Ruminati

Install the Windows Presentation Foundation, it's worth it. You will find yourself with a new printer, Microsoft XPS Document Writer. This does exactly what a PDF printer does, allowing you to produce an XPS file from anything that can use a printer.

What the hell is an XPS file? Effectively it's a PDF. Windows will open it in Internet Explorer similar to the way it handles PDFs, except that it loads faster and it doesn't pester you to install crap you don't want at times that don't suit.

More importantly,

• You don't have to buy anything to get the PDF printer driver
• There's extensive dotnet support for generating XPS programmatically
• You don't have to buy the dotnet support

If you have Windows Update in fully automatic mode you may find this is already installed. Check your printers, if you have a printer called Microsoft XPS Document Writer then you already have both viewer and printer driver. Otherwise install the WPF which you can find using Windows Update. Depending on what you have installed on your system it may be listed as an optional update.

Suppose it’s all true, the planet warms, the icecaps melt and the sea rises. What does this mean for Australia?

This has happened before, several times, quite naturally and without help from industry. During those times, Australia had an inland sea, a big shallow warm inland sea – the world’s biggest estuary, in fact, full of fish, prawns, shellfish, crabs, waterbirds and all the other things that live in estuaries.

Has anyone thought about the commercial value of having the world’s biggest estuary nicely landlocked where foreigners can’t poach? Not to mention the environmental value of a gigantic, freshly minted, unpolluted wildlife habitat.

How about the transport implications? Shallow protected seas like this don’t have big waves: cheap waterborne heavy freight, more or less point to point – a maintenance-free national freight highway.

What about the effect of an inland sea on our climate? Warm, wet air on both sides of the Great Divide means it doesn’t matter which way the wind blows, you get rain. Our climate will be wetter and more temperate. This means we are likely to end up with more arable land than we have now.

Then there’s the fact that a huge warm inland estuary full of fish and prawns will cause crocodile populations to boom, producing vast quantities of lean meat and premium leather, which is hardly a problem.

Of course, all the lawyers, politicians and other parasites who currently own waterfront property will find themselves disenfranchised, whereas Aussie battlers who couldn’t afford the waterfront will find themselves in possession of it anyway.

Not so great for city dwellers, but all you get from cities is vandals, queers, pollution and water shortages (there’d be heaps of water in the Wivenhoe dam if it we didn’t waste so much of it on Brisbane).

So, global warming will feed us, water us, reduce our transport costs, improve our biodiversity, increase the amount of arable land available to us, create new industries and rebalance the distribution of wealth.

You might argue that in the medium term global warming will produce the effects that we are already seeing. Quite right. The deed has been done, the Earth is already tucked in a blanket of dense gas and the temperature is rising as a consequence. We'll just have to deal with it, because the deed is already done. If all of humanity ceased producing greenhouses gases right now the temperature would continue to rise because the blanket of greenhouse gases already exists.

So there you go: we can't stop the rising temperature and no sensible Australian would want to. What we need is accelerated global warming to shorten the period of increased aridity and bring about the return of the inland sea.

From an international perspective a rising sea is likely to seriously weaken the current superpowers right about the time it strengthens Australia. The pressure on Indonesia to move here will be enormous and we will have to be ready to repel boarders without restraint or hesitation. Fortunately the do-gooders in the united nations will be too busy with their own problems to come and interfere so we should be in a position to ignore the UN and do whatever is necessary to prevent them from establishing a foothold.

Far from paying to prevent, we should be doing everything in our power to encourage global warming.

The simplest and most effective way to do this is to exploit our abundance of coal energy for very large scale desalination to see us through the interim. This will solve the short term problems and speed up the return of our inland sea. Ideally we should deplete the low-lying coal reserves first, since these will eventually be inundated. Once the inland sea returns weather patterns should become a lot wetter and the desal plants can be sold off to other nations or simply mothballed against future need. They might even remain in production, since the product water is of very high grade and when MFD or MED desalinators are combined with electricity generation plants there are significant efficiencies to be had, greatly reducing the net energy spend to process the water.

I can't believe it! Less than a week after I expressed relief that Rockhampton was too far away for practical water theft by Brisbane, I hear a news report that plans are afoot for piping water to Brisbane from as far north as Mackay (which is 300km north of Rocky).

What is wrong with our elected representatives? A desalination plant would be cheaper than stealing water, and regional water supplies might be heaps for the regions they supply but a monster like Brisbane will deplete them quickly.

Listen up, genius leaders: desalination plants don't run out. You can't empty the Pacific Ocean. Get your greedy hands off the regional watersheds and build desalination plants. Build them right now. If you don't have time to build big desalination plants (almost certainly the case) then build small ones. Get them online and supplying water to give you time to build more small ones.

Piping from the north will not be popular. You may well find the locals will defend themselves from the appetites of the south. As soon as they realise their reserves are plummeting they'll wreck the pipe. I'm sure of this because it's what I'd do in their shoes. There are farm sheds full of nitropril and diesel all the way from Brisbane to Mackay, most of them in the hands of people with no respect for city slickers. Means, motivation and opportunity. It's a doddle.

I hope our famously interfering government refrains from sending the army to guard the pipe. For starters, it's not practical. Brisbane to Mackay is about a thousand kilometres. To put a man every 100m and allowing for 8/8/8 shifts (eight hours on, eight hours off, eight hours personal admin) and supply chain overheads, you would need about 30,000 soldiers which is the entire army on continuous active duty. Also, that whole area already has secessionist tendencies. Any attempt at force will trigger Australia's first civil war - and just like the American civil war and much later Viet Nam, it will be a conventional force versus entrenched guerilla forces with no command or supply lines to disrupt. You got guns, they got guns, food, water and lots of places to hide.

The smart thing to do is mobilise the army to build emergency desal plants. We are about to run out of water. This will cause untold damage to the economy and threaten public health on a grand scale. If that's not a national emergency on the same scale as a declared war then I don't know what is. What are you waiting for, the first outbreak of cholera or the collapse of industry?

Nero installs a lot of crap whether you like it or not. To dispose of Nero Scout and the taskbar search, open a command prompt window and paste the following commands.

regsvr32 /u "%COMMONPROGRAMFILES%\Ahead\Lib\NeroSearch.dll"

regsvr32 /u "%COMMONPROGRAMFILES%\Ahead\Lib\NeroSearchBar.dll"

regsvr32 /u "%COMMONPROGRAMFILES%\Ahead\Lib\NeroSearchTray.dll"

regsvr32 /u "%COMMONPROGRAMFILES%\Ahead\Lib\MediaLibraryNSE.dll"

The world as we know it is coming to an end.

This is axiomatically true as a corollary of change being the only constant. From a social and technological perspective things change and the world isn't what it was when you were a kid. This has been true for all of recorded history, and it applies to ecologies too. On a local scale some proto-semites trashed their garden of Eden by allowing human and goat numbers to grow unchecked.

This is not to say that they weren't pretty good at managing the environmental impact of people and goats; it's just that eventually there were far too many of both, and no amount of goat lore could save them.

It should also be noted that deserts are not biologically empty; they just aren't full of goats or people - and this is my first main point. The world goes on, it just ceases to be the world as we know it. If Kennedy and Kruschev had got overexcited and given us a glow-in-the-dark world, it wouldn't be empty. It would be positively bustling with cockroaches and rats and mould and grass and everything else that's adaptable and hardy. From their point of view such an event would have represented a marvellous opportunity, and increased mutation would only have accelerated their filling of vacant niches. It's only large, long-lived predators that puke everywhere and keel over.

But let's not dwell on nuclear apocalypse: it didn't happen and it probably won't. Instead, let us consider another type of apocalypse, one that certainly will happen: resource exhaustion. How can I be so certain? Basically because it already has happened, over and over. The primary difference now is globalisation, which means two things: (a) it will be global rather than localised, and (b) as a consequence of this there won't be immediate reseeding from large adjacent unaffected areas: neither rescue nor recolonisation will be forthcoming. The cavalry, gentlemen, is not coming.

It doesn't have to be a total wipeout. Individual resource consumption and pollution is not the problem. It's about total resource consumption and pollution, which is a direct function of population.

A population of a few million could sustain a medium technology civilisation, with all the really important stuff like refrigeration, hot water, potable water and medicine including reliable contraception.

This is the key to fast recovery from cataclysm: you aren't bootstrapping. You don't have to wonder how and where to mine or smelt iron. You know how to desalinate water, and with a small population spread wide you probably wouldn't need to - why tear your iron out of a mountain of dirt when there's a mountain of old cars? A population reduction like this will demand radical cultural changes (especially if we are to keep the population small) but in the initial turmoil there will be crucial, temporary advantages: a sudden relative abundance of the produce of a technological world. There will be twenty years before there is any need to manufacture heavy machinery.

This also represents a risk, because with no need to make, people will stop making - and they will forget how. And some technologies don't like neglect: if you turn off the power to an aluminium refinery and the aluminium solidifies in the vat, the plant is junked - time to build a new one. So a great deal of care will have to be taken to preserve certain technologies, or a decision made to abandon them. Fortunately, other technologies are more robust, and with a much reduced duty cycle, equipment will tend to last a lot longer.

A few tens of millions could more than sustain not just a medium technology, they could build a high technology. Reaching for the stars is a matter of economics. Get just one robot out to bring back an iceteroid and you have millions of tonnes of reaction mass and bonded oxygen. Once you have lots of reaction mass you can bring em back by the dozen and the economics of space colonisation becomes radically different.

All things in good time. Let us begin with what we definitely can do today.

In the short term, the most important things are that primary and secondary production continue. Demand will be reduced, and if operations is scaled back to simply fulfil requirements rather than greed then their own environmental and other resource demands are likewise mitigated.

Direct economic management is a fool's game, doomed from the start by the unpredictability of chaos systems and the decoupling of motivation. This should have been obvious, and if it wasn't, the Russians demonstrated it for us. If I sound like I can't make up my mind, it's because I'm trying to express the difference between a planned economy and a regulated economy.

Something else I'd like to see is the eradication of religion. Religion is by definition insane - you are asked to believe a bunch of absurdities in the absence of evidence on the basis that if you do then after you die you won't be dead. Which is just plain silly. Silliness on its own is merely annoying and sometimes entertaining, but when people start squabbling over the details of their collective silliness they steal resources from things that do matter. I don't really care if they want to torture each other but squandering resources I will not tolerate. Even if there were a watching maker of worlds, it is even ridiculous to suggest that it might be concerned with whether or how people kiss its metaphysical bum. I mean, really, if there is a god and we're made in its image then I rather suspect the reason it hasn't turned up for a while is that we're the embarassing relatives. We keep having hordes of illiterate ill-mannered children and beating each other up over how many pins can dance on the head of an angel. No, I didn't get that wrong - it's entirely hypothetical and the details do not matter.

The thing about resource exhaustion is that to avoid it you basically have to get rid of all your competitors before they consume the resources. Imagine you're in a life-raft with other people and limited supplies. Remarkably you know how long till landfall and you also know there isn't enough food and water. It is much smarter to get rid of your competitors immediately. You now have complex choices to make: do you ally with the strong to preserve them as resources or do you ally with the weak to dispatch the strong on the basis that it will be easier to get rid of the weak later? Ideally you would arrange for a credible accident to dispatch the weak so that you can retain the strong as resources without your being recognised as a threat.

Oil will run out in perhaps thirty years. But if the world's population dropped to perhaps ten million then even with per-capita consumption unabated the reserve would last 150+ years, which is plenty of time to redevelop technology and industry around renewable resources - especially since there's so much less of it to adapt.