I wouldn't call it a natural desire, because the animals aren't born with it. But most every animal that has experienced consciousness alteration wants more of it. Birds eat fermented fruits and berries and get so drunk they can't fly. Most dogs love beer. Many pets like the effects of marijuana. But my all time favorite drunken animal story is the one about the derailed corn train and the drunken bears. A trainload of corn derailed in the Rockies, where cleanup was next to impossible. After the corn fermented, bears would come from miles around to eat the fermented corn, and get so drunk they'd pass out on the tracks. So the railroad company buried the corn. And the bears dug it up. The company sprayed it with nasty tasting stuff. The bears didn't care. Finally, they covered it in diesel fuel and burned it. The bears ate what was left.
That's the breakthrough. They add (as a made up example) E47F109A and FA619B05, coming up with 191AA7FC. They have no idea that, when decrypted with your key, those values are 51, 49, and 100 respectively. How is that possible? You'll have to read the paper, because I can't explain it:)
Considering that, currently, performing calculations on encrypted data takes trillions of times as long as calculations on unencrypted data, you may very well be right. But this is just a proof of concept, and the thought is, this could be useful if the processing time can be brought down.
Besides the tax example, other articles have mentioned search terms. Perhaps you don't want Google to know you are searching for 'bisexual midget porn.' Now, there's a solution! They also mention cloud computing. With a system like this, you could outsource processing of classified data.
Think of the possibilities for games. You could have cheat proof peer to peer gaming. Each peer could compute a part of the shared world, without knowing what the data was or how to alter it to cheat.
I'm sure there are tons of other applications no one has even thought of yet (or at least, that I haven't thought of yet.) But only if the processing time can be reduced by many orders of magnitude.
You can not analyze the data. You can perform calculations on it without knowing what it is. So, for instance, you could encrypt all your tax info, send it to a company that processes the encrypted data without decrypting it, and sends you back your encrypted tax return, without ever having seen any of your financial detail.
Yeah, you can perform calculations on encrypted data without unencrypting it. But it's just a LITTLE slow. The first step is just showing it can be done, but it's a very long way from useful.
Well, if solar doesn't make economic sense for you now, you aren't alone. It doesn't for most people. But solar has come down in total cost of ownership quite dramatically in the last twenty years. Pretty soon it may make sense for your town to put up solar.
As for house warranties, heh, you'd be lucky if the contractor was still around. Many of them form an LLC or partnership for one development, and dissolve it after the development is over. Who do you sue if something goes wrong? When I was a kid, my dad had to pay $45,000 to have his septic system rebuilt. The sub contractor had installed the leaching field upside down, with the drainage holes facing up, so they filled up with soil. Next year, the county put in a sewer and made everyone pay to hook up. (sad trombone noise: WAH Wah waaahhhh)
There is no accepted idea of how a time machine might work. There is plenty of speculation. As for the multiple worlds hypothesis, you would be right if time travel were the only way that universes branch. However, that isn't what the hypothesis claims at all. It claims universes branch any time a subatomic reaction could go more than one way. If this hypothesis is true, then time travel is simply one more kind of subatomic reaction that causes universes to branch. Meaning, the vast majority of universes would be formed from non-time-machine related splits.
I see what you are saying, "Just as we used to believe that the sun revolved around the earth, we used to believe that free energy was possible. Now we know better. People used to believe all kinds of ridiculous, untrue things. Let's not make that mistake here. " Gotcha! Thanks for that heads up.
They are in our past and present, we are just not in that dimension. Time travel to the past would lead you to another dimension but would never alter the past we have presently lived. We will never see time travel in our past and our current present. Our future is a different story since the path we are traveling can still be altered.
-aEN
Not to be pedantic, but you seem to have missed something. Say you travel back in time, and end up in another dimension, not your own. You are a time traveler in someone's present. Time passes, and people in that dimension talk about 'that time traveler guy who came and gave us the secret of time travel.' You are a time traveler in someone's past. Someone may have already traveled back into our past and we could one day find a fossilized time machine. We don't know about it right now, but that does not mean it could not have happened, and been recorded as part of our past. Nothing gets altered, the time machine is already there, waiting to be discovered (hypothetically.) So when you say, "We will never see time travel in our past and our current present" you may very well be right, but not for any of the reasons you give.
No warranty is a 100% assurance of anything. That's not the point. The point is, this is the industry standard. Not one flash in the pan company's decision. The reason being, solar panels last that long. Why wouldn't they warranty a product for 25 years if it is designed to last that long?
You seemed to be implying that the panels will not last 25 years, and therefore, the person mentioned in the article will not be saving any money. If this is not what you meant to imply, I simply have to ask, what was your motivation for posting your trivial observation?
I never thought you were finding fault, I was chastising the dumb trolls like sexconker. Assuming the thing lasts 30 years (which it should) and is worth absolutely nothing then, requires minimal maintenance or repairs, and the cost of electricity stays about the same, I calculate about a 4.5% ROI. Of course, the conversion infrastructure will still be worth something even if the PVs and the batteries aren't, and electricity will likely become more expensive in that time, so the actual ROI is likely somewhere in between 4.5 and 7.8. Assuming I did my math right, which is a pretty big assumption.
No, they are all lying, their panels will only last five years, and they all plan to go out of business before then. Never mind the fact that many of them have already been in business for twenty five years. It's solar, the hippies like it, therefore there must be something wrong with it.
Let me quote the part of the parent post I objected to:
"In fact the way technological things change in general I would assume that his solar-power setting would have pretty much depreciated to some small fraction of 38k."
The parent was talking about the standard definition of depreciation, that of the lose of value of the durable good. In fact, based on the that post's logic, the cost of repairing and replacing parts will come down over time. But by now, I'm sure you've read the dozens of posts explaining that solar panels will last at least 25 years at 80% rated power. So both your arguments are moot.
Perhaps you did not understand what I meant. I would respectfully ask that you google the term. Or ask a financial expert. Or look on investopedia. Return on Investment is measured as a percentage, not a period of years.
Ah, what? He's not reselling the damn thing, he is making money off of it every month. So what if it depreciates, we were never measuring the value of the thing over time anyway. Though I'm guessing many of the components will not depreciate much, just the batteries and photovoltaics. Having his house set up to run off of photovoltaics will let him easily take advantage of whatever advances come along in module and energy storage. The power modules will last at least 30 years. See, he would never be reselling the thing independent of his house. The thing is a part of the house now, and the entire house will continue to appreciate. As people become more interested in solar, a house with solar already in place will appreciate faster.
Funny how so many people seem to want to find fault with solar energy, and use incomplete reasoning to look at only the possible negative consequences without looking at all the positives. Why do you think some people have such an irrational hatred of solar energy? I think the hippies are to blame. Nobody likes them, and they never fight back when you blame them, so I am going to go with definitely the hippies fault.
Most manufacturers guarantee that their panels will give at least 90% of peak power at ten years, and 80% of power at 25 years. Yes, he's saving money.
A generalization? Duh, of course it is, so what, is it true or not? I've witnessed it, many of my friends work just as hard as I do, but make far less money. I've volunteered a lot with groups such as Food Not Bombs, helping feed all the hungry people in America with the food that your vaunted 'free market' was just going to throw away, because it isn't salable, although still edible and tasty. I've seen a lot of just plain crazy people (thanks, Reagan, for emptying the mental hospitals!) but I've also seen a lot of people who made all the right choices but were unlucky.
It isn't jealousy to hate seeing parasites leaching off of hard working folks. For one thing, the word you are looking for is envy. Jealousy is a feeling that someone you care about may care about someone else more than you. Envy is the feeling you get when you think someone has more than you. Envy isn't bad, if it points out a real unfairness in the world and motivates one to act to correct it.
Look, I'm no psychic. I'm just telling you how you come across. If that's not the image you want to project, change your tune.
I agree that any society must respect the rights of the individual. But those rights are simply what everyone agrees to. If society says you have no right to exclude people from using 'your' natural resources, then you don't have a right to exclude them. You may have the power to exclude them, but if society does not define a right to ownership of natural resources, then your use of force to exclude others is preemptive force, and society will sanction you for it.
If you use force to exclude others from using any natural resource, that is preemptive use of force. YOU are the one robbing others, and when we come to take 'your' property, we are taking it back from a thief.
The topic of sex with underage Japanese ninjas frightens and confuses the moderators because, little known fact, many of them have recently been tentacle-raped. In fact, if you wake up one morning with amnesia, a bloody asshole, and sucker marks all over your body, you too may have fallen prey to some oversexed, tentacled horror. Don't be the next victim, protect yourself today with my patented Holy Water Suppositories!
We don't have a right to impose our wills on each other, but we have both agreed to it. That's democracy: you go along with what the majority decides, you try to change their minds, or you leave. Those are your only choices. The important difference between a democracy and a corporation is that second option, trying to change the minds of the majority. As a worker for a corporation, you have no say in how you are governed by that corporation.
Congratulations, you are just about the first person on Slashdot who seems to understand the consequences of these things. The truth is, I DON'T think the 'if you don't like it, you can leave' argument is fair. But it is the argument that everyone uses to support the free market, "You choose to sell your labor and buy your products for that amount, so it MUST be fair!' is the same exact argument. So I use it against the libertarians in the hope that they will see the hypocrisy of their arguments.
I'm upset because I see inequality of outcome: two people who work just as hard, and contribute just as much to society, will often experience very different levels of reward. In fact, some people who are nothing but leaches on society seem to get rewarded very well.
Ah yes, democracy. You seem to think it is only valid the the outcome is what you desire, otherwise, screw those bastages trying to tell you what to do! Tyranny of the majority!
I mean, if you love democracy so much, why do you complain that people shouldn't have the right to 'coerce' you into doing what they want? That is democracy: you agree to go along with things the majority votes on, even if you don't like it. Or, you can leave. There is no coercion in an open democratic system, so stop trying to claim that there is.
John Stossel is a libertarian ideologue. He cherry picked his data to support his foregone conclusion. More balanced surveys of the data seem to show that luxury item producers that are privatized generally do much better. Commodity item producers do alright. Monopolies that are privatized fail to deliver the value that they did as public sector entities. The free market has a place, in some cases it works better. In others, much, much worse.
Competition, of the sort where someone MUST lose in order for others to win, is a destructive force. It destroys intrinsic motivations: people in competition do not feel intrinsically motivated by what they do, they do it to beat others. Intrinsic motivation happens when people love what they do, and a competitive environment makes it hard for most people to enjoy what they do for its own sake.
Competition also duplicates effort. What is done by one group must be duplicated by all. There is less sharing of knowledge or technique. This is why you never see corporations organized internally as multiple competing units pursuing the same goals using separate resources. It simply isn't efficient, the times it has been tried, it failed miserably.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't call it a natural desire, because the animals aren't born with it. But most every animal that has experienced consciousness alteration wants more of it. Birds eat fermented fruits and berries and get so drunk they can't fly. Most dogs love beer. Many pets like the effects of marijuana. But my all time favorite drunken animal story is the one about the derailed corn train and the drunken bears. A trainload of corn derailed in the Rockies, where cleanup was next to impossible. After the corn fermented, bears would come from miles around to eat the fermented corn, and get so drunk they'd pass out on the tracks. So the railroad company buried the corn. And the bears dug it up. The company sprayed it with nasty tasting stuff. The bears didn't care. Finally, they covered it in diesel fuel and burned it. The bears ate what was left.
That's the breakthrough. They add (as a made up example) E47F109A and FA619B05, coming up with 191AA7FC. They have no idea that, when decrypted with your key, those values are 51, 49, and 100 respectively. How is that possible? You'll have to read the paper, because I can't explain it :)
Considering that, currently, performing calculations on encrypted data takes trillions of times as long as calculations on unencrypted data, you may very well be right. But this is just a proof of concept, and the thought is, this could be useful if the processing time can be brought down.
Besides the tax example, other articles have mentioned search terms. Perhaps you don't want Google to know you are searching for 'bisexual midget porn.' Now, there's a solution! They also mention cloud computing. With a system like this, you could outsource processing of classified data.
Think of the possibilities for games. You could have cheat proof peer to peer gaming. Each peer could compute a part of the shared world, without knowing what the data was or how to alter it to cheat.
I'm sure there are tons of other applications no one has even thought of yet (or at least, that I haven't thought of yet.) But only if the processing time can be reduced by many orders of magnitude.
Totally off topic, but were you on Spinnwebe back in the DFC days? Good times, good times...
You can not analyze the data. You can perform calculations on it without knowing what it is. So, for instance, you could encrypt all your tax info, send it to a company that processes the encrypted data without decrypting it, and sends you back your encrypted tax return, without ever having seen any of your financial detail.
Yeah, you can perform calculations on encrypted data without unencrypting it. But it's just a LITTLE slow. The first step is just showing it can be done, but it's a very long way from useful.
Well, if solar doesn't make economic sense for you now, you aren't alone. It doesn't for most people. But solar has come down in total cost of ownership quite dramatically in the last twenty years. Pretty soon it may make sense for your town to put up solar.
As for house warranties, heh, you'd be lucky if the contractor was still around. Many of them form an LLC or partnership for one development, and dissolve it after the development is over. Who do you sue if something goes wrong? When I was a kid, my dad had to pay $45,000 to have his septic system rebuilt. The sub contractor had installed the leaching field upside down, with the drainage holes facing up, so they filled up with soil. Next year, the county put in a sewer and made everyone pay to hook up. (sad trombone noise: WAH Wah waaahhhh)
There is no accepted idea of how a time machine might work. There is plenty of speculation. As for the multiple worlds hypothesis, you would be right if time travel were the only way that universes branch. However, that isn't what the hypothesis claims at all. It claims universes branch any time a subatomic reaction could go more than one way. If this hypothesis is true, then time travel is simply one more kind of subatomic reaction that causes universes to branch. Meaning, the vast majority of universes would be formed from non-time-machine related splits.
I see what you are saying, "Just as we used to believe that the sun revolved around the earth, we used to believe that free energy was possible. Now we know better. People used to believe all kinds of ridiculous, untrue things. Let's not make that mistake here. " Gotcha! Thanks for that heads up.
They are in our past and present, we are just not in that dimension. Time travel to the past would lead you to another dimension but would never alter the past we have presently lived. We will never see time travel in our past and our current present. Our future is a different story since the path we are traveling can still be altered.
-aEN
Not to be pedantic, but you seem to have missed something. Say you travel back in time, and end up in another dimension, not your own. You are a time traveler in someone's present. Time passes, and people in that dimension talk about 'that time traveler guy who came and gave us the secret of time travel.' You are a time traveler in someone's past. Someone may have already traveled back into our past and we could one day find a fossilized time machine. We don't know about it right now, but that does not mean it could not have happened, and been recorded as part of our past. Nothing gets altered, the time machine is already there, waiting to be discovered (hypothetically.) So when you say, "We will never see time travel in our past and our current present" you may very well be right, but not for any of the reasons you give.
No warranty is a 100% assurance of anything. That's not the point. The point is, this is the industry standard. Not one flash in the pan company's decision. The reason being, solar panels last that long. Why wouldn't they warranty a product for 25 years if it is designed to last that long?
You seemed to be implying that the panels will not last 25 years, and therefore, the person mentioned in the article will not be saving any money. If this is not what you meant to imply, I simply have to ask, what was your motivation for posting your trivial observation?
I never thought you were finding fault, I was chastising the dumb trolls like sexconker. Assuming the thing lasts 30 years (which it should) and is worth absolutely nothing then, requires minimal maintenance or repairs, and the cost of electricity stays about the same, I calculate about a 4.5% ROI. Of course, the conversion infrastructure will still be worth something even if the PVs and the batteries aren't, and electricity will likely become more expensive in that time, so the actual ROI is likely somewhere in between 4.5 and 7.8. Assuming I did my math right, which is a pretty big assumption.
No, they are all lying, their panels will only last five years, and they all plan to go out of business before then. Never mind the fact that many of them have already been in business for twenty five years. It's solar, the hippies like it, therefore there must be something wrong with it.
Let me quote the part of the parent post I objected to:
"In fact the way technological things change in general I would assume that his solar-power setting would have pretty much depreciated to some small fraction of 38k."
The parent was talking about the standard definition of depreciation, that of the lose of value of the durable good. In fact, based on the that post's logic, the cost of repairing and replacing parts will come down over time. But by now, I'm sure you've read the dozens of posts explaining that solar panels will last at least 25 years at 80% rated power. So both your arguments are moot.
Perhaps you did not understand what I meant. I would respectfully ask that you google the term. Or ask a financial expert. Or look on investopedia. Return on Investment is measured as a percentage, not a period of years.
Ah, what? He's not reselling the damn thing, he is making money off of it every month. So what if it depreciates, we were never measuring the value of the thing over time anyway. Though I'm guessing many of the components will not depreciate much, just the batteries and photovoltaics. Having his house set up to run off of photovoltaics will let him easily take advantage of whatever advances come along in module and energy storage. The power modules will last at least 30 years. See, he would never be reselling the thing independent of his house. The thing is a part of the house now, and the entire house will continue to appreciate. As people become more interested in solar, a house with solar already in place will appreciate faster.
Funny how so many people seem to want to find fault with solar energy, and use incomplete reasoning to look at only the possible negative consequences without looking at all the positives. Why do you think some people have such an irrational hatred of solar energy? I think the hippies are to blame. Nobody likes them, and they never fight back when you blame them, so I am going to go with definitely the hippies fault.
I don't think return on investment is measured in the units you think it is measured in.
Most manufacturers guarantee that their panels will give at least 90% of peak power at ten years, and 80% of power at 25 years. Yes, he's saving money.
Why should the rest of us let you selfishly pollute our shared environment?
A generalization? Duh, of course it is, so what, is it true or not? I've witnessed it, many of my friends work just as hard as I do, but make far less money. I've volunteered a lot with groups such as Food Not Bombs, helping feed all the hungry people in America with the food that your vaunted 'free market' was just going to throw away, because it isn't salable, although still edible and tasty. I've seen a lot of just plain crazy people (thanks, Reagan, for emptying the mental hospitals!) but I've also seen a lot of people who made all the right choices but were unlucky.
It isn't jealousy to hate seeing parasites leaching off of hard working folks. For one thing, the word you are looking for is envy. Jealousy is a feeling that someone you care about may care about someone else more than you. Envy is the feeling you get when you think someone has more than you. Envy isn't bad, if it points out a real unfairness in the world and motivates one to act to correct it.
Look, I'm no psychic. I'm just telling you how you come across. If that's not the image you want to project, change your tune.
I agree that any society must respect the rights of the individual. But those rights are simply what everyone agrees to. If society says you have no right to exclude people from using 'your' natural resources, then you don't have a right to exclude them. You may have the power to exclude them, but if society does not define a right to ownership of natural resources, then your use of force to exclude others is preemptive force, and society will sanction you for it.
If you use force to exclude others from using any natural resource, that is preemptive use of force. YOU are the one robbing others, and when we come to take 'your' property, we are taking it back from a thief.
The topic of sex with underage Japanese ninjas frightens and confuses the moderators because, little known fact, many of them have recently been tentacle-raped. In fact, if you wake up one morning with amnesia, a bloody asshole, and sucker marks all over your body, you too may have fallen prey to some oversexed, tentacled horror. Don't be the next victim, protect yourself today with my patented Holy Water Suppositories!
A man on Slashdot attacks Slashdot readers by implying they are all irrational US haters.
Slashdot response: "Give that man a +5 Insightful, he's got us pegged!"
Discuss.
We don't have a right to impose our wills on each other, but we have both agreed to it. That's democracy: you go along with what the majority decides, you try to change their minds, or you leave. Those are your only choices. The important difference between a democracy and a corporation is that second option, trying to change the minds of the majority. As a worker for a corporation, you have no say in how you are governed by that corporation.
Congratulations, you are just about the first person on Slashdot who seems to understand the consequences of these things. The truth is, I DON'T think the 'if you don't like it, you can leave' argument is fair. But it is the argument that everyone uses to support the free market, "You choose to sell your labor and buy your products for that amount, so it MUST be fair!' is the same exact argument. So I use it against the libertarians in the hope that they will see the hypocrisy of their arguments.
You've really made my day, Hatta.
I'm upset because I see inequality of outcome: two people who work just as hard, and contribute just as much to society, will often experience very different levels of reward. In fact, some people who are nothing but leaches on society seem to get rewarded very well.
Ah yes, democracy. You seem to think it is only valid the the outcome is what you desire, otherwise, screw those bastages trying to tell you what to do! Tyranny of the majority!
I mean, if you love democracy so much, why do you complain that people shouldn't have the right to 'coerce' you into doing what they want? That is democracy: you agree to go along with things the majority votes on, even if you don't like it. Or, you can leave. There is no coercion in an open democratic system, so stop trying to claim that there is.
John Stossel is a libertarian ideologue. He cherry picked his data to support his foregone conclusion. More balanced surveys of the data seem to show that luxury item producers that are privatized generally do much better. Commodity item producers do alright. Monopolies that are privatized fail to deliver the value that they did as public sector entities. The free market has a place, in some cases it works better. In others, much, much worse.
Competition, of the sort where someone MUST lose in order for others to win, is a destructive force. It destroys intrinsic motivations: people in competition do not feel intrinsically motivated by what they do, they do it to beat others. Intrinsic motivation happens when people love what they do, and a competitive environment makes it hard for most people to enjoy what they do for its own sake.
Competition also duplicates effort. What is done by one group must be duplicated by all. There is less sharing of knowledge or technique. This is why you never see corporations organized internally as multiple competing units pursuing the same goals using separate resources. It simply isn't efficient, the times it has been tried, it failed miserably.