Is it even possible to commit war crimes against zombies? I mean, they'll just climb out of those mass graves, right? Should Kratos from God of War offered surrender terms to that Krakken before or after it swallowed him?
But I see their point, I always thought that Captain Olimar should be tried for enslaving the local natives into helping repair his ship. And while it's possible to genocide species on Nethack, I always found that vaguely disturbing. Then again, being evil is more of a gameplay mechanic with it's own tradeoffs and less of a philosophical lifestyle choice.
Soooooo... There's a guy running a company looking at getting other people to give him money to build a fusion reactor which can... do whatever sounds like it'll make investor's panties wet.
I dunno man, fusion power has had a whole hell of a lot of snake oil salesmen. Your post even raises some red flags because "you've met the guy". Seriously, unless you're a high-energy physicist and know your shit about fusion, that's a net negative data-point for this project. The more charismatic he is, ie, his ability to get shmucks to believe in him, the more likely that this is all a scam, or simply a mistake. He might have even fooled himself into thinking this is a good idea and worth the money.
Or hey, he might be sitting on a breakthrough idea that will make unlimited cheap clean energy and change the world forever. It could be real this time.
Actually, isn't this the sort of thing that Burlesque covers? Don't they do kooky themed things every now and then? The Star Wars burlesque made some waves a little while ago. Where's my science themed show? A burlesque version of that skit showing how elements react would be hilarious. Among other things.
I'm sure with only some minor instructions, the dancers would be able to work alongside Jacob's ladders and liquid nitrogen.
Terribly sorry for not RTFA, but when did AMD try to add this to the Linux driver? When was it noticed? When was it corrected? And can I shove this in the face of windows fanboys who say that anyone could submit anything they want to Linux and you don't really know what's in there?
Oil production in Texas has more than doubled since 2010
Huh, that's interesting because I thought that it was more or less established that the lower 48 states hit peak oil a while ago. The price went up, but production didn't, because they couldn't, because it wasn't there.
Now, the main thrust of the article could be right on the money because it lumps natural gas in with oil and we've got a new way of squeezing gas out of the ground. WOO! Let's here it for technological innovation making the world a better place! But pointing out how Texas has doubled production from 300 to 600 million of barrels per year when it used to produce over 1200, and other than the last few years has been in decline since the 70's.... it's a little disingenuous.
But it's interesting that Texas has indeed ramped up oil production. There's probably a pretty serious story about why they're doing it NOW as opposed to during the massive scare that preceded the econopocalypse cica 2006.
Software types cling to their thick padding of abstraction. I like coding up from the reset vector.
I like not having to re-invent quicksort, atoi, hexToDec, etc etc etc every god-damn time. Or having to whip out the scope to find out what quirk this SPI implementation is doing. I like libraries where I know how they work, I can plop them down, and instantly have known capabilities. And no, you don't need big engines for everything. But if you need an Ethernet connection, even though the speed constraints are so lax that even a 8051 could handle it, it doesn't mean that you should piss away weeks re-inventing the wheel just to save a couple bucks on a cheaper chip. Unless you're making millions of units. It's a business decision. Whatever is cheapest and gets the job done. Sometimes that means slapping an intel in there.
And the standard response to the "reboot" that happened in the great depression is that the New Deal didn't actually fix the problem. The public work programs put food on the plate of some people that would have straight-up died without them. That's good. But it didn't get us out of the great depression. As depressing as it is, it was WWII that ended the great depression. Also, it's kind of a bad example as the USA was already DESPERATE for any sort of change or fix. There was a decade and a half of being utterly destitute. While the middle class is shrinking and the gini co-efficiant is falling, I've got a good job and I'm putzing about on Slashdot. You'll have to wait a decade or two of shit getting a lot worse for the population to be in the same sort of mental state as they were in the 1940's.
I don't actually know much about Iceland's woes. There's the 90's free market reform and the 2007 crisis? But I think you're talking about the fall of the USSR.
Fast forward a few years and you see thriving economies.
Yeah... Those were some pretty bad years for them as I recall. "The result was a rapid decline in the value of the ruble, flight of foreign investment, delayed payments on sovereign and private debts, a breakdown of commercial transactions through the banking system, and the threat of runaway inflation." And only a MERE DECADE LATER, they appear to be doing well..... yeah.... if all of your plans involve a decade of chaos, pain, suffering, economic woe, then I'm not exactly a big fan of your plan. That whole "going flat fucking broke" and not being able to borrow money isn't really a good thing. It's not a solution. It's a result of being fucked up. It's a negative effect rather than a way forward. The fact that some people recover from gunshots after getting shot isn't a reason to go shooting people.
And, you've got two solutions that are at odds. Russia's solution was to move from a central economy to a free market. The New Deal was moving away from the free market and more towards a central economy. (Where the government puts you to work).
Seriously, you can throw as much hardware as you want at a problem, it's all just a matter of price. We could shove an iphone everywhere we want compact processing capabilities. (And god knows enough people actually do that).
Also, it really helps if it's open. The raspberry pi is neat because it's specifically useful as a full-fledged computer that DAMN cheap. It runs Linux so there's a lot of leeway with what you want to do with it. (Quickly, without having to develop your own RTOS and windows manager) But it IS questionable about what sort of long-term legs it has because the broadcom chip on it is very much closed. I don't care how awesome the hardware is if I can't even blink an LED without asking mother-may-I from some corporate whore.
Because a lot of different people have different "ultimate goals". Some people just want recreation and to play video games all day. Other want progress. Others want to dominate everyone else.
They're riding high on a massive population that used to be minnow farmers with a culture of being happy that they've got a warm meal at the end of the day. Those fuckers will work hard at a job because they're happy and content with their upward social mobility on a personal and a national level. So they would have double the economic output as the lazy americans across the ocean who let robots do their work and just play around all day. It's not like we're the only ones with robots increasing our productivity. So when the choice comes to buy widget X and you can buy one made mostly by American robots for Y dollars or you can buy one made by Chinese robots for Y/2 dollars (It's cheaper because the Chinese robots don't have to support a bunch of Chinese just lazing about living on welfare) you're going to call the Americans lazy and go with the cheaper option. The Americans lose business and eventually have to go back to work, but not before the realize they're no longer a superpower.
How do we really define "provides a basic level of acceptable living"?
Social norms.
Is it considered OK if people can't afford internet or cell phones?
Internet connections can run as low as FREE, provided you put up with some ads. Basic dialup is, what, $10/mo. And as more services move to the cheaper form of providing service over the Internet, a connection is more important. But a lot of people can make do with charities, starbucks, and/or public libraries.
Cell phones are becoming more the norm, but no, right now you don't need a cell phone to qualify as "acceptable living". You can get by on a good ol' POTs line. Cell phones, and more importantly connections, can be pretty cheap and they're DAMN useful. For some, combining their primary computer, communications, planner, and whateverelseyoucanshoveinthere makes more financial sense then buying all those things separate.
Long story short: Yes, but it's dirt cheap to get.
luxury items, like cars and designer clothes
BWAHAHAHAHAHAAAaaaaaaooohboy. Yeah, others have pointed this out, but it's pretty damn hilarious how you include a car as a luxury item next to "designer clothes". Sigh, yeah no. Maybe you live in the city where everyone can bike or take the subway. Out in the rest of the world, you have to get to work somehow. Even if it's a $500 beater and death-trap waiting to happen.
because in a free market, the people making stuff that people buy continually...
are continually undercut by competition. At least in the mystical magical land of the "true" "free" market. People NEED to buy food. Yet food is not priced so exorbitantly priced that people are starving out in the streets.
Also, there's the question about people who simply don't need to make an "acceptable living" with their job. High school kids...
Don't work 40 hours a week. You know, because they "work" 40 hour weeks AT SCHOOL. And during the summer, yeah, some of those kids do need to make a living wage.
There are other ideas, like garuanteed income supplements,...the government tops up the difference... But very few governments want to have these services, because it looks like a free hand out,... it would be cheaper to operate than the current welfare systems.
That IS welfare. And yeah, it's a really bad idea to continually sustain people. It completely demotivates them from doing anything. The welfare safety net is supposed to be there when you fall. Like when you get laid off, injured, face natural catastrophe. It's supposed to sustain you while you get back on your feet. It's supposed to make you less adverse to risk and try and reach for that brass ring, because the collective "we" will be there to catch you. But you HAVE to get back on your feet and get off of welfare eventually. And.... eh... the disabled are a case of compassion....
All that aside though, YES, we can most assuredly define how much people need to make to "make a living". It's hard, not entirely accurate, but good enough. And if shit sucks when you're making no more than a living wage, that's actually how it's supposed to be.
What's needed, (and here's where the Libertarians, capitalists, free-marketeers, and other rugged individualist types start howling), is a re-boot of the system.
That's called a revolution.
If we don't all come together and change this situation in an orderly fashion, then revolution is almost inevitable, and the next one may be very bloody indeed.
Yeah, they are almost always followed by a coupled failed attempts at government and everything goes to hell. See: The US revolution, the french revolution, and most of the nations affected by the arab spring are going through that right now. Remember, the first government of the USA was an abysmal failure.
Don't get me wrong, I detest this corporocracy as much as you, but well, I'm howling at your proposed solution. But please, cite some examples of a "re-boot" that happened in an orderly fashion. Please explain how you'd want it to go down.
Whoa, dude. What's wrong with being on the short side? You equated it to being blind, sickly, deaf and retarded. Can we screen embryos against asshole offspring? Is that possible yet?
the great reduction of genetic diversity since there will be an overwhelming demand for genetic engineering your children and choosing the same list of traits that everyone else will want.
Yeah, healthy, wealthy, and wise. HOW DARE THEY!
we are now in a time when genetic diversity in world has been increasing since the invention of the locomotive train.
Actually, we're facing more outbreeding than ever before. It's all that travel and interracial breeding. It's not that the recessive genes are going away, it just that they're being dispersed amongst the crowd. You get diversity and freakshows through inbreeding.
When a species increases their genetic diversity they become
Two different species. Eventually.
...more resistant to extinction while the opposite increases the risk of extinction
Uh, got a citation for that? The ill effects of monocultures hit ecological systems. When a disease hits a forest that's full of deer and just deer, everything goes to hell and your predators die off due to a lack of food. But if it's full of various deer-like animals then they can just go munch on something else.
But we're talking about humans. "Extinction events" are shortlisted to nukes and asteroids. Designer doomsday plagues probably don't care what color hair you have. And since these designer babies are (in theory) specifically more resistant to disease, it's a step in the right direction, genepool wise.
It might be it's own sort of bleak future, but try "The People of Sand and Slag" by Paolo Bacigalupi.
fill an entire bay with obsolete junk, depriving others of desirable and useful bench space.
I dunno about your setup, but this is kind of the status quo at the QC-colab in Davenport, IA.
I mean, "obsolete junk" is pretty subjective. We've got the sewing machines that are working perfectly, but nobody's touched them in years. The giant robotic arm is completely busted and would need a monumental reverse engineering to get up and running, but it looks damn cool when you enter the electronics room. The pile of literal scrap PCBs below it, not so much. The kilns have massive potential, we want to start smelting, but nobody has had time. The whole thing is kind of one giant circulation of broken dreams and half-thought out projects which move around making way for more of the exact same thing. And somehow cool shit slips through the cracks and makes the whole thing worth it.
Ah, the NSA lapdog comes in to try and weedle and twist and squirm any way he can to apologize for the NSA.
But no. You can't even do that correctly, can you? Listen, the FBI demanded something. Lavabits said no. The court said yes. Then the FBI came in with an even bigger demand.
A week later, prosecutors upped the ante and obtained the search warrant demanding “all information necessary to decrypt communications sent to or from the Lavabit e-mail account [redacted] including encryption keys and SSL keys.”
"Upping the ante" is pretty synonymous with bullying. They refused the request, and the court order, and then the FBI "ups the ante" and demands complete access to everything? That's bullying flat out. It's abuse of power. Comply with our demands or we'll throw the whole book at you and make you dance.
This is on Lavabit
You mean the blame for this shit? No. No I don't think the blame is on Lavabits. I think the FBI got miffed that their cock wasn't sucked hard enough so they decided to rape a business to death.
Hey, the FBI came back with a warrant. Ok. That's not that bad. It's actually a lot better than this bullshit warrantless "pen register order". That the warrant includes COMPLETE control over ALL communication that your entire business is specifically sold as being secure? That's bad.
But please forgive me if my circle of co-workers was a tad more paranoid than most federal workers have a need to be.
Oh, you're an IRS field agent. Yeah, ok, you've got some reason to be concerned about "nut jobs with a bomb or a gun who wanted to go out in a blaze of glory". That's very much who Joe Stack was. But he wasn't a terrorist. He was having a fight with the IRS over some money. He committed suicide over it and tried to hurt the IRS in a blaze of glory. And it killed someone. Other than himself. He's kind of an asshole for that. But he's not a terrorist. He's a protestor. Distinctly more violent than the monk who self-immolated, but along those same lines.
The number of nuts we caught at the door with guns over the years was staggering. During about a third of my time with the agency, I was a field officer and I was credibly threatened multiple times, attacked more than once, held hostage twice, and had dogs set on me more times than I can remember.
That's because you are coming to take their money. You're the tax man. They don't like you. This is not terrorism! This has nothing to do with 9/11. We don't call it terrorism when the cops have to strong-arm a drunk out of a building or when a junkie tries to shank them. It's part of the job, and you kind of attract that sort of nut. But let me be REAL clear here. They are not terrorists, you should not be afraid of terrorists, things we could do to thwart terrorists will not thwart these people.
And, as hard of a hit as this has to be to your ego, you're still not a high-value target. You're a hated target. An enticing target. People out there really want to smack you. But "high value"... sorry dude, you're a middle-class office drone and not especially unique or vital. The nation keeps spinning if you get blown up. If your entire office gets wiped off the map, it's a minor blip on the federal budget. Probably equal parts paying out benefits, rebuilding, retraining replacements, and whatever lost revenue from assholes who would take advantage of the chaos to not pay as much on their taxes. I mean really, how much do the feds care about $38 million?
Oh, don't get me wrong, I don't even know the guy or what he's really done. It's just that Seanellis's defense of the man falls short. Once you parse through it, the defense actually looks like an insult to the man. You know, cause it's showcasing the meaningless metrics rather than what would actually impress us.
can you please define what you mean by "impressive" things in the field of Cybernetics,
Connecting a computer interface to a nervous system is indeed impressive. Kinda old-hat now a days, but it's something that they're continually striving to do better all the time. Also on the list of impressive cybernetics: replacement eyes (or really, any sensory-input that originates from a computer that's shortcutting our other senses), thought-controlled limbs, and anything that helps those with locked-in syndrome. You know, letting the blind see and the lame walk. That sort of thing.
"meaningful" papers,
That'd be subjective to someone more knowledgeable in the field of cybernetics. But papers that are referenced a lot seem to count.
and bringing "glory" to the school?
Seeing their peers shattered at conferences and having them flee before you. Drinking your enemies' blood from their own skulls as their women and children lament their loss with your name blazing across the sky in 50' high letter of roaring fire. And getting grants I guess.
You dismiss the talent for raising money
Damn straight. Professors really shouldn't piss away their time writing grant proposals. They should focus on how to sustain 50' high letters of fire.
You then ask him to satisfy your personal, hopelessly subjective goals.
Yes. Yes I do. Welcome to politics. If you want to spend my money, you better impress me.
I got news for you: the fundamental science is basically leisure, the very opposite of planting seeds or digging a ditch. We don't do it for any kind of profit or return, we do it because it's fun, we share the results with the world, and every now and then a small portion of our research happens to be useful hundreds of years in the future, which is the best we can hope for.
I prefer my science to be done in the name of progress and advancing human knowledge and capabilities. If you know of any grad students, professors, or departments that are primarily focused on their own leisure, please name them so we can de-fund them and put that money towards something worthwhile.
Whooooaaa, even the comments are crammed into that narrow space.
Ok, listen up. The slashdot commentators (and the community mod point system they use) are really what has value here. God knows it's not the editors. If you don't understand that we're a cut above the facebook and generic web 2.0 crowd and that we'd want more horizontal space to have more in depth conversations, you really disconnected from what actually makes this site worth coming to. I don't come here for the "lol dems are crazy" "Nuh-uh, reps are stupid" one-liners. I'm here for
(also, why is the top third and bottom half of Snowden's face cut off and/or obscured? If you're trying to add an image, just add it below. If you want to overlay something on top of the image, it probably shouldn't block 83% of the image. But seriously, why overlay anything? Is that some sort of lame watermark-like effect?)
The users's page looks ok I guess. The karma image and the chievo badges are... cute? But where are the point values of the posts? And where the hell is the "comments" button that showed me if anyone replied to my posts?
The bottom line of text, the line just above "read more" cuts off the descenders of all the characters. You know, the bottom bit of 'g', 'p', 'q' and such.
And yeah, the flat and minimalist look is for phones where you have to cram everything into a small-ass phone screen. This is slashdot. We come here to screw around while we should be working for that half-minute of mental relief. That means we have big-ass honkin monitors that real people who do real meaningful work use to interact with real programs. This is where your website is viewed.
Come on Dice, know your market. Just because all the webdevs are wanking themselves off on iphone screens doesn't mean that's what's best here.
That was a very insightful post detailing some inner-workings of what all this means. It was helpful and beneficial to the crowd.
And I was with you all the way up to this point:
Congress would be stupid to do it. The mechanics of the process made every federal building in the nation an incredibly enticing, super-target-rich environment for any nut job with a bomb or a gun who wanted to go out in a blaze of glory.
We tended to think that putting all government employees in central locations, metaphorically under a giant banner that said "All terrorists attack here. Multiple high-value targets present. High level of success guaranteed." was so stupid that even Congress wouldn't do it.
Seriously? It's stupid because of terrorism? You think that terrorists are just waiting around with a bucket full of bombs hoping that congress can't pass a budget so they can target a bunch of "non-essential" bureaucrats? Seriously? How deep did that screw drill into your head back in 2001? It was more than a decade ago. Get over it. The "post 9/11 world" was a group of scared children with too much power. We are not facing weekly suicide bombings. We didn't "fight them over there". They didn't "come over here". By and far there is no "they". You're not "high-value target" if you're putzing about in an office waiting to get furloughed. Osama's deranged cousin doesn't particularly care about you. Terrorism is simply not that big of a threat.
Congress is collectively stupid for the shutdown, agreed. But I think you're missing why.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it even possible to commit war crimes against zombies? I mean, they'll just climb out of those mass graves, right? Should Kratos from God of War offered surrender terms to that Krakken before or after it swallowed him?
But I see their point, I always thought that Captain Olimar should be tried for enslaving the local natives into helping repair his ship. And while it's possible to genocide species on Nethack, I always found that vaguely disturbing. Then again, being evil is more of a gameplay mechanic with it's own tradeoffs and less of a philosophical lifestyle choice.
Soooooo... There's a guy running a company looking at getting other people to give him money to build a fusion reactor which can... do whatever sounds like it'll make investor's panties wet.
I dunno man, fusion power has had a whole hell of a lot of snake oil salesmen. Your post even raises some red flags because "you've met the guy". Seriously, unless you're a high-energy physicist and know your shit about fusion, that's a net negative data-point for this project. The more charismatic he is, ie, his ability to get shmucks to believe in him, the more likely that this is all a scam, or simply a mistake. He might have even fooled himself into thinking this is a good idea and worth the money.
Or hey, he might be sitting on a breakthrough idea that will make unlimited cheap clean energy and change the world forever. It could be real this time.
I would totally support a strip-off for science.
Actually, isn't this the sort of thing that Burlesque covers? Don't they do kooky themed things every now and then? The Star Wars burlesque made some waves a little while ago. Where's my science themed show? A burlesque version of that skit showing how elements react would be hilarious. Among other things.
I'm sure with only some minor instructions, the dancers would be able to work alongside Jacob's ladders and liquid nitrogen.
Terribly sorry for not RTFA, but when did AMD try to add this to the Linux driver? When was it noticed? When was it corrected? And can I shove this in the face of windows fanboys who say that anyone could submit anything they want to Linux and you don't really know what's in there?
Oil production in Texas has more than doubled since 2010
Huh, that's interesting because I thought that it was more or less established that the lower 48 states hit peak oil a while ago. The price went up, but production didn't, because they couldn't, because it wasn't there.
Oh, wait, yeah, here we go:
It doubled from almost nothing. (linked like it's hot) And here's the larger picture.
Now, the main thrust of the article could be right on the money because it lumps natural gas in with oil and we've got a new way of squeezing gas out of the ground. WOO! Let's here it for technological innovation making the world a better place! But pointing out how Texas has doubled production from 300 to 600 million of barrels per year when it used to produce over 1200, and other than the last few years has been in decline since the 70's.... it's a little disingenuous.
But it's interesting that Texas has indeed ramped up oil production. There's probably a pretty serious story about why they're doing it NOW as opposed to during the massive scare that preceded the econopocalypse cica 2006.
Software types cling to their thick padding of abstraction. I like coding up from the reset vector.
I like not having to re-invent quicksort, atoi, hexToDec, etc etc etc every god-damn time. Or having to whip out the scope to find out what quirk this SPI implementation is doing. I like libraries where I know how they work, I can plop them down, and instantly have known capabilities. And no, you don't need big engines for everything. But if you need an Ethernet connection, even though the speed constraints are so lax that even a 8051 could handle it, it doesn't mean that you should piss away weeks re-inventing the wheel just to save a couple bucks on a cheaper chip. Unless you're making millions of units. It's a business decision. Whatever is cheapest and gets the job done. Sometimes that means slapping an intel in there.
And the standard response to the "reboot" that happened in the great depression is that the New Deal didn't actually fix the problem. The public work programs put food on the plate of some people that would have straight-up died without them. That's good. But it didn't get us out of the great depression. As depressing as it is, it was WWII that ended the great depression. Also, it's kind of a bad example as the USA was already DESPERATE for any sort of change or fix. There was a decade and a half of being utterly destitute. While the middle class is shrinking and the gini co-efficiant is falling, I've got a good job and I'm putzing about on Slashdot. You'll have to wait a decade or two of shit getting a lot worse for the population to be in the same sort of mental state as they were in the 1940's.
I don't actually know much about Iceland's woes. There's the 90's free market reform and the 2007 crisis? But I think you're talking about the fall of the USSR.
Fast forward a few years and you see thriving economies.
Yeah... Those were some pretty bad years for them as I recall.
"The result was a rapid decline in the value of the ruble, flight of foreign investment, delayed payments on sovereign and private debts, a breakdown of commercial transactions through the banking system, and the threat of runaway inflation."
And only a MERE DECADE LATER, they appear to be doing well..... yeah.... if all of your plans involve a decade of chaos, pain, suffering, economic woe, then I'm not exactly a big fan of your plan. That whole "going flat fucking broke" and not being able to borrow money isn't really a good thing. It's not a solution. It's a result of being fucked up. It's a negative effect rather than a way forward. The fact that some people recover from gunshots after getting shot isn't a reason to go shooting people.
And, you've got two solutions that are at odds. Russia's solution was to move from a central economy to a free market. The New Deal was moving away from the free market and more towards a central economy. (Where the government puts you to work).
So... you know.... pick one.
Intel didn’t announce pricing for Galileo,
Aaaaand I'm instantly not interested.
Seriously, you can throw as much hardware as you want at a problem, it's all just a matter of price. We could shove an iphone everywhere we want compact processing capabilities. (And god knows enough people actually do that).
Also, it really helps if it's open. The raspberry pi is neat because it's specifically useful as a full-fledged computer that DAMN cheap. It runs Linux so there's a lot of leeway with what you want to do with it. (Quickly, without having to develop your own RTOS and windows manager) But it IS questionable about what sort of long-term legs it has because the broadcom chip on it is very much closed. I don't care how awesome the hardware is if I can't even blink an LED without asking mother-may-I from some corporate whore.
Because China is going to undercut you.
Because a lot of different people have different "ultimate goals". Some people just want recreation and to play video games all day. Other want progress. Others want to dominate everyone else.
They're riding high on a massive population that used to be minnow farmers with a culture of being happy that they've got a warm meal at the end of the day. Those fuckers will work hard at a job because they're happy and content with their upward social mobility on a personal and a national level. So they would have double the economic output as the lazy americans across the ocean who let robots do their work and just play around all day. It's not like we're the only ones with robots increasing our productivity. So when the choice comes to buy widget X and you can buy one made mostly by American robots for Y dollars or you can buy one made by Chinese robots for Y/2 dollars (It's cheaper because the Chinese robots don't have to support a bunch of Chinese just lazing about living on welfare) you're going to call the Americans lazy and go with the cheaper option. The Americans lose business and eventually have to go back to work, but not before the realize they're no longer a superpower.
Do you think management is that incompetent?
I don't think you want me to answer that one, boss...
How do we really define "provides a basic level of acceptable living"?
Social norms.
Is it considered OK if people can't afford internet or cell phones?
Internet connections can run as low as FREE, provided you put up with some ads. Basic dialup is, what, $10/mo. And as more services move to the cheaper form of providing service over the Internet, a connection is more important. But a lot of people can make do with charities, starbucks, and/or public libraries.
Cell phones are becoming more the norm, but no, right now you don't need a cell phone to qualify as "acceptable living". You can get by on a good ol' POTs line. Cell phones, and more importantly connections, can be pretty cheap and they're DAMN useful. For some, combining their primary computer, communications, planner, and whateverelseyoucanshoveinthere makes more financial sense then buying all those things separate.
Long story short: Yes, but it's dirt cheap to get.
luxury items, like cars and designer clothes
BWAHAHAHAHAHAAAaaaaaaooohboy. Yeah, others have pointed this out, but it's pretty damn hilarious how you include a car as a luxury item next to "designer clothes". Sigh, yeah no. Maybe you live in the city where everyone can bike or take the subway. Out in the rest of the world, you have to get to work somehow. Even if it's a $500 beater and death-trap waiting to happen.
because in a free market, the people making stuff that people buy continually...
are continually undercut by competition. At least in the mystical magical land of the "true" "free" market. People NEED to buy food. Yet food is not priced so exorbitantly priced that people are starving out in the streets.
Also, there's the question about people who simply don't need to make an "acceptable living" with their job. High school kids...
Don't work 40 hours a week. You know, because they "work" 40 hour weeks AT SCHOOL. And during the summer, yeah, some of those kids do need to make a living wage.
There are other ideas, like garuanteed income supplements,...the government tops up the difference ... But very few governments want to have these services, because it looks like a free hand out,... it would be cheaper to operate than the current welfare systems.
That IS welfare. And yeah, it's a really bad idea to continually sustain people. It completely demotivates them from doing anything. The welfare safety net is supposed to be there when you fall. Like when you get laid off, injured, face natural catastrophe. It's supposed to sustain you while you get back on your feet. It's supposed to make you less adverse to risk and try and reach for that brass ring, because the collective "we" will be there to catch you. But you HAVE to get back on your feet and get off of welfare eventually. And.... eh... the disabled are a case of compassion....
All that aside though, YES, we can most assuredly define how much people need to make to "make a living". It's hard, not entirely accurate, but good enough. And if shit sucks when you're making no more than a living wage, that's actually how it's supposed to be.
What's needed, (and here's where the Libertarians, capitalists, free-marketeers, and other rugged individualist types start howling), is a re-boot of the system.
That's called a revolution.
If we don't all come together and change this situation in an orderly fashion, then revolution is almost inevitable, and the next one may be very bloody indeed.
Yeah, they are almost always followed by a coupled failed attempts at government and everything goes to hell. See: The US revolution, the french revolution, and most of the nations affected by the arab spring are going through that right now. Remember, the first government of the USA was an abysmal failure.
Don't get me wrong, I detest this corporocracy as much as you, but well, I'm howling at your proposed solution. But please, cite some examples of a "re-boot" that happened in an orderly fashion. Please explain how you'd want it to go down.
Whoa, dude. What's wrong with being on the short side?
You equated it to being blind, sickly, deaf and retarded.
Can we screen embryos against asshole offspring? Is that possible yet?
the great reduction of genetic diversity since there will be an overwhelming demand for genetic engineering your children and choosing the same list of traits that everyone else will want.
Yeah, healthy, wealthy, and wise. HOW DARE THEY!
we are now in a time when genetic diversity in world has been increasing since the invention of the locomotive train.
Actually, we're facing more outbreeding than ever before. It's all that travel and interracial breeding. It's not that the recessive genes are going away, it just that they're being dispersed amongst the crowd. You get diversity and freakshows through inbreeding.
When a species increases their genetic diversity they become
Two different species. Eventually.
...more resistant to extinction while the opposite increases the risk of extinction
Uh, got a citation for that? The ill effects of monocultures hit ecological systems. When a disease hits a forest that's full of deer and just deer, everything goes to hell and your predators die off due to a lack of food. But if it's full of various deer-like animals then they can just go munch on something else.
But we're talking about humans. "Extinction events" are shortlisted to nukes and asteroids. Designer doomsday plagues probably don't care what color hair you have. And since these designer babies are (in theory) specifically more resistant to disease, it's a step in the right direction, genepool wise.
It might be it's own sort of bleak future, but try "The People of Sand and Slag" by Paolo Bacigalupi.
Oh good! A shop.
How about a little red Leicester? I do hope you're not out of that particular cheese.
I read that 205 robots st and though "damn, how cool is that". Then I re-read it. You should talk to your mayor and have it fixed.
fill an entire bay with obsolete junk, depriving others of desirable and useful bench space.
I dunno about your setup, but this is kind of the status quo at the QC-colab in Davenport, IA.
I mean, "obsolete junk" is pretty subjective. We've got the sewing machines that are working perfectly, but nobody's touched them in years. The giant robotic arm is completely busted and would need a monumental reverse engineering to get up and running, but it looks damn cool when you enter the electronics room. The pile of literal scrap PCBs below it, not so much. The kilns have massive potential, we want to start smelting, but nobody has had time. The whole thing is kind of one giant circulation of broken dreams and half-thought out projects which move around making way for more of the exact same thing. And somehow cool shit slips through the cracks and makes the whole thing worth it.
This is a democracy right?
Who Run Bartertown?
Ah, the NSA lapdog comes in to try and weedle and twist and squirm any way he can to apologize for the NSA.
But no. You can't even do that correctly, can you? Listen, the FBI demanded something. Lavabits said no. The court said yes. Then the FBI came in with an even bigger demand.
A week later, prosecutors upped the ante and obtained the search warrant demanding “all information necessary to decrypt communications sent to or from the Lavabit e-mail account [redacted] including encryption keys and SSL keys.”
"Upping the ante" is pretty synonymous with bullying. They refused the request, and the court order, and then the FBI "ups the ante" and demands complete access to everything? That's bullying flat out. It's abuse of power. Comply with our demands or we'll throw the whole book at you and make you dance.
This is on Lavabit
You mean the blame for this shit? No. No I don't think the blame is on Lavabits. I think the FBI got miffed that their cock wasn't sucked hard enough so they decided to rape a business to death.
Hey, the FBI came back with a warrant. Ok. That's not that bad. It's actually a lot better than this bullshit warrantless "pen register order". That the warrant includes COMPLETE control over ALL communication that your entire business is specifically sold as being secure? That's bad.
Huh, I guess I derived it from kooshy or koosh, which is the brand name of those balls with all the rubber strands sticking out of them.
See kids, this is what marketing does to you after 20 years.
But please forgive me if my circle of co-workers was a tad more paranoid than most federal workers have a need to be.
Oh, you're an IRS field agent. Yeah, ok, you've got some reason to be concerned about "nut jobs with a bomb or a gun who wanted to go out in a blaze of glory". That's very much who Joe Stack was. But he wasn't a terrorist. He was having a fight with the IRS over some money. He committed suicide over it and tried to hurt the IRS in a blaze of glory. And it killed someone. Other than himself. He's kind of an asshole for that. But he's not a terrorist. He's a protestor. Distinctly more violent than the monk who self-immolated, but along those same lines.
The number of nuts we caught at the door with guns over the years was staggering. During about a third of my time with the agency, I was a field officer and I was credibly threatened multiple times, attacked more than once, held hostage twice, and had dogs set on me more times than I can remember.
That's because you are coming to take their money. You're the tax man. They don't like you. This is not terrorism! This has nothing to do with 9/11. We don't call it terrorism when the cops have to strong-arm a drunk out of a building or when a junkie tries to shank them. It's part of the job, and you kind of attract that sort of nut. But let me be REAL clear here. They are not terrorists, you should not be afraid of terrorists, things we could do to thwart terrorists will not thwart these people.
And, as hard of a hit as this has to be to your ego, you're still not a high-value target. You're a hated target. An enticing target. People out there really want to smack you. But "high value"... sorry dude, you're a middle-class office drone and not especially unique or vital. The nation keeps spinning if you get blown up. If your entire office gets wiped off the map, it's a minor blip on the federal budget. Probably equal parts paying out benefits, rebuilding, retraining replacements, and whatever lost revenue from assholes who would take advantage of the chaos to not pay as much on their taxes. I mean really, how much do the feds care about $38 million?
Oh, don't get me wrong, I don't even know the guy or what he's really done. It's just that Seanellis's defense of the man falls short. Once you parse through it, the defense actually looks like an insult to the man. You know, cause it's showcasing the meaningless metrics rather than what would actually impress us.
can you please define what you mean by "impressive" things in the field of Cybernetics,
Connecting a computer interface to a nervous system is indeed impressive. Kinda old-hat now a days, but it's something that they're continually striving to do better all the time. Also on the list of impressive cybernetics: replacement eyes (or really, any sensory-input that originates from a computer that's shortcutting our other senses), thought-controlled limbs, and anything that helps those with locked-in syndrome. You know, letting the blind see and the lame walk. That sort of thing.
"meaningful" papers,
That'd be subjective to someone more knowledgeable in the field of cybernetics. But papers that are referenced a lot seem to count.
and bringing "glory" to the school?
Seeing their peers shattered at conferences and having them flee before you. Drinking your enemies' blood from their own skulls as their women and children lament their loss with your name blazing across the sky in 50' high letter of roaring fire. And getting grants I guess.
You dismiss the talent for raising money
Damn straight. Professors really shouldn't piss away their time writing grant proposals. They should focus on how to sustain 50' high letters of fire.
You then ask him to satisfy your personal, hopelessly subjective goals.
Yes. Yes I do. Welcome to politics. If you want to spend my money, you better impress me.
I got news for you: the fundamental science is basically leisure, the very opposite of planting seeds or digging a ditch. We don't do it for any kind of profit or return, we do it because it's fun, we share the results with the world, and every now and then a small portion of our research happens to be useful hundreds of years in the future, which is the best we can hope for.
I prefer my science to be done in the name of progress and advancing human knowledge and capabilities. If you know of any grad students, professors, or departments that are primarily focused on their own leisure, please name them so we can de-fund them and put that money towards something worthwhile.
Whooooaaa, even the comments are crammed into that narrow space.
Ok, listen up. The slashdot commentators (and the community mod point system they use) are really what has value here. God knows it's not the editors. If you don't understand that we're a cut above the facebook and generic web 2.0 crowd and that we'd want more horizontal space to have more in depth conversations, you really disconnected from what actually makes this site worth coming to. I don't come here for the "lol dems are crazy" "Nuh-uh, reps are stupid" one-liners. I'm here for
(also, why is the top third and bottom half of Snowden's face cut off and/or obscured? If you're trying to add an image, just add it below. If you want to overlay something on top of the image, it probably shouldn't block 83% of the image. But seriously, why overlay anything? Is that some sort of lame watermark-like effect?)
The users's page looks ok I guess. The karma image and the chievo badges are... cute? But where are the point values of the posts? And where the hell is the "comments" button that showed me if anyone replied to my posts?
The bottom line of text, the line just above "read more" cuts off the descenders of all the characters. You know, the bottom bit of 'g', 'p', 'q' and such.
And yeah, the flat and minimalist look is for phones where you have to cram everything into a small-ass phone screen. This is slashdot. We come here to screw around while we should be working for that half-minute of mental relief. That means we have big-ass honkin monitors that real people who do real meaningful work use to interact with real programs. This is where your website is viewed.
Come on Dice, know your market. Just because all the webdevs are wanking themselves off on iphone screens doesn't mean that's what's best here.
That was a very insightful post detailing some inner-workings of what all this means. It was helpful and beneficial to the crowd.
And I was with you all the way up to this point:
Congress would be stupid to do it. The mechanics of the process made every federal building in the nation an incredibly enticing, super-target-rich environment for any nut job with a bomb or a gun who wanted to go out in a blaze of glory.
We tended to think that putting all government employees in central locations, metaphorically under a giant banner that said "All terrorists attack here. Multiple high-value targets present. High level of success guaranteed." was so stupid that even Congress wouldn't do it.
Seriously? It's stupid because of terrorism? You think that terrorists are just waiting around with a bucket full of bombs hoping that congress can't pass a budget so they can target a bunch of "non-essential" bureaucrats? Seriously? How deep did that screw drill into your head back in 2001? It was more than a decade ago. Get over it. The "post 9/11 world" was a group of scared children with too much power. We are not facing weekly suicide bombings. We didn't "fight them over there". They didn't "come over here". By and far there is no "they". You're not "high-value target" if you're putzing about in an office waiting to get furloughed. Osama's deranged cousin doesn't particularly care about you. Terrorism is simply not that big of a threat.
Congress is collectively stupid for the shutdown, agreed. But I think you're missing why.