Even better, there could be a dedicated section of slashdot where people could submit new patents, and the/. community would audit them. Were there any prior art being passed off as original art in a particular patant, slashdotters would then e-mail the us patent office with a note explaining as much, as well as any proof that could be digitized.
If slashdot is a closed community, how would you define an 'open' community'? Slashdot has options for news/links/search boxes from dozens of other sites to appear on the main page, if you set it up in such a way. Regardless, the 'walled community' the author of the news item was referring more to web portals/startup screens than single websites.
Noone cares about how thin your skin is... taco made a swipe at Microsoft and their software. It's a joke.... noone really thinks service packs ahve to be downloaded every 5 minues. Noone. From that you can deduce that the comments were jocular. Get over it!
As Ken Finkelman once said, 'CANDU can't do'. Nuclear power in unsafe in communist hands and CANDU is a good pun, certainly - but I wouldn't call the Japanese communist, nor would I call the CANDU reactor safe, in either Korean hands or Canadianhands, though that may be due to all the pinkos up here. Regardless, fusionpower will probably be the long-term solution to energy demands. It solves the principal problem of fission - radioactive waste - while introducing no new problems of its own, aside from the inevitable problem of finding out how to build something never built before.
but can you link to some of your own code (perl, preferably) to give an idea of what you consider acceptable? Otherwise, you're just blowing some rather pungent hot air.
The market the article talks about is the analog to digital converter market, not the desktop market. You're probably right about the chips not being at the consumer level in five years, but it is entierly possible that they _will_ come down to the desktop market in (complete guess) 10 years. It's not uncommon at all for technologies to be limited to well-funded high-end applications when they first are put into use, and then move into more general low-cost applications as the technology matures. The article makes it clear that this technology is only now in its infacny.
You still don't get it, do you? You must realize that the post which started this whole flamewar implied that Ellison's money should have been spent on helping the poor, rather than his unnecessary 'additions' to his house.
All you're saying is that, assuming he would have spent the money on himself anyway, how he spends his money is of no consequence to the poor, and will not affect them.
If you need to have it affirmed, YOU ARE RIGHT about his money not helping the poor if you assume he would have spent it on himself no matter what. You are wrong if you accept that he had the option, before breaking ground on the house, to spend all that money on others.
Get off it, man. You're acting as if it were written in Greek. If you can't read it, then don't bother reading it; I don't really care either way. In itself, however, it was not unlike most posts I write when half-asleep - but it was grammatically correct, if a bit run-on. I'll decipher its for you. When translated, it reads : "The post you made in response to the one which started this (lengthy) thread (the 'original thread' for clarity's sake) took the original thread too literally.". And, reading this line of argumentation, I can see that what I spoke of was not an isolated incident.
That dosen't really tell the whole story. You also have to know how much they spend on stock buy-back programs. Remember, when they just 'print more stock certificates', they're in effect selling the company. You can't continue that ad infinitum without diluting the value of your own shares (as related to the total number of shares) to such a degree that you lose whatever dominant stock position you had.
That is why there is a problem. Microsoft is activly trying to subvert the labour standards which have been built up over the past century or so. They want to greatly reduce the job security and the benifits that would normally have to give to their employees. That is a serious crime, and in my opinion at least they deserve punishment for it.
You must count yourself among those who 'couldn't glean an intelligent idea of that morass of run-on sentances', as you didn't respond to the substance of the post. Try reading it again, and then commenting... I'm sure you'll get it someday.
Re:Expensive medicine is just Darwin at work
on
Profit vs. Science
·
· Score: 1
Why has a social darwinist post been moderated as 'interesting'? That viewpoint has been, and can be, debunked as irrational, and only serves as an attempt to legitimate inaction in making the distribution of resources more fair. I dare anyone to rationally explain here how something determined by the oh-so-rational and scientific, the 'Invisible Hand', can possibly be said to be a fair way of determining who is and who isn't 'fit enough' on this planet. That is, that because 1/10 of the world's population has around 9/10 of the world's resources, the 10 percent who control such a portion of the world's resources are the only ones who deserve to have access to modern medicine,. And the unnervingly high percentage of people born in the poor areas of the earth arn't 'fit' enough. You can't demonstrate that with logic, as the logical extension of that is that there is a connection between where someone is born and how 'fit' they are. Perhaps there are über-nano rays that eminate from the earth and de-fit people in certain areas. Or aliens have come down. Though there are a number of reasons you could give for this being true, there are no reasons you can state that would hold up to any critical observation. Besides, you're posting as an AC, so you don't feel you can justify what you're saying, anyway.
No, they are not equivalent. You assume with your corn-in-the-toilet-bowl that the corn has been eaten, while the argument concerning the waste with Mr. Ellison's house is that, had he spent the money on other endeavours, more people would benifit, and perhaps, had the money been spent in certain places, more people would have their lives today. (how's that for a lengthy sentance, eh? 5 commas!) Poor people would not necessarily get more corn had the houses not been built, but they would get more corn had the money used to build the houses had not been spent on the houses, but rather on (in one of the many ways on can do this) helping the poor. I will admit, however, that in the tight constraints of the precice wording of the original post that you are correct. But you are incorrect if one preforms the simple extrapolation intended by the author, which one can make when the substance of what he wrote is related to his thesis. Commenting on such a minor flaw is, while interesting as a logic game, at times confusing to those who don't read slashdot posts with such a precise (and by precise I don't mean wise - just to be as accurate as I can be. You understand.) eye, especially when your comments are of such a Spartan nature.
You have done well in a system which has left all the people you knew as a child in the same positions their parents were in in society. I am doing well in a system which is leaving most of the people I knew well as a child in the same positions their parents were in in society. You grew up in a lower-class household; I grew up in a middle-class household. This can't be right. Any system which leaves behind all but one of the people in any given neighborhood in the social position their parents were in is not a system in which social mobility is easy. Yes, simple handouts arn't always, or even often, the best way to go about things and yes, the wealthier shouldn't be taxed so much that they gain no extra benifit from their increased output to society. But at the same time, those who can give more to society (i.e. the wealthier) should do so, forced or not, and opportunity should be made more available to those born into poorer families. If you have done as well for yourself as you describe, why not sponsor a scholarship. Or give money to your former school. Or something - but it will always remain that people who percieve no likely benifit from a course of action are less likely to attempt to carry out that action. If a poor person sees a white-coller career as a very remote possability, he is more likely to abstain from trying - making it the job of those who know this and have means to improve the situation to do what they can to lower the barriers to social mobility.
Exactly. I don't find anything wrong with the idea that some people do better than others. The idea that someone should pay with their life for not working hard enough is as wrong as saying that no person should have more than anyone else, no matter what they do in life. As always, the middle ground has the best foundation.
Pg1 - read what I wrote. hard work etc. is valueble, but so is luck, especially when you're speaking of people with millions or billions of dollars.
Pg2 - what? my reasoning is that people shouldn't starve because they didn't work. read what I wrote.
Pg3 - I place Capitalism as being PART OF human rights. Along with the right to self determination, the right to free speech, the right of assembly, of religion, and on down the list, I have the right to earn money... And I quote - "The right to life, liberty and the presuit of happiness" (emphasis mine). Note how happiness is last on the list.
Pg4 - Well, you poopyheads don't realize that the right to life is one which is equal for all, and the most important of all. If you don't get that, you don't get it.
Go read the UN declaration on human rights, though you probably think it's too liberal or someting.. go talk to one of those people you think deserves to die for their sloth, and tell them that to their face like a man, if you really believe it. If you place the capitalist system above human rights, you're worse than the most rabid of the old communists. noone should die because they don't conform to the system they were born into. noone should die because larry ellison wants to hear the dinosaurs roar as loud as they did in the jurassic period - something he dosen't need, something he wouldn't miss if he had never had it, unlike food. Besides, isn't asking for charity a way of gaining money for yourself? Government is for whatever the people under it want it to be for. Just remember - the capitalist system isn't fair, and it can never be. Larry Ellison is as rich as he is because he was in the right place at the right time, just like Rockefeller, just like Gates, just like any superich person in the us.
Since when is the comment system a tool for picking apart every editorial attached to the stories, and not the stories themselves? If you visit/. regularly, then you know that the humans who run it have opinions, and don't spend half their day convulsing over what is and what isn't precise, and what is and what isn't the proper grammer to use. Yes, they could do better - but they're doing a lot more than most of the whiners who complain. Stop presuming that taco et al have some sort of debt to you which they have to repay by having your opinion on everything.... just chill out. It's only a website, and opinions are just that - opinions.
With a browser like mozilla, you have the option of viewing pages with and without advertisements. You can go to the kuro5hin's and the nasa.gov's of the web, and read without banners flashing in yo' face. If you use a browser like this latest opera, every page will have an advert. Yes, slashdot uses advertisements - but slashdot is only one page. It seems logical that taco was refering to the fact that you won't have the opition of advertisement-free browsing.
(thisis from the Joint European Torus, a experimental fusion reactor, lit): "A worst case fusion accident would not require evacuation of local populations and teh radioactive health risk of the waste from fusion would reduce to the same level as that from a coal fired power station, after only 100 years, very much quicker than that from fission."
Nuclear fusion, if it is developed, will with high certainty be significantly more expensive than fission. This creates its own environmental problems.
Firstly, the technology is still in its reasarch stage, so projections about the cost of operating a reactor when the research is just speculation. It may not be too cheap to meter, but neither is fission - and fission has its own problems.
It also can't be the "only power source which has little" environmental impact since the consensus of energy scientists including solar power researchers is that fission is one such power source
True, but solar power can't be used on anything like the scale fusion can be used - solar power generates electricity by catching some of the radiated energy from the sun. Nuclear fusion duplicates the process which occures within the sun. It's logical that you can have a much more efficient concentration of power generation with fusion, and this logic is demonstrated by the fact that you (currently) need a field of solar panels the size of texas in a cloudless desert to get enough power for any significantly sized population (I'm exagerating, as I have not stats, but if you look it up the point will be borne out)
A fusion power plant will produce the same amount of electricity as any other steam or gas turbine
True, and I was unclear myself on that, but it remains a fact that the fuel for a fusion reactor is far more prodcutive per given weight (even fission - think of an a-bomb (hiroshima) vs. an h-bomb) and far more common (it's deuterium, which exists in water) than the fuel sources for other power generation systems. On earth alone, there is estimated to be enough deuterium to supply energy requierments 1000 times the globe's current requierments for an insanly long period of time. All of which is not to consider the relative abundance of water in the solar system...
The main reason why nuclear fission is simply less useful in the long term is that the waste it produces is of too high a volume, and required too much time to become nonhazerdous. Nuclear fusion produces no radioactive or otherwise dangerous waste, and the reactors themselves have, 100 years after being decommissioned, the same radioactivity as a coal fired power station (much faster, that is, than fission).
Slashdot Mirror
Even better, there could be a dedicated section of slashdot where people could submit new patents, and the /. community would audit them. Were there any prior art being passed off as original art in a particular patant, slashdotters would then e-mail the us patent office with a note explaining as much, as well as any proof that could be digitized.
If slashdot is a closed community, how would you define an 'open' community'? Slashdot has options for news/links/search boxes from dozens of other sites to appear on the main page, if you set it up in such a way. Regardless, the 'walled community' the author of the news item was referring more to web portals/startup screens than single websites.
But it is a portal... and, if memory serves, it is the original portal. Altavista, msn.com, and the rest of them are just copying yahoo...
Noone cares about how thin your skin is... taco made a swipe at Microsoft and their software. It's a joke.... noone really thinks service packs ahve to be downloaded every 5 minues. Noone. From that you can deduce that the comments were jocular. Get over it!
As Ken Finkelman once said, 'CANDU can't do'. Nuclear power in unsafe in communist hands and CANDU is a good pun, certainly - but I wouldn't call the Japanese communist, nor would I call the CANDU reactor safe, in either Korean hands or Canadian hands, though that may be due to all the pinkos up here. Regardless, fusion power will probably be the long-term solution to energy demands. It solves the principal problem of fission - radioactive waste - while introducing no new problems of its own, aside from the inevitable problem of finding out how to build something never built before.
but can you link to some of your own code (perl, preferably) to give an idea of what you consider acceptable? Otherwise, you're just blowing some rather pungent hot air.
I guess they're used to getting free software as well..
The market the article talks about is the analog to digital converter market, not the desktop market. You're probably right about the chips not being at the consumer level in five years, but it is entierly possible that they _will_ come down to the desktop market in (complete guess) 10 years. It's not uncommon at all for technologies to be limited to well-funded high-end applications when they first are put into use, and then move into more general low-cost applications as the technology matures. The article makes it clear that this technology is only now in its infacny.
All you're saying is that, assuming he would have spent the money on himself anyway, how he spends his money is of no consequence to the poor, and will not affect them.
If you need to have it affirmed, YOU ARE RIGHT about his money not helping the poor if you assume he would have spent it on himself no matter what. You are wrong if you accept that he had the option, before breaking ground on the house, to spend all that money on others.
Get off it, man. You're acting as if it were written in Greek. If you can't read it, then don't bother reading it; I don't really care either way. In itself, however, it was not unlike most posts I write when half-asleep - but it was grammatically correct, if a bit run-on. I'll decipher its for you. When translated, it reads : "The post you made in response to the one which started this (lengthy) thread (the 'original thread' for clarity's sake) took the original thread too literally.". And, reading this line of argumentation, I can see that what I spoke of was not an isolated incident.
That dosen't really tell the whole story. You also have to know how much they spend on stock buy-back programs. Remember, when they just 'print more stock certificates', they're in effect selling the company. You can't continue that ad infinitum without diluting the value of your own shares (as related to the total number of shares) to such a degree that you lose whatever dominant stock position you had.
That is why there is a problem. Microsoft is activly trying to subvert the labour standards which have been built up over the past century or so. They want to greatly reduce the job security and the benifits that would normally have to give to their employees. That is a serious crime, and in my opinion at least they deserve punishment for it.
You must count yourself among those who 'couldn't glean an intelligent idea of that morass of run-on sentances', as you didn't respond to the substance of the post. Try reading it again, and then commenting... I'm sure you'll get it someday.
Why has a social darwinist post been moderated as 'interesting'? That viewpoint has been, and can be, debunked as irrational, and only serves as an attempt to legitimate inaction in making the distribution of resources more fair. I dare anyone to rationally explain here how something determined by the oh-so-rational and scientific, the 'Invisible Hand', can possibly be said to be a fair way of determining who is and who isn't 'fit enough' on this planet. That is, that because 1/10 of the world's population has around 9/10 of the world's resources, the 10 percent who control such a portion of the world's resources are the only ones who deserve to have access to modern medicine,. And the unnervingly high percentage of people born in the poor areas of the earth arn't 'fit' enough. You can't demonstrate that with logic, as the logical extension of that is that there is a connection between where someone is born and how 'fit' they are. Perhaps there are über-nano rays that eminate from the earth and de-fit people in certain areas. Or aliens have come down. Though there are a number of reasons you could give for this being true, there are no reasons you can state that would hold up to any critical observation. Besides, you're posting as an AC, so you don't feel you can justify what you're saying, anyway.
No, they are not equivalent. You assume with your corn-in-the-toilet-bowl that the corn has been eaten, while the argument concerning the waste with Mr. Ellison's house is that, had he spent the money on other endeavours, more people would benifit, and perhaps, had the money been spent in certain places, more people would have their lives today. (how's that for a lengthy sentance, eh? 5 commas!) Poor people would not necessarily get more corn had the houses not been built, but they would get more corn had the money used to build the houses had not been spent on the houses, but rather on (in one of the many ways on can do this) helping the poor. I will admit, however, that in the tight constraints of the precice wording of the original post that you are correct. But you are incorrect if one preforms the simple extrapolation intended by the author, which one can make when the substance of what he wrote is related to his thesis. Commenting on such a minor flaw is, while interesting as a logic game, at times confusing to those who don't read slashdot posts with such a precise (and by precise I don't mean wise - just to be as accurate as I can be. You understand.) eye, especially when your comments are of such a Spartan nature.
You have done well in a system which has left all the people you knew as a child in the same positions their parents were in in society. I am doing well in a system which is leaving most of the people I knew well as a child in the same positions their parents were in in society. You grew up in a lower-class household; I grew up in a middle-class household.
This can't be right. Any system which leaves behind all but one of the people in any given neighborhood in the social position their parents were in is not a system in which social mobility is easy. Yes, simple handouts arn't always, or even often, the best way to go about things and yes, the wealthier shouldn't be taxed so much that they gain no extra benifit from their increased output to society. But at the same time, those who can give more to society (i.e. the wealthier) should do so, forced or not, and opportunity should be made more available to those born into poorer families. If you have done as well for yourself as you describe, why not sponsor a scholarship. Or give money to your former school. Or something - but it will always remain that people who percieve no likely benifit from a course of action are less likely to attempt to carry out that action. If a poor person sees a white-coller career as a very remote possability, he is more likely to abstain from trying - making it the job of those who know this and have means to improve the situation to do what they can to lower the barriers to social mobility.
Exactly. I don't find anything wrong with the idea that some people do better than others. The idea that someone should pay with their life for not working hard enough is as wrong as saying that no person should have more than anyone else, no matter what they do in life. As always, the middle ground has the best foundation.
Pg1 - read what I wrote. hard work etc. is valueble, but so is luck, especially when you're speaking of people with millions or billions of dollars. ... And I quote - "The right to life, liberty and the presuit of happiness" (emphasis mine). Note how happiness is last on the list.
Pg2 - what? my reasoning is that people shouldn't starve because they didn't work. read what I wrote.
Pg3 - I place Capitalism as being PART OF human rights. Along with the right to self determination, the right to free speech, the right of assembly, of religion, and on down the list, I have the right to earn money
Pg4 - Well, you poopyheads don't realize that the right to life is one which is equal for all, and the most important of all. If you don't get that, you don't get it.
I mean, $80 000 speakers on 20ft collums of steel which are set onto the bedrock. Not bad.
Go read the UN declaration on human rights, though you probably think it's too liberal or someting.. go talk to one of those people you think deserves to die for their sloth, and tell them that to their face like a man, if you really believe it. If you place the capitalist system above human rights, you're worse than the most rabid of the old communists. noone should die because they don't conform to the system they were born into. noone should die because larry ellison wants to hear the dinosaurs roar as loud as they did in the jurassic period - something he dosen't need, something he wouldn't miss if he had never had it, unlike food. Besides, isn't asking for charity a way of gaining money for yourself? Government is for whatever the people under it want it to be for. Just remember - the capitalist system isn't fair, and it can never be. Larry Ellison is as rich as he is because he was in the right place at the right time, just like Rockefeller, just like Gates, just like any superich person in the us.
you honastly don't see any middle ground between a communist revolution and a (nearly) unregulated capitalist system?
Since when is the comment system a tool for picking apart every editorial attached to the stories, and not the stories themselves? If you visit /. regularly, then you know that the humans who run it have opinions, and don't spend half their day convulsing over what is and what isn't precise, and what is and what isn't the proper grammer to use. Yes, they could do better - but they're doing a lot more than most of the whiners who complain. Stop presuming that taco et al have some sort of debt to you which they have to repay by having your opinion on everything.... just chill out. It's only a website, and opinions are just that - opinions.
With a browser like mozilla, you have the option of viewing pages with and without advertisements. You can go to the kuro5hin's and the nasa.gov's of the web, and read without banners flashing in yo' face. If you use a browser like this latest opera, every page will have an advert. Yes, slashdot uses advertisements - but slashdot is only one page. It seems logical that taco was refering to the fact that you won't have the opition of advertisement-free browsing.
"A worst case fusion accident would not require evacuation of local populations and teh radioactive health risk of the waste from fusion would reduce to the same level as that from a coal fired power station, after only 100 years, very much quicker than that from fission."
Fo mo info, go to http://www.jet.efda.org
Nuclear fusion, if it is developed, will with high certainty be significantly more expensive than fission. This creates its own environmental problems.
Firstly, the technology is still in its reasarch stage, so projections about the cost of operating a reactor when the research is just speculation. It may not be too cheap to meter, but neither is fission - and fission has its own problems.
It also can't be the "only power source which has little" environmental impact since the consensus of energy scientists including solar power researchers is that fission is one such power source
True, but solar power can't be used on anything like the scale fusion can be used - solar power generates electricity by catching some of the radiated energy from the sun. Nuclear fusion duplicates the process which occures within the sun. It's logical that you can have a much more efficient concentration of power generation with fusion, and this logic is demonstrated by the fact that you (currently) need a field of solar panels the size of texas in a cloudless desert to get enough power for any significantly sized population (I'm exagerating, as I have not stats, but if you look it up the point will be borne out)
A fusion power plant will produce the same amount of electricity as any other steam or gas turbine
True, and I was unclear myself on that, but it remains a fact that the fuel for a fusion reactor is far more prodcutive per given weight (even fission - think of an a-bomb (hiroshima) vs. an h-bomb) and far more common (it's deuterium, which exists in water) than the fuel sources for other power generation systems. On earth alone, there is estimated to be enough deuterium to supply energy requierments 1000 times the globe's current requierments for an insanly long period of time. All of which is not to consider the relative abundance of water in the solar system...
The main reason why nuclear fission is simply less useful in the long term is that the waste it produces is of too high a volume, and required too much time to become nonhazerdous. Nuclear fusion produces no radioactive or otherwise dangerous waste, and the reactors themselves have, 100 years after being decommissioned, the same radioactivity as a coal fired power station (much faster, that is, than fission).