I love your post, but I have a few questions. For example, I'd rather see chain-reacting radioactives being used to make electricity than sitting in missile silos. For that matter, why can't we just dump the radioactives down a subduction fault? They're heavy, so won't they sink into the mantle quite nicely?
Yes, I'm aware that we can't simply dilute stuff like Strontium 90 into seawater because it gets concentrated with calcium into the animals higher on the food chain.
"Remember Nuclear power in the 1950's? Remember how it would provide electricity so cheap as to be free? How it would be completely safe? The reality has turned out to be somewhat different, has it not?"
The problem is not with nuclear power - it is with people. Nuclear power is a very useful tool, and it can be used to provide electricity so cheap as to be free. It still can be everything they promised, including safe if we can find a way to make electricity that isn't useful as a weapon. IEC fusion shows some promise in this area.
Remember, fission doesn't kill people, people kill people.:) Sorry, I couldn't resist.
"Also, there are social implications - unemployment and the death of an industry. Do we really want to cause the death of an industry for the sake of cheap electricity?"
Sure we do. Why not. I'd like to see the art, music, and movies industries replaced, as well as big oil, big software, and big medicine. I'd like to see them replaced by something that frees people instead of binding them.
As for unemployment, it is very low in the US right now - so low that industries are having amazing difficulty recruiting and hanging on to employees. A touch of unemployment is healthy for the industries you seem to like so much. There is a balance to be had there. Low unemployment can trigger inflation, due to companies having to give their employees all sorts of incentives and then having to raise prices for the consumer. The employees in high-demand industries will not suffer, but employees in low-demand industries will because cost of living will rise but their paychecks won't. This could artificially widen the income gap between rich and poor.
"The millions of people who work in electricity plants, where nuclear reactors are used responsibly by the government, will beg to differ on that one."
Ummm... used responsibly by the government? There's been lots of nuclear accidents caused by governments besides just the famous ones. There have also been deliberate misuses of nuclear power by governments. Hiroshima and Nagasaki spring to mind. You seem to put undue trust in government.
As for millions of people who work in electricity plants, their skills will be useful elsewhere. Trained engineers can find jobs, if they don't mind a little retraining. Plus, I don't think there's really millions of them.
Any good docter would love to become obsolete. Why should electrical engineers be any different? I have mixed feelings about genetic algorithms and AI eventually replacing me as a programmer, but I'd like to see it happen.
"So, from a social and practical perspective I must be sceptical."
So should we all. However, you seem more cynical than skeptical.
"We must not embrace new technologies solely because they are new, but rather because they improve our quality of life. I don't think fission reactors fulfil that requirement."
I agree with your first sentence, but I think fission reactors could fulfill that requirement. I guess we'll just agree to disagree, then.
If the distance covered is time, then it usually takes the same amount of time to cover that time. (Unless you happen to be moving close to the speed of light.) Therefore, we are moving into the future at a rate of one.
That refers to one c, the physical constant of speed, the speed of light. We are all moving into the future at the speed of light.
I like your sig. Yeah, the Republicans are in our bedrooms. I just wanted to add that the Democrats are in our wallets slightly more than the Republicans. Either way...
Nothing, per se, but there are many wrong ways to prevent crime. Legal bullying of ISPs for something their users did? That's crime prevention, and it's wrong.
"I don't understand why people are so defensive of pirates. I hear people talking about it all the time, and they don't feel in the least bit guilty about the fact that they're committing a criminal act."
If people believe a law is stupid or wrong, they'll be quite proud of breaking it. Speeding is one example of many.
If you want to convince people that "piracy" is wrong, you first have to convince them that copyright is right.
"How would you feel if something you'd spent 6-months of your life creating was being given away free?"
Not 6 months, but I've put one and a half months into a piece of free software: cfract, a continued fraction converter. It's quick and dirty but quickly getting better.
"someone is being denied the income from their copyrighted works."
Who says they deserve that income?
Neither nature nor man rewards effort. Only results get rewarded - thus, the argument that artists deserve money because they work hard doesn't work at all. Plenty of artists work hard - yet only the Britney Spears of the world get rich.
The RIAA doesn't reward effort either. They reward looks and dancing ability.
Someone please explain to me why it is wrong to copy something that can be coped endlessly at no expense to the author.
Non-physical objects, people - what does the artist lose? By your standards, it is wrong for me to listen to music cds from the library, or read books from the library, or listen to music but not commercials on the radio.
By your standards, even having a mute button on the tv remote control is "enabling piracy." What, you mean fans of a tv show might not want to watch commercials? Horrors! Let's tie them down and turn the volume up!
Someone explain to me the difference here, please.
Exposure is the only thing that can get an artist sales, and thus food and rent. Exposure comes before anything else. Why do so many artists sign up with the record companies? For one thing, because the record companies have the power to make them famous.
Exposure is not only needed, it is the first thing needed. Those "friends in the recording industry here in Nova Scotia" may be better off because of things like Napster. They certainly are not starving because of Napster. They are starving because either their music isn't popular right now or because the RIAA members haven't seen fit to give them their 15 minutes of fame yet.
Would I have ever bought an Arthur C Clarke or Larry Niven book if I hadn't first seen them in the library or at el cheapo used book sales? Because I read them for free when I was young, I bought many books when I got older.
Open source? Maybe the GPL needs two of those, but open source doesn't and free software doesn't. They just need open channels of communication.
Personally, I see no difference between rule of law and rule of force. It is part of the curse of living under human rule that we are doomed to suffer both. Not that I'm ungrateful for what we have now, but the people in charge in the US got there by force and they maintain their power by force.
"You guys always bitch about how everyone should respect Linus's IP by not violating his product's license, why not show the same respect for Apple? Oops, I forgot, IP rights only apply to GPLed material..."
You have overgeneralized. I think it would be wonderful if someone violated Linux's license. Linux could use some fair, skilled competition from people who wanted to build a better OS, not just make lots of money. Of course there's always BSD, but I don't know much about that yet. Will learn, as soon as I have time.
Don't get me wrong: I love Linux and Linus, I just don't like the GPL.
"Microsoft clobbered Apple -- and the rest of the industry -- with openness."
That was IBM, not MS. Even IBM didn't want to build an open system, they were forced into because Apple already had such a lead that IBM didn't have time to design a closed system. When clonemakers reverse-engineered the PC, IBM sued them and lost.
Microsoft was never for openness, and neither was IBM. The US courts and IBM clonemakers were responsible for cheap, open PCs.
"Linux itself exists only because Microsoft created the modern microcomputer industry, where standardized, fully-documented hardware was available at reasonable prices dictated by a competitive marketplace."
Intel created the modern microcomputer industry. IBM helped them with the software side. The competitive marketplace, again, existed because of the PC clonemakers and the US courts, in spite of IBM. Microsoft never even entered the picture.
"It's no coincidence that Linux was first developed for the same hardware platform as DOS."
Coincidence? That was Linus' personal decision: beacuse the 386 was fairly cheap and fairly capable. Because Intel made a good, cheap chip. Not because of MS.
"Microsoft has always been open and competitive. They encourage competition and thrive on it."
MS is an anticompetitive cartel. They use anything from copyright law to patent law to contract law to undocumented features to make sure their competition does not have a chance.
Here's an idea - fund NASA and government social programs with a combination of lotteries and donations. Yeah, the rich should give to the poor, but the poor should not take from the rich. Let the donators decide who will be funded.
You'd have plenty of room for fuel, but you'd have two problems:
DS1 is light, the Space Shuttle is massive. Acceleration would be very slow. You'd eventually get there, but it'd take quite awhile, even accelerating the whole time.
DS1 needed 2.5 kilowatts to generate as much thrust as the weight of a piece of paper. In order to get something the mass of the Shuttle to get there, you'd need a powerful, light nuclear reactor. Nuclear reactors are hard to make light enough - there's a lot of energy per unit mass, but not really enough when you're doing a manned trip using an ion drive.
A nerva or vasimir(sp?) drive might work better. If you could make a large, light, reflective sheet, you could use it as a solar sail.
"sounds(!): NONE! one of the 1st things I do on a Win box is turn off all sounds (though I haven't found out how to turn off the PC speaker beep when the trashcan empties)"
I used the screwdriver solution.:) As an added bonus, I don't have to worry about that magnet right next to my hard drive. Yeah, I know it won't hurt anything, but...
I'm not talking about a religious issue. I'm talking about the Young Earth question, which, sadly, some people call a religious issue. If the Earth is young, there will be evidence. If that evidence is found, the Earth is young. If the evidence says the Earth is old, the Earth is old.
Creationism is an entirely different thing. There are a lot of Old Earth Creationists and some Young Earth Naturalists (Paul Hogan, for one.) Personally, I don't see what the two issues have to do with each other.
The Young Earth question is a matter of science and evidence. Creationism is a matter of faith.
Science is getting closer and closer to the truth. Most Christians I know (and I am one, btw) sit back and make fun of the scientists. They make me almost ashamed to be a Christian.
If you want to disprove the idea of an old Earth, roll up your sleeves and start working. Find all the young earth arguments you can, then find out how most of them have been disproved long ago. Do some research, find out which young earth arguments still work, and quote them, not any others.
When a Christian starts talking about how entropy disproves evolution, I start laughing bitterly. Christians who want to be believed in the scientific crowd need to become scientifically literate. They need to humble themselves and learn. Until then, there is very little that they will say about evolution that is worth listening to.
Yeah, I've been very hard on Christians. That's because I am one and I'm disgusted.
That said, I'm perfectly willing to accept the idea of a young earth. Of course, there is something that I'd like to see first. Evidence. It helps. I've seen some already, but not quite enough to convince me yet.
"The moon gives kinetic energy to the waves by its gravitational field. Newton's Second Law (which says that when one object exerts a force on a second object, the second object exerts an opposite force on the first object) does not apply to fields."
The moon's field acts on the tides, and the tides' fields act on the moon.
"As you can see, the moon would not "expend" more energy moving the tides if we were using tidal power."
It would expend more energy, just a negligible amount. If we held the tides back a little, they would exert more force on the moon, causing it to fall away from the earth a little faster.
"You can't exhaust the moon's "supply" of gravity."
Right. We'd be talking about exhauting the moon's supply of kinetic energy, which is very large but finite.
Slashdot Mirror
I love your post, but I have a few questions. For example, I'd rather see chain-reacting radioactives being used to make electricity than sitting in missile silos. For that matter, why can't we just dump the radioactives down a subduction fault? They're heavy, so won't they sink into the mantle quite nicely?
Yes, I'm aware that we can't simply dilute stuff like Strontium 90 into seawater because it gets concentrated with calcium into the animals higher on the food chain.
"Remember Nuclear power in the 1950's? Remember how it would provide electricity so cheap as to be free? How it would be completely safe? The reality has turned out to be somewhat different, has it not?"
:) Sorry, I couldn't resist.
The problem is not with nuclear power - it is with people. Nuclear power is a very useful tool, and it can be used to provide electricity so cheap as to be free. It still can be everything they promised, including safe if we can find a way to make electricity that isn't useful as a weapon. IEC fusion shows some promise in this area.
Remember, fission doesn't kill people, people kill people.
"Also, there are social implications - unemployment and the death of an industry. Do we really want to cause the death of an industry for the sake of cheap electricity?"
Sure we do. Why not. I'd like to see the art, music, and movies industries replaced, as well as big oil, big software, and big medicine. I'd like to see them replaced by something that frees people instead of binding them.
As for unemployment, it is very low in the US right now - so low that industries are having amazing difficulty recruiting and hanging on to employees. A touch of unemployment is healthy for the industries you seem to like so much. There is a balance to be had there. Low unemployment can trigger inflation, due to companies having to give their employees all sorts of incentives and then having to raise prices for the consumer. The employees in high-demand industries will not suffer, but employees in low-demand industries will because cost of living will rise but their paychecks won't. This could artificially widen the income gap between rich and poor.
"The millions of people who work in electricity plants, where nuclear reactors are used responsibly by the government, will beg to differ on that one."
Ummm... used responsibly by the government? There's been lots of nuclear accidents caused by governments besides just the famous ones. There have also been deliberate misuses of nuclear power by governments. Hiroshima and Nagasaki spring to mind. You seem to put undue trust in government.
As for millions of people who work in electricity plants, their skills will be useful elsewhere. Trained engineers can find jobs, if they don't mind a little retraining. Plus, I don't think there's really millions of them.
Any good docter would love to become obsolete. Why should electrical engineers be any different? I have mixed feelings about genetic algorithms and AI eventually replacing me as a programmer, but I'd like to see it happen.
"So, from a social and practical perspective I must be sceptical."
So should we all. However, you seem more cynical than skeptical.
"We must not embrace new technologies solely because they are new, but rather because they improve our quality of life. I don't think fission reactors fulfil that requirement."
I agree with your first sentence, but I think fission reactors could fulfill that requirement. I guess we'll just agree to disagree, then.
Ah, of course - I forgot. Thanks.
"Lengths that can be imaginary."
I know that part.
"Nonzero vectors of zero lengths,"
But how does this work?
Rate = distance covered / time taken
If the distance covered is time, then it usually takes the same amount of time to cover that time. (Unless you happen to be moving close to the speed of light.) Therefore, we are moving into the future at a rate of one.
That refers to one c, the physical constant of speed, the speed of light. We are all moving into the future at the speed of light.
I like your sig. Yeah, the Republicans are in our bedrooms. I just wanted to add that the Democrats are in our wallets slightly more than the Republicans. Either way...
"All your pants are belong to us!"
"You underestimate the value of a CD."
You're not talking about value, you're talking about cost. Value is subjective, varying wildly from one listener to another.
"What's wrong with crime prevention."
Nothing, per se, but there are many wrong ways to prevent crime. Legal bullying of ISPs for something their users did? That's crime prevention, and it's wrong.
"I don't understand why people are so defensive of pirates. I hear people talking about it all the time, and they don't feel in the least bit guilty about the fact that they're committing a criminal act."
If people believe a law is stupid or wrong, they'll be quite proud of breaking it. Speeding is one example of many.
If you want to convince people that "piracy" is wrong, you first have to convince them that copyright is right.
"How would you feel if something you'd spent 6-months of your life creating was being given away free?"
Not 6 months, but I've put one and a half months into a piece of free software: cfract, a continued fraction converter. It's quick and dirty but quickly getting better.
"someone is being denied the income from their copyrighted works."
Who says they deserve that income?
Neither nature nor man rewards effort. Only results get rewarded - thus, the argument that artists deserve money because they work hard doesn't work at all. Plenty of artists work hard - yet only the Britney Spears of the world get rich.
The RIAA doesn't reward effort either. They reward looks and dancing ability.
How is copying music, theft?
How is descrambling radio waves, stealing cable?
How is downloading e-books for free, piracy?
Someone please explain to me why it is wrong to copy something that can be coped endlessly at no expense to the author.
Non-physical objects, people - what does the artist lose? By your standards, it is wrong for me to listen to music cds from the library, or read books from the library, or listen to music but not commercials on the radio.
By your standards, even having a mute button on the tv remote control is "enabling piracy." What, you mean fans of a tv show might not want to watch commercials? Horrors! Let's tie them down and turn the volume up!
Someone explain to me the difference here, please.
Exposure is the only thing that can get an artist sales, and thus food and rent. Exposure comes before anything else. Why do so many artists sign up with the record companies? For one thing, because the record companies have the power to make them famous.
Exposure is not only needed, it is the first thing needed. Those "friends in the recording industry here in Nova Scotia" may be better off because of things like Napster. They certainly are not starving because of Napster. They are starving because either their music isn't popular right now or because the RIAA members haven't seen fit to give them their 15 minutes of fame yet.
Would I have ever bought an Arthur C Clarke or Larry Niven book if I hadn't first seen them in the library or at el cheapo used book sales? Because I read them for free when I was young, I bought many books when I got older.
Open source? Maybe the GPL needs two of those, but open source doesn't and free software doesn't. They just need open channels of communication.
Personally, I see no difference between rule of law and rule of force. It is part of the curse of living under human rule that we are doomed to suffer both. Not that I'm ungrateful for what we have now, but the people in charge in the US got there by force and they maintain their power by force.
"You guys always bitch about how everyone should respect Linus's IP by not violating his product's license, why not show the same respect for Apple? Oops, I forgot, IP rights only apply to GPLed material..."
You have overgeneralized. I think it would be wonderful if someone violated Linux's license. Linux could use some fair, skilled competition from people who wanted to build a better OS, not just make lots of money. Of course there's always BSD, but I don't know much about that yet. Will learn, as soon as I have time.
Don't get me wrong: I love Linux and Linus, I just don't like the GPL.
"Microsoft clobbered Apple -- and the rest of the industry -- with openness."
That was IBM, not MS. Even IBM didn't want to build an open system, they were forced into because Apple already had such a lead that IBM didn't have time to design a closed system. When clonemakers reverse-engineered the PC, IBM sued them and lost.
Microsoft was never for openness, and neither was IBM. The US courts and IBM clonemakers were responsible for cheap, open PCs.
"Linux itself exists only because Microsoft created the modern microcomputer industry, where standardized, fully-documented hardware was available at reasonable prices dictated by a competitive marketplace."
Intel created the modern microcomputer industry. IBM helped them with the software side. The competitive marketplace, again, existed because of the PC clonemakers and the US courts, in spite of IBM. Microsoft never even entered the picture.
"It's no coincidence that Linux was first developed for the same hardware platform as DOS."
Coincidence? That was Linus' personal decision: beacuse the 386 was fairly cheap and fairly capable. Because Intel made a good, cheap chip. Not because of MS.
"Microsoft has always been open and competitive. They encourage competition and thrive on it."
MS is an anticompetitive cartel. They use anything from copyright law to patent law to contract law to undocumented features to make sure their competition does not have a chance.
"Is it really that suprising that a company who thinks of their gui as the crown jewel of their company would do anything to protect it?"
This is not protection, it's an attack.
"...expressly forbidden by apple..."
Who gave apple the authority to forbid?
"unauthorized reverse-engineering of its software."
Nobody needs authorization to reverse-engineer software. That's totally legal. As for any EULAs, who says these people were the ones to click "okay"?
You are making assumptions.
"Apple is a company. Heaven forbid they would want to make money and defend themselves...oh my, can't have that."
:)
Defend themselves? They are attacking their own fans. This is not defense, this is one more in a long series of unprovoked attacks.
As for making money, Apple ain't too good at that either.
"I suspect I will be flamed and modded down
for this, but it is the truth. Deal with it."
You are very arrogent. You preach your personal opinion as if it was some high and mighty truth. You must think you are so profound.
Share your opinion, please.
Speak your mind.
But please, stuff the attitude.
Here's an idea - fund NASA and government social programs with a combination of lotteries and donations. Yeah, the rich should give to the poor, but the poor should not take from the rich. Let the donators decide who will be funded.
You'd have plenty of room for fuel, but you'd have two problems:
DS1 is light, the Space Shuttle is massive. Acceleration would be very slow. You'd eventually get there, but it'd take quite awhile, even accelerating the whole time.
DS1 needed 2.5 kilowatts to generate as much thrust as the weight of a piece of paper. In order to get something the mass of the Shuttle to get there, you'd need a powerful, light nuclear reactor. Nuclear reactors are hard to make light enough - there's a lot of energy per unit mass, but not really enough when you're doing a manned trip using an ion drive.
A nerva or vasimir(sp?) drive might work better. If you could make a large, light, reflective sheet, you could use it as a solar sail.
"sounds(!): NONE! one of the 1st things I do on a Win box is turn off all sounds (though I haven't found out how to turn off the PC speaker beep when the trashcan empties)"
:) As an added bonus, I don't have to worry about that magnet right next to my hard drive. Yeah, I know it won't hurt anything, but...
I used the screwdriver solution.
The PC speaker really annoyed me. Now it doesn't.
I'm not talking about a religious issue. I'm talking about the Young Earth question, which, sadly, some people call a religious issue. If the Earth is young, there will be evidence. If that evidence is found, the Earth is young. If the evidence says the Earth is old, the Earth is old.
Creationism is an entirely different thing. There are a lot of Old Earth Creationists and some Young Earth Naturalists (Paul Hogan, for one.) Personally, I don't see what the two issues have to do with each other.
The Young Earth question is a matter of science and evidence. Creationism is a matter of faith.
Science is getting closer and closer to the truth. Most Christians I know (and I am one, btw) sit back and make fun of the scientists. They make me almost ashamed to be a Christian.
If you want to disprove the idea of an old Earth, roll up your sleeves and start working. Find all the young earth arguments you can, then find out how most of them have been disproved long ago. Do some research, find out which young earth arguments still work, and quote them, not any others.
When a Christian starts talking about how entropy disproves evolution, I start laughing bitterly. Christians who want to be believed in the scientific crowd need to become scientifically literate. They need to humble themselves and learn. Until then, there is very little that they will say about evolution that is worth listening to.
Yeah, I've been very hard on Christians. That's because I am one and I'm disgusted.
That said, I'm perfectly willing to accept the idea of a young earth. Of course, there is something that I'd like to see first. Evidence. It helps. I've seen some already, but not quite enough to convince me yet.
Yes! Lister is the greatest. I miss Craig Charles, they don't show Robot Wars on broadcast TV anymore.
> [BZZZT] Wrong.
What is *with* that? I'm not the first to mention this. What you just said was very rude. It's disturbingly popular on Slashdot.
"The moon gives kinetic energy to the waves by its gravitational field. Newton's Second Law (which says that when one object exerts a force on a second object, the second object exerts an opposite force on the first object) does not apply to fields."
The moon's field acts on the tides, and the tides' fields act on the moon.
"As you can see, the moon would not "expend" more energy moving the tides if we were using tidal power."
It would expend more energy, just a negligible amount. If we held the tides back a little, they would exert more force on the moon, causing it to fall away from the earth a little faster.
"You can't exhaust the moon's "supply" of gravity."
Right. We'd be talking about exhauting the moon's supply of kinetic energy, which is very large but finite.