Orbital mechanics dictate that it's far easier to fling mass out of the system than in towards the sun (this having primarily to do with an existing angular velocity around the sun of ~30,000 m/s, borrowed from Earth's solar orbit).
Practically speaking, of course, there's no difference between throwing the waste out of the system and into the sun. The percentage of people who would honestly raise a "polluting the universe" concern has got to be vanishingly small. If it isn't, we're finished a species, anyway.
Um, actually, I'm more its a good thing that all things that we should be taxes on actually get taxed.
In one sense, I agree from an efficiency standpoint, if nothing else. Practically speaking, however, the system has evolved to a stable state without such a comprehensive tax system. Changing one of the underpinnings at this stage would be grossly unfair to all the people suddenly being taxed. The question is the definition of what "should" be taxed. The laws as written include many transactions that, legally, "should" be taxed, but in all other senses should not be. The laws, when written, took into account that difference. Eliminating that difference would be, in my opinion, a Bad Thing. Obviously, laws could be rewritten with comprehensive taxation in mind, but that would be the government giving up income...this is a fairly rare occurence. Instead, this would end up being one more push to a non-governmental currency.
Let's be honest. Maybe we need to just change our morals where instead of hiding everything its all out in the open. Why should tipping a stripper or paying for porn have to be hidden from the wife, mom, or others? Oh, yeah because the women would get mad, and others might not like that activity themselves and would judge us that's why we like hiding our currency tranactions.
Yes, it would be more elegant if we didn't have to conceal such things from others. But actually making that transition happen is, for all practical purposes, impossible. If it happens, it will be by slow mutation of cultural standards; there's no way to enforce that kind of change from above. Witness racism and bigotry: attempts to mandate racial/sexual blindness have fallen far short of hitting the mark in a cultural sense. While, legally, such equality is mandated, that legal equality already exists for the semi-illicit transactions we're talking about.
Ultimately, yes, it would be better if all transactions were on the up-and-up, there was never any desire to do things that you didn't want other people knowing about, and the government was flexible and reasonable about its desires to tax. One benefit of those things being true would be the feasibility of an all-electronic monetary system. But at that point, we're talking about such an unlikely set of changes that we might as well talk about how it would be better if scarcity went away so we wouldn't need money at all.
1) "Hard currencies" and metal only have value because people agree on it beforehand. Gold has no intrinsic value assigned to it by the universe, only by human beings. So keeping your money on a gold standard is only marginally less absurd than our current system. 2) Money is a reflection of wealth, and limiting the money supply limits wealth creation and distribution. There's a reason why there are more millionaires (and billionaires) in the US today than in the 19th century: there's more money available. With an effectively unlimited wealth base, it's easier for more people to become wealthy, not just the few misers who hoard all the gold
1. While the human desire for gold is, from the point of view of the universe, just as absurd as the human desire for pieces of greenish paper, the key difference is that the supply of greenish paper is limited (effectively) by the issuing government, the supply of gold is limited by the planet, the laws of physics, and the relative scarcity of particle accelerators. This means that the value of gold is tied directly to how much people like gold. The value of greenish paper is tied to how much people like greenish paper, which is in turn tied to how much greenish paper the issuing government decides to produce.
Of course, you already know this, as demonstrated by your second point, which I also disagree with:
2. This depends on your definition of wealth. Real wealth is best described as utility: that is, how much stuff you have the power to obtain. That value of wealth does not have anything to do with the numbers used to describe it. For example, at any given instant, you can convert dollars into yen at a particular exchange rate with no loss of wealth (that is, after all, what the exchange rate means). A quick check of Yahoo! indicates it's currently trading at ~121 yen to the dollar. So, if a hundred millionaire switched all her money to yen, she would suddenly become a billionaire, without changing her wealth in the slightest.
1) Now all people with whom I wish to conduct transactions need to be capable of accepting electronic money. I've bought several used cars in private sales from people who were unable to accept Visa. The possibility exists of introducing generally-available third parties who can mediate the transaction (as PayPal already does, obviously), but that introduces a new cost to the transaction that is not necessarily matched for either party: there's no benefit to me or the seller individually (though you could argue we derive an indirect benefit from the society-wide benefits).
2) All those transactions are now taxed. While some would view this as a good thing, an awful lot of transactions are performed currently that are not taxed, and, in my view, should not be. For example, I helped a friend paint his house a couple years back, and he paid me $100 (plus beer and pizza). I felt no ethical or moral obligation to pay income tax on that money, much less the taxes involved in being a seller of a good or service.
3) There are privacy concerns, as well. For example, who wants to tip a stripper with a credit card? How will she accept the money without disrupting the show? Even if the logistical hurdles are overcome, who wants that particular transaction recorded in a master government database? Or, more personally, who wants that transaction recorded in a place his wife can see it (as would be mandated under some states' financial regulations regarding marriage)? While you can make a case that these sorts of transactions shouldn't happen in the first place, I think such an argument ignores human nature - not to mention that even if true, since when is it government's job to curtail legal activities?
4) Truly illicit transactions become impossible to conduct in money. This sounds like a good thing (who wants to make heroin easier to purchase?), but I don't believe it would be. The transactions would still occur (if waiving most of your Constitutional rights isn't enough of a disincentive, I sincerely doubt lack of cash would be), but now they'd be in some more chaotic barter system. I suspect this would lead to increased violence.
4a) Moreover, the economic impact of that might be significant. How much construction, cleaning, and other menial labor is paid for under the table? I suspect rather a lot. I also recall finding out that the drug trade is Florida's second- or third-largest industry. Whether or not this is a good thing, suddenly taking that out of the economy would have potentially disastrous effects.
The most important thing, here, is I don't think society as a whole will, in the foreseeable future, shift over to an entirely electronic monetary system. Even if the US government goes for it, I strongly suspect there would be sudden, widespread adoption of non-fiat fungible currency, á la the liberty dollar for all the reasons I've already stated.
Of course, it's entirely possible I've just proved your point: the government should get out of the business of selling currency, and shift to an entirely electronic system. Then let the free market decide what kind of currency it wants to use.
I was going to lay down a thick bed of sarcasm here, but instead I'll just ask you to consider the surveillance, privacy, economic, and tax implications of replacing a fungible, untraceable medium of exchange (cash) with one that's inextricably linked to your identity, records every transaction as an inherent part of the transaction, and can be watched in real-time from anywhere on the planet.
I'm not a neurophysiologist, so perhaps the answer to this is obvious, but I've got a question: if the chip can detect light impulses and stimulate the optic nerve, why does there need to be cellular regeneration? Given time, wouldn't the brain learn to interpret those signals as optical input, just like it did with the rods and cones the eye was born with? Obviously, the "grain" and responsiveness of the photodiodes is much worse than that of the Mark I eyeball, but it's still a path for light information to get to the brain. The resultant "sight" would be far inferior to natural vision, but also better than blindness.
The human brain is nothing if not adaptable; I would think it could learn to use anything which was able to pump signals onto the optic nerve.
If I recall correctly - I may not, and I don't have time just now to link hunt - the Tenifer process isn't allowed in some countries (including the US) for environmental reasons (byproducts of the process are particularly pernicious waste, I believe).
It was an arcade space fighter game, not a Newtonian physics simulator. It followed the same rules as X-Wing, TIE Fighter, Wing Commander *, and various other lesser-known games of the same genre.
If that's not a genre you like, that is, of course, fine - but singling out FreeSpace as differently worse really isn't legit.
Well, since I joined before Google existed, and your uid is less than half mine, I have to say that you may not have the most relevant experience when it comes to judging the number of people who find/. via Google.
Not that I'm saying you're wrong, necessarily...just that I'd have to see some numbers to back it up.
So you are denying that CO2 has an effect on climate? And you are saying that that is what all those research hours have been spent on, finding out whether CO2 has an effect? He says CO2 has an effect, and you pull out the ridiculous straw man, accusing him of making a statement he never made. Nice opening salvo, there.
I'm not denying the effect. And, I suppose, it is obvious that there has to be "an effect." His phraseology and the rest of the content of the post sure make it sound like he's claiming that the specific effect of a global increase in average temperature and the concomitant turmoil are obvious, which they are obviously not.
I suppose he may have just literally meant that there is obviously "an effect." But that's an incredibly weak statement. Everything has "an effect." I could go on and claim that the sun goes through thermal cycles, how could that not have "an effect," but I doubt you would accept that as a meaningful statement in the context of global climate change.
And you would probably base your disagreement on the hundrededs (thousands?) of man years spent studying the climate to answer the non-obvious question of "what will the effect be."
Not if we put pressure on companies to use less oil by rasing the tax on it, to offset the negative externalities of using it.
Er...yes. That's what I meant when I said "more draconian enforcement." The initial punitive tax would have to become a more punitive tax as the cost of oil decreased. I'm not sure what you're arguing, here.
No speculation, there is plenty of data showing that environmental regulations have nearly always lead to reductions in cost. Fancy that, beign more efficient is cheaper. Who woulda thunk it?
And there was plenty of data showing that Enron was a quality stock. The economy, as a result of human interaction, is significantly less obviously deterministic than the climate or any other set of physical processes, and the impact on the economy of regulation is highly unpredictable. The gap between "nearly always" and "always" really illustrates the difference: 11.2 km/s isn't "nearly always" escape velocity.
The gap between "nearly always" and "always" needs to be filled by some actual analysis of:
1) What the plan will be 2) What implementing the plan will cost 3) What not implementing the plan will cost
Funny, I always thought it was the appeals to Do Nothing that skipped the real cost-benefit analysis by cherry picking their figures. Economic harm is trumped, while any economic growth due to new industries and better efficiency is glossed over.
As opposed to environmental harm being trumpeted, while any economic cost due to complete replacement of the world's energy infrastucture is glossed over. How is that better?
When you come right down to it, global warming (or climate change, or whatever we want to call it) is only important insofar as it has an effect on how we as a species and as a collection of cultures and societies live on the planet. That's quantifiable in economic terms. There is a direct correlation between the strength of nations' economies and the quality of life within those nations.
The advantage of this is it gives a convenient metric by which to judge potential courses of action. Doing Something always has a cost, and one that is largely unaddressed by the people most often heard ringing the climate change bell. Doing Nothing also always has a cost, and one that is largely unaddressed by the people most often heard ringing the economic cost bell.
I have only recently heard (and then only once, the paper produced in the UK and reported on either here or arstechnica not too long ago) about someone doing an actual analysis of what the cost of Doing Nothing is, along with the cost of Doing Something.
Why isn't that the sort of thing everyone concerned with climate change is doing? Why does it seem that all we ever hear are ice shelves melting, sea levels rising, d
We dump billions of tons of C02 (heat trapping gas) into the atmosphere annually and it is accumulating. How could this not be having an effect? Wishful thinking?
Good thing you're here to explain how simple it is. Too bad we wasted all those research hours of all those climatologists studying and trying to model what they called a massively complex system, when in fact, you had the simple, obvious answer all along.
You really should have spoken up sooner.
I think we owe to future generations to at least make an effort to slow the damage we are doing
No, we owe it to future generations to address the problem effectively. No one gives two hoots about "how hard we tried." All they're going to care about is a) whether the climate has changed for the worse, and/or b) how they are equipped to deal with the climate. We owe it to future generations to ensure that there is a livable world for them to inherit.
Preventing climate change is one possible approach to this. Mitigating its effects is another. We should probably do the one that has the best chance of actually working, because "sorry, we meant to help" doesn't cut it.
The climate deniers will whine that this might cost the economy $$$
You think that the sort of fundamental, sweeping changes required to reverse the current trend might not cost "the economy" (which is really a euphemism for "people," or, more specifically, "the poor" - you know, the ones who can't just go out and buy a new car because you want to save the planet)? Bottom line: you want to change every facet of our energy, manufacturing, and transportation sectors. How could this not cost the economy money? Wishful thinking?
(Incidentally, I'm unaware of anyone who is a "climate denier." I'm reasonably sure everyone agrees that there is a climate.)
how about the Trillion dollars spent on misadventures in Iraq? Would it cost more than that?
Shockingly bad logic. The fact that money is being ill-spent in one place does not support the contention that it would be better spent in a specific other place, it only supports the contention that it should not have been spent there. That is: if I blow $200 at a casino, it does not follow that I should spend (or even that I should have spent) $200 on lottery tickets. All it means is I should probably have spent my $200 not at a casino.
Consider the trade deficit benefits of importing less oil, the price for oil would probably drop along with this further improving the deficit
True. Of course, that will simply increase the economic pressure to use oil, which will require more draconian enforcement to prevent it...but then, the inherent problems in fighting basic economics are clearly not a concern, here.
Conservation efforts will have offsetting economic benefits.
Complete speculation. This is no more or less irrational than someone claiming that climate change will have offsetting environmental benefits.
Putting money into locally constructed nuclear or renewables is money kept in country and not sent out to purchase oil from volatile regions
I couldn't agree more. If I could arrange it, I would have a nuclear power plant on my street. Preferably a modern design. Even more preferably, a plant which was part of an infrastructure including reprocessing spent fuel.
Of course, this sort of thing is made less likely by people like the Greenpeace muckety-muck who got on TV during a hazardous material transportation show on Discovery, referring to the cannisters used to transport nuclear waste as "mobile Chernobyl[s]." This after seeing that the cannister didn't spill any of its contents upon being struck broadside by a rocket-propelled locomotive.
But I bet he's very concerned about the climate.
The point of all this? We need to address the problem. Denying it doesn't do any good. But appeals to Do Something(tm) always seem to skip doing any real cost-benefit analysis. We can't just Do Something,
First, each full game is supposed to have 50 achivements totaling 1000 points. This hasn't been strictly adhered to, but it's what's supposed to happen.
Second, 360voice.com will give you a list of the top gamerscore holders that have registered their machines on the site (a sample of ~70,000). The top gamerscore is over 100k, #50 is almost 60,000, and #100 is almost 50,000. #35,000 comes in with a score of 3110 on 31 games played. The bottom of the list, of course, contains people who have scores of zero (though I did see one guy with a score of zero and twenty-three games played, which is at least mildly incredible to me).
I'm not sure what this says, and I suspect the sort of person who signs up to have his XBox 360 "blog" about his gaming habits skews the results towards higher gamerscores, but it's interesting nonetheless.
Exactly. Most of the achievement points in most titles are notably difficult (or at the very least, time-consuming) to acquire. I've put over 100 hours into Oblivion, and I'm still nowhere near having all the achievements, since I haven't worked my way to the top of each guild. DoA has an achievement for getting an "A" ranking in online play (also for lower rankings, of course), Kameo has achievements for practically perfect scores in online play as well as in single player, PGR3 has achievements for owning every car of a given make, and so forth.
Of course, there are games where just beating it gets you all the achievements (NFS:MW, I'm looking at you), but those are, in my experience, the exception rather than the rule.
Either that, or I'm way worse at video gaming than I thought I was.
I've got six digits attached to my name (curse those last 5,494 people who clubbed up to screw me!), so it's not a market I've personally entered, but I'm sure I've heard of it happening.
On the other hand, a quick ebay search on "slashdot" doesn't turn up any current auctions, which means the market may have dried up.
Alternatively, of course, it could mean that the market is pristinely untapped. You should probably put your uid up for bid and see what happens.
The only thing that surprises me about this is that they're surprised - achievements are the first thing I said "wow, that's a good idea" to when I got my 360. It just seems obvious that in a hobby where people used to mail Polaroids of arcade machine high-score screens to each other (and to gaming mags) something like this would catch on like wildfire.
The encouraging thing is that, so far, I haven't heard of too many games (and the ones that are guilty of it are from EA...no shock there) that have stupidly easy achievements included just as a way to encourage people to buy them ($60 for a meh game, but with a guaranteed 1000 points attached). My gamerscore is a paltry 4600 or so, but even I've been lured into trying certain things over and over just to get an elusive achievement.
Looked at objectively, of course, it's ridiculous - but subjectively, it hearkens back to the console games the eighties and nineties, where you'd obsessively try to beat Facility in less than two minutes to get a new cheat code, or spend an hour jumping on Goombas to get 99 lives.
Sure, the points can't be redeemed for anything - but since when have high scores in games, or unlocking all the secrets, or beating Mike Tyson, ever been redeemable for anything? Really, all this indicates is that, while the days of gamers striving for the number one high score have been supplanted by most games being story-based (or at least, game-completion based), there's still an attracting to having a number that says you're exactly this much better or worse than the next guy.
Hell, haven't there been cases where a low slashdot uid has been sold on ebay? It's all about cachet amongst a certain type of geek/nerd/gamer, and they're surprised that a metric for providing exactly that cachet is popular?
The company I currently work for does something that sounds similar: you're given a list of a few dozen (maybe 50-ish) adjectives, and asked to check the ones that you believe describe you. Then you're given an identical screen and asked to check the ones that you believe you should exhibit.
When I was called in for the interview, they showed me the results of the survey, and I was astounded at how accurate a profile of my work personality they had come up with. It was almost frightening. Of course, as I assume most people do, I pretty much just breezed through both screens, which might be part of why it worked.
In any event, I got the job, and I'm glad I did; this is actually the best group of people I've ever worked with.
The point, though, is that the test (which I originally blew off as ridiculous HR fluff) was shockingly accurate about me.
The statistical argument against Ice-9 doesn't hold water (yuk-yuk) without knowing the number of possible permutations that can occur (and how long it takes to try a new one). If there are on the order of 10^45 molecules of water on the planet (16 grams is one mole, and according to this the mass of the oceans is on the order of 10^24 grams), but there are 10^4500 permutations, it's entirely conceivable that such an accident hasn't happened.
This is the same logic that dictates that no two snowflakes are identical.
Of course, this is not to say that I believe there is an Ice-9, but I don't like the argument against it.
I'm spectacularly unexcited about video over the internet. I've downloaded video, sure (insert one-handed downloading joke here), but I don't find it any more or less exciting than a lot of the other stuff available. Hell, the Gutenberg Project is more intriguing than yet another way to serve up advertising.
HOWEVER:
If video drives mainstream acceptance of P2P (and by mainstream, I mean corporate), then it's possible that ISPs won't be able to hide behind the "all you send is clicks and text" rationale that so shakily supports their asynchronous bandwidth scams^W schemes^W services.
Nerd enough to read "Brian Posehn" as "Brian Posleen."
But not nerd enough to know what the hell "nerd core" is. Weird Al is nerd core? MC Hawking is more than a gag, it's representative of a musical style?
I must be getting old./me turns on Exile On Coldharbour Lane
Slashdot Mirror
We can't get a follow up to Advent Rising or another episode of SiN, but we can get an N-Gage 2?
That's pretty fucked up, right there.
Tangentially (literally):
Orbital mechanics dictate that it's far easier to fling mass out of the system than in towards the sun (this having primarily to do with an existing angular velocity around the sun of ~30,000 m/s, borrowed from Earth's solar orbit).
Practically speaking, of course, there's no difference between throwing the waste out of the system and into the sun. The percentage of people who would honestly raise a "polluting the universe" concern has got to be vanishingly small. If it isn't, we're finished a species, anyway.
Um, actually, I'm more its a good thing that all things that we should be taxes on actually get taxed.
In one sense, I agree from an efficiency standpoint, if nothing else. Practically speaking, however, the system has evolved to a stable state without such a comprehensive tax system. Changing one of the underpinnings at this stage would be grossly unfair to all the people suddenly being taxed. The question is the definition of what "should" be taxed. The laws as written include many transactions that, legally, "should" be taxed, but in all other senses should not be. The laws, when written, took into account that difference. Eliminating that difference would be, in my opinion, a Bad Thing. Obviously, laws could be rewritten with comprehensive taxation in mind, but that would be the government giving up income...this is a fairly rare occurence. Instead, this would end up being one more push to a non-governmental currency.
Let's be honest. Maybe we need to just change our morals where instead of hiding everything its all out in the open. Why should tipping a stripper or paying for porn have to be hidden from the wife, mom, or others? Oh, yeah because the women would get mad, and others might not like that activity themselves and would judge us that's why we like hiding our currency tranactions.
Yes, it would be more elegant if we didn't have to conceal such things from others. But actually making that transition happen is, for all practical purposes, impossible. If it happens, it will be by slow mutation of cultural standards; there's no way to enforce that kind of change from above. Witness racism and bigotry: attempts to mandate racial/sexual blindness have fallen far short of hitting the mark in a cultural sense. While, legally, such equality is mandated, that legal equality already exists for the semi-illicit transactions we're talking about.
Ultimately, yes, it would be better if all transactions were on the up-and-up, there was never any desire to do things that you didn't want other people knowing about, and the government was flexible and reasonable about its desires to tax. One benefit of those things being true would be the feasibility of an all-electronic monetary system. But at that point, we're talking about such an unlikely set of changes that we might as well talk about how it would be better if scarcity went away so we wouldn't need money at all.
It's not really a "war", it's just armed robbery writ large.
The ironic thing about your post is that this statement describes just about every war* in all of human history.
*I'm tempted to say every war, but I don't have the historical chops to be that bold.
1) "Hard currencies" and metal only have value because people agree on it beforehand. Gold has no intrinsic value assigned to it by the universe, only by human beings. So keeping your money on a gold standard is only marginally less absurd than our current system.
2) Money is a reflection of wealth, and limiting the money supply limits wealth creation and distribution. There's a reason why there are more millionaires (and billionaires) in the US today than in the 19th century: there's more money available. With an effectively unlimited wealth base, it's easier for more people to become wealthy, not just the few misers who hoard all the gold
1. While the human desire for gold is, from the point of view of the universe, just as absurd as the human desire for pieces of greenish paper, the key difference is that the supply of greenish paper is limited (effectively) by the issuing government, the supply of gold is limited by the planet, the laws of physics, and the relative scarcity of particle accelerators. This means that the value of gold is tied directly to how much people like gold. The value of greenish paper is tied to how much people like greenish paper, which is in turn tied to how much greenish paper the issuing government decides to produce.
Of course, you already know this, as demonstrated by your second point, which I also disagree with:
2. This depends on your definition of wealth. Real wealth is best described as utility: that is, how much stuff you have the power to obtain. That value of wealth does not have anything to do with the numbers used to describe it. For example, at any given instant, you can convert dollars into yen at a particular exchange rate with no loss of wealth (that is, after all, what the exchange rate means). A quick check of Yahoo! indicates it's currently trading at ~121 yen to the dollar. So, if a hundred millionaire switched all her money to yen, she would suddenly become a billionaire, without changing her wealth in the slightest.
Allow me to expand on my concerns:
1) Now all people with whom I wish to conduct transactions need to be capable of accepting electronic money. I've bought several used cars in private sales from people who were unable to accept Visa. The possibility exists of introducing generally-available third parties who can mediate the transaction (as PayPal already does, obviously), but that introduces a new cost to the transaction that is not necessarily matched for either party: there's no benefit to me or the seller individually (though you could argue we derive an indirect benefit from the society-wide benefits).
2) All those transactions are now taxed. While some would view this as a good thing, an awful lot of transactions are performed currently that are not taxed, and, in my view, should not be. For example, I helped a friend paint his house a couple years back, and he paid me $100 (plus beer and pizza). I felt no ethical or moral obligation to pay income tax on that money, much less the taxes involved in being a seller of a good or service.
3) There are privacy concerns, as well. For example, who wants to tip a stripper with a credit card? How will she accept the money without disrupting the show? Even if the logistical hurdles are overcome, who wants that particular transaction recorded in a master government database? Or, more personally, who wants that transaction recorded in a place his wife can see it (as would be mandated under some states' financial regulations regarding marriage)? While you can make a case that these sorts of transactions shouldn't happen in the first place, I think such an argument ignores human nature - not to mention that even if true, since when is it government's job to curtail legal activities?
4) Truly illicit transactions become impossible to conduct in money. This sounds like a good thing (who wants to make heroin easier to purchase?), but I don't believe it would be. The transactions would still occur (if waiving most of your Constitutional rights isn't enough of a disincentive, I sincerely doubt lack of cash would be), but now they'd be in some more chaotic barter system. I suspect this would lead to increased violence.
4a) Moreover, the economic impact of that might be significant. How much construction, cleaning, and other menial labor is paid for under the table? I suspect rather a lot. I also recall finding out that the drug trade is Florida's second- or third-largest industry. Whether or not this is a good thing, suddenly taking that out of the economy would have potentially disastrous effects.
The most important thing, here, is I don't think society as a whole will, in the foreseeable future, shift over to an entirely electronic monetary system. Even if the US government goes for it, I strongly suspect there would be sudden, widespread adoption of non-fiat fungible currency, á la the liberty dollar for all the reasons I've already stated.
Of course, it's entirely possible I've just proved your point: the government should get out of the business of selling currency, and shift to an entirely electronic system. Then let the free market decide what kind of currency it wants to use.
Hrm.
I was going to lay down a thick bed of sarcasm here, but instead I'll just ask you to consider the surveillance, privacy, economic, and tax implications of replacing a fungible, untraceable medium of exchange (cash) with one that's inextricably linked to your identity, records every transaction as an inherent part of the transaction, and can be watched in real-time from anywhere on the planet.
I'm not a neurophysiologist, so perhaps the answer to this is obvious, but I've got a question: if the chip can detect light impulses and stimulate the optic nerve, why does there need to be cellular regeneration? Given time, wouldn't the brain learn to interpret those signals as optical input, just like it did with the rods and cones the eye was born with? Obviously, the "grain" and responsiveness of the photodiodes is much worse than that of the Mark I eyeball, but it's still a path for light information to get to the brain. The resultant "sight" would be far inferior to natural vision, but also better than blindness.
The human brain is nothing if not adaptable; I would think it could learn to use anything which was able to pump signals onto the optic nerve.
Or am I way off base?
If I recall correctly - I may not, and I don't have time just now to link hunt - the Tenifer process isn't allowed in some countries (including the US) for environmental reasons (byproducts of the process are particularly pernicious waste, I believe).
Call me when I can get a skull gun.
Or leverage my dry wit, stiff upper lip, and giant mustache to join the Vickies.
Ridiculous physics? Compared to what?
It was an arcade space fighter game, not a Newtonian physics simulator. It followed the same rules as X-Wing, TIE Fighter, Wing Commander *, and various other lesser-known games of the same genre.
If that's not a genre you like, that is, of course, fine - but singling out FreeSpace as differently worse really isn't legit.
Well, since I joined before Google existed, and your uid is less than half mine, I have to say that you may not have the most relevant experience when it comes to judging the number of people who find /. via Google.
Not that I'm saying you're wrong, necessarily...just that I'd have to see some numbers to back it up.
So you are denying that CO2 has an effect on climate? And you are saying that that is what all those research hours have been spent on, finding out whether CO2 has an effect? He says CO2 has an effect, and you pull out the ridiculous straw man, accusing him of making a statement he never made. Nice opening salvo, there.
I'm not denying the effect. And, I suppose, it is obvious that there has to be "an effect." His phraseology and the rest of the content of the post sure make it sound like he's claiming that the specific effect of a global increase in average temperature and the concomitant turmoil are obvious, which they are obviously not.
I suppose he may have just literally meant that there is obviously "an effect." But that's an incredibly weak statement. Everything has "an effect." I could go on and claim that the sun goes through thermal cycles, how could that not have "an effect," but I doubt you would accept that as a meaningful statement in the context of global climate change.
And you would probably base your disagreement on the hundrededs (thousands?) of man years spent studying the climate to answer the non-obvious question of "what will the effect be."
Not if we put pressure on companies to use less oil by rasing the tax on it, to offset the negative externalities of using it.
Er...yes. That's what I meant when I said "more draconian enforcement." The initial punitive tax would have to become a more punitive tax as the cost of oil decreased. I'm not sure what you're arguing, here.
No speculation, there is plenty of data showing that environmental regulations have nearly always lead to reductions in cost. Fancy that, beign more efficient is cheaper. Who woulda thunk it?
And there was plenty of data showing that Enron was a quality stock. The economy, as a result of human interaction, is significantly less obviously deterministic than the climate or any other set of physical processes, and the impact on the economy of regulation is highly unpredictable. The gap between "nearly always" and "always" really illustrates the difference: 11.2 km/s isn't "nearly always" escape velocity.
The gap between "nearly always" and "always" needs to be filled by some actual analysis of:
1) What the plan will be
2) What implementing the plan will cost
3) What not implementing the plan will cost
Funny, I always thought it was the appeals to Do Nothing that skipped the real cost-benefit analysis by cherry picking their figures. Economic harm is trumped, while any economic growth due to new industries and better efficiency is glossed over.
As opposed to environmental harm being trumpeted, while any economic cost due to complete replacement of the world's energy infrastucture is glossed over. How is that better?
When you come right down to it, global warming (or climate change, or whatever we want to call it) is only important insofar as it has an effect on how we as a species and as a collection of cultures and societies live on the planet. That's quantifiable in economic terms. There is a direct correlation between the strength of nations' economies and the quality of life within those nations.
The advantage of this is it gives a convenient metric by which to judge potential courses of action. Doing Something always has a cost, and one that is largely unaddressed by the people most often heard ringing the climate change bell. Doing Nothing also always has a cost, and one that is largely unaddressed by the people most often heard ringing the economic cost bell.
I have only recently heard (and then only once, the paper produced in the UK and reported on either here or arstechnica not too long ago) about someone doing an actual analysis of what the cost of Doing Nothing is, along with the cost of Doing Something.
Why isn't that the sort of thing everyone concerned with climate change is doing? Why does it seem that all we ever hear are ice shelves melting, sea levels rising, d
We dump billions of tons of C02 (heat trapping gas) into the atmosphere annually and it is accumulating. How could this not be having an effect? Wishful thinking?
Good thing you're here to explain how simple it is. Too bad we wasted all those research hours of all those climatologists studying and trying to model what they called a massively complex system, when in fact, you had the simple, obvious answer all along.
You really should have spoken up sooner.
I think we owe to future generations to at least make an effort to slow the damage we are doing
No, we owe it to future generations to address the problem effectively. No one gives two hoots about "how hard we tried." All they're going to care about is a) whether the climate has changed for the worse, and/or b) how they are equipped to deal with the climate. We owe it to future generations to ensure that there is a livable world for them to inherit.
Preventing climate change is one possible approach to this. Mitigating its effects is another. We should probably do the one that has the best chance of actually working, because "sorry, we meant to help" doesn't cut it.
The climate deniers will whine that this might cost the economy $$$
You think that the sort of fundamental, sweeping changes required to reverse the current trend might not cost "the economy" (which is really a euphemism for "people," or, more specifically, "the poor" - you know, the ones who can't just go out and buy a new car because you want to save the planet)? Bottom line: you want to change every facet of our energy, manufacturing, and transportation sectors. How could this not cost the economy money? Wishful thinking?
(Incidentally, I'm unaware of anyone who is a "climate denier." I'm reasonably sure everyone agrees that there is a climate.)
how about the Trillion dollars spent on misadventures in Iraq? Would it cost more than that?
Shockingly bad logic. The fact that money is being ill-spent in one place does not support the contention that it would be better spent in a specific other place, it only supports the contention that it should not have been spent there. That is: if I blow $200 at a casino, it does not follow that I should spend (or even that I should have spent) $200 on lottery tickets. All it means is I should probably have spent my $200 not at a casino.
Consider the trade deficit benefits of importing less oil, the price for oil would probably drop along with this further improving the deficit
True. Of course, that will simply increase the economic pressure to use oil, which will require more draconian enforcement to prevent it...but then, the inherent problems in fighting basic economics are clearly not a concern, here.
Conservation efforts will have offsetting economic benefits.
Complete speculation. This is no more or less irrational than someone claiming that climate change will have offsetting environmental benefits.
Putting money into locally constructed nuclear or renewables is money kept in country and not sent out to purchase oil from volatile regions
I couldn't agree more. If I could arrange it, I would have a nuclear power plant on my street. Preferably a modern design. Even more preferably, a plant which was part of an infrastructure including reprocessing spent fuel.
Of course, this sort of thing is made less likely by people like the Greenpeace muckety-muck who got on TV during a hazardous material transportation show on Discovery, referring to the cannisters used to transport nuclear waste as "mobile Chernobyl[s]." This after seeing that the cannister didn't spill any of its contents upon being struck broadside by a rocket-propelled locomotive.
But I bet he's very concerned about the climate.
The point of all this? We need to address the problem. Denying it doesn't do any good. But appeals to Do Something(tm) always seem to skip doing any real cost-benefit analysis. We can't just Do Something,
Schadenfreude, thy name is me.
*cackle*
Just a couple points of interest:
First, each full game is supposed to have 50 achivements totaling 1000 points. This hasn't been strictly adhered to, but it's what's supposed to happen.
Second, 360voice.com will give you a list of the top gamerscore holders that have registered their machines on the site (a sample of ~70,000). The top gamerscore is over 100k, #50 is almost 60,000, and #100 is almost 50,000. #35,000 comes in with a score of 3110 on 31 games played. The bottom of the list, of course, contains people who have scores of zero (though I did see one guy with a score of zero and twenty-three games played, which is at least mildly incredible to me).
I'm not sure what this says, and I suspect the sort of person who signs up to have his XBox 360 "blog" about his gaming habits skews the results towards higher gamerscores, but it's interesting nonetheless.
Exactly. Most of the achievement points in most titles are notably difficult (or at the very least, time-consuming) to acquire. I've put over 100 hours into Oblivion, and I'm still nowhere near having all the achievements, since I haven't worked my way to the top of each guild. DoA has an achievement for getting an "A" ranking in online play (also for lower rankings, of course), Kameo has achievements for practically perfect scores in online play as well as in single player, PGR3 has achievements for owning every car of a given make, and so forth.
Of course, there are games where just beating it gets you all the achievements (NFS:MW, I'm looking at you), but those are, in my experience, the exception rather than the rule.
Either that, or I'm way worse at video gaming than I thought I was.
Oh, for the ability to mod and post in the same discussion.
+1 for you, sir.
I've got six digits attached to my name (curse those last 5,494 people who clubbed up to screw me!), so it's not a market I've personally entered, but I'm sure I've heard of it happening.
On the other hand, a quick ebay search on "slashdot" doesn't turn up any current auctions, which means the market may have dried up.
Alternatively, of course, it could mean that the market is pristinely untapped. You should probably put your uid up for bid and see what happens.
Now that you say it, I think you're right. Obviously, I never scored any swag that way, or I might have remembered it myself.
The only thing that surprises me about this is that they're surprised - achievements are the first thing I said "wow, that's a good idea" to when I got my 360. It just seems obvious that in a hobby where people used to mail Polaroids of arcade machine high-score screens to each other (and to gaming mags) something like this would catch on like wildfire.
The encouraging thing is that, so far, I haven't heard of too many games (and the ones that are guilty of it are from EA...no shock there) that have stupidly easy achievements included just as a way to encourage people to buy them ($60 for a meh game, but with a guaranteed 1000 points attached). My gamerscore is a paltry 4600 or so, but even I've been lured into trying certain things over and over just to get an elusive achievement.
Looked at objectively, of course, it's ridiculous - but subjectively, it hearkens back to the console games the eighties and nineties, where you'd obsessively try to beat Facility in less than two minutes to get a new cheat code, or spend an hour jumping on Goombas to get 99 lives.
Sure, the points can't be redeemed for anything - but since when have high scores in games, or unlocking all the secrets, or beating Mike Tyson, ever been redeemable for anything? Really, all this indicates is that, while the days of gamers striving for the number one high score have been supplanted by most games being story-based (or at least, game-completion based), there's still an attracting to having a number that says you're exactly this much better or worse than the next guy.
Hell, haven't there been cases where a low slashdot uid has been sold on ebay? It's all about cachet amongst a certain type of geek/nerd/gamer, and they're surprised that a metric for providing exactly that cachet is popular?
The company I currently work for does something that sounds similar: you're given a list of a few dozen (maybe 50-ish) adjectives, and asked to check the ones that you believe describe you. Then you're given an identical screen and asked to check the ones that you believe you should exhibit.
When I was called in for the interview, they showed me the results of the survey, and I was astounded at how accurate a profile of my work personality they had come up with. It was almost frightening. Of course, as I assume most people do, I pretty much just breezed through both screens, which might be part of why it worked.
In any event, I got the job, and I'm glad I did; this is actually the best group of people I've ever worked with.
The point, though, is that the test (which I originally blew off as ridiculous HR fluff) was shockingly accurate about me.
The statistical argument against Ice-9 doesn't hold water (yuk-yuk) without knowing the number of possible permutations that can occur (and how long it takes to try a new one). If there are on the order of 10^45 molecules of water on the planet (16 grams is one mole, and according to this the mass of the oceans is on the order of 10^24 grams), but there are 10^4500 permutations, it's entirely conceivable that such an accident hasn't happened.
This is the same logic that dictates that no two snowflakes are identical.
Of course, this is not to say that I believe there is an Ice-9, but I don't like the argument against it.
I'm spectacularly unexcited about video over the internet. I've downloaded video, sure (insert one-handed downloading joke here), but I don't find it any more or less exciting than a lot of the other stuff available. Hell, the Gutenberg Project is more intriguing than yet another way to serve up advertising.
HOWEVER:
If video drives mainstream acceptance of P2P (and by mainstream, I mean corporate), then it's possible that ISPs won't be able to hide behind the "all you send is clicks and text" rationale that so shakily supports their asynchronous bandwidth scams^W schemes^W services.
And that would be a great thing.
Nerd enough to read "Brian Posehn" as "Brian Posleen."
/me turns on Exile On Coldharbour Lane
But not nerd enough to know what the hell "nerd core" is. Weird Al is nerd core? MC Hawking is more than a gag, it's representative of a musical style?
I must be getting old.