And how much CO2 and other environmental damage would there be from covering vast swaths of land with solar panels? The manufacturing process is filthy, the disposal process even worse, and it results in more human lives lost than nuclear.
Hmm. Why is solar's manufacturing and disposal process "filthy"? Is it inherent to the physics and chemistry, or - like how we're still using old uranium reactor designs instead of something better - is it just because we're cutting corners like we do on everything else where a profit is involved?
Yes, it's highly urbanised, but (1) those urban zones are low density - the "quarter acre block" is a common residential size - and (2) the rural areas contribute a great deal to Australia's GDP - for example, northern Australia has only about 6% of the population but produces around 30% of its exports. The rural folk thus get PO'd when they miss out on the cheap fast internet that their city cousins - particularly their metropolitan city cousins - get.
That some people confuse their cultural conditioning to be the same as ethics does not give engineers - or anyone else - a free pass to not consider the implications of their work. For example, I don't agree with abortion, but that doesn't mean there aren't situations where it's the least bad choice (and if someone can't think of any, they aren't trying). Ethical behaviour is, in part, asking yourself "what if I'm wrong?" and truly weighing that possibility rather than glibly assuming that you can't be.
The point of the article is that we should (a) think about the long-term consequences of our work and (b) think about the motivations and history of who we are working for. Do the positives outweigh the negatives of the known and likely applications?
Interesting that you fixate on the Middle East and oil, considering there's no mention of either in the article and "Mr. El-Zein" is an "Associate Professor of Environmental Engineering at the School of Civil Engineering of the University of Sydney".
The University of Sydney is in Australia by the way. I checked, and he is indeed an AP there, since 2004.
Are your prejudices showing, or do you have something you'd like to share with the audience?
That same existence of nuclear bombs has also repeatedly come damn close to ending those lives.
Let's be blunt: MAD was a strategy of desperation, based on the fact that the sociopaths we continue to let rule us would continue sending us off to die in counter-productive wars of invasion and conquest if it wasn't for the fact that our biggest weapons would with absolute certainty kill them too, despite the significant risks of it biting the entire human race in the ass.
Did you read the article? If so, you might have noticed the author is actually calling for engineers to to exercise their own morality over their own actions, rather than leave it up to some "higher" authority to decide.
In other words, exactly what you claim to do and the complete opposite of what you claim the author believes.
The dirty bomb, as a weapon of mass destruction, is a myth. Disperse the radioactive material far enough to affect a large number of people, and you disperse the radiation as well. The concentration of radioactive material decreases as the square of the radius of the area of dispersal.
Except of course bombs don't disperse their material with perfect uniformity. Otherwise, would anyone object to standing 50 feet away from the detonation of a US M67 fragmentation grenade? After all, according to the documentation, the "effective range" is only 49.5 feet.
Oh, wait, there's this warning further down, which for some reason they've put in capitals: "FRAGMENTS CAN DISPERSE AS FAR AWAY AS 230 METERS."
It might be a firecracker on the WMD scale, but it's still an instant radioactive minefield deployment (that can follow you home) with a bonus "do you feel lucky, punk?" for anyone downwind.
The only requirement is that he judges fairly and by the law.
That's the point: fairly. Jesus was saying that stoning someone for adultery might be "legal" but it was not fair (nor merciful, nor just). The United States even has the concept in the Eighth Amendement: "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."
By its own records, in the last decade (2001-2010) the US legal system had a "known false positive" rate in death sentences of roughly eight percent (551 executions, plus 48 exonerations on appeal). I emphasize, that's the _known_ false positive rate.
It is possible to protest without damaging anyone or anything
Yes. Yes it is. And implicit in such protests is the message that you ignore them at your future peril, and that you should consider your response with care.
"De minimis non curat lex" is the principle that the law should not concern itself with trifles: in a sane and rational world, this particular DDoS protest was akin to throwing a blanket over a billboard for fifteen minutes. The authorities responded with federal charges and a $183000 criminal judgement.
What message does that response send back to the protestors?
Cool. But we should be clear, the site in question is not a store, it's a billboard boasting about a store, and the protesters threw a blanket over it for fifteen minutes.
Irony: the site map's link to its section on economic freedom is broken.
Not even that you prevented their friends from entering their house. The site in question is a glorified PR poster (kochind.com). It's more like you helped throw a blanket over a poster so people couldn't see what the owner was boasting about. For fifteen minutes.
(and oh gods, the irony of the site having a section on economic freedom - compounded by the irony of the site map's link to it being broken)
The trouble is that if you don't also keep your poor healthy etc, at some point "keep your rich healthy" will involve funding the rich's private armies to keep the rebellion at bay.
From the link: But the degrading microbes are difficult to isolate because they do not exist in high numbers in nature.
Like you said, "favorable conditions". Not guaranteed in a landfill, where the specific bacteria that degrade plastic bags still have to compete with all the other bacteria.
The plant in Japan was an obsolete design, hit by a tsunami rather larger than any planned for, and experiencing by sheer bad luck multiple redundent system failures.
Your mistake is that you treat these as mitigating factors. They are not. The obsolete design should have been replaced. It was not. The tsunami should have been planned for. It was not. The multiple redundant system failures occurred due to sloppy (at best) implementation and management, which should have been prevented. It was not. And each of these failures derive from a common, unavoidable cause: humans. I suspect that even if you made it a law that any executive involved in the planning, building or maintaining of a nuclear power plant had to live for their rest of their life in an apartment built on top of the reactor dome, humans would still find a way to screw things up.
Basically, there is no problem with nuclear power technology that can't be solved by not letting homo sapiens get within about eight light-minutes of it.
Okay, so you've come up with a countermeasure, now how would you defeat that countermeasure?
Rough draft suggestion: the maximum wage ratio that applies to a given company shall include the lowest-paid employee of any other company for which the given company is the other company's primary revenue source.
Forbidding people from signing contracts that both parties deem as mutually beneficial is wrong and destructive to the economy.
Except when one party is deceiving the other party as to the "mutually beneficial" part.
Let me put it another way. The US already has a maximum wage ratio: it's set at infinity. Think about that. Checks? Balances? Nope. Not even social ones; to the contrary, as a result of its cold war with the USSR, mainstream US culture is strongly conditioned to believe (a) that the free market can solve anything and (b) that the United States has a free market.
Sadly, despite the free market's many benefits, neither of those are true.
The US doesn't have "equality of opportunity". It hasn't for some time. What it does have is a democratic republic sliding further into an authoritarian plutocracy.
I would much rather live in a world with a strong middle class where the CEO's make 1500x what the average worker makes than a world where the middle class barely squeaks by while the CEO's only make 20x what the average worker makes.
Except you don't actually live in either of those worlds.
It's late, it's hot, I'm tired, I can't be assed to enumerate the myriad ills, I'm just going to call the spade a bloody shovel. The United States is FUBAR. I love its people, I really do, but from the far side of the planet there's buckley's I can do about the problem besides draw it to your attention. Good luck.
And yet there is genetic code we all share and code that exists everywhere but with the more originals.
Meaningless. We have code they didn't while we don't have code they did and vice versa, and meanwhile at any given time some strains of us have code that other strains of us don't have and vice versa. And it's entirely possible that any given piece of code can come and go repeatedly over enough generations. _There are no goalposts_. Goals are a mental construct, and evolution has no mentality. This is important, and a whole bunch of people have entirely the wrong idea. They think evolution is like some kind of ladder you climb, when it's more like a spider throwing out web in random directions with the hope it will stick to something.
But how much variation should be considered or counted? I find it much more convenient to identify what they don't have as a means ot identifying. And that was more or less what I was getting at.
You said it yourself: "we're all human." Whether a person is homo sapiens sapiens [strain X] or homo sapiens sapiens [strain Y] or homo sapiens other or homo other or even other is a scientific problem, (and should) not (be) a cultural or political one.
And you know what? We're working on it. We're getting better at separating science and politics, and at understanding what should be which. Hopefully we'll keep getting better.
The following is from your reply to another poster:
But we should be allowed to know and to discuss things. Looking at my once +5 Interesting now down to +1 Interesting, it would seem that we are not yet allowed to discuss and objectify.
"We" are allowed to know and to discuss things. In many countries, anyway, to varying degrees. What "we" aren't is ready to discuss them as a people in a completely rational way. To quote Agent K from Men in Black, "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it." - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkCwFkOZoOY
Notice that while each poster on slashdot is a person, all the posters on slashdot are people. As far as I know, anyway.:)
(another issue: we're trying to have an objective, rational discussion in English, a language that resulted, as one wit put it, from Norman knights and Saxon barmaids trying to communicate enough to get each other into bed, and, as another wit put it, has been mugging the other languages and rifling through their pockets for loose vocabulary ever since)
(indeed, even my use of the phrase "not even them" is wrong, because "even" implies they are closer to pure, when there is no "closer" because there is no "pure")
A very insightful post, except for one line (so I found it quite odd that you started from/with it):
What I'm getting at is that the only "pure human" seems to be the black African human.
Nope. Not even them. The trap, which from reading the rest of your post you do recognise, is that the adjective "pure" is subjective, arbitrary and inapplicable - but we try to apply it anyway, arising from a desire to have life's infinite complexities fit into a set of simple, easily-understood boxes, preferably ones with dials and locks.
What I'm getting at is that humanity is a variable, not a constant.
More precisely, but not actually precisely, from an interactive ongoing perspective over time it's an evolving, um, multi-nodal continuum that... ah, cue Doctor Who excerpt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vY_Ry8J_jdw
Or to paraphrase the Tao Te Ching: "The human that can be spoken of is not the constant human".
Hmm, that's a tad indigestible, I need a car analogy. No, a gorilla analogy!
Imagine a tribe of gorillas. Let's call the biggest, strongest, most heavily-armed gorilla "Sam". Luckily enough for the tribe, Sam was actually a fairly nice guy - so long as you purchased his stuff or at least used his bananas to purchase stuff, and didn't draw attention to his tendencies to vanity and his insistence on being in charge - and it really helped that he kept the more aggressive males in check (every so often one'd get nasty where Sam could see it, or even challenge him, and everybody else'd get a reminder of why nobody fought Sam).
When the second-biggest gorilla, a tyrant and almost as big as Sam, collapsed from steroid abuse, things were really starting to look up.
But as time passed, the other gorillas noticed Sam was changing. Now some folk go doddery and forgetful, but Sam, he kept poking through the tribe's stuff, peeking in on them all the time. It was like he'd spent so long keeping a lookout for what his old nemesis did, he couldn't stop doing it. And he started to care less and less about whether the other gorillas complained when he rode roughshod over someone. He even started hassling his own young, creating lots of rules about where they could go, what they could take with them, what they should report back to him, and his punishments got harder too.
Trouble is, it's not just Sam's young and his friends in the tribe that have noticed. Some of those aggressive gorillas, both the older ones who kept their heads down while Sam was in his prime and the younger ones who don't remember how bad it was before Sam became the tribe's silverback, they've noticed too. They've noticed the changes, and they've noticed he's having trouble holding his bananas.
Can you guess what they'll try to do if, some day, Sam can't hold his bananas anymore?
Yes, it is. _Being_ the world's police, at the request of the world's sovereign countries, is not. It's the difference between "we're here because we say so" and "we're here because you say so".
Slashdot Mirror
And how much CO2 and other environmental damage would there be from covering vast swaths of land with solar panels? The manufacturing process is filthy, the disposal process even worse, and it results in more human lives lost than nuclear.
Hmm. Why is solar's manufacturing and disposal process "filthy"? Is it inherent to the physics and chemistry, or - like how we're still using old uranium reactor designs instead of something better - is it just because we're cutting corners like we do on everything else where a profit is involved?
Yes, it's highly urbanised, but (1) those urban zones are low density - the "quarter acre block" is a common residential size - and (2) the rural areas contribute a great deal to Australia's GDP - for example, northern Australia has only about 6% of the population but produces around 30% of its exports. The rural folk thus get PO'd when they miss out on the cheap fast internet that their city cousins - particularly their metropolitan city cousins - get.
That some people confuse their cultural conditioning to be the same as ethics does not give engineers - or anyone else - a free pass to not consider the implications of their work. For example, I don't agree with abortion, but that doesn't mean there aren't situations where it's the least bad choice (and if someone can't think of any, they aren't trying). Ethical behaviour is, in part, asking yourself "what if I'm wrong?" and truly weighing that possibility rather than glibly assuming that you can't be.
The point of the article is that we should (a) think about the long-term consequences of our work and (b) think about the motivations and history of who we are working for. Do the positives outweigh the negatives of the known and likely applications?
Interesting that you fixate on the Middle East and oil, considering there's no mention of either in the article and "Mr. El-Zein" is an "Associate Professor of Environmental Engineering at the School of Civil Engineering of the University of Sydney".
The University of Sydney is in Australia by the way. I checked, and he is indeed an AP there, since 2004.
Are your prejudices showing, or do you have something you'd like to share with the audience?
The average download speed in Australia is 4.8Mbit. Upload speed is nowhere near that.
And yeah, sure, VDSL2 can do 100Mbit for short distances. In ideal conditions. Um, you did notice the location is Australia, right?
That same existence of nuclear bombs has also repeatedly come damn close to ending those lives.
Let's be blunt: MAD was a strategy of desperation, based on the fact that the sociopaths we continue to let rule us would continue sending us off to die in counter-productive wars of invasion and conquest if it wasn't for the fact that our biggest weapons would with absolute certainty kill them too, despite the significant risks of it biting the entire human race in the ass.
Did you read the article? If so, you might have noticed the author is actually calling for engineers to to exercise their own morality over their own actions, rather than leave it up to some "higher" authority to decide.
In other words, exactly what you claim to do and the complete opposite of what you claim the author believes.
Except of course bombs don't disperse their material with perfect uniformity. Otherwise, would anyone object to standing 50 feet away from the detonation of a US M67 fragmentation grenade? After all, according to the documentation, the "effective range" is only 49.5 feet.
Oh, wait, there's this warning further down, which for some reason they've put in capitals: "FRAGMENTS CAN DISPERSE AS FAR AWAY AS 230 METERS."
It might be a firecracker on the WMD scale, but it's still an instant radioactive minefield deployment (that can follow you home) with a bonus "do you feel lucky, punk?" for anyone downwind.
That's the point: fairly. Jesus was saying that stoning someone for adultery might be "legal" but it was not fair (nor merciful, nor just). The United States even has the concept in the Eighth Amendement: "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."
By its own records, in the last decade (2001-2010) the US legal system had a "known false positive" rate in death sentences of roughly eight percent (551 executions, plus 48 exonerations on appeal). I emphasize, that's the _known_ false positive rate.
Yes. Yes it is. And implicit in such protests is the message that you ignore them at your future peril, and that you should consider your response with care.
"De minimis non curat lex" is the principle that the law should not concern itself with trifles: in a sane and rational world, this particular DDoS protest was akin to throwing a blanket over a billboard for fifteen minutes. The authorities responded with federal charges and a $183000 criminal judgement.
What message does that response send back to the protestors?
Cool. But we should be clear, the site in question is not a store, it's a billboard boasting about a store, and the protesters threw a blanket over it for fifteen minutes.
Irony: the site map's link to its section on economic freedom is broken.
Not even that you prevented their friends from entering their house. The site in question is a glorified PR poster (kochind.com). It's more like you helped throw a blanket over a poster so people couldn't see what the owner was boasting about. For fifteen minutes.
(and oh gods, the irony of the site having a section on economic freedom - compounded by the irony of the site map's link to it being broken)
Dear AC, did you mean to paste a different link? That one supports your opponent. :)
The trouble is that if you don't also keep your poor healthy etc, at some point "keep your rich healthy" will involve funding the rich's private armies to keep the rebellion at bay.
From the link: But the degrading microbes are difficult to isolate because they do not exist in high numbers in nature.
Like you said, "favorable conditions". Not guaranteed in a landfill, where the specific bacteria that degrade plastic bags still have to compete with all the other bacteria.
What part of "freedom for you to choose your life" did you miss?
Yeah, pretty much you're right, any countermeasure can just get buried in fog and turtles.
Seems to have been the opinion of the Swiss, too; they've now been to the polls and provisional results have the "No" tally at 65%.
Your mistake is that you treat these as mitigating factors. They are not. The obsolete design should have been replaced. It was not. The tsunami should have been planned for. It was not. The multiple redundant system failures occurred due to sloppy (at best) implementation and management, which should have been prevented. It was not. And each of these failures derive from a common, unavoidable cause: humans. I suspect that even if you made it a law that any executive involved in the planning, building or maintaining of a nuclear power plant had to live for their rest of their life in an apartment built on top of the reactor dome, humans would still find a way to screw things up.
Basically, there is no problem with nuclear power technology that can't be solved by not letting homo sapiens get within about eight light-minutes of it.
Okay, so you've come up with a countermeasure, now how would you defeat that countermeasure?
Rough draft suggestion: the maximum wage ratio that applies to a given company shall include the lowest-paid employee of any other company for which the given company is the other company's primary revenue source.
Can you come up with something better?
Except when one party is deceiving the other party as to the "mutually beneficial" part.
Let me put it another way. The US already has a maximum wage ratio: it's set at infinity. Think about that. Checks? Balances? Nope. Not even social ones; to the contrary, as a result of its cold war with the USSR, mainstream US culture is strongly conditioned to believe (a) that the free market can solve anything and (b) that the United States has a free market.
Sadly, despite the free market's many benefits, neither of those are true.
The US doesn't have "equality of opportunity". It hasn't for some time. What it does have is a democratic republic sliding further into an authoritarian plutocracy.
Except you don't actually live in either of those worlds.
It's late, it's hot, I'm tired, I can't be assed to enumerate the myriad ills, I'm just going to call the spade a bloody shovel. The United States is FUBAR. I love its people, I really do, but from the far side of the planet there's buckley's I can do about the problem besides draw it to your attention. Good luck.
Meaningless. We have code they didn't while we don't have code they did and vice versa, and meanwhile at any given time some strains of us have code that other strains of us don't have and vice versa. And it's entirely possible that any given piece of code can come and go repeatedly over enough generations. _There are no goalposts_. Goals are a mental construct, and evolution has no mentality. This is important, and a whole bunch of people have entirely the wrong idea. They think evolution is like some kind of ladder you climb, when it's more like a spider throwing out web in random directions with the hope it will stick to something.
You said it yourself: "we're all human." Whether a person is homo sapiens sapiens [strain X] or homo sapiens sapiens [strain Y] or homo sapiens other or homo other or even other is a scientific problem, (and should) not (be) a cultural or political one.
And you know what? We're working on it. We're getting better at separating science and politics, and at understanding what should be which. Hopefully we'll keep getting better.
The following is from your reply to another poster:
"We" are allowed to know and to discuss things. In many countries, anyway, to varying degrees. What "we" aren't is ready to discuss them as a people in a completely rational way. To quote Agent K from Men in Black, "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it." - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkCwFkOZoOY
Notice that while each poster on slashdot is a person, all the posters on slashdot are people. As far as I know, anyway. :)
(another issue: we're trying to have an objective, rational discussion in English, a language that resulted, as one wit put it, from Norman knights and Saxon barmaids trying to communicate enough to get each other into bed, and, as another wit put it, has been mugging the other languages and rifling through their pockets for loose vocabulary ever since)
(indeed, even my use of the phrase "not even them" is wrong, because "even" implies they are closer to pure, when there is no "closer" because there is no "pure")
A very insightful post, except for one line (so I found it quite odd that you started from/with it):
Nope. Not even them. The trap, which from reading the rest of your post you do recognise, is that the adjective "pure" is subjective, arbitrary and inapplicable - but we try to apply it anyway, arising from a desire to have life's infinite complexities fit into a set of simple, easily-understood boxes, preferably ones with dials and locks.
What I'm getting at is that humanity is a variable, not a constant.
More precisely, but not actually precisely, from an interactive ongoing perspective over time it's an evolving, um, multi-nodal continuum that... ah, cue Doctor Who excerpt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vY_Ry8J_jdw
Or to paraphrase the Tao Te Ching: "The human that can be spoken of is not the constant human".
It might not stay gentle. Do you remember the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire?
Oh, wait, yeah, that was a while back. Here, some reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empire
Hmm, that's a tad indigestible, I need a car analogy. No, a gorilla analogy!
Imagine a tribe of gorillas. Let's call the biggest, strongest, most heavily-armed gorilla "Sam". Luckily enough for the tribe, Sam was actually a fairly nice guy - so long as you purchased his stuff or at least used his bananas to purchase stuff, and didn't draw attention to his tendencies to vanity and his insistence on being in charge - and it really helped that he kept the more aggressive males in check (every so often one'd get nasty where Sam could see it, or even challenge him, and everybody else'd get a reminder of why nobody fought Sam).
When the second-biggest gorilla, a tyrant and almost as big as Sam, collapsed from steroid abuse, things were really starting to look up.
But as time passed, the other gorillas noticed Sam was changing. Now some folk go doddery and forgetful, but Sam, he kept poking through the tribe's stuff, peeking in on them all the time. It was like he'd spent so long keeping a lookout for what his old nemesis did, he couldn't stop doing it. And he started to care less and less about whether the other gorillas complained when he rode roughshod over someone. He even started hassling his own young, creating lots of rules about where they could go, what they could take with them, what they should report back to him, and his punishments got harder too.
Trouble is, it's not just Sam's young and his friends in the tribe that have noticed. Some of those aggressive gorillas, both the older ones who kept their heads down while Sam was in his prime and the younger ones who don't remember how bad it was before Sam became the tribe's silverback, they've noticed too. They've noticed the changes, and they've noticed he's having trouble holding his bananas.
Can you guess what they'll try to do if, some day, Sam can't hold his bananas anymore?
Yes, it is. _Being_ the world's police, at the request of the world's sovereign countries, is not. It's the difference between "we're here because we say so" and "we're here because you say so".