reduce greed! it is a sin!) and that is where other countries that don't have the Western notion of Original Sin won't really be too keen on taking a colonialist attitude towards their own development, thank you very much. The only politically adept strategy I can think of personally is about flexibility, adaptability, and technological progress which tends to drive social progress. If the climate is changing for ANY reason, it is changing and hankering for a quiet cabin in the woods living off of solar panels and sustainable local vegetable gardens is not going to fix that -- if you are under 6 feet of snow all year. The world is staggeringly complex, and I'm sorry but "sustainability" as it is often described is just a naive and simplistic notion which is too braindead to cope with -- it denies -- the complexity of the modern world, which is changing far faster and in more ways than ever.

Don't forget to also examine the pork sausages and bacon.

Anything else un-Islamic they could be carrying? A copy of "Feminism is for Everybody"? A CND flag? A kilt?

I agree about timing. I wonder whether Apple would have released the iPad any sooner, or whether their product intelligence said, there's no point until it is X weight and gives Y hours. Arguably, Apple was just at the right place at the right time. They figured you didn't need a "full Mac OS X" experience, the product would still sell as an iDevice. And touch meant apps need to be made for touch, with new UIs, so again, they figured, no point unless the app is made for touch.

What seems in the air now is whether anybody cares anymore to stick with Windows brand. A touch UI means you lose your old apps anyway. Don't just think of all the things you can do on a PC that you can't do on a tablet, but think of all the things people do on a tablet that they wouldn't do on a PC.

The whole point of ubiquitous computing is that you have a whole bunch of devices. One way or the other it is a post-PC world. Windows tablets can still sell, just like Android sells, and Apple sells. I can't imagine anyone dominating everything. Different markets will probably end up picking different ecosystems. Doctors will be buying Apple, accountants Windows, architects Windows and Apple, sales will be buying Androids, etc. etc. The IT people will do the usual jumps to try to make things run smoothly. Home shopper grannies will be using Kindles, and in the rest of the world, other brands will appear. Those that can't get any traction anywhere will fade. It'll be driven by apps, and apps will drive the adoption. If architects want an A3 sized tablet and the only niche available is a Windows one running some custom touch AutoCAD app, they'll be driven to adopt Windows ecosystem on tablets. But just in that market. It is all about the apps. But nobody will get too excited about any of this. If anything it'll mean even more compatibility headaches. Nobody will dominate, not even Google or "open".

True, and humans aren't entirely on the animal level. We don't just eat and breed, we also "want to have a life", and as people have been getting more well off, their interest in children and in material things has tended to reduce, as they become interested in enlightenment, or dance classes, or holidays. Men become so obsessed with philosophising that they neglect to find a mate. Kinda pathetic biologically.

That sort of culture isn't just part of one group, though.

I recall my Scottish grandmother showing similar contempt for her children when they made moves to improve themselves. It became a life long resentment that destroyed the relationships and the hatred was never healed. Another example from a previous generation, a son and his wife who left Pakistan for the UK, to find better opportunities, was spat at by his mother and she said she hoped they all died on the voyage.

Modern life demands that individuals leave their family and community loyalty behind and go where the opportunities are.

Those who don't shift into that modern mindset will remain poor.

If that sort of attitude sounds hard to believe, you have to bear in mind at that time in Scotland, it was considered wise to have all your teeth pulled when you were a teenager so you wouldn't face medical bills later on. When people are very poor all they have is family loyalty. So what makes you strong is also what holds you back in modern life.

True and as the symbol faded, its essence -- cheap transportation -- became more obvious. A bit like the invention of the standard shipping container -- shipping doesn't need armies of men manually loading cargo, that's not what it is about, it is about being able to send anything anywhere quickly.

The iPad doesn't so much change computing as bring us a bit closer to the point of having computers. The DynaBook was supposed to be a way for any child to learn anything, cheaply, quickly, easily.

Is the iPad a DynaBook? Give one to an old lady who's never used a computer and in 2 minutes she's using it. It is kinda the right idea, in terms of the essence. Does computing need people to know the difference between "programs" and "data" ? Well, maybe not. People say "the internet" they don't say "web client" and "url" and "dynamic pages" and "backend database". Most people who fly don't know anything about routes or altitude or navigation or fuel consumption or any of that; they just "fly".

This is where MS adding a touch interface don't really get it -- it isn't about touch per se. Apple have shown they've been willing and able to strip down computing a bit. Traditionally you could open an app then open a file, or open the file to open the app. Apple said, well, a lot of stuff is no longer about you knowing the file location anyway, like web sites, databases, email, etc., they all manage storage themselves. So let's wrap it under the app.

The technically minded take interest in all that though, like my plumber knows the routes of all the pipes in my house, but I have no idea what each pipe does or what layout he chose. I just want the essence, ie. I'm cold, push a button and make it warm.

Do we want users learning about computing or do we want them spending that time learning what they want to learn? Which might be computing but it might be a million other topics.