I've yet to sit down and research this whole 'commercial ads rating' stuff, but it still sounds like nonsense to me. You pay for ads during programs that people want to watch, not cancel shows because people watch the show and not the ads; that's what makes sense to me. If the other way is really how they're doing it then I wonder how they manage to stay out of bankruptcy.
OK.. Did you spend all the money you made working here in the U.S., in the U.S., or did you send it overseas? If you spent it all here then I'm OK with it. If you're one of those people who sent as much of it back home as you possibly could then I'm decidedly not OK with it. But since you became a naturalized citizen of the U.S. then you probably spent your money here. I'm talking about the latter of the two: People who came here to work on an H1B visa and sent their money overseas. I don't think that's right, not at all.
Consequently, any story about temporary work visas being bad must be racist x 1000.
Really? Well, tell you what, then: If it's H1-B workers being brought in from England, Ireland, Scotland, France, Germany, Russia, or any other Western European country full of white people, I am STILL against it, because it takes away jobs from U.S. citizens, and in many cases takes cash money out of the U.S. economy and sends it back overseas. I don't care if you're white, black, yellow, brown, or purple with pink polka-dots, I see the whole H1-B thing as just more profit for corporate America and to hell with American citizens so far as they're concerned. If your argument is that you can't find the talent here then I disagree with you, and even if you're right then the way to fix that is to get our own citizens up to speed, not get someone from half a world away. But we all know I'm right and it's about money and how much less of it you can get away with paying someone from a foreign country.
Never mind a 'bioweapon defense' mode from outside sources, we're talking an SUV here, with fairly large seating capacity, which implies carpooling: Where's the 'bioweapon defense mode' for the interior of the vehicle, to defend against Phil from the accounting department who ate three bowls of his (in)famous 3-alarm chili last night for dinner? Or in a family situation, little Tommy who keeps saying " 'scuse me!" every 10 seconds for the whole two-hour trip to grandma's?
All kidding aside, is this just Musk adding a 'feature' to get media attention, or does he know something we don't? I guess only him and his hairdresser will know.
Okay.. but how can they even tell what I'm watching or not watching? I don't participate in any polls.
Also, they're slitting their own throats, then, because even if I didn't have a DVR that could skip through commercials, if I had to watch shows live when they're broadcast, I'd still mute commercials and do something else during them anyway. Or I'd have a VCR still and I'd be fast-forwarding through them. Cancelling all the shows I like because I don't watch the commercials would just turn me off to TV completely and I'd stop bothering. Frankly if I couldn't have TiVo I think I would stop watching TV, it just wouldn't be convenient anymore. Likewise if they strongarmed TiVo to make it impossible to even fast-forward through commercials, I think I'd just unplug everything and go read more books instead of being bothered with commercials in my face.
Of course I don't necessarily believe what you're telling me about all this until I do my own research to verify it.
Finally, you seem to have not noticed the {/humor} tag at the bottom of my comment, or you just don't understand I was being funny (or don't have a sense of humor?): I don't actually think I'm 'getting over on' anybody here, or even really care what networks or anyone else thinks about my viewing habits; I was being intentionally absurd. I just don't like, care to be subjected to, or have time to waste watching commercials on broadcast television, which is why I have TiVo.
Also, I'll have you know that I go to sleep at night with a big smile on my face knowing that somewhere in the world, there are television advertisers gnashing their teeth in their sleep because they know that someone like me with a TiVo DVR with 30-second skip turned on is just going blip-blip-blip past all their skeezy little commercials, and right back to the program I want to watch. Also I have an antenna on the roof for OTA broadcast reception, so I pay nothing, nada, zip, zippo, zero to watch TV to start with. XD XD XD After all, it's my God-given right as a citizen of the United States of America, with it's rich history of civil disobedience to wave my middle finger in the air at these corporate bastards and their shitty commercials; Don't Tread On Me, motherfuckers!!! XD XD XD
I'm perfectly OK with a car being able to take over if I want it to -- so long as I can flip a switch and turn that off, and drive myself as I'm accustomed to. Besides which for a long time to come it'll just be an expensive option on luxury cars, not standard equipment on sub-compact economy cars.
In the meantime I propose there be reforms to driver education, driver training, and driver license testing procedures. We can start with doing away with this silly notion that attempting to enter a highway at 45mph when the traffic is going 70mph is 'OK, they'll slow down for you' just so you can save a teaspoon of fuel, we need to teach drivers to match velocities with the traffic. We also need to teach drivers to 'see' motorcycles and bicycles 100% of the time.
Actually there are numerous industries (auto being one) that do this very thing with their proprietary electronics.
Heh, where do you think I got the reference from? I've seen things that were like that. I also used to (back in a previous life) repair arcade games; it was not at all uncommon in that industry for them to sand the part numbers off all the ICs on a PCB to deter pirates from copying the design. Would also make it damned near impossible in some cases to repair them.
I've been here longer than it appears I have, just lost access to my original account..
What you're seeing happen here, is an influx of common, garden-variety trolls, along with some sad-sacks who, for whatever reasons, seem to only be interested in being negative and starting arguments solely for the sake of starting arguments, not because they have any particular viewpoint they want to defend. You're right, though, the overall tone of this place (and many places where discussions can happen on the Internet) has changed over the years. Don't let 'em get you down, though. I've found that identifying them, then dismissing them publicly and ignoring them seems to be effective; trolls and trouble-makers will go in search of the low-hanging fruit they seem to prefer once they discover that they can't get inside your head.
Also, people who apparently either don't have any sense of fun, or perhaps they're all millennials and poo-poo anything older than they are, or maybe both. For cryin' out loud, people, these emulators for (in some cases literally) antique hardware aren't intended for 'serious' use, or development, or anything like that: They're intended to be fun to play with, or maybe educational since most of them are emulating systems that either don't exist anymore or are so rare that you'll likely never even see one in the flesh. Yes, some of us are old enough that we actually owned (or built, as the case may be) some of these systems, but again: If you're complaining about them then I question whether you have any sense of what's fun or not. When some of these computers were available, screwing around with computers was still fun; they're not as much fun in many ways now, because it's all too much serious business, and too much of it is closed-source, proprietary, locks the user out, physically inaccessible, or in some extreme cases you get prosecuted or sued in civil court for getting caught messing with it. In many cases some of the hardware may as well be potted in a solid brick of opaque epoxy, for all the good it'll do you to try to get at the actual hardware. Building a complete computer system from component parts (i.e. requiring soldering)? So impractical now as to be nigh-unto impossible (I could do it, but there's no point anymore). The closest thing we have anymore is you younger guys screwing around with microcontrollers (many of which are more powerful than many of the computers being emulated here, ironically enough), but even then you have to have an entire modern computer just to write the simplest code for them, there's no 'front panel' where you can enter machine code directly, one byte at a time. Don't knock it 'till you try it, guys (and ladies).
Well, my point was that in a future where human population has gone so completely out of control that there's not enough food to go around, if there aren't people around smart enough to develop new techniques or technology to meet the growing need, there will be a crisis, and historically speaking isn't that one of the conditions that triggers war? Can't feed your own people, so go kill your neighbors and take theirs? Then someone else sees the writing on the wall and does it to you. And so on.
The only problem I see with what you're saying, is that people who are not smart enough to make WsMD, probably aren't smart enough to develop efficient enough farming techniques to produce enough food to feed the teeming masses of population that they're creating, since they can't control their urge to reproduce, vis-a-vis Idiocracy, where they (comically, but it got the point across) completely sabotaged themselves by watering farmland with salt-laden energy drink instead of plain water. The end result might just be as destructive as if someone pushed the Red Button and turned the Earth into a radioactive cinder, except slower, and without the big boom and all that radiation: endless war over dwindling resources.
I'm responding to you, but there is also an AC who has a similar, if more verbose, response to my comment, which I will cite here: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Now, then.. I agree wholeheartedly with you, and with the AC linked above. Either way, we, as a race of neo-sentients, lose. The only way out of this trap is if we, as a race, evolve past the point where our reproductive instincts aren't in control of our cognition. I wish I could say I see that on the near horizon, but I don't; it may take thousands or tens of thousands of years for us as a race to have our cognitive functions evolve to the point where we control our instincts instead of the other way around, which is what in my opinion is the current state of things.
Analysis: China-US Hacking Accord Is Tall On Rhetoric, Short On Substance
Seriously? Anyone with an IQ over 75 that actually believes that either the U.S. or China is going to cease their 'cyberspying' activities needs to take off and put away their Rose-Colored Glasses and view the world the way it really is. That's like when the crossbow was invented and was put into regular military use; it was deemed an unchivalrous and honorless way of killing your enemies, but did that stop it's use? Hell no. Genie's out of the bottle, and it's not going back in for love or money, not until hearts and minds all over the world are changed such that no one feels the need to spy on anyone else; in other words, not during our lifetime.
If you want to start World War 3, go right ahead and try starting a world-wide campaign to control people's reproduction. It's literally at the top of the list of things that will piss people off to the point of violence. On a world-wide scale most people are part of one religion or another and those religions almost universally preach that birth control is bad and wrong and you're sinner if you use it because it's the Will of God (whichever flavor) for the faithful to be fruitful and multiply. Do we need to learn to control our numbers? Absolutely. But humans are still mostly dumb animals when it comes to things like this especially, and the hardwired instinct to reproduce, strong as it is on it's own, is just reinforced by religion, and people will get violent if you stand in the way of it. Sad really that drowning in our own offspring is what's really going to bring about the apocalypse.
Oh course most are all far to addicted to rampant consumerism to actually change.. So that is pretty much the only solution if there really is a problem
The role of changing hearts and minds for something on this scale must fall to national governments, then. The average citizen isn't going to change anything until they're personally inconvenienced by it, and if we wait that long then it'll be far, far too late.
Here's my thing about this: Regardless of whether human activity is causing global climate change or not, we're still putting massive amounts of pollutants into the atmosphere, things like CO2 and methane. At the same time we're still cutting down massive tracts of jungle and forest land in order to farm, effectively reducing the ability to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere and return oxygen in exchange. We know these things we are doing are bad yet we stubbornly continue to do them. It's like if you're a smoker, and your doctor tells you every single time you go in that it's documentably bad for your health and will eventually kill you, to which you say "But doc, I'm not sick right now, so what's the problem? I LIKE smoking!". It's time for humanity to give up these childish ways of generating power and moving themselves around and start using more efficient, cleaner ways. There's literally no logical reason NOT to, and lame excuses relating to money are about as far from logical as you can get.
Lets see how many people bring their VW in to have the ECU s/w updated
I'll be interested in that myself.
I mean without an EPA threat to brin them in or else
It won't be the EPA directly, it'll be the EPA working through the DMV of every state, at least here in the U.S., and even then it'll probably be relatively indirect like this: The EPA will issue a mandate, state Departments of Motor Vehicles will change the emissions testing requirements for individual vehicles, and when you go to get required emissions testing done, you find your vehicle doesn't pass, and you have to take it to the dealer to get 'updated' so it will pass. There'll probably also be a mass recall by Volkswagen (and from what I hear all other German automakers as well) as part of the settlement over this fiasco, and they'll remove/reprogram/update/whatever the 'device' that's doing the actual cheating, after which your vehicle passes inspection -- and probably, from what I hear, runs like shit out on the road. I'm just glad I don't own a German car anymore. I live in California, so whatever gets done about it by the government will be even worse here.
Yes, but, even a tightly focused laser experiences some spreading of the beam over distance. Now we're talking anywhere from dozens to thousands of light-years, and we're talking about radio emissions. There's always going to be some leakage even with a tight-beam transmission. ____________________________________
So far as someone else's assertion about encryption so good that it might be indistinguishable from background noise: Entirely plausble. Wouldn't well-encrypted data ideally have no repeating patterns? Add in the theoretical distances involved degrading the original signal, and it being just barely above the noise floor to start with, and we might have been hearing extraterrestrial communications for decades and not even have known it. It might just be the case that our receivers just aren't sensitive enough, or our methods of extracting signal from the noise isn't sufficient, or that it's just too damned far away for it to be possible in the first place. It might also be as others have suggested, and someone else out there is using something other than electromagnetic waves for interstellar communications; something at the quantum level, or perhaps gravity waves, or who knows what. I have to assume that for everything we do know about physics, there must be thousands of things we don't know yet. Time may tell.
I imagine many people bought those vehicles because they wanted one that was better for the environment. They may have have even paid extra for them. Then they discover that it's all a bunch of lies, and that what's coming out the tailpipe is probably worse than some other vehicles they might have bought (and maybe paid less money for). It's bait-and-switch. Also, german automakers broke the law, and hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of vehicles they sold are emitting many times the pollutants than they claimed they do or that they're allowed to. 'Not complaining' after the fact, if you now have knowledge of all this, might, in an ethical sense, make you an accessory after the fact, if you think it's OK for your vehicle to be this way.
Should there be reparations from Volkswagen (and whoever else is also guilty of this) to their customers? Absolutely, in the form of fixing the problem, and likely cash settlements from (a) class action lawsuit(s), because owners of these vehicles may for all we know have their registration renewals held up because of the high emissions.
For my part, all I can say is, I'm damned glad I don't own a German car right now.
Are you a citizen of the UK? I'm suspecting you might be.. U.S. citizen here. It apparently being a common phenomenon that you have a harder time getting the straight scoop on what's going on inside your own country than it is from the outside, I'd have to say that while the U.S. is very buggered by it's own leadership right now, I'd still rather be living here than in England or anywhere in the UK. The only thing that sounds worse to me would be living in Australia or New Zealand. Anywhere in the EU is right out as well, but that's mainly because of the immigration crisis, and I think we all know who's on the short list of who to blame for that. Sorry to hear it, you have a pretty country with a rich history and much to offer, too.
I can agree with what you're saying -- but only if this is a one-time, publicity-stunt-like thing that the United States would be doing just to show the rest of the world how awesome we are.
However it needs to be more than that, and that's why going back to the Moon first is important. We need to build a permanent colony there. Living on the Moon will be excellent practice for living in other places in our Solar system, and it's close enough that when the inevitable mistakes happen, it'll be possible to send up who and what is necessary to correct them, or at the very least to rescue the inhabitants and bring them back to Earth. The amount of data there is to be gathered from the experience will be priceless and will better prepare us for a Mars mission.
We need to build an infrastructure and industry on the Moon. Achieving escape velocity from 1/6th gravity requires far less fuel than from Earth, and if you've got the industrial base on the Moon to construct and assemble spacecraft, and to create the fuel required, then suddenly the cost per mission goes way, way down.
Think of how much cheaper it would be to go from the Moon to the asteroid belt and back, hauling resources you mined there?
Think of how much cheaper it would be to build colonies out in the asteroid belt, if you're using the Moon as your base of operations, until you have enough infrastructure and industry out in the asteroid belt itself to be self-sustaining?
Of course this is all my opinion, and it's all about things that may be a generation or two in the future. But if we're serious about getting out into our own Solar system, shouldn't we be planning at least that far ahead? I don't think that 100% of humanity can or should stay on Earth, forever. Having all your eggs in one basket is generally considered to be a Bad Idea, and we've got the capability and resources now to correct that. I say we do it, and I say we start with the Moon, not Mars. Moon now, Mars tomorrow.
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I've yet to sit down and research this whole 'commercial ads rating' stuff, but it still sounds like nonsense to me. You pay for ads during programs that people want to watch, not cancel shows because people watch the show and not the ads; that's what makes sense to me. If the other way is really how they're doing it then I wonder how they manage to stay out of bankruptcy.
OK.. Did you spend all the money you made working here in the U.S., in the U.S., or did you send it overseas? If you spent it all here then I'm OK with it. If you're one of those people who sent as much of it back home as you possibly could then I'm decidedly not OK with it. But since you became a naturalized citizen of the U.S. then you probably spent your money here. I'm talking about the latter of the two: People who came here to work on an H1B visa and sent their money overseas. I don't think that's right, not at all.
it's a comfort feature for an expensive luxury car
I don't see how it can be a 'comfort' feature, care to elaborate?
I have no problem at all with bringing in people from foreign countries, AS LONG AS THEY INTEND TO STAY HERE and become citizens
I second this. Otherwise it's like someone crashing your party just to score some free food.
Consequently, any story about temporary work visas being bad must be racist x 1000.
Really? Well, tell you what, then: If it's H1-B workers being brought in from England, Ireland, Scotland, France, Germany, Russia, or any other Western European country full of white people, I am STILL against it, because it takes away jobs from U.S. citizens, and in many cases takes cash money out of the U.S. economy and sends it back overseas. I don't care if you're white, black, yellow, brown, or purple with pink polka-dots, I see the whole H1-B thing as just more profit for corporate America and to hell with American citizens so far as they're concerned. If your argument is that you can't find the talent here then I disagree with you, and even if you're right then the way to fix that is to get our own citizens up to speed, not get someone from half a world away. But we all know I'm right and it's about money and how much less of it you can get away with paying someone from a foreign country.
Never mind a 'bioweapon defense' mode from outside sources, we're talking an SUV here, with fairly large seating capacity, which implies carpooling: Where's the 'bioweapon defense mode' for the interior of the vehicle, to defend against Phil from the accounting department who ate three bowls of his (in)famous 3-alarm chili last night for dinner? Or in a family situation, little Tommy who keeps saying " 'scuse me!" every 10 seconds for the whole two-hour trip to grandma's?
All kidding aside, is this just Musk adding a 'feature' to get media attention, or does he know something we don't? I guess only him and his hairdresser will know.
Okay.. but how can they even tell what I'm watching or not watching? I don't participate in any polls.
Also, they're slitting their own throats, then, because even if I didn't have a DVR that could skip through commercials, if I had to watch shows live when they're broadcast, I'd still mute commercials and do something else during them anyway. Or I'd have a VCR still and I'd be fast-forwarding through them. Cancelling all the shows I like because I don't watch the commercials would just turn me off to TV completely and I'd stop bothering. Frankly if I couldn't have TiVo I think I would stop watching TV, it just wouldn't be convenient anymore. Likewise if they strongarmed TiVo to make it impossible to even fast-forward through commercials, I think I'd just unplug everything and go read more books instead of being bothered with commercials in my face.
Of course I don't necessarily believe what you're telling me about all this until I do my own research to verify it.
Finally, you seem to have not noticed the {/humor} tag at the bottom of my comment, or you just don't understand I was being funny (or don't have a sense of humor?): I don't actually think I'm 'getting over on' anybody here, or even really care what networks or anyone else thinks about my viewing habits; I was being intentionally absurd. I just don't like, care to be subjected to, or have time to waste watching commercials on broadcast television, which is why I have TiVo.
Holy crap, I thought the arcade game industry was paranoid, but that absolutely takes the cake, and as it turns out the cake really is a lie! XD
I like you, you're funny. :-)
Also, I'll have you know that I go to sleep at night with a big smile on my face knowing that somewhere in the world, there are television advertisers gnashing their teeth in their sleep because they know that someone like me with a TiVo DVR with 30-second skip turned on is just going blip-blip-blip past all their skeezy little commercials, and right back to the program I want to watch. Also I have an antenna on the roof for OTA broadcast reception, so I pay nothing, nada, zip, zippo, zero to watch TV to start with. XD XD XD
After all, it's my God-given right as a citizen of the United States of America, with it's rich history of civil disobedience to wave my middle finger in the air at these corporate bastards and their shitty commercials; Don't Tread On Me, motherfuckers!!! XD XD XD
{/humor}
I'm perfectly OK with a car being able to take over if I want it to -- so long as I can flip a switch and turn that off, and drive myself as I'm accustomed to. Besides which for a long time to come it'll just be an expensive option on luxury cars, not standard equipment on sub-compact economy cars.
In the meantime I propose there be reforms to driver education, driver training, and driver license testing procedures. We can start with doing away with this silly notion that attempting to enter a highway at 45mph when the traffic is going 70mph is 'OK, they'll slow down for you' just so you can save a teaspoon of fuel, we need to teach drivers to match velocities with the traffic. We also need to teach drivers to 'see' motorcycles and bicycles 100% of the time.
Actually there are numerous industries (auto being one) that do this very thing with their proprietary electronics.
Heh, where do you think I got the reference from? I've seen things that were like that. I also used to (back in a previous life) repair arcade games; it was not at all uncommon in that industry for them to sand the part numbers off all the ICs on a PCB to deter pirates from copying the design. Would also make it damned near impossible in some cases to repair them.
I've been here longer than it appears I have, just lost access to my original account..
What you're seeing happen here, is an influx of common, garden-variety trolls, along with some sad-sacks who, for whatever reasons, seem to only be interested in being negative and starting arguments solely for the sake of starting arguments, not because they have any particular viewpoint they want to defend. You're right, though, the overall tone of this place (and many places where discussions can happen on the Internet) has changed over the years. Don't let 'em get you down, though. I've found that identifying them, then dismissing them publicly and ignoring them seems to be effective; trolls and trouble-makers will go in search of the low-hanging fruit they seem to prefer once they discover that they can't get inside your head.
Also, people who apparently either don't have any sense of fun, or perhaps they're all millennials and poo-poo anything older than they are, or maybe both. For cryin' out loud, people, these emulators for (in some cases literally) antique hardware aren't intended for 'serious' use, or development, or anything like that: They're intended to be fun to play with, or maybe educational since most of them are emulating systems that either don't exist anymore or are so rare that you'll likely never even see one in the flesh. Yes, some of us are old enough that we actually owned (or built, as the case may be) some of these systems, but again: If you're complaining about them then I question whether you have any sense of what's fun or not. When some of these computers were available, screwing around with computers was still fun; they're not as much fun in many ways now, because it's all too much serious business, and too much of it is closed-source, proprietary, locks the user out, physically inaccessible, or in some extreme cases you get prosecuted or sued in civil court for getting caught messing with it. In many cases some of the hardware may as well be potted in a solid brick of opaque epoxy, for all the good it'll do you to try to get at the actual hardware. Building a complete computer system from component parts (i.e. requiring soldering)? So impractical now as to be nigh-unto impossible (I could do it, but there's no point anymore). The closest thing we have anymore is you younger guys screwing around with microcontrollers (many of which are more powerful than many of the computers being emulated here, ironically enough), but even then you have to have an entire modern computer just to write the simplest code for them, there's no 'front panel' where you can enter machine code directly, one byte at a time. Don't knock it 'till you try it, guys (and ladies).
Show the business world that there is money to be made off-world and you'll get plenty of investors interested in funding it.
Well, my point was that in a future where human population has gone so completely out of control that there's not enough food to go around, if there aren't people around smart enough to develop new techniques or technology to meet the growing need, there will be a crisis, and historically speaking isn't that one of the conditions that triggers war? Can't feed your own people, so go kill your neighbors and take theirs? Then someone else sees the writing on the wall and does it to you. And so on.
The only problem I see with what you're saying, is that people who are not smart enough to make WsMD, probably aren't smart enough to develop efficient enough farming techniques to produce enough food to feed the teeming masses of population that they're creating, since they can't control their urge to reproduce, vis-a-vis Idiocracy, where they (comically, but it got the point across) completely sabotaged themselves by watering farmland with salt-laden energy drink instead of plain water. The end result might just be as destructive as if someone pushed the Red Button and turned the Earth into a radioactive cinder, except slower, and without the big boom and all that radiation: endless war over dwindling resources.
I'm responding to you, but there is also an AC who has a similar, if more verbose, response to my comment, which I will cite here: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Now, then.. I agree wholeheartedly with you, and with the AC linked above. Either way, we, as a race of neo-sentients, lose. The only way out of this trap is if we, as a race, evolve past the point where our reproductive instincts aren't in control of our cognition. I wish I could say I see that on the near horizon, but I don't; it may take thousands or tens of thousands of years for us as a race to have our cognitive functions evolve to the point where we control our instincts instead of the other way around, which is what in my opinion is the current state of things.
Analysis: China-US Hacking Accord Is Tall On Rhetoric, Short On Substance
Seriously? Anyone with an IQ over 75 that actually believes that either the U.S. or China is going to cease their 'cyberspying' activities needs to take off and put away their Rose-Colored Glasses and view the world the way it really is. That's like when the crossbow was invented and was put into regular military use; it was deemed an unchivalrous and honorless way of killing your enemies, but did that stop it's use? Hell no. Genie's out of the bottle, and it's not going back in for love or money, not until hearts and minds all over the world are changed such that no one feels the need to spy on anyone else; in other words, not during our lifetime.
I'd prefer universal birth control myself.
If you want to start World War 3, go right ahead and try starting a world-wide campaign to control people's reproduction. It's literally at the top of the list of things that will piss people off to the point of violence. On a world-wide scale most people are part of one religion or another and those religions almost universally preach that birth control is bad and wrong and you're sinner if you use it because it's the Will of God (whichever flavor) for the faithful to be fruitful and multiply. Do we need to learn to control our numbers? Absolutely. But humans are still mostly dumb animals when it comes to things like this especially, and the hardwired instinct to reproduce, strong as it is on it's own, is just reinforced by religion, and people will get violent if you stand in the way of it. Sad really that drowning in our own offspring is what's really going to bring about the apocalypse.
Oh course most are all far to addicted to rampant consumerism to actually change.. So that is pretty much the only solution if there really is a problem
The role of changing hearts and minds for something on this scale must fall to national governments, then. The average citizen isn't going to change anything until they're personally inconvenienced by it, and if we wait that long then it'll be far, far too late.
Here's my thing about this: Regardless of whether human activity is causing global climate change or not, we're still putting massive amounts of pollutants into the atmosphere, things like CO2 and methane. At the same time we're still cutting down massive tracts of jungle and forest land in order to farm, effectively reducing the ability to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere and return oxygen in exchange. We know these things we are doing are bad yet we stubbornly continue to do them. It's like if you're a smoker, and your doctor tells you every single time you go in that it's documentably bad for your health and will eventually kill you, to which you say "But doc, I'm not sick right now, so what's the problem? I LIKE smoking!". It's time for humanity to give up these childish ways of generating power and moving themselves around and start using more efficient, cleaner ways. There's literally no logical reason NOT to, and lame excuses relating to money are about as far from logical as you can get.
Lets see how many people bring their VW in to have the ECU s/w updated
I'll be interested in that myself.
I mean without an EPA threat to brin them in or else
It won't be the EPA directly, it'll be the EPA working through the DMV of every state, at least here in the U.S., and even then it'll probably be relatively indirect like this: The EPA will issue a mandate, state Departments of Motor Vehicles will change the emissions testing requirements for individual vehicles, and when you go to get required emissions testing done, you find your vehicle doesn't pass, and you have to take it to the dealer to get 'updated' so it will pass. There'll probably also be a mass recall by Volkswagen (and from what I hear all other German automakers as well) as part of the settlement over this fiasco, and they'll remove/reprogram/update/whatever the 'device' that's doing the actual cheating, after which your vehicle passes inspection -- and probably, from what I hear, runs like shit out on the road. I'm just glad I don't own a German car anymore. I live in California, so whatever gets done about it by the government will be even worse here.
Yes, but, even a tightly focused laser experiences some spreading of the beam over distance. Now we're talking anywhere from dozens to thousands of light-years, and we're talking about radio emissions. There's always going to be some leakage even with a tight-beam transmission.
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So far as someone else's assertion about encryption so good that it might be indistinguishable from background noise: Entirely plausble. Wouldn't well-encrypted data ideally have no repeating patterns? Add in the theoretical distances involved degrading the original signal, and it being just barely above the noise floor to start with, and we might have been hearing extraterrestrial communications for decades and not even have known it. It might just be the case that our receivers just aren't sensitive enough, or our methods of extracting signal from the noise isn't sufficient, or that it's just too damned far away for it to be possible in the first place. It might also be as others have suggested, and someone else out there is using something other than electromagnetic waves for interstellar communications; something at the quantum level, or perhaps gravity waves, or who knows what. I have to assume that for everything we do know about physics, there must be thousands of things we don't know yet. Time may tell.
I imagine many people bought those vehicles because they wanted one that was better for the environment. They may have have even paid extra for them. Then they discover that it's all a bunch of lies, and that what's coming out the tailpipe is probably worse than some other vehicles they might have bought (and maybe paid less money for). It's bait-and-switch. Also, german automakers broke the law, and hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of vehicles they sold are emitting many times the pollutants than they claimed they do or that they're allowed to. 'Not complaining' after the fact, if you now have knowledge of all this, might, in an ethical sense, make you an accessory after the fact, if you think it's OK for your vehicle to be this way.
Should there be reparations from Volkswagen (and whoever else is also guilty of this) to their customers? Absolutely, in the form of fixing the problem, and likely cash settlements from (a) class action lawsuit(s), because owners of these vehicles may for all we know have their registration renewals held up because of the high emissions.
For my part, all I can say is, I'm damned glad I don't own a German car right now.
Are you a citizen of the UK? I'm suspecting you might be..
U.S. citizen here. It apparently being a common phenomenon that you have a harder time getting the straight scoop on what's going on inside your own country than it is from the outside, I'd have to say that while the U.S. is very buggered by it's own leadership right now, I'd still rather be living here than in England or anywhere in the UK. The only thing that sounds worse to me would be living in Australia or New Zealand. Anywhere in the EU is right out as well, but that's mainly because of the immigration crisis, and I think we all know who's on the short list of who to blame for that. Sorry to hear it, you have a pretty country with a rich history and much to offer, too.
I can agree with what you're saying -- but only if this is a one-time, publicity-stunt-like thing that the United States would be doing just to show the rest of the world how awesome we are.
However it needs to be more than that, and that's why going back to the Moon first is important. We need to build a permanent colony there. Living on the Moon will be excellent practice for living in other places in our Solar system, and it's close enough that when the inevitable mistakes happen, it'll be possible to send up who and what is necessary to correct them, or at the very least to rescue the inhabitants and bring them back to Earth. The amount of data there is to be gathered from the experience will be priceless and will better prepare us for a Mars mission.
We need to build an infrastructure and industry on the Moon. Achieving escape velocity from 1/6th gravity requires far less fuel than from Earth, and if you've got the industrial base on the Moon to construct and assemble spacecraft, and to create the fuel required, then suddenly the cost per mission goes way, way down.
Think of how much cheaper it would be to go from the Moon to the asteroid belt and back, hauling resources you mined there?
Think of how much cheaper it would be to build colonies out in the asteroid belt, if you're using the Moon as your base of operations, until you have enough infrastructure and industry out in the asteroid belt itself to be self-sustaining?
Of course this is all my opinion, and it's all about things that may be a generation or two in the future. But if we're serious about getting out into our own Solar system, shouldn't we be planning at least that far ahead? I don't think that 100% of humanity can or should stay on Earth, forever. Having all your eggs in one basket is generally considered to be a Bad Idea, and we've got the capability and resources now to correct that. I say we do it, and I say we start with the Moon, not Mars. Moon now, Mars tomorrow.