But since non-human animals can't give us consent to take the milk they produced for their own offspring, that stolen cows' or goats' milk is not vegan.
Well, if you go into that, plants cannot give consent either. It seems like the only way out for vegans is starving to death.
"Giving consent" assumes being aware of the implications of what is happening. Unless you assume animals have the mental capability of understanding the abstract notion of property and the difference between stealing and buying, the act of giving consent has no meaning for them.
The Maya didn't reach peak anything--the most current thought is that they had a long drought
So, they reached peak water
And the Easter Islanders were barbarians who had no concept of land as property, so their thug chiefs took all the wood and used it
So, they reached peak wood.
It's interesting how you cherry pick the data you use. When Easter islanders waste their wood in erecting statues, they are stupid, when we waste our oil in SUVs we are civilized...
For ENERGY, there are many, MANY sources, the vast majority of which aren't economically viable because they consume more resources than they produce.
FTFY.
Thorium can run the world for a thousand years
If only we had some super alloy that can hold the molten salt without being eaten away. If thorium were that easy to use we would be using it.
I think you have been reading Popular Mechanics too much. Take a look at your back issues, those wonderful new energy sources like thorium and nuclear fusion have been right around the corner since the 1950s. Oh, and didn't they predict in the 1960s that oil shale and tar sands would be providing all our oil by now?
it relies on a logical fallacy that implies our wealth is derived from being free, and not from being a growing industrialized nation. China might be an argument against your supposition.
China was piss-poor until they adopted a free economy system.
The fallacy is on you, when you consider all the industrialization plans they implemented in communist countries, hoping they would provide wealth. The end result? Communism is no more, except in Cuba and North Korea.
What happens is that with global warming there's more energy in the atmosphere.
What causes winds is the air warming up in some places more than in others. As it warms up, it expands and rises, creating a low pressure region. Air from some colder region is blown in as wind, to replace the air that went up.
Looking at it globally, air near the equator warms up and rises, cold air from polar regions is brought in. That's why a warmer climate causes colder winters, paradoxical as it may seem. Climate is different from weather, you will still have spells of cold weather in a hotter climate.
Since the air near the equator is warming up more, it rises quicker and brings air from the poles faster. The quicker the air comes from the poles, the less time it has to warm up before it reaches middle latitudes.
If you want a fast way to get money into an economy you give it to poor people who have a hundred different things that they HAVE to spend it on.
That works only if you have unused production capacity in that country. If the industry has the capacity to produce more than they can sell at any cost above production cost, then it makes sense to distribute income to the people. Otherwise, all you'll accomplish will be inflation.
When you do not have the capacity to produce everything the people demand, then it's better to let the rich have money to invest. And you shouldn't forget that the full production chain is needed, people want finished products, not part assemblies.
This is where Paul Krugman is getting it wrong in his calls for stimulus spending in the US. You can't just add all the unused capacity of all corporations and say that if you give that much to the people the economy will run at full capacity without inflation. The chain is as strong as the weakest link, and the US economy has lots of weak links at this moment.
The same situation happens in India, only more so. There are a billion people there, most of them living below poverty level. They are poor not because they do not have money, they are poor because they have no products available in the market. Let's say you gave every poor family in India the cash they need to buy a refrigerator. Where would the hundred million refrigerators come from?
Give the money to an investor instead, he will build a factory to make refrigerators, that factory will hire people, it will buy materials and subassemblies from other companies, all those companies will pay wages that will end in the hands of the workers. The end result will be people with enough money to buy a refrigerator and refrigerators for sale in the stores.
the Alphastations would have been the perfect workstation platforms for NT, as would the Silicon Graphics Magnum, the DeskStation Tyne and other offerings from Carrera, Aspen and Microway
Considering the Alpha could run VMS and Unix and the others you mention ran Unix, why should anyone consider running NT on them?
Why would anyone run an OS that lacks a decent command language in a professional machine?
Physics simulation of rotation is complicated because you are handling matrices and vectors. Google David Baraff for a good reference. Russell Smith's ODE is a good library for this.
that's also no big deal because you can always use a decimal point in the US standard system too
But... but... WHY??? I mean, what's so remarkable about 528 feet or 1.2 inches?
Tell me, quickly, how much is a millionth of a mile? No, don't use a computer, tell it from your gut feeling, how big is a millionth of a mile?
You know what? The quickest way to get a feeling for an order of magnitude like that is converting to metric. One mile is 1609 meters, therefore a millionth of that is 1.6 millimeter, which translates roughly to about 1/16".
Now do that calculation through the usual miles -> feet -> inches -> fraction of inch process. Let's see, a mile is 5260 feet, one millionth of that is 0.00526 feet, multiply by 12 to get inches...
BTW, exactly how many meters in a kilometer? Not 980, not 1020, but exactly 1000. Now tell me, can you see something wrong in the preceding paragraph? Ask a thousand kids in the US how many feet in a mile, ask a thousand kids anywhere else how many meters in a kilometer, which is easier to remember?
Do we actually need all those agriculture products?
Yes, we do.
The real question is, do we need to use that much water in agriculture? As the Israeli have proved, there is much that can be done to reduce water consumption when growing plants.
Cyber warfare seems very much like child pornography. There are plenty of people there claiming that there's child pornography everywhere in the internet, the FBI spends considerable resources fighting it.
Yet, after some 20 years browsing, after seeing countless examples of pornography of nearly all kinds, I have yet to see one single example of child pornography. I have never, ever, seen one photo or video of a child engaged in sex.
Proponents of the existence of child pornography have only one goal in mind: total control of the internet. What they want is censorship, under their control, they will invent all sort of lies to obtain it.
I wonder why there's so much drive in Linux to abandon whatever is in the right track.
I used KDE 3 with Konqueror as my main application. There was everything I could want in a computer UI there. Then someone thought Konqueror isn't good because it combines the functions of a browser with a file manager. Well, that's exactly what I want, a system that integrates well with the web!
Then they came up with this idea of getting rid of KDE altogether. The reason I first started using Linux is that KDE is so good to program in, it has, by far, the best documentation system of any GUI I know, Kdevelop is an excellent development environment, and the API is better than any other.
If any company wished to create a new computer environment, the best bet would be to start with KDE and do some small improvements. With the Koffice suite and the other standard applications of the KDE environment you already have 95% of what either Apple or Microsoft have in their systems, all it needs is a bit of polishing.
If Apple threatens to move all of their device production out of China
There's a reason why Apple has its production in China, the same reason why all other companies do it; If they threaten to move out the Chinese government will just call their bluff.
That's if a cop tries to get you to commit a crime you were unlikely to commit. If I hack a major security company and steal their source code blackmailing the company is going to be right there on the list next to "sell on black market."
Are we now being judged by the crimes someone else believes we might commit?
Having followed the alleged Anonymous hacks, the only thing they seem likely to do is to publish the data they got. A cop offering something to get them to do anything else is entrapment.
Slackware is Linux for grown-ups, people who know what they want and aren't afraid of learning new stuff.
The first time I installed Linux it was the Yggdrasil distro, back in 1995, but I only started using it for real in 1998, when I discovered Slackware.
Slackware had this wonderful quality that if something didn't work you could find someone who had written a simple how-to on that. If you weren't afraid of digging under the surface, it was the easiest system to hack.
Yes, all science is questioned. The process is named "peer review". Do you know what the word "peer" means? It means someone who has a similar standing.
The work of scientists should be questioned by people who have gone to the trouble of studying and understanding what the subject is about. Not by trolls who repeat the bullshit spewed by corporations whose interests are hurt by the facts that scientists present.
There is a benefit to putting in the bolts the way the worker was taught to do it. It is also the standard way.
There are no standards in aircraft design, only general guidelines. If the instructions said to install the bolt one way, the assembly workers should have been thoroughly trained to do it *exactly* that way. Creativity in assembling planes kills people.
The engineers who design a plane are working under a strict constraint to make everything as strong as needed while being as lightweight as possible. It's not their job to anticipate any convoluted reasoning an assembly line worker may have. The engineer must assume that the workers will be trained well enough to follow correctly all the procedures.
If someone cannot control his or her creativity enough to follow instructions, he or she should not be working at an assembly line.
When people must follow instructions, they should NEVER, under any circumstances, try to outguess the procedures. If they have any doubt, they should ask someone and, whenever applicable, have their observations brought to the attention of the engineers. I have been an engineer working at design tasks for over 30 years, and have received many good contributions from people who operate the systems I have designed. Constructive criticism is always welcome.
It's quite possible that an engineer may not have realized some practical detail of the design. But people who assemble equipment like aircraft on which people's lives may depend should not have the presumption to try to "improve" the design on their own initiative.
without a used market for buyers of new games to recoup some of the cost of their unwanted games with, they simply won't buy as many new games.
If the software companies management thought as far as that, they'd lower their prices.
What they will do is to raise prices more and create more restrictions for users. Seeing the consequences they will never acknowledge that they are killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, they will blame "pirates" as usual and lobby for more restrictive legislation.
Why pick on Glass-Steagal? This crisis was triggered by MORTGAGES. Get it? It was the junk mortgages that started everything. Mortgages. Not general credit extension.
Now, why did the banks give so many mortgages? If you want to learn a bit about this, go and study redlining and the regulations the US Federal Government has created restricting the ability of banks to deny mortgages to low-income people.
It's not the banks that make inflation, it's not the banks that give bad credit. It's the federal government that regulates banking and forces them to give ghetto loans to people who are unable to pay back.
Houses must be scarce to have value. They will literally bulldoze houses to make sure that remains true
There are cities in the US where whole city blocks are being bulldozed, but that's not to create scarcity, it's because they could find no buyers for those homes.
You guarantee that homelessness and poverty exist because if they didn't, the banks wouldn't have anyone to lend money to and without money being loaned into existence, the economy would by definition, decline, not grow.
You should find yourself another crack dealer, the one you have right now is selling you really bad stuff.
Money saved represents work whose output wasn't consumed right away. Investments are a way to use the results of that work immediately. It has nothing to do with poverty, in fact poor people are exactly those customers that banks try to avoid.
Money is a unit of measure of value. Without markets and money how would you know how many bales of cotton to exchange for a bushel of wheat? Banking depends on money only for that, to have a way to compare the value of different things. As a matter of fact, in the last decades governments have done their worst to destroy the usefulness of money by making inflation, but banks have some ways to cope with that.
The way the economy works is that people do more work than they need for their immediate needs. They save for a day when they may not be able to work anymore. The result of that extra work that has been saved would stand idly if everyone were by himself, but why not use it by lending it to someone else?
I have a tool that I'm not using right now, I will lend it to you under the condition that you bring it back to me tomorrow when I'll need it. That way one tool can be used by two people. Investments and lending work exactly like that, only they do not refer to one specific tool, but to everything that people have created and haven't used at once.
Slashdot Mirror
But since non-human animals can't give us consent to take the milk they produced for their own offspring, that stolen cows' or goats' milk is not vegan.
Well, if you go into that, plants cannot give consent either. It seems like the only way out for vegans is starving to death.
"Giving consent" assumes being aware of the implications of what is happening. Unless you assume animals have the mental capability of understanding the abstract notion of property and the difference between stealing and buying, the act of giving consent has no meaning for them.
The Maya didn't reach peak anything--the most current thought is that they had a long drought
So, they reached peak water
And the Easter Islanders were barbarians who had no concept of land as property, so their thug chiefs took all the wood and used it
So, they reached peak wood.
It's interesting how you cherry pick the data you use. When Easter islanders waste their wood in erecting statues, they are stupid, when we waste our oil in SUVs we are civilized...
For ENERGY, there are many, MANY sources, the vast majority of which aren't economically viable because they consume more resources than they produce.
FTFY.
Thorium can run the world for a thousand years
If only we had some super alloy that can hold the molten salt without being eaten away. If thorium were that easy to use we would be using it.
I think you have been reading Popular Mechanics too much. Take a look at your back issues, those wonderful new energy sources like thorium and nuclear fusion have been right around the corner since the 1950s. Oh, and didn't they predict in the 1960s that oil shale and tar sands would be providing all our oil by now?
And the one thing in common with every major pandemic, catastrophe, and economic collapse has had in common? No one ever saw them coming.
Only people who put fingers in their ears and say "LALALA, I can't hear you!".
The Club of Rome made a prediction forty years ago that's coming pretty close to reality. RTFA and take a look at the comparative plots.
it relies on a logical fallacy that implies our wealth is derived from being free, and not from being a growing industrialized nation. China might be an argument against your supposition.
China was piss-poor until they adopted a free economy system.
The fallacy is on you, when you consider all the industrialization plans they implemented in communist countries, hoping they would provide wealth. The end result? Communism is no more, except in Cuba and North Korea.
What happens is that with global warming there's more energy in the atmosphere.
What causes winds is the air warming up in some places more than in others. As it warms up, it expands and rises, creating a low pressure region. Air from some colder region is blown in as wind, to replace the air that went up.
Looking at it globally, air near the equator warms up and rises, cold air from polar regions is brought in. That's why a warmer climate causes colder winters, paradoxical as it may seem. Climate is different from weather, you will still have spells of cold weather in a hotter climate.
Since the air near the equator is warming up more, it rises quicker and brings air from the poles faster. The quicker the air comes from the poles, the less time it has to warm up before it reaches middle latitudes.
Then Zimbabwe is the richest country in the world, everyone there is a trillionaire. Money means nothing if you cannot buy things with it.
Ironically, such an action by the RIAA/MPAA in international waters would technically be an act of piracy.
The US Congress could allow them to do it, by granting a Letter of Marque and Reprisal
If you want a fast way to get money into an economy you give it to poor people who have a hundred different things that they HAVE to spend it on.
That works only if you have unused production capacity in that country. If the industry has the capacity to produce more than they can sell at any cost above production cost, then it makes sense to distribute income to the people. Otherwise, all you'll accomplish will be inflation.
When you do not have the capacity to produce everything the people demand, then it's better to let the rich have money to invest. And you shouldn't forget that the full production chain is needed, people want finished products, not part assemblies.
This is where Paul Krugman is getting it wrong in his calls for stimulus spending in the US. You can't just add all the unused capacity of all corporations and say that if you give that much to the people the economy will run at full capacity without inflation. The chain is as strong as the weakest link, and the US economy has lots of weak links at this moment.
The same situation happens in India, only more so. There are a billion people there, most of them living below poverty level. They are poor not because they do not have money, they are poor because they have no products available in the market. Let's say you gave every poor family in India the cash they need to buy a refrigerator. Where would the hundred million refrigerators come from?
Give the money to an investor instead, he will build a factory to make refrigerators, that factory will hire people, it will buy materials and subassemblies from other companies, all those companies will pay wages that will end in the hands of the workers. The end result will be people with enough money to buy a refrigerator and refrigerators for sale in the stores.
the Alphastations would have been the perfect workstation platforms for NT, as would the Silicon Graphics Magnum, the DeskStation Tyne and other offerings from Carrera, Aspen and Microway
Considering the Alpha could run VMS and Unix and the others you mention ran Unix, why should anyone consider running NT on them?
Why would anyone run an OS that lacks a decent command language in a professional machine?
Physics simulation of rotation is complicated because you are handling matrices and vectors. Google David Baraff for a good reference. Russell Smith's ODE is a good library for this.
that's also no big deal because you can always use a decimal point in the US standard system too
But... but... WHY??? I mean, what's so remarkable about 528 feet or 1.2 inches?
Tell me, quickly, how much is a millionth of a mile? No, don't use a computer, tell it from your gut feeling, how big is a millionth of a mile?
You know what? The quickest way to get a feeling for an order of magnitude like that is converting to metric. One mile is 1609 meters, therefore a millionth of that is 1.6 millimeter, which translates roughly to about 1/16".
Now do that calculation through the usual miles -> feet -> inches -> fraction of inch process. Let's see, a mile is 5260 feet, one millionth of that is 0.00526 feet, multiply by 12 to get inches...
BTW, exactly how many meters in a kilometer? Not 980, not 1020, but exactly 1000. Now tell me, can you see something wrong in the preceding paragraph? Ask a thousand kids in the US how many feet in a mile, ask a thousand kids anywhere else how many meters in a kilometer, which is easier to remember?
they're making cat litter out of corn
Only if it's from leftovers. The best material for cat litter is bentonite clay
Do we actually need all those agriculture products?
Yes, we do.
The real question is, do we need to use that much water in agriculture? As the Israeli have proved, there is much that can be done to reduce water consumption when growing plants.
Cyber warfare seems very much like child pornography. There are plenty of people there claiming that there's child pornography everywhere in the internet, the FBI spends considerable resources fighting it.
Yet, after some 20 years browsing, after seeing countless examples of pornography of nearly all kinds, I have yet to see one single example of child pornography. I have never, ever, seen one photo or video of a child engaged in sex.
Proponents of the existence of child pornography have only one goal in mind: total control of the internet. What they want is censorship, under their control, they will invent all sort of lies to obtain it.
you can easily install KDE on either.
I can also install it on Microsoft Windows as well.
I wonder why there's so much drive in Linux to abandon whatever is in the right track.
I used KDE 3 with Konqueror as my main application. There was everything I could want in a computer UI there. Then someone thought Konqueror isn't good because it combines the functions of a browser with a file manager. Well, that's exactly what I want, a system that integrates well with the web!
Then they came up with this idea of getting rid of KDE altogether. The reason I first started using Linux is that KDE is so good to program in, it has, by far, the best documentation system of any GUI I know, Kdevelop is an excellent development environment, and the API is better than any other.
If any company wished to create a new computer environment, the best bet would be to start with KDE and do some small improvements. With the Koffice suite and the other standard applications of the KDE environment you already have 95% of what either Apple or Microsoft have in their systems, all it needs is a bit of polishing.
Go through it and look for pr0n.
And if you find any, don't forget to post it to 4chan, we want to take a look at it too.
If Apple threatens to move all of their device production out of China
There's a reason why Apple has its production in China, the same reason why all other companies do it; If they threaten to move out the Chinese government will just call their bluff.
That's if a cop tries to get you to commit a crime you were unlikely to commit. If I hack a major security company and steal their source code blackmailing the company is going to be right there on the list next to "sell on black market."
Are we now being judged by the crimes someone else believes we might commit?
Having followed the alleged Anonymous hacks, the only thing they seem likely to do is to publish the data they got. A cop offering something to get them to do anything else is entrapment.
Slackware is Linux for grown-ups, people who know what they want and aren't afraid of learning new stuff.
The first time I installed Linux it was the Yggdrasil distro, back in 1995, but I only started using it for real in 1998, when I discovered Slackware.
Slackware had this wonderful quality that if something didn't work you could find someone who had written a simple how-to on that. If you weren't afraid of digging under the surface, it was the easiest system to hack.
Perhaps it's time to get back to Slackware now.
Shouldn't all science be questioned?
Yes, all science is questioned. The process is named "peer review". Do you know what the word "peer" means? It means someone who has a similar standing.
The work of scientists should be questioned by people who have gone to the trouble of studying and understanding what the subject is about. Not by trolls who repeat the bullshit spewed by corporations whose interests are hurt by the facts that scientists present.
There is a benefit to putting in the bolts the way the worker was taught to do it. It is also the standard way.
There are no standards in aircraft design, only general guidelines. If the instructions said to install the bolt one way, the assembly workers should have been thoroughly trained to do it *exactly* that way. Creativity in assembling planes kills people.
The engineers who design a plane are working under a strict constraint to make everything as strong as needed while being as lightweight as possible. It's not their job to anticipate any convoluted reasoning an assembly line worker may have. The engineer must assume that the workers will be trained well enough to follow correctly all the procedures.
If someone cannot control his or her creativity enough to follow instructions, he or she should not be working at an assembly line.
When people must follow instructions, they should NEVER, under any circumstances, try to outguess the procedures. If they have any doubt, they should ask someone and, whenever applicable, have their observations brought to the attention of the engineers. I have been an engineer working at design tasks for over 30 years, and have received many good contributions from people who operate the systems I have designed. Constructive criticism is always welcome.
It's quite possible that an engineer may not have realized some practical detail of the design. But people who assemble equipment like aircraft on which people's lives may depend should not have the presumption to try to "improve" the design on their own initiative.
without a used market for buyers of new games to recoup some of the cost of their unwanted games with, they simply won't buy as many new games.
If the software companies management thought as far as that, they'd lower their prices.
What they will do is to raise prices more and create more restrictions for users. Seeing the consequences they will never acknowledge that they are killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, they will blame "pirates" as usual and lobby for more restrictive legislation.
Why pick on Glass-Steagal? This crisis was triggered by MORTGAGES. Get it? It was the junk mortgages that started everything. Mortgages. Not general credit extension.
Now, why did the banks give so many mortgages? If you want to learn a bit about this, go and study redlining and the regulations the US Federal Government has created restricting the ability of banks to deny mortgages to low-income people.
It's not the banks that make inflation, it's not the banks that give bad credit. It's the federal government that regulates banking and forces them to give ghetto loans to people who are unable to pay back.
Houses must be scarce to have value. They will literally bulldoze houses to make sure that remains true
There are cities in the US where whole city blocks are being bulldozed, but that's not to create scarcity, it's because they could find no buyers for those homes.
You guarantee that homelessness and poverty exist because if they didn't, the banks wouldn't have anyone to lend money to and without money being loaned into existence, the economy would by definition, decline, not grow.
You should find yourself another crack dealer, the one you have right now is selling you really bad stuff.
Money saved represents work whose output wasn't consumed right away. Investments are a way to use the results of that work immediately. It has nothing to do with poverty, in fact poor people are exactly those customers that banks try to avoid.
Money is a unit of measure of value. Without markets and money how would you know how many bales of cotton to exchange for a bushel of wheat? Banking depends on money only for that, to have a way to compare the value of different things. As a matter of fact, in the last decades governments have done their worst to destroy the usefulness of money by making inflation, but banks have some ways to cope with that.
The way the economy works is that people do more work than they need for their immediate needs. They save for a day when they may not be able to work anymore. The result of that extra work that has been saved would stand idly if everyone were by himself, but why not use it by lending it to someone else?
I have a tool that I'm not using right now, I will lend it to you under the condition that you bring it back to me tomorrow when I'll need it. That way one tool can be used by two people. Investments and lending work exactly like that, only they do not refer to one specific tool, but to everything that people have created and haven't used at once.