The real reason is to close the analog hole and add DRM to even your headphones.
It's this. It's pretty much the last 'analog hole'.
Of course like so many things it only 'closes' it for the average user, or people who don't look hard enough. Easy enough to hack a pair of cheap headphones to provide an analog output, and I'm sure it'll be easy to order an adapter from some overseas company that does the same thing without having to modify anything.
As if Cruz wasn't a crackpot and a joke to start with, he picks the second-worst running mate imaginable, the worst being Sarah Palin. When I heard about this on NPR I almost ran myself off the road, I was laughing so hard.
You're missing what I believe to be an important part of the problem: So-called 'millennials' were smacked in the face by the recession in 2007-2008 just like everyone else was, but since they lack life experience and perspective, I'd imagine it hit them harder, emotionally-speaking. Not hard to imagine from their perspective that the deck is stacked against them by Big Business. I'd guess they think of themselves as 'The 99%', and 'capitalism' represents 'The 1%'.
For a country that ostensibly is 'government by the people, for the people', the 'people' don't seem to give a damn. If 100% of eligible voters bothered to go vote, I think it'd be a very different situation.
Goddamnit, I AM NOT TROLLING ANYBODY FOR ANY REASON.
What the hell is going on here? You can't have an opinion about something that isn't the mainstream without being labeled a 'troll'? What, have we reached a point where everyone has to be so politically correct that it's assumed that I'm kidding or something if I say something that doesn't line up with everyone else?
I've hacked on smartphones being anything but 'smart' for quite some time now, because of the cost of the phone, getting gouged for overpriced, underperforming, capped data plans from the highway robbers masquerading as wireless companies, and the fact that all smartphones have more holes in their security than a swisscheese, but now I have a whole new reason to never want a smartphone: I don't want to be associated with these mouth-breathers whose eyes are so thoroughly glued to their gods-be-damned phones, that they'd walk out into the middle of a busy street and get hit by a car, and some municipality therefore feels the need to install gods-be-damned traffic signals on the sidewalk to keep these idiots from killing themselves. Nope, no, hell no, don't want to be associated with them, at all, ever.
Here's the thing: All the current proposals for this 'UBI'? They're coming out of countries that have a fraction of the population, as well as the GDP, of the U.S.. I do not have any confidence in the idea that it'll scale up and still be viable. Like I said somewhere else: How about you make basic health insurance free for everyone first, getting rid of the ACA as it currently exists, and if the federal government can make that work for, say, 10 years? Then we can talk about giving everyone free money to live on and making having a job 'optional'. As is we don't have anywhere near a balanced budget, nineteen BILLION in National Debt, and no end in sight for any of it, and it would cost trillions of dollars, every single year to give the people free money every month. It just doesn't make a lick of sense to me, and I'm torn between thinking the ostensible proponents of it are either paid trolls trying to ruin the U.S. permanently, or just rose-colored-glasses-wearing blue-sky types who aren't living in the real world, trying to sell everyone on an utter fantasy. So my challenge stands: Get rid of the ACA and give everyone free basic healthcare; expand the existing Medicare system to accomplish that. If you can't do that, then none of this UBI nonsense will work either, plain and simple.
Friend, it's moderated down to -1 by self-hating white people who don't seem to understand that they can 'apologize' to ISIS and muslims in general, Native Americans, and whoever else has been wronged, and it won't matter: ISIS and types like them will enslave, beat, and murder them regardless, because their hatred of us is such that they'd like to make us extinct, erase the world we're living in, and create their own fucked-up 'Caliphate'-oriented world, where everyone is muslim, and of course THEY are in control of everything. But you can't tell these people any of this, they're too fixated on hating themselve for things that they had no direct hand in causing, and would gleefully doom the rest of us to the fate they feel they deserve.
My point is your point: The proponents of this 'UBI' apparently can't see past the end of their own noses, which is more or less typical for the average person: a lack of practical vision. All they seem to see is the shiny parts, which boils down to 'I won't have to work anymore!'. I've already looked forward at what this might cause and I don't like the implications of it one bit. I think the main problem is that they're using countries with a fraction of the population and GDP of the U.S. as examples, ignoring that the idea just won't likely scale up at all without falling apart under it's own mass.
BLAH BLAH BLAH TOO MANY WORDS! I'm not reading all that!
Your countries that have free universal healthcare also have a fraction of the population and GDP of the U.S. so of course it's easier to implement and maintain. Try that trick with 300M citizens and the GDP of the U.S.
I certainly hope you understand that we, apparently, agree with each other. When this issue first came up a couple months ago, I said more or less exactly the same things you're saying in your comment, but of course I was shouted down by people who don't seem to understand the math or the subtleties (or the blinding obviousness!) of the whole problem. So to you, at least, I re-state the following from back then: I do not believe that this 'UBI' nonsense can EVER work, and it would just wreck everything for everyone in the U.S. That being said: We're already having the ACA shoved down our throats. We already have national healthcare managed by the government: namely, Medicare. So to reiterate my challenge to the UBI-supporters and the (apparent) socialists within our own government: If you can't manage to (expand Medicare to cover all citizens automatically all the time? Or something equivalent?) without completely screwing it all up, then how the hell can anyone think that we can totally disrupt the entire economic model of the United States by telling everyone "You don't have to work anymore, here's your free government money"? I'm throwing down a gauntlet, that I have no expectation anybody, in reality, will ever pick up; the UBI-supporters, however many of them exist in reality (and not just the Internet, where anyone can say anything they want and never be made accountable for it), will not, I believe, ever gain any traction with the American public, and the U.S. Government will likewise never take the idea seriously. (Laugh out loud!) I think we'd have a card-carrying Libertarian in the White House before we'd ever see it happen! I'm basically just trying to shut these UBI people up about it by giving them a task they would be able to accomplish if their idea had any merit -- but it does not, so it'll never happen.
The sad irony for me is that I'm one of the people who would actually do something different with my life if money wasn't a problem anymore. I'd like to go back to school for a few things, and I'd like to be able to spend more time training for bike racing than I'm able to having to work a fulltime job. But the whole UBI thing, despite it working in 'other' countries (which, by the way, all have a fraction of the population of the U.S.) is just a fantasy, like me winning a hundred million dollars in the lottery.
Cheers.:-) Here's to having a decent week working this week, Pete.:-)
Communism and Socialism look great on paper; it's when you get a bunch of people involved in administering it, that it gets all screwed up and corrupted. No plan survives first contact with the human race, intact.
I don't really care about anybodys arguments for this UBI concept, I know one thing for sure: Somehow, it'll get corrupted, so that I get screwed out of it, have to work, my taxes jacked up, and I'll be paying for some jackoffs to smoke weed, drink beer, and play video games all day long, while I get my pay cut, and as mentioned above, my taxes increased to pay for losers to play all day. I just KNOW it will happen that way.
You want the government to give us free shit? How about we do away with the requirement for healthcare (or paying Danegeld to the IRS if you don't) and give us basic healthcare for FREE instead!? That would make WAY MORE sense than this UBI crap. I'm dead serious about this: If the U.S. Government can't manage to give every U.S. citizen free basic healthcare, then it sure as fuck can't afford to give everyone enough cash to live on every month. Call it a test case. I challenge the Government and everyone who supports this UBI nonsense to make free healthcare for everyone work, first; if that works for, say, a decade, THEN we can talk about your UBI. Deal?
Oh come on, don't sugar-coat it: There is a huge horde of assholes running around the Middle East blowing shit up, kidnapping women (even young girls) and turning them into sex slaves, and cutting off peoples' gods-be-damned heads on gods-be-damned YouTube, meanwhile recruiting (stupid) young men from first-world countries including the U.S. into their hellish anti-life organization. I'm normally immune to hearing about this sort of shit, but it's even gave me nightmares for a while. How the fuck do you think some people are going to react to that, on top of the usual bullshit going on in the U.S. (although Trump is far from 'usual', he's an extraordinary asshole, even for U.S. politics)? It's no big mystery to me that more people are just saying "fuck it" and checking out permanently.
See, I'd normally agree with you, but in this case there is a push for more and more electric vehicles, and reducing the overall cost and raising the efficiency is a priority, and it's all being pushed by the government, so they'll have to use technology like this at least in electric vehicles or lose their market share. Since it's then in electric vehicles it'll end up in everything else, too. Having battery packs for your electric car that last the entire lifespan of the car itself is a great selling point, and vehicles will always need some type of servicing or other regardless. Smartphones will break or fail in some way regardless of the battery wearing out so there's that. Computers and tablets will fail or become obsolete regardless of the battery failing or not. I just don't see a technological breakthrough like this one being supressed, it would benefit no one (especially corporations).
The second is fixed by having bus-only lanes or corridors.
Sure. And traffic problems on highways were supposed to be 'fixed' by having carpool-only lanes.. which end up empty, while all the other general-use lanes are bumper-to-bumper. All having a 'bus-only' lane will accomplish will be to piss off drivers who are sitting in traffic while half-empty buses go whizzing by them. Oh and by the way if we're going to have 'bus-only lanes' then we also need to have protected bike lanes everywhere, too -- which will also piss off drivers. The U.S. is a car-centric country, and I don't see that changing anytime soon. Public transit is not practical because it doesn't go everywhere you need to go, and it takes way too long to get anywhere. Everyone riding bikes is a non-starter too because not everyone can or has the time. We've all heard the arguments for and against both and I'm not going to put all of them here, go find them yourself. In the U.S. at least public transit is the province of the poor, and unless you can magically change hearts and minds to see that differently you're not going to magically make public transit 'fashionable' and highly utilized. If you can't do that then you can't get people to vote for legislation to fund huge expansive public transportation projects, which means it won't improve which means nobody is going to use it. Meanwhile it wouldn't matter anyway because the 1%-ers wouldn't be caught dead on a public bus, and so long as that persists, public transit is always going to be viewed as something only the poor use. Meanwhile at least half or more of people who talk about how we should get rid of cars and use public transit will likewise find reasons why they need their cars and not take the bus themselves so none of this ever goes anywhere. You, friend, are just one more person in a long line of people stretching back for 100 years who stump about how we need more and better public transit but you see it never really happens? Please, just give up. People like personal transportation in this country, and improving that instead of trying to force public transit on people is the direction we need to keep moving in. If you like taking buses and trains everywhere and walking then perhaps you should consider moving to the EU where that's the mindset; it's just not going to fly here.
Congratulations, AC, you're the only commentor in this thread that actually understands the question I was asking! 1E+6 Internets are awarded to you!
Being as unaware as I was about the quantity of said Xenon gas required in a typical application of this particular type of thruster, I assumed the quantity was significantly larger than I've now heard by at least an order of magnitude or two. Now that I have that information I see that it's not totally unrealistic.
If Elon Musk wants to invent something that will improve mass transit, how about a mind control device that will make people actually want to use public transit in the first place? All a 'self-driving bus' will do is make bus drivers less skilled -- because they'll still have to sit there, supervising some shitty pseudo-AI that is pseudo-driving a 9 ton chunk of metal and flesh on wheels that could kill dozens of people if it fucks up -- and make no mistake, it will be required to still have manual controls and a qualified human operator, alert and supervising it, at all times. Stupid idea.
I'd like to know how you can talk about a drive system being '10 times more efficient' when it's 'fuel' is one of the rarest gasses in Earth's atmosphere? Shall we just design a spacecraft drive system that uses giant diamonds or something instead, so it'd be cheaper and easier to obtain fuel?
Slashdot Mirror
The real reason is to close the analog hole and add DRM to even your headphones.
It's this. It's pretty much the last 'analog hole'.
Of course like so many things it only 'closes' it for the average user, or people who don't look hard enough. Easy enough to hack a pair of cheap headphones to provide an analog output, and I'm sure it'll be easy to order an adapter from some overseas company that does the same thing without having to modify anything.
As if Cruz wasn't a crackpot and a joke to start with, he picks the second-worst running mate imaginable, the worst being Sarah Palin. When I heard about this on NPR I almost ran myself off the road, I was laughing so hard.
Oh, shut up.
You're missing what I believe to be an important part of the problem: So-called 'millennials' were smacked in the face by the recession in 2007-2008 just like everyone else was, but since they lack life experience and perspective, I'd imagine it hit them harder, emotionally-speaking. Not hard to imagine from their perspective that the deck is stacked against them by Big Business. I'd guess they think of themselves as 'The 99%', and 'capitalism' represents 'The 1%'.
For a country that ostensibly is 'government by the people, for the people', the 'people' don't seem to give a damn. If 100% of eligible voters bothered to go vote, I think it'd be a very different situation.
Sounds rediculous and expensive to use Uber.
This guy is high on Chinese pollution
You're close; the correct phrase here is, he's 'blowing smoke'. It's like Kim Jung Un babbling on about how great North Korea is.
I'd rather keep driving myself, thank you very much. Make it an option I can 'opt out' of.
Goddamnit, I AM NOT TROLLING ANYBODY FOR ANY REASON.
What the hell is going on here? You can't have an opinion about something that isn't the mainstream without being labeled a 'troll'? What, have we reached a point where everyone has to be so politically correct that it's assumed that I'm kidding or something if I say something that doesn't line up with everyone else?
I've hacked on smartphones being anything but 'smart' for quite some time now, because of the cost of the phone, getting gouged for overpriced, underperforming, capped data plans from the highway robbers masquerading as wireless companies, and the fact that all smartphones have more holes in their security than a swisscheese, but now I have a whole new reason to never want a smartphone: I don't want to be associated with these mouth-breathers whose eyes are so thoroughly glued to their gods-be-damned phones, that they'd walk out into the middle of a busy street and get hit by a car, and some municipality therefore feels the need to install gods-be-damned traffic signals on the sidewalk to keep these idiots from killing themselves. Nope, no, hell no, don't want to be associated with them, at all, ever.
There, that's better. XD
Sure. Buckminster Fuller, or so I'm told.
Here's the thing: All the current proposals for this 'UBI'? They're coming out of countries that have a fraction of the population, as well as the GDP, of the U.S.. I do not have any confidence in the idea that it'll scale up and still be viable. Like I said somewhere else: How about you make basic health insurance free for everyone first, getting rid of the ACA as it currently exists, and if the federal government can make that work for, say, 10 years? Then we can talk about giving everyone free money to live on and making having a job 'optional'. As is we don't have anywhere near a balanced budget, nineteen BILLION in National Debt, and no end in sight for any of it, and it would cost trillions of dollars, every single year to give the people free money every month. It just doesn't make a lick of sense to me, and I'm torn between thinking the ostensible proponents of it are either paid trolls trying to ruin the U.S. permanently, or just rose-colored-glasses-wearing blue-sky types who aren't living in the real world, trying to sell everyone on an utter fantasy. So my challenge stands: Get rid of the ACA and give everyone free basic healthcare; expand the existing Medicare system to accomplish that. If you can't do that, then none of this UBI nonsense will work either, plain and simple.
Friend, it's moderated down to -1 by self-hating white people who don't seem to understand that they can 'apologize' to ISIS and muslims in general, Native Americans, and whoever else has been wronged, and it won't matter: ISIS and types like them will enslave, beat, and murder them regardless, because their hatred of us is such that they'd like to make us extinct, erase the world we're living in, and create their own fucked-up 'Caliphate'-oriented world, where everyone is muslim, and of course THEY are in control of everything. But you can't tell these people any of this, they're too fixated on hating themselve for things that they had no direct hand in causing, and would gleefully doom the rest of us to the fate they feel they deserve.
My point is your point: The proponents of this 'UBI' apparently can't see past the end of their own noses, which is more or less typical for the average person: a lack of practical vision. All they seem to see is the shiny parts, which boils down to 'I won't have to work anymore!'. I've already looked forward at what this might cause and I don't like the implications of it one bit. I think the main problem is that they're using countries with a fraction of the population and GDP of the U.S. as examples, ignoring that the idea just won't likely scale up at all without falling apart under it's own mass.
BLAH BLAH BLAH TOO MANY WORDS! I'm not reading all that!
Your countries that have free universal healthcare also have a fraction of the population and GDP of the U.S. so of course it's easier to implement and maintain. Try that trick with 300M citizens and the GDP of the U.S.
Hello, new friend,
:-) :-)
I certainly hope you understand that we, apparently, agree with each other. When this issue first came up a couple months ago, I said more or less exactly the same things you're saying in your comment, but of course I was shouted down by people who don't seem to understand the math or the subtleties (or the blinding obviousness!) of the whole problem. So to you, at least, I re-state the following from back then: I do not believe that this 'UBI' nonsense can EVER work, and it would just wreck everything for everyone in the U.S. That being said: We're already having the ACA shoved down our throats. We already have national healthcare managed by the government: namely, Medicare. So to reiterate my challenge to the UBI-supporters and the (apparent) socialists within our own government: If you can't manage to (expand Medicare to cover all citizens automatically all the time? Or something equivalent?) without completely screwing it all up, then how the hell can anyone think that we can totally disrupt the entire economic model of the United States by telling everyone "You don't have to work anymore, here's your free government money"? I'm throwing down a gauntlet, that I have no expectation anybody, in reality, will ever pick up; the UBI-supporters, however many of them exist in reality (and not just the Internet, where anyone can say anything they want and never be made accountable for it), will not, I believe, ever gain any traction with the American public, and the U.S. Government will likewise never take the idea seriously. (Laugh out loud!) I think we'd have a card-carrying Libertarian in the White House before we'd ever see it happen! I'm basically just trying to shut these UBI people up about it by giving them a task they would be able to accomplish if their idea had any merit -- but it does not, so it'll never happen.
The sad irony for me is that I'm one of the people who would actually do something different with my life if money wasn't a problem anymore. I'd like to go back to school for a few things, and I'd like to be able to spend more time training for bike racing than I'm able to having to work a fulltime job. But the whole UBI thing, despite it working in 'other' countries (which, by the way, all have a fraction of the population of the U.S.) is just a fantasy, like me winning a hundred million dollars in the lottery.
Cheers.
Here's to having a decent week working this week, Pete.
Communism and Socialism look great on paper; it's when you get a bunch of people involved in administering it, that it gets all screwed up and corrupted. No plan survives first contact with the human race, intact.
I don't really care about anybodys arguments for this UBI concept, I know one thing for sure: Somehow, it'll get corrupted, so that I get screwed out of it, have to work, my taxes jacked up, and I'll be paying for some jackoffs to smoke weed, drink beer, and play video games all day long, while I get my pay cut, and as mentioned above, my taxes increased to pay for losers to play all day. I just KNOW it will happen that way.
You want the government to give us free shit? How about we do away with the requirement for healthcare (or paying Danegeld to the IRS if you don't) and give us basic healthcare for FREE instead!? That would make WAY MORE sense than this UBI crap. I'm dead serious about this: If the U.S. Government can't manage to give every U.S. citizen free basic healthcare, then it sure as fuck can't afford to give everyone enough cash to live on every month. Call it a test case. I challenge the Government and everyone who supports this UBI nonsense to make free healthcare for everyone work, first; if that works for, say, a decade, THEN we can talk about your UBI. Deal?
continued military actions
Oh come on, don't sugar-coat it: There is a huge horde of assholes running around the Middle East blowing shit up, kidnapping women (even young girls) and turning them into sex slaves, and cutting off peoples' gods-be-damned heads on gods-be-damned YouTube, meanwhile recruiting (stupid) young men from first-world countries including the U.S. into their hellish anti-life organization. I'm normally immune to hearing about this sort of shit, but it's even gave me nightmares for a while. How the fuck do you think some people are going to react to that, on top of the usual bullshit going on in the U.S. (although Trump is far from 'usual', he's an extraordinary asshole, even for U.S. politics)? It's no big mystery to me that more people are just saying "fuck it" and checking out permanently.
See, I'd normally agree with you, but in this case there is a push for more and more electric vehicles, and reducing the overall cost and raising the efficiency is a priority, and it's all being pushed by the government, so they'll have to use technology like this at least in electric vehicles or lose their market share. Since it's then in electric vehicles it'll end up in everything else, too. Having battery packs for your electric car that last the entire lifespan of the car itself is a great selling point, and vehicles will always need some type of servicing or other regardless. Smartphones will break or fail in some way regardless of the battery wearing out so there's that. Computers and tablets will fail or become obsolete regardless of the battery failing or not. I just don't see a technological breakthrough like this one being supressed, it would benefit no one (especially corporations).
I have zero years of chemistry classes; I've never taken one. Doesn't mean I can't understand the subject if you explain it to me.
:-)
Thank you for making an informative, non-sarcastic, non-pedantic comment in this thread.
The second is fixed by having bus-only lanes or corridors.
Sure. And traffic problems on highways were supposed to be 'fixed' by having carpool-only lanes.. which end up empty, while all the other general-use lanes are bumper-to-bumper. All having a 'bus-only' lane will accomplish will be to piss off drivers who are sitting in traffic while half-empty buses go whizzing by them. Oh and by the way if we're going to have 'bus-only lanes' then we also need to have protected bike lanes everywhere, too -- which will also piss off drivers. The U.S. is a car-centric country, and I don't see that changing anytime soon. Public transit is not practical because it doesn't go everywhere you need to go, and it takes way too long to get anywhere. Everyone riding bikes is a non-starter too because not everyone can or has the time. We've all heard the arguments for and against both and I'm not going to put all of them here, go find them yourself. In the U.S. at least public transit is the province of the poor, and unless you can magically change hearts and minds to see that differently you're not going to magically make public transit 'fashionable' and highly utilized. If you can't do that then you can't get people to vote for legislation to fund huge expansive public transportation projects, which means it won't improve which means nobody is going to use it. Meanwhile it wouldn't matter anyway because the 1%-ers wouldn't be caught dead on a public bus, and so long as that persists, public transit is always going to be viewed as something only the poor use. Meanwhile at least half or more of people who talk about how we should get rid of cars and use public transit will likewise find reasons why they need their cars and not take the bus themselves so none of this ever goes anywhere. You, friend, are just one more person in a long line of people stretching back for 100 years who stump about how we need more and better public transit but you see it never really happens? Please, just give up. People like personal transportation in this country, and improving that instead of trying to force public transit on people is the direction we need to keep moving in. If you like taking buses and trains everywhere and walking then perhaps you should consider moving to the EU where that's the mindset; it's just not going to fly here.
Congratulations, AC, you're the only commentor in this thread that actually understands the question I was asking! 1E+6 Internets are awarded to you!
Being as unaware as I was about the quantity of said Xenon gas required in a typical application of this particular type of thruster, I assumed the quantity was significantly larger than I've now heard by at least an order of magnitude or two. Now that I have that information I see that it's not totally unrealistic.
If Elon Musk wants to invent something that will improve mass transit, how about a mind control device that will make people actually want to use public transit in the first place? All a 'self-driving bus' will do is make bus drivers less skilled -- because they'll still have to sit there, supervising some shitty pseudo-AI that is pseudo-driving a 9 ton chunk of metal and flesh on wheels that could kill dozens of people if it fucks up -- and make no mistake, it will be required to still have manual controls and a qualified human operator, alert and supervising it, at all times. Stupid idea.
I'd like to know how you can talk about a drive system being '10 times more efficient' when it's 'fuel' is one of the rarest gasses in Earth's atmosphere? Shall we just design a spacecraft drive system that uses giant diamonds or something instead, so it'd be cheaper and easier to obtain fuel?