Nothing could be truer and more important than the statement this researcher made.
Look at our most pressing problems, they are all caused by human nature . What IS human nature? It's whatever evolution shit out its ass over the course of a few hundred millions years. What was (and is) evolution's goal? Make something, anything, that lives long enough in its environment to reproduce itself as much as possible. Full stop.
We evolved in a resource constrained environment in which we had to compete for those resources in order to survive. So we have a genetic mandate to see the world and the things in it as prizes in a zero sum game, and this impulse of ours admits of no limits and knows no boundaries whatsoever, moral or otherwise.
The evidence is all around you . Just to snatch the latest headlines, look at the LIBOR scandal. This is a broad criminal conspiracy on the part of the most privileged, most educated, most well-off, most secure segment of a first world society which itself enjoys the most stability, the most food security, the highest standard of living of any in all of human history. And yet, these Brooks Brother wearing, extraordinarily successful members of that society are hungry for more.
This is what human beings are. This is the underlying force driving all of human history. The hypothetical, counterfactual alternative is laughable on the face of it: instead of war, humans work with fervor to make sure everyone has what they need and when that's accomplished they set about with equal determination to attack our few remaining foes - natural disaster and disease.
Men want to copulate with as many desirable females as they can in order to make as many copies of their genes as they can. This is their genetic heritage and it knows no limits. Females greatly prefer men who have power and resources and stature to men who don't because it facilitates the survival of their offspring . This is their genetic heritage. So we have Genghis Khan seeding his way across Asia leaving 1 in 200 Asians alive today as direct descendants of him and his kin. So we have Arnold and Kennedy and Elliot Spitzer the Republican Congressman or Senator of your choice unable to control their impulses despite hat amounts to personal dynasties being imperiled because the whole purpose of personal dynasty making is to provide increased access to desirable females. Not fucking everything that isn't nailed down would e like starting a business and then eschewing the profits.
You can talk about genetic engineering in terms of criminality and sociopathy all your want, but the fact is that what counts as sociopathy changes with the times . There's a great scene in Clockwork Orange where Alex is daydreaming about being a Roman Centurion and whipping Christ a few times as trudges by with the cross on his back on the way to Calvary. What Kubric is saying is, as bad as Alex seems to us, the same personality type was a well adjusted member of society in Roman times. What is changing society now and determining whose "in" and who's "out" is technology and specifically the ability of a small band of humans to inflict their will not merely on every other human on the planet, and not merely temporarily, but for all future time and all future people. By leveraging the collective but hierarchical power of the corporation and the systematic abasement and perversion of lawmaking through "campaign contributions" (Citizens United being just the most recent example of an enabler in this context) , the impulse to have more, to accumulate greater and greater amounts of wealth and power at the expense of all future human generations has reached its self destructive peak forward of which point there is either radical reform or oblivion.
And if there is going to be radical reform, if we're going to survive, how exactly is that we're going to change? Are we going to shore up our democratic institutions ? Is that working now
No they're not about to happen because the laws of physics that say heavy machinery that falls out of the sky is subject to trajectories determined by Newton's Laws and not legislation concerning property damage, wrongful death and zoning ordinances.
The whole beauty of the terrestrial street grid is you CAN get directly there from here . With flying cars, you exactly CAN'T get directly there from here. You're confined to an air corridor. That air corridor has to be waaay away from stuff like buildings and streets etc etc by the above. You drive to the air corridor. You wait in line to take off. You fly to another air corridor . You wait to land. Then you drive to your destination. That's the best you're going to get, and you're not even going to get that because the logistics are so bad, no one will be interested.
How many people die in car accidents each year? How many more people would die and how much more chaos would there be if instead of veering into the ditch or a tree, you crashed into a city, town, road, sidewalk, playground, church, school , parking lot, chemical plant, farmer's field, whatever?
This hits me the same way Ray Kurzweil's obsession with not dying hits me- as the feverish activity of a small group of people funded by someone with a fetishistic obsession. Ray K is going to die like everyone else - an old man whose body has broken down in familiar ways. That's going to happen sometime relatively soon. Flying cars is just the opposite- it's going to happen exactly never.
Fine by me because anything that makes Adobe have less market share is a step in the right direction. I am sick of dealing with uneditable, unreachable text locked away inside PDFs and the crappy you-will-sit-and-watch brain dead Flash "movies" that everyone thinks I have the time to sit through and worst of all, Flash-based websites that send me and my wallet packing with some message about how I need to download Flash or Shockwave or whatever, rather than just showing me what I came for, again because some misguided "creative type" (in which I count myself thank you) wanted to turn their brochure site into a Peabody Award winner in the category of "Groovy Page Transitions and Indecipherable Navigational Cues"
A Flash-less Android experience? How much to get a ticket to that concert?
You already signed it away through the legalistic terms of service with a cloud provider that computer users must agree to...
Exactly. You don't anything especially the right to continue using the service should that service provider unilaterally decide you're violated their TOS, TOS which , btw, don't include anything like a satisfactory or effective right of redress or review of their unilateral adjudication of what they thought they smelled in your panties.
It only takes one incident for the AVERAGE customer to defect from all such services forever. The only thing keeping these services going is that 1) new people are always coming online and 2) it's actually hard to offend that many people that quickly .
So Facebook and G+ which only permits real names (lest you violate their TOS) et al survive by appealing to people who are either constitutionally unstrategic in their thinking or who are posting throw-away comments of no real value. No one of any competence is going to work hard on anything so much as an opinion which ceases to be theirs or even entered into the Creative Commons, the second it's submitted but instead becomes the sole private property of Google MS or whoever else who can do what they want with it.
No one is with an ounce of business acumen and ability to strategize or flesh out the consequences of hypothetical events, that is, anyone who can run a business to begin with, is going to trust their business email or contacts to Gmail, their calendar to whatever is any cloud-based provider has set up for them, or their documents to Google / MS docs et. al.
There's a huge element of hubris on the part of providers in all this. There's a sense that it goes beyond what Eric Schmidt ex-CEO Google asserted which was to paraphrase him- "all your privacy and anonymity is *poof!* and belong to us...." and is now heading into- "your life, thoughts and work have no value and belong to us !."
Not to be too dramatic , but that kind of thinking is the stuff rebellions are made of .
I used to spend a lot, way too much of my leisure time authoring *very* highly rated highly replied-to, comments in a 2nd tier online magazine's comment section which was VERY lively indeed and the known habitue of most of their paying customers. I had built up a lot of good content that I like to self -plaguarize because it very often represented that perfect moment when topic and brain and passion come together to create something really well said and penetrating.
Then *one day* they decided that you could not be anonymous any longer and locked everyone out of their identities and accumulated posts until their readership had proven their real identity to the site admin's satisfaction.
So I don't do that anymore. I don't contribute the same level of speech and thought online I used to. I don't put *that* much effort into forums because one day it can all be taken away.
It's becoming a bottom feeder world in the online forums, where there are positive disincentives to meaningful contributions and the fantasy that you're actually contributing to society by being a clear and nuanced voice instead of a bomb thrower or drive-by artist is being ripped away. Really, I used to look at the number of people who read my posts and take it very seriously, doing research, crunching numbers accumulating links and laboring over my words and phrasing because I was convinced that the online forum had revived the concept of the public street corner, the town hall, the marketplace of ideas.
Then one day I just stopped cold because I saw everything disappear on someone else's whim .
Blogs are not online forums where large numbers of people go at it in public for the edification of the onlookers. They're pompous monologues authored very often by ego maniacs who at best answer each other's criticisms across great distances, omitting inconvenient facts and contradictions and avoiding their opponent's best points without suffering reputational conseq
You're a perfect idiot. You can't distinguish between people trying to kill you and people trying to stop people from killing you. Anyone in the world who has any power not reviewable and accountable to you directly and personally is your "enemy" .
It's too bad we can't force cretins like you and other " libertarian freedom fighters " to individually endure the fates you would assign to everyone else, while the rest of us who understand that we benefit and in fact are grateful for the services our tax dollars pay for can watch from a safe distance.
Forcing people to live with the consequences of their actions would go a long way to solving a lot of the world's problems right now. I see that a lot of Oklahoma is on fire, what with the climate change induced drought and climate change induced scorching record temperatures. Maybe God does have a sense of personal justice after all. Nah, most people in OK wouldn't be rabid right wing deniers,. if they didn't have a piece of shit alcoholic Senator who acts like he shoved so much nose candy up his nose during his heyday of the 80s that he barely has two brain cells left in communication with each other.
You wouldn't even BE here if it weren't for the national security apparatus you spit in the face of and compare to the Stasi. What would your philosophical uber-cunt Ayn Rand make of your spitting in the face of the dedicated hard working who provide your miserable existence for you?
There. That should spin you into an infinite loop of some sort.
Oh no another mod down.... the only problem is, what I am saying is perfectly true. Conservatives exclusively have denied and forestalled the change needed to address global warming in time. That is a fact. But for conservatives, we would have already effectively be limiting carbon emissions to keep us under the 2 degrees centigrade we need to be under. If not for conservatives we would right now be at a WWII level of national mobilization to reduce our carbon footprint.
Mod me down, have fun. Meanwhile, at a place called "reality" , which is different than slashdot, the inevitable is barreling down on you in full rage form. Don't like what I'm saying? Read a little history have you? Don't like the inevitable place this leading to and what it means for you? Never mind modding me down on slashdot. Make it not true.
What is the null hypothesis in this case? Marginal or no effect by humans on the climate AND ALSO a stunning series of errors on the part of the world's scientists, people whose CVs look like - 4 years HARD undergrad followed by 3-5 years HARD graduate school filled with every kind of earth science physics math and stat there is followed by another 2-5 years as post docs doing original research and subjecting their theories to world-class peer review in peer-reviewed journals. All these scientists with various approaches have all arrived through different and unrelated means and methods at the same conclusion and their theories instead of competing with each other, buttress each other and furthermore have and continue to predict the general changes we are actually seeing, and non-specialists and radio and cable TV personalities along with special interest executives of the effected industries are all right.
That's the real problem with deniers- they're essentially throwing in their lot with likes of the Young Earth believers and evolution deniers. For all these groups the sheer number and the basic nature of things that would have to be fundamentally misunderstood and actually different from what they are, yet somehow all conspire to give the same results as if the scientists were correct is impossible.
For Young Earthers, you can't deny carbon dating, for instance, because the follow on consequences of it being wrong in completely different fields would imply even MORE basic things were wrong and in need of a new set of explanations which coincidentally give us the same results. The fan out from carbon dating being an error essentially leaves only magic as a possible explanation for all of science.
So also with human caused global warming. The burden of having to account for the observed events and findings as the pieces start to lock together into a coherent whole, the odds that you'll be able to do that and still be doing what we call science are effectively nil.
Even Einstein was wrong about quantum mechanics and God playing dice. At some point, the mountain of evidence is not just too high, but too casually interlinked to supporting lines of evidence and in fact to facts which are not even related to the field in question that any future explanation is only an elaboration of the theory, not a refutation of the theory.
All they have to do is write support for the most basic parts of a computer everyone uses- video cards and input devices.
I don't understand this. An enormous amount of development goes into all the various Linuii, yet they do not support very many of the devices through which people USE their computers. This should always be have been job #1. I don't use the OS or windowing system or the windowing system's graphics details the way I USE my Logitech or Kensington trackball's driver software which gives me access to more than just three measly buttons.... I am sure people with other input devices have their own list of stuff Linux distro X doesn't *do*. What's with this? I am not a device driver authoer, so this is meant as a serious question. Why no Kensington SlimBlade Trackball Mouseware support or Logitech SetPoint support?
This is how I USE my computer. This IS my computer when everything else is working well
Interesting but I have to say it's a bit of an anomaly in that not that many places have as their only source of electricity only very dirty coal plants. You're building a non-representative statistic using extremes of bad coal power stations. On the other extreme, I know people who can opt to get their electricity from renewable resources with their power supplier.
Additionally, here are some points you're missing :
1) the EV is a disintermediating technology which frees vehicle owners from an only-dirty option, gas. IT enables them to get power from whatever cleaner current or, especially, future source of power is or becomes available and furthermore incentivizes such by creating a ready market for any players that want to enter the field.
2) EVs create a fat, ready target for mass carbon reduction via the retrofitting of coal plants with current or new carbon capture technology. In one blow the carbon emissions of each and every vehicle which derives its energy from such plants will be lowered without owners having to upgrade or change their cars in any way. This is a big deal.
3) Although I am sure your intentions are good your calculation is STILL merely a home grown, non-published, non-peer reviewed assertion or unknown accuracy and quality and it (sorry!) . In most of the country, electricity consumers just do have at least some option to get some part of their electricity through renewable resources, and that's just the USA. In other European nations (Germany, France) and Scandinavian nations, the non-coal based electricity is plentiful relative to the US and once again, having EVs in those nations both lowers the world's carbon foot print and creates a market for alternative energy providers and incentives for R and D in much needed adjunct technology companies, in such things as energy storage and distribution, each of whose advancement feeds back and advances the alternative energy econo-sphere.
So I really feel like taking one extreme case and presenting it in the decontextualized way you did is a near form of not telling the truth about EVs.
Human caused civilization-destroying, national security devastating global warming is a proven scientific fact about reality. If you can't accept reality, then you're just part of the problem.
You can't accept it because it obviously demands regulatory and legislative action by the government, a tax on carbon (at least! ) and other . probably more draconic measures since all of human civilization hangs in the balance of what we do or don't do.
It's the height of ideologically driven irrationality to reject a set of scientifically valid conclusions because you don't happen to like the social and political implications. It puts you right up there with evolution denier,s young earth fruit cakes, ozone-depletion deniers, tobacco - cancer link deniers, people who think we coexisted with dinosaurs, Communists who think they have more knowledge about the economy than is possible to have, astrology, flat earthers and other lunatics. You're using exactly the same "thinking" process to come to your conclusions.
No one is going to go on and on arguing about whether scientists who have spent 20 plus years of their lives merely acquiring the needed expertise in their specific field to be able to begin to do research and another 10 doing research are correct on the specifics of that field or whether Shawn Hannity and Rush Limbaugh are instead correct. That conversation is over.
Along with the fact of AGW, here's another unpleasant fact- it is now possible it's too late no matter what we do to avert global catastrophe. That's insane and the people who led us to this point - conservatives and libertarians- need to be neutralized by the government you hate so much and through any means necessary because whatever their beliefs or intentions, they are , by definition, a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States of America.
The CEO of Exxon Mobile who blithely asserted we (the rest of us that is) "can adapt" should not imagine the money he thinks he has and his current position of influence and power is a permanent thing
which will save him from the consequences of his denialism, distortion and minimization of global warming. I recommend all such people have a good long look at the last moments of Saddam Hussein's life if they want to see what lies in store for them at the hands whose lives have been destroyed by them.
Inciting the government to act against you because you preferred to act out your psychotic hatred of one of the most enlightened, well meaning and rational governments and the world has ever birthed rather than accept a scientific reality about the world is pretty much the definition of "self -fulfilling prophecy". Congratulations.
There's a huge aspect of suicidal impulses in the right wing generally who would rather see the earth destroyed than run in a just, equitable and rational manner. It's not the just Evangelicals who long for the End Times I'm talking about, it's the fucking radical individualists whose cocaine is their imaginary "independence" and "freedom" from the rest of humanity and some kind of fucking phobia about anything egalitarian and communal at all. Get over it. What you do impacts me and what I do impacts you and from this basic fact, all else follows. GTFU.
If you're not willing to GTFU, then know this. Libertarians and conservatives will and are being identified and will be held directly and most personally responsible for the consequences of their actions and decisions when the time comes, a fact I am sure they will approve of given their loud-mouthed and frequent assertions regarding taking personal responsibility, and if not, one which society by general consensus and spontaneous, individual agreement will impose on them anyway.
Reality is like a train. You can stand on the tracks and as long as that train is still some distance away you can mouth off about how there is no train and you're
here have been articles demonstrating that, watt for watt, electric vehicles may result in more emissions than Diesel ones in areas where a lot of electricity is produced using coal.
Unless we get some good watts from some other source, your electric hybrid is likely generating more CO2 than my Chevy truck.
A perfect example of conservative/ denier thinking in action. This is what conservatives / libertarian / deniers are and why democracy appears to be unable to handle climate change. This is the quality of reasoning and level of circumspection and seriousness of thought they bring to the one issue which is actually on track to completely wipe civilization out . This person votes.
What the fuck are you talking about?
Do you really think that no one has ever computed how much coal you burn (assuming it is coal you're using) and emissions you create when you re-charge your hybrid car? A thought pops into a deniers head, it *feels* right and viola! it's now true!
Before you generated your little home-grown, data free, fucking fact-free, Google-free conclusion, did you stop to think that grown-ups capable of doing analysis have done this analysis?
. 'Our best hope,' says Benjamin H. Strauss, 'is some kind of disruptive technology that takes off on its own, the way the Internet and the fax took off.
Which is to say that thanks to conservatives, the fate of all human civilization has been imperiled to a point such that everyone's fate is left to chance.
Another way to say this, democracy has fundamentally failed its first and primary function to protect itself and human civilization itself from the ravages of cultural and religious conservatives.. There is no way to whitewash this basic fact. There is no other way to think about this.
From 9-11 and the Twin Towers, to climate change and evolution, conservatism and civilization are fundamentally incompatible.
Science should consider it its foremost goal to find the genetic and/or cultural defect that causes someone to become conservative and bring all knowledge, money and effort to eliminating those causes before conservatives succeed in killing us all.
There is no other way thing can go. You can't answer the threats present to and in a modern society without processing everyone's data automatically. If your data is processed automatically and no one looks at it until your activity throws a red flag, what do you care?
People just don't get that the world is changing faster than the Constitution - written in the 18th century by Men Who Wore Wigs and Owned Slaves - was designed to cope with. That's a fact.
An easy fix here is just to do the processing and run the algos but don't let any human see the names attached to suspicious results until a some Congressionally agreed upon threshold is reached. You can't run to the court every time your threshold is reached because what's the point?
for (int i= 0; iM everytimeTheyWantTo; i++)
{
NSA: "Your honor, we want to view Mr X's name."
Judge: what is your probable cause?
NSA- "our threshold we defined like THIS was met" Judge "Uh, OK".
}
Holy shit. You're telling me the WSJ , Rupert Murdoch's mouthpiece, systematically and knowingly lied about near (and very well documented !!! ) history for the purpose of discrediting a wildly successful government initiative and substituting a false narrative?
1) I think you're lying. I don't believe you own any company, hired anyone for any R and D or even have a wife, much less one who drives a "snazzy" BMW.
2) You arguments about the poverty rate are specious in the extreme since they're nothing more than you opening your mouth and speaking words that please you.
Here's how substantiating assertions works:
Poverty rate in 1962 for male head of household, wife with 3 kids:
This is what users are presented with , cut n pasted from Google's own pop-up:
We realize that using your full name isnâ(TM)t for everyone. Maybe people know you by your YouTube username. Perhaps you donâ(TM)t want your name publicly associated with your channel. To continue using your YouTube username, just click âoeI donâ(TM)t want to use my full nameâ when you see the prompt.â
Damn.. thinn skinned ? Gotta find something to hate Google for? Paid FB / Apple / Amazon / M$ shill? I mean, come on.
"Android based devices are being activated at the rate of million a day and users are downloading apps and games at a rate never seen before. Despite these promising stats, developers of Android based games and apps are not really keen on porting games and apps that have been successful on iOS to Android. Why?
The link provided to support the above otherwise unsupported assertion is nothing other than the story subject's own story as told by that subject. In other words, it's not an additional supporting link about the alleged problem of high rates of piracy on Android. and especially it's not any kind of independent measure of the relative frequency of app piracy iOS vs Android.
It must hurt Apple to see Google's tablet being sold out so quickly
Windows have what's known as a VT rating or visible transmittance rating. Just a plain pane of glass 3-4 mm thick has a VT of about 90-93%. Two such panes bring it down to 80-86%, and that's without any other kind of coating or anything else. Some windows on the market today have a VT of just 15%, and people still buy them . To most people at VT of about 60% looks clear. 30% on this technology would give a 70% VT if nothing else reduces it.
Yeah that's right, when someone points out what libertarianism is, has been and what it actually advocates with the rhetoric of the "limited government, maximum liberty" pulled out of airy fairy land where they like to keep it, you act as though someone has aggrieved you in some particularly outrageous way. On top of everything else, you're a thin-skinned bunch with an exaggerated sense of entitlement to nearly everything on the earth, including respect for your planet-destroying deregulatory policies.
In fact, what libertarians are is pathological liars. You just told me and everyone else that libertarians are "centrist" and "moderate". What exactly are they centrist about? Because last I knew centrist was sort of a mid-point between extremes. In fact your party is defined as nothing BUT extremes in personal ( I can choose not not serve *niggers* if I damn well please ! You should be able to sell yourself into indentured servitude if that's what you decide to do! ) and corporate "liberty" , which is another name for environment destroying de-regulatory policies and social Darwinism.
. Somehow you think that advocating extremes in both corporate lawlessness and personal predatory, anti-social behaviour necessarily constitutes some form of "centrist" position irrespective of real world consequences.
Tell us again how libertarians are against Big Business when your party ran billionaire and budding mass-murderer David fucking Koch as it's vice-presidential candidate in 1980, from which position he advocated for all the "centrist moderate" positions we all can feel good about, you know, things like the abolition of the FBI, the abolition of the CIA , the abolition of public schools , the abolition of social security etc etc.
Oh and all of your "think tanks" - the Cato Institute, the Reason Foundation, the Fraser Institute , the Heritage Foundation are ALL funded by Exxon Mobil and right wing ideologues with the last name of.. whoa, what's this? "Koch" who also happens to be , whoa what's this?? Reason' Foundation's trustee while the rest of its officers, guys like Mike Flynn, are in a revolving door relationship with "centrist" organizations like ALEC who ran the "centrist" "global warming Ted Kaszinsky / Charles Manson" billboard .
Yeah , libertarians are "centrist moderates" all right. Well, either that or they're Machiavellian psychopaths who see their holy ends as justifying any means whatsoever, especially the means of systematically and knowingly lying about who they are and what they represent.
Hey! How do you know when a libertarian is lying? His lips are moving.
Lighting your tap water on fire is now a form of science rejectioism? Really? This isn't a huge PR campaign by gas and oil companies , using their ever willing WSJ as the conduit?
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing could be truer and more important than the statement this researcher made.
Look at our most pressing problems, they are all caused by human nature . What IS human nature? It's whatever evolution shit out its ass over the course of a few hundred millions years. What was (and is) evolution's goal? Make something, anything, that lives long enough in its environment to reproduce itself as much as possible. Full stop.
We evolved in a resource constrained environment in which we had to compete for those resources in order to survive. So we have a genetic mandate to see the world and the things in it as prizes in a zero sum game, and this impulse of ours admits of no limits and knows no boundaries whatsoever, moral or otherwise.
The evidence is all around you . Just to snatch the latest headlines, look at the LIBOR scandal. This is a broad criminal conspiracy on the part of the most privileged, most educated, most well-off, most secure segment of a first world society which itself enjoys the most stability, the most food security, the highest standard of living of any in all of human history. And yet, these Brooks Brother wearing, extraordinarily successful members of that society are hungry for more.
This is what human beings are. This is the underlying force driving all of human history. The hypothetical, counterfactual alternative is laughable on the face of it: instead of war, humans work with fervor to make sure everyone has what they need and when that's accomplished they set about with equal determination to attack our few remaining foes - natural disaster and disease.
Men want to copulate with as many desirable females as they can in order to make as many copies of their genes as they can. This is their genetic heritage and it knows no limits. Females greatly prefer men who have power and resources and stature to men who don't because it facilitates the survival of their offspring . This is their genetic heritage. So we have Genghis Khan seeding his way across Asia leaving 1 in 200 Asians alive today as direct descendants of him and his kin. So we have Arnold and Kennedy and Elliot Spitzer the Republican Congressman or Senator of your choice unable to control their impulses despite hat amounts to personal dynasties being imperiled because the whole purpose of personal dynasty making is to provide increased access to desirable females. Not fucking everything that isn't nailed down would e like starting a business and then eschewing the profits.
You can talk about genetic engineering in terms of criminality and sociopathy all your want, but the fact is that what counts as sociopathy changes with the times . There's a great scene in Clockwork Orange where Alex is daydreaming about being a Roman Centurion and whipping Christ a few times as trudges by with the cross on his back on the way to Calvary. What Kubric is saying is, as bad as Alex seems to us, the same personality type was a well adjusted member of society in Roman times. What is changing society now and determining whose "in" and who's "out" is technology and specifically the ability of a small band of humans to inflict their will not merely on every other human on the planet, and not merely temporarily, but for all future time and all future people. By leveraging the collective but hierarchical power of the corporation and the systematic abasement and perversion of lawmaking through "campaign contributions" (Citizens United being just the most recent example of an enabler in this context) , the impulse to have more, to accumulate greater and greater amounts of wealth and power at the expense of all future human generations has reached its self destructive peak forward of which point there is either radical reform or oblivion.
And if there is going to be radical reform, if we're going to survive, how exactly is that we're going to change? Are we going to shore up our democratic institutions ? Is that working now
Nice analysis +1. AI still hate the lock-in Adobe shit represents though
No they're not about to happen because the laws of physics that say heavy machinery that falls out of the sky is subject to trajectories determined by Newton's Laws and not legislation concerning property damage, wrongful death and zoning ordinances.
The whole beauty of the terrestrial street grid is you CAN get directly there from here . With flying cars, you exactly CAN'T get directly there from here. You're confined to an air corridor. That air corridor has to be waaay away from stuff like buildings and streets etc etc by the above. You drive to the air corridor. You wait in line to take off. You fly to another air corridor . You wait to land. Then you drive to your destination. That's the best you're going to get, and you're not even going to get that because the logistics are so bad, no one will be interested.
How many people die in car accidents each year? How many more people would die and how much more chaos would there be if instead of veering into the ditch or a tree, you crashed into a city, town, road, sidewalk, playground, church, school , parking lot, chemical plant, farmer's field, whatever?
This hits me the same way Ray Kurzweil's obsession with not dying hits me- as the feverish activity of a small group of people funded by someone with a fetishistic obsession. Ray K is going to die like everyone else - an old man whose body has broken down in familiar ways. That's going to happen sometime relatively soon. Flying cars is just the opposite- it's going to happen exactly never.
Fine by me because anything that makes Adobe have less market share is a step in the right direction. I am sick of dealing with uneditable, unreachable text locked away inside PDFs and the crappy you-will-sit-and-watch brain dead Flash "movies" that everyone thinks I have the time to sit through and worst of all, Flash-based websites that send me and my wallet packing with some message about how I need to download Flash or Shockwave or whatever, rather than just showing me what I came for, again because some misguided "creative type" (in which I count myself thank you) wanted to turn their brochure site into a Peabody Award winner in the category of "Groovy Page Transitions and Indecipherable Navigational Cues"
A Flash-less Android experience? How much to get a ticket to that concert?
You already signed it away through the legalistic terms of service with a cloud provider that computer users must agree to...
Exactly. You don't anything especially the right to continue using the service should that service provider unilaterally decide you're violated their TOS, TOS which , btw, don't include anything like a satisfactory or effective right of redress or review of their unilateral adjudication of what they thought they smelled in your panties.
It only takes one incident for the AVERAGE customer to defect from all such services forever. The only thing keeping these services going is that 1) new people are always coming online and 2) it's actually hard to offend that many people that quickly .
So Facebook and G+ which only permits real names (lest you violate their TOS) et al survive by appealing to people who are either constitutionally unstrategic in their thinking or who are posting throw-away comments of no real value. No one of any competence is going to work hard on anything so much as an opinion which ceases to be theirs or even entered into the Creative Commons, the second it's submitted but instead becomes the sole private property of Google MS or whoever else who can do what they want with it.
No one is with an ounce of business acumen and ability to strategize or flesh out the consequences of hypothetical events, that is, anyone who can run a business to begin with, is going to trust their business email or contacts to Gmail, their calendar to whatever is any cloud-based provider has set up for them, or their documents to Google / MS docs et. al.
There's a huge element of hubris on the part of providers in all this. There's a sense that it goes beyond what Eric Schmidt ex-CEO Google asserted which was to paraphrase him- "all your privacy and anonymity is *poof!* and belong to us...." and is now heading into- "your life, thoughts and work have no value and belong to us !."
Not to be too dramatic , but that kind of thinking is the stuff rebellions are made of .
I used to spend a lot, way too much of my leisure time authoring *very* highly rated highly replied-to, comments in a 2nd tier online magazine's comment section which was VERY lively indeed and the known habitue of most of their paying customers. I had built up a lot of good content that I like to self -plaguarize because it very often represented that perfect moment when topic and brain and passion come together to create something really well said and penetrating.
Then *one day* they decided that you could not be anonymous any longer and locked everyone out of their identities and accumulated posts until their readership had proven their real identity to the site admin's satisfaction.
So I don't do that anymore. I don't contribute the same level of speech and thought online I used to. I don't put *that* much effort into forums because one day it can all be taken away.
It's becoming a bottom feeder world in the online forums, where there are positive disincentives to meaningful contributions and the fantasy that you're actually contributing to society by being a clear and nuanced voice instead of a bomb thrower or drive-by artist is being ripped away. Really, I used to look at the number of people who read my posts and take it very seriously, doing research, crunching numbers accumulating links and laboring over my words and phrasing because I was convinced that the online forum had revived the concept of the public street corner, the town hall, the marketplace of ideas.
Then one day I just stopped cold because I saw everything disappear on someone else's whim .
Blogs are not online forums where large numbers of people go at it in public for the edification of the onlookers. They're pompous monologues authored very often by ego maniacs who at best answer each other's criticisms across great distances, omitting inconvenient facts and contradictions and avoiding their opponent's best points without suffering reputational conseq
You're a perfect idiot. You can't distinguish between people trying to kill you and people trying to stop people from killing you. Anyone in the world who has any power not reviewable and accountable to you directly and personally is your "enemy" .
It's too bad we can't force cretins like you and other " libertarian freedom fighters " to individually endure the fates you would assign to everyone else, while the rest of us who understand that we benefit and in fact are grateful for the services our tax dollars pay for can watch from a safe distance.
Forcing people to live with the consequences of their actions would go a long way to solving a lot of the world's problems right now. I see that a lot of Oklahoma is on fire, what with the climate change induced drought and climate change induced scorching record temperatures. Maybe God does have a sense of personal justice after all. Nah, most people in OK wouldn't be rabid right wing deniers,. if they didn't have a piece of shit alcoholic Senator who acts like he shoved so much nose candy up his nose during his heyday of the 80s that he barely has two brain cells left in communication with each other.
You wouldn't even BE here if it weren't for the national security apparatus you spit in the face of and compare to the Stasi. What would your philosophical uber-cunt Ayn Rand make of your spitting in the face of the dedicated hard working who provide your miserable existence for you?
There. That should spin you into an infinite loop of some sort.
Oh no another mod down.... the only problem is, what I am saying is perfectly true. Conservatives exclusively have denied and forestalled the change needed to address global warming in time. That is a fact. But for conservatives, we would have already effectively be limiting carbon emissions to keep us under the 2 degrees centigrade we need to be under. If not for conservatives we would right now be at a WWII level of national mobilization to reduce our carbon footprint.
Mod me down, have fun. Meanwhile, at a place called "reality" , which is different than slashdot, the inevitable is barreling down on you in full rage form. Don't like what I'm saying? Read a little history have you? Don't like the inevitable place this leading to and what it means for you? Never mind modding me down on slashdot. Make it not true.
That's the real problem with deniers- they're essentially throwing in their lot with likes of the Young Earth believers and evolution deniers. For all these groups the sheer number and the basic nature of things that would have to be fundamentally misunderstood and actually different from what they are, yet somehow all conspire to give the same results as if the scientists were correct is impossible.
For Young Earthers, you can't deny carbon dating, for instance, because the follow on consequences of it being wrong in completely different fields would imply even MORE basic things were wrong and in need of a new set of explanations which coincidentally give us the same results. The fan out from carbon dating being an error essentially leaves only magic as a possible explanation for all of science.
So also with human caused global warming. The burden of having to account for the observed events and findings as the pieces start to lock together into a coherent whole, the odds that you'll be able to do that and still be doing what we call science are effectively nil.
Even Einstein was wrong about quantum mechanics and God playing dice. At some point, the mountain of evidence is not just too high, but too casually interlinked to supporting lines of evidence and in fact to facts which are not even related to the field in question that any future explanation is only an elaboration of the theory, not a refutation of the theory.
All they have to do is write support for the most basic parts of a computer everyone uses- video cards and input devices.
I don't understand this. An enormous amount of development goes into all the various Linuii, yet they do not support very many of the devices through which people USE their computers. This should always be have been job #1. I don't use the OS or windowing system or the windowing system's graphics details the way I USE my Logitech or Kensington trackball's driver software which gives me access to more than just three measly buttons.... I am sure people with other input devices have their own list of stuff Linux distro X doesn't *do*. What's with this? I am not a device driver authoer, so this is meant as a serious question. Why no Kensington SlimBlade Trackball Mouseware support or Logitech SetPoint support? This is how I USE my computer. This IS my computer when everything else is working well
"Then you should say what you mean,'
- the March Hare
Oh no someone marked me down as trolling. Am I trolling? I ask you, am I merely trolling? Or am I just speaking a plain and unpleasant truth?
Interesting but I have to say it's a bit of an anomaly in that not that many places have as their only source of electricity only very dirty coal plants. You're building a non-representative statistic using extremes of bad coal power stations. On the other extreme, I know people who can opt to get their electricity from renewable resources with their power supplier.
Additionally, here are some points you're missing :
1) the EV is a disintermediating technology which frees vehicle owners from an only-dirty option, gas. IT enables them to get power from whatever cleaner current or, especially, future source of power is or becomes available and furthermore incentivizes such by creating a ready market for any players that want to enter the field.
2) EVs create a fat, ready target for mass carbon reduction via the retrofitting of coal plants with current or new carbon capture technology. In one blow the carbon emissions of each and every vehicle which derives its energy from such plants will be lowered without owners having to upgrade or change their cars in any way. This is a big deal.
3) Although I am sure your intentions are good your calculation is STILL merely a home grown, non-published, non-peer reviewed assertion or unknown accuracy and quality and it (sorry!) . In most of the country, electricity consumers just do have at least some option to get some part of their electricity through renewable resources, and that's just the USA. In other European nations (Germany, France) and Scandinavian nations, the non-coal based electricity is plentiful relative to the US and once again, having EVs in those nations both lowers the world's carbon foot print and creates a market for alternative energy providers and incentives for R and D in much needed adjunct technology companies, in such things as energy storage and distribution, each of whose advancement feeds back and advances the alternative energy econo-sphere.
So I really feel like taking one extreme case and presenting it in the decontextualized way you did is a near form of not telling the truth about EVs.
"global warming" is the new "fear generator"
Human caused civilization-destroying, national security devastating global warming is a proven scientific fact about reality. If you can't accept reality, then you're just part of the problem.
You can't accept it because it obviously demands regulatory and legislative action by the government, a tax on carbon (at least! ) and other . probably more draconic measures since all of human civilization hangs in the balance of what we do or don't do.
It's the height of ideologically driven irrationality to reject a set of scientifically valid conclusions because you don't happen to like the social and political implications. It puts you right up there with evolution denier,s young earth fruit cakes, ozone-depletion deniers, tobacco - cancer link deniers, people who think we coexisted with dinosaurs, Communists who think they have more knowledge about the economy than is possible to have, astrology, flat earthers and other lunatics. You're using exactly the same "thinking" process to come to your conclusions.
No one is going to go on and on arguing about whether scientists who have spent 20 plus years of their lives merely acquiring the needed expertise in their specific field to be able to begin to do research and another 10 doing research are correct on the specifics of that field or whether Shawn Hannity and Rush Limbaugh are instead correct. That conversation is over.
Along with the fact of AGW, here's another unpleasant fact- it is now possible it's too late no matter what we do to avert global catastrophe. That's insane and the people who led us to this point - conservatives and libertarians- need to be neutralized by the government you hate so much and through any means necessary because whatever their beliefs or intentions, they are , by definition, a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States of America.
The CEO of Exxon Mobile who blithely asserted we (the rest of us that is) "can adapt" should not imagine the money he thinks he has and his current position of influence and power is a permanent thing which will save him from the consequences of his denialism, distortion and minimization of global warming. I recommend all such people have a good long look at the last moments of Saddam Hussein's life if they want to see what lies in store for them at the hands whose lives have been destroyed by them.
Inciting the government to act against you because you preferred to act out your psychotic hatred of one of the most enlightened, well meaning and rational governments and the world has ever birthed rather than accept a scientific reality about the world is pretty much the definition of "self -fulfilling prophecy". Congratulations.
There's a huge aspect of suicidal impulses in the right wing generally who would rather see the earth destroyed than run in a just, equitable and rational manner. It's not the just Evangelicals who long for the End Times I'm talking about, it's the fucking radical individualists whose cocaine is their imaginary "independence" and "freedom" from the rest of humanity and some kind of fucking phobia about anything egalitarian and communal at all. Get over it. What you do impacts me and what I do impacts you and from this basic fact, all else follows. GTFU.
If you're not willing to GTFU, then know this. Libertarians and conservatives will and are being identified and will be held directly and most personally responsible for the consequences of their actions and decisions when the time comes, a fact I am sure they will approve of given their loud-mouthed and frequent assertions regarding taking personal responsibility, and if not, one which society by general consensus and spontaneous, individual agreement will impose on them anyway.
Reality is like a train. You can stand on the tracks and as long as that train is still some distance away you can mouth off about how there is no train and you're
here have been articles demonstrating that, watt for watt, electric vehicles may result in more emissions than Diesel ones in areas where a lot of electricity is produced using coal.
And yet you can't locate even one of them.
Unless we get some good watts from some other source, your electric hybrid is likely generating more CO2 than my Chevy truck.
A perfect example of conservative/ denier thinking in action. This is what conservatives / libertarian / deniers are and why democracy appears to be unable to handle climate change. This is the quality of reasoning and level of circumspection and seriousness of thought they bring to the one issue which is actually on track to completely wipe civilization out . This person votes.
What the fuck are you talking about?
Do you really think that no one has ever computed how much coal you burn (assuming it is coal you're using) and emissions you create when you re-charge your hybrid car? A thought pops into a deniers head, it *feels* right and viola! it's now true!
Before you generated your little home-grown, data free, fucking fact-free, Google-free conclusion, did you stop to think that grown-ups capable of doing analysis have done this analysis?
http://money.cnn.com/2010/12/13/autos/electric_car_myths/index.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/automobiles/how-green-are-electric-cars-depends-on-where-you-plug-in.html?pagewanted=all
. 'Our best hope,' says Benjamin H. Strauss, 'is some kind of disruptive technology that takes off on its own, the way the Internet and the fax took off.
Which is to say that thanks to conservatives, the fate of all human civilization has been imperiled to a point such that everyone's fate is left to chance.
Another way to say this, democracy has fundamentally failed its first and primary function to protect itself and human civilization itself from the ravages of cultural and religious conservatives.. There is no way to whitewash this basic fact. There is no other way to think about this.
From 9-11 and the Twin Towers, to climate change and evolution, conservatism and civilization are fundamentally incompatible.
Science should consider it its foremost goal to find the genetic and/or cultural defect that causes someone to become conservative and bring all knowledge, money and effort to eliminating those causes before conservatives succeed in killing us all.
There is no other way thing can go. You can't answer the threats present to and in a modern society without processing everyone's data automatically. If your data is processed automatically and no one looks at it until your activity throws a red flag, what do you care?
People just don't get that the world is changing faster than the Constitution - written in the 18th century by Men Who Wore Wigs and Owned Slaves - was designed to cope with. That's a fact.
An easy fix here is just to do the processing and run the algos but don't let any human see the names attached to suspicious results until a some Congressionally agreed upon threshold is reached. You can't run to the court every time your threshold is reached because what's the point?
for (int i= 0; iM everytimeTheyWantTo; i++) { NSA: "Your honor, we want to view Mr X's name."
Judge: what is your probable cause?
NSA- "our threshold we defined like THIS was met"
Judge "Uh, OK".
}
Holy shit. You're telling me the WSJ , Rupert Murdoch's mouthpiece, systematically and knowingly lied about near (and very well documented !!! ) history for the purpose of discrediting a wildly successful government initiative and substituting a false narrative?
Holy shit. Dog bites man! Hold the presses!
1) I think you're lying. I don't believe you own any company, hired anyone for any R and D or even have a wife, much less one who drives a "snazzy" BMW.
2) You arguments about the poverty rate are specious in the extreme since they're nothing more than you opening your mouth and speaking words that please you.
Here's how substantiating assertions works:
Poverty rate in 1962 for male head of household, wife with 3 kids:
$3,571 in 1962 dollars
cited from:
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/threshld/thresh62.html
Poverty rate in 2011 for male head of household, wife with 3 kids
$28,844 in 2012 dollars
cited from
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/threshld/index.html
Value of a single 1962 dollar today
$7.60
cited from
http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm/
poverty rate for 1962 in 2012 dollars:
3,571 *7.60 = $ 27,139.60
Difference in poverty between 1962 and 2012:
28,844- 27,139.60 = $1,704.40 in 2012 dollars or $224.30 in 1962 dollars
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Damn.. thinn skinned ? Gotta find something to hate Google for? Paid FB / Apple / Amazon / M$ shill? I mean, come on.
"Android based devices are being activated at the rate of million a day and users are downloading apps and games at a rate never seen before. Despite these promising stats, developers of Android based games and apps are not really keen on porting games and apps that have been successful on iOS to Android. Why?
The link provided to support the above otherwise unsupported assertion is nothing other than the story subject's own story as told by that subject. In other words, it's not an additional supporting link about the alleged problem of high rates of piracy on Android. and especially it's not any kind of independent measure of the relative frequency of app piracy iOS vs Android.
It must hurt Apple to see Google's tablet being sold out so quickly
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/07/23/123257/16gb-nexus-7-sold-out-on-google-play-store
Sorry, Apple. Me personally, I think your products are cool enough, but the whole walled-in garden thingy just leaves me cold.
Windows have what's known as a VT rating or visible transmittance rating. Just a plain pane of glass 3-4 mm thick has a VT of about 90-93%. Two such panes bring it down to 80-86%, and that's without any other kind of coating or anything else. Some windows on the market today have a VT of just 15%, and people still buy them . To most people at VT of about 60% looks clear. 30% on this technology would give a 70% VT if nothing else reduces it.
Yeah that's right, when someone points out what libertarianism is, has been and what it actually advocates with the rhetoric of the "limited government, maximum liberty" pulled out of airy fairy land where they like to keep it, you act as though someone has aggrieved you in some particularly outrageous way. On top of everything else, you're a thin-skinned bunch with an exaggerated sense of entitlement to nearly everything on the earth, including respect for your planet-destroying deregulatory policies.
In fact, what libertarians are is pathological liars. You just told me and everyone else that libertarians are "centrist" and "moderate". What exactly are they centrist about? Because last I knew centrist was sort of a mid-point between extremes. In fact your party is defined as nothing BUT extremes in personal ( I can choose not not serve *niggers* if I damn well please ! You should be able to sell yourself into indentured servitude if that's what you decide to do! ) and corporate "liberty" , which is another name for environment destroying de-regulatory policies and social Darwinism.
. Somehow you think that advocating extremes in both corporate lawlessness and personal predatory, anti-social behaviour necessarily constitutes some form of "centrist" position irrespective of real world consequences.
Tell us again how libertarians are against Big Business when your party ran billionaire and budding mass-murderer David fucking Koch as it's vice-presidential candidate in 1980, from which position he advocated for all the "centrist moderate" positions we all can feel good about, you know, things like the abolition of the FBI, the abolition of the CIA , the abolition of public schools , the abolition of social security etc etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_activities_of_the_Koch_family
Oh and all of your "think tanks" - the Cato Institute, the Reason Foundation, the Fraser Institute , the Heritage Foundation are ALL funded by Exxon Mobil and right wing ideologues with the last name of .. whoa, what's this? "Koch" who also happens to be , whoa what's this?? Reason' Foundation's trustee while the rest of its officers, guys like Mike Flynn, are in a revolving door relationship with "centrist" organizations like ALEC who ran the "centrist" "global warming Ted Kaszinsky / Charles Manson" billboard .
http://alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed
and the rest is chock to the gills with former Big Tobacco / cancer science deniers .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraser_Institute
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heartland_Institute
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_Institute
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Reason_Foundation
Yeah , libertarians are "centrist moderates" all right. Well, either that or they're Machiavellian psychopaths who see their holy ends as justifying any means whatsoever, especially the means of systematically and knowingly lying about who they are and what they represent.
Hey! How do you know when a libertarian is lying? His lips are moving.
http://www.gaslandthemovie.com/whats-fracking/affirming-gasland
pdf at bottom.
Yeah, that should do it.
One word. Gasland : http://www.gaslandthemovie.com/.
Oh all right, it was a portmanteau