Your mileage may vary, but I don't hold that being an atheist and being a member of a church (Catholic or otherwise) are mutually exclusive. A lot of people who've claimed to be members of a church (or even held official positions) certainly don't act as though they actually believed in a God whose Top 10 Commands include not to covet, commit adultery, steal, kill, etc.
I should hope so. Fear is a survival mechanism; rationally dealt with, it is healthy. One way to view science is as the empirical application of our reason to our fear.
Okay, I read the paper. It doesn't even imply ocean acidification is nothing to worry about, let alone your claim "there is no ocean acidification to worry about". The paper indicates certain regions experience considerable pH variance, that various biota may be capable of greater tolerance for CO2/pH extremes than we previously believed, and that there are certain biota capable of extreme CO2 and/or pH variation tolerances. While that is good news for the continued survival of multi-cellular life in general, the study also goes on to indicate that much further study is required to understand O2/CO2/pH dynamics and the consequences for various biota and the biosphere in general.
Or to put it in lay terms: we still don't know what all will die, what all will thrive, and what all that means for our food chain. So yeah, sure, ocean acidification FOR CERTAIN ORGANISMS is nothing to worry about. But for homo sapiens, that paper doesn't indicate anything except the need to find out what we need to do, whether that turns out to be "stop burning coal or we're all gonna starve", "turn up the aircon baby!" or "if we keep burning coal we better invest in a lot of fish farms".
Here's the thing: until humanity formally recognizes that human organizations - be they governments or businesses - cannot successfully scale indefinitely, and in fact have rather limited bounds wherein each functions optimally, we will continue to have tyrannies. The old "poster child" for this is communism - it may work at the commune level but tends to train-wreck at anything higher. The new one is corporatism, which I suspect starts to derail at the county level, and is certainly a disaster happening right now at the national/international level.
What are we going to do about this? Frankly, my inner cynic thinks it's too late for the first four boxes unless a game-changer occurs (e.g. somebody pulls an "Untouchables" and cleans up the government, or somebody presents a Mister Fusion at the next big trade show and posts the blueprints). There's too much social inertia to fight head-on, because your opponents are playing dirty as hell. Take the fifth box, the shipping box, and find somewhere to go - whether inside or outside the country - that lives up to your ideals. Enough like-minded individuals do the same, and hopefully it'll become a "point of light" when things go from bad to worse. Remember how the modern US originally got its start - a bunch of highly educated (for the time) people decided they'd move somewhere else, where they could live their way. Just try not to upset the neighbours, this time round they'll be entrenched and heavily armed.
True. It does raise a serious question however: just where *do* we draw the line on copyright? How many companies have to be abusing the privileges we granted them before the social contract - i.e. the spirit, not the letter, of the law - is no longer conscionable? The Supreme Court has just decided that Congress can re-copyright works that have entered the public domain. The supposed ideal of copyright was that in return for a temporary monopoly, works would become freely available to all in perpetuity. That's not what's happening anymore.
And while we can "vote with our dollars" by buying indie works, the truth is the ignorant sheep outnumber the enlightened sheep by sufficient order of magnitude that the cartels can continue to accumulate and concentrate political power regardless. A *lot* more sheep will need to "look up" for that to change.
You get rid of the media cartels' protection racket on every blank CDR bought in the countries where that levy applies, and I'll consider accepting your argument.
After all, "taking something without paying just because you can" is practically scripture for the big media companies.
I was thinking most of the power usage going towards space-based industry across the solar system (e.g. melting down asteroids). As you say, that much power (from any source) being confined to Earth alone would have quite an impact - I'm reminded of Niven's Puppeteers, who had to move their covered-in-city planet away from its sun to manage the additional heat.
Politics and lasers... hmm, yes, I'm going to go with whoever it was said (something like): the summary of the summary is that... people are a problem.:/
The sun is a safe, clean fusion power source. Our species already has the technological capability sufficient to harness it for becoming a Type I, perhaps even (eventually) Type II, civilisation on the Kardashev scale. What our species so far lacks is the sociological capability to overcome our fractious instincts and irrational elements. So we remain stuck at the bottom, Type 0, wasting trillions of resource-units fighting over diminishing deposits of liquefacted fossil-corpses instead of executing an efficient transition of our civilisation from a hydrocarbon economy to a solar fusion economy.
Instead quite likely billions of people will die as we lurch from one near-exinction event to the next, before we finally stagger into a sustainable architecture. That is, assuming we don't actually go extinct from a gloves-off biological war. This will be more difficult to avoid than a gloves-off nuclear war, because nukes are relatively expensive and decay rather than being relatively cheap, self-replicating and self-mutating.
Hmm. That came out rather more depressing than I intended. Still, hopefully the scary pictures will provide motivation for those in charge.:p
If you truly feel none of the four boxes are going to work, there still remains the fifth, original, option: leave. The founders of the US emigrated from what is now the UK (more or less, I know, I'm keeping it short) for a land where they could create a nation of their own, rather than stay and engage in what they felt would be useless revolution. Why not do this again? Find a country where your skills are valued and your ideals are accepted. You'll (hopefully) carry the best of what it means to be an American with you, and if enough of you emigrate to the same place, you'll found a new America, at first in spirit, perhaps someday in name.
If you don't want to emigrate, alternatives include moving to any of the US states that you feel still hold true to pre-fall values in the hope that they will avoid the rest of the nation's slide to a banana republic, but I don't know enough of US politics to comment as to which ones. Heck, you never know, the country still might manage to find the brakes on the hand-basket. After all, it could be worse, we could be in a Fallout game.
More accurate to say that the middlemen shifted the terms and the people are reacting accordingly. The original terms of the bargain - roughly twenty years, give or take several more - were fine. What we have now is a broken contract: there is no meeting of minds, there is no equitable exchange of consideration (financial and ethical).
If creators and owners of content want to contract with me, that's fine, but they should not be able to shackle my children and my children's children with that contract. I even seem to recall there was a civil war, fought between the north and south halves of some country, about such one-sided bargains....
(posting in part to break moderation - I clicked Underrated, it got modded Overrated. WTF, slashdot?)
But while I'm here - I've played the game as far as Coruscant. I think the dialogue is pretty damn good actually - yes, many (but not all) of the dialogue choices are superficial, but if it's good enough to help me imagine that they're important, does it really matter?
What actually broke my suspension of disbelief - hard - was all the identical "companions" upon reaching the first space area after leaving the starting planet. They've presented this story of a unique NPC teaming up with you, when you walk out of a shuttle and a dozen identical copies of him run past you following other players.
(and yes, you can customise his gear, but the other dozen+ players all still had the stock gear - blam, SoD blown away)
I'd still have had them arrested immediately, because "I thought they were harmless activists and besides everyone knows it takes a two-tonne weapon to crack a containment vessel" sounds pretty lame after your nuclear plant gets cracked by a shiny new man-portable version.
It sounds like the kind of thing that should be in the Evil Overlord List, actually. #11 and #24 seem applicable.
I'll be interested to see if if you can admit that the private sector could just of easily handled your list of goodies...
People who think the private sector can easily replace government (or vice versa)... well, to use a car anology, if I have a sedan and a tractor, I use the former to do the shopping and the latter to till my fields, not the other way around.
Sorry, I'm not a biologist, I was thinking more in colour/metaphor; the reefs around here aren't rebuilding quickly. But thankyou for the link, it was interesting reading.
It used to be the atmospheric warming that concerned me, however ocean acidification is a bigger concern. I mean, four degrees warmer? Like you say, pros and cons, even if the weather'll get pretty wild in parts. But the ocean pH worsens by four? Marine life as we know it pretty much goes bye-bye. And even tiny changes in ocean pH is still bad news, since it's a logarithmic effect. Lot of coral reefs are already bleaching out.
Aha, so *that* will be the reason why autonomous meshing becomes the standard and standardised. Because manufacturers who want to keep up with the increasing demand for wireless gadgets will have no other choice. Adapt or perish.
Hmm. I seem to recall a semi-recent article on the first recorded observation of natural (as opposed to human-induced) speciation in an animal, but annoyingly I can't find it. However, if evidence of the evolution of plants and insects is sufficient, I direct you to http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html#part5 and http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/speciation.html which lists some observed speciation events.
Apologies for interrupting from the sidelines, but should we be using the general or sexual definition of perverted? Because if it's the former, "number of people hurt by perverted government agents using the tools of their job" has been going back up lately.;)
The internet didn't exist in the early 20th century, so even with those tweaks the lobbyists will still come forward with crazy things like SOPA to control who copies what.
Given it's irrelevant to the spirit of copyright whether a work is on the internet or on carrier pigeons, the problem pretty much resolves down to "lobbyists"; the foxes have been given the keys to the hen-house, so any fix we attempt to implement will fail until those keys are taken back.
Slashdot Mirror
Your mileage may vary, but I don't hold that being an atheist and being a member of a church (Catholic or otherwise) are mutually exclusive. A lot of people who've claimed to be members of a church (or even held official positions) certainly don't act as though they actually believed in a God whose Top 10 Commands include not to covet, commit adultery, steal, kill, etc.
I should hope so. Fear is a survival mechanism; rationally dealt with, it is healthy. One way to view science is as the empirical application of our reason to our fear.
Okay, I read the paper. It doesn't even imply ocean acidification is nothing to worry about, let alone your claim "there is no ocean acidification to worry about". The paper indicates certain regions experience considerable pH variance, that various biota may be capable of greater tolerance for CO2/pH extremes than we previously believed, and that there are certain biota capable of extreme CO2 and/or pH variation tolerances. While that is good news for the continued survival of multi-cellular life in general, the study also goes on to indicate that much further study is required to understand O2/CO2/pH dynamics and the consequences for various biota and the biosphere in general.
Or to put it in lay terms: we still don't know what all will die, what all will thrive, and what all that means for our food chain. So yeah, sure, ocean acidification FOR CERTAIN ORGANISMS is nothing to worry about. But for homo sapiens, that paper doesn't indicate anything except the need to find out what we need to do, whether that turns out to be "stop burning coal or we're all gonna starve", "turn up the aircon baby!" or "if we keep burning coal we better invest in a lot of fish farms".
Here's the thing: until humanity formally recognizes that human organizations - be they governments or businesses - cannot successfully scale indefinitely, and in fact have rather limited bounds wherein each functions optimally, we will continue to have tyrannies. The old "poster child" for this is communism - it may work at the commune level but tends to train-wreck at anything higher. The new one is corporatism, which I suspect starts to derail at the county level, and is certainly a disaster happening right now at the national/international level.
What are we going to do about this? Frankly, my inner cynic thinks it's too late for the first four boxes unless a game-changer occurs (e.g. somebody pulls an "Untouchables" and cleans up the government, or somebody presents a Mister Fusion at the next big trade show and posts the blueprints). There's too much social inertia to fight head-on, because your opponents are playing dirty as hell. Take the fifth box, the shipping box, and find somewhere to go - whether inside or outside the country - that lives up to your ideals. Enough like-minded individuals do the same, and hopefully it'll become a "point of light" when things go from bad to worse. Remember how the modern US originally got its start - a bunch of highly educated (for the time) people decided they'd move somewhere else, where they could live their way. Just try not to upset the neighbours, this time round they'll be entrenched and heavily armed.
True. It does raise a serious question however: just where *do* we draw the line on copyright? How many companies have to be abusing the privileges we granted them before the social contract - i.e. the spirit, not the letter, of the law - is no longer conscionable? The Supreme Court has just decided that Congress can re-copyright works that have entered the public domain. The supposed ideal of copyright was that in return for a temporary monopoly, works would become freely available to all in perpetuity. That's not what's happening anymore.
And while we can "vote with our dollars" by buying indie works, the truth is the ignorant sheep outnumber the enlightened sheep by sufficient order of magnitude that the cartels can continue to accumulate and concentrate political power regardless. A *lot* more sheep will need to "look up" for that to change.
You get rid of the media cartels' protection racket on every blank CDR bought in the countries where that levy applies, and I'll consider accepting your argument.
After all, "taking something without paying just because you can" is practically scripture for the big media companies.
Count me as one of the people who hadn't yet bought it - and certainly won't now because of its DRM being brought to my attention.
Sadly, "3 machine activation limit" is misleading, as the Guru3D reviewer in TFA discovered when he swapped video cards to benchmark it.
It should be described as "3 hardware changes activation limit".
Does that mean Sony, having removed linux capability on the PS3 via firmware update, should now owe the EU a large chunk of back-taxes?
I was thinking most of the power usage going towards space-based industry across the solar system (e.g. melting down asteroids). As you say, that much power (from any source) being confined to Earth alone would have quite an impact - I'm reminded of Niven's Puppeteers, who had to move their covered-in-city planet away from its sun to manage the additional heat.
Politics and lasers... hmm, yes, I'm going to go with whoever it was said (something like): the summary of the summary is that... people are a problem. :/
The sun is a safe, clean fusion power source. Our species already has the technological capability sufficient to harness it for becoming a Type I, perhaps even (eventually) Type II, civilisation on the Kardashev scale. What our species so far lacks is the sociological capability to overcome our fractious instincts and irrational elements. So we remain stuck at the bottom, Type 0, wasting trillions of resource-units fighting over diminishing deposits of liquefacted fossil-corpses instead of executing an efficient transition of our civilisation from a hydrocarbon economy to a solar fusion economy.
Instead quite likely billions of people will die as we lurch from one near-exinction event to the next, before we finally stagger into a sustainable architecture. That is, assuming we don't actually go extinct from a gloves-off biological war. This will be more difficult to avoid than a gloves-off nuclear war, because nukes are relatively expensive and decay rather than being relatively cheap, self-replicating and self-mutating.
Hmm. That came out rather more depressing than I intended. Still, hopefully the scary pictures will provide motivation for those in charge. :p
If you truly feel none of the four boxes are going to work, there still remains the fifth, original, option: leave. The founders of the US emigrated from what is now the UK (more or less, I know, I'm keeping it short) for a land where they could create a nation of their own, rather than stay and engage in what they felt would be useless revolution. Why not do this again? Find a country where your skills are valued and your ideals are accepted. You'll (hopefully) carry the best of what it means to be an American with you, and if enough of you emigrate to the same place, you'll found a new America, at first in spirit, perhaps someday in name.
If you don't want to emigrate, alternatives include moving to any of the US states that you feel still hold true to pre-fall values in the hope that they will avoid the rest of the nation's slide to a banana republic, but I don't know enough of US politics to comment as to which ones. Heck, you never know, the country still might manage to find the brakes on the hand-basket. After all, it could be worse, we could be in a Fallout game.
More accurate to say that the middlemen shifted the terms and the people are reacting accordingly. The original terms of the bargain - roughly twenty years, give or take several more - were fine. What we have now is a broken contract: there is no meeting of minds, there is no equitable exchange of consideration (financial and ethical).
If creators and owners of content want to contract with me, that's fine, but they should not be able to shackle my children and my children's children with that contract. I even seem to recall there was a civil war, fought between the north and south halves of some country, about such one-sided bargains....
Most nations with the capability to destroy satellites tend to have satellites of their own they'd like to keep. It's getting crowded up there.
(posting in part to break moderation - I clicked Underrated, it got modded Overrated. WTF, slashdot?)
But while I'm here - I've played the game as far as Coruscant. I think the dialogue is pretty damn good actually - yes, many (but not all) of the dialogue choices are superficial, but if it's good enough to help me imagine that they're important, does it really matter?
What actually broke my suspension of disbelief - hard - was all the identical "companions" upon reaching the first space area after leaving the starting planet. They've presented this story of a unique NPC teaming up with you, when you walk out of a shuttle and a dozen identical copies of him run past you following other players.
(and yes, you can customise his gear, but the other dozen+ players all still had the stock gear - blam, SoD blown away)
I'd still have had them arrested immediately, because "I thought they were harmless activists and besides everyone knows it takes a two-tonne weapon to crack a containment vessel" sounds pretty lame after your nuclear plant gets cracked by a shiny new man-portable version.
It sounds like the kind of thing that should be in the Evil Overlord List, actually. #11 and #24 seem applicable.
People who think the private sector can easily replace government (or vice versa)... well, to use a car anology, if I have a sedan and a tractor, I use the former to do the shopping and the latter to till my fields, not the other way around.
Sorry, I'm not a biologist, I was thinking more in colour/metaphor; the reefs around here aren't rebuilding quickly. But thankyou for the link, it was interesting reading.
It used to be the atmospheric warming that concerned me, however ocean acidification is a bigger concern. I mean, four degrees warmer? Like you say, pros and cons, even if the weather'll get pretty wild in parts. But the ocean pH worsens by four? Marine life as we know it pretty much goes bye-bye. And even tiny changes in ocean pH is still bad news, since it's a logarithmic effect. Lot of coral reefs are already bleaching out.
Hmm. Barter. What happens when you need something from me, but thanks to my robots I don't need anything from you?
Aha, so *that* will be the reason why autonomous meshing becomes the standard and standardised. Because manufacturers who want to keep up with the increasing demand for wireless gadgets will have no other choice. Adapt or perish.
Hmm. I seem to recall a semi-recent article on the first recorded observation of natural (as opposed to human-induced) speciation in an animal, but annoyingly I can't find it. However, if evidence of the evolution of plants and insects is sufficient, I direct you to http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html#part5 and http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/speciation.html which lists some observed speciation events.
Apologies for interrupting from the sidelines, but should we be using the general or sexual definition of perverted? Because if it's the former, "number of people hurt by perverted government agents using the tools of their job" has been going back up lately. ;)
Interesting. Link please?
Given it's irrelevant to the spirit of copyright whether a work is on the internet or on carrier pigeons, the problem pretty much resolves down to "lobbyists"; the foxes have been given the keys to the hen-house, so any fix we attempt to implement will fail until those keys are taken back.