True, but the photons that rain down from heaven, every day, automatically, for free, guaranteed for the next billion years, is about as close as it gets to AFL. All we need is a practical way to convert them into fuel.
It would be convenient if that were true, but for a long time they didn't think about us ("us" meaning the USA in this case) at all, because we weren't involved in their regional politics. And even if they had hated us, they had no resources to do anything about it, because they weren't sitting on top of a mountain of money that we gave them in return for supplying us with our nation's drug of choice.
Before complaining about the liberals, you should consider how many of your own positions are actually based on facts, and how many are just ignorant post-hoc rationalizations of the status quo.
There is no clear way to power cars with electricity.
Convert (electricity+water) into hydrogen to fuel cars with. (Yes, I'm aware there are engineering problems to be solved before this method is practical, but sooner or later they will be solved)
If someone wants to get addicted to some drug and die young then that's their business.
... until they OD on their drug of choice and show up at your local trauma center to be resuscitated. Then we have the choice of either (a) throwing them out and letting them die, or (b) saving them and paying for it ourselves.
Since most people think that option (a) is unacceptable, we are left with (b) -- and so our money goes to bail out the drug addicts. Therefore, it is our business, and we have the prerogative to do what we can to discourage people from getting addicted to drugs.
(Not that I think throwing them in jail is a very effective way to discourage them, mind you)
I did. Sorry. You see, unlike leftist arrogant elitists, I appreciate the contributions of other nations, now matter how modest they might be.
In particular, you appreciate being able to use their meaningless token contributions as a fig leaf to justify your government's unjustifiable, unprovoked, and unilateral invasion. Unfortunately the only person you are fooling is yourself.
bad analogy, downloading shows and watching them is nothing like tivo at all.
It's actually very much like tivo. Tivo "downloads" shows over your cable connection to its internal hard drive, and then you can later watch them at your convenience. This product would download shows over your Internet connection to the internal hard drive, and then you can later watch them at your convenience.
the concept is pretty lame anyways since you have to wait for your show to download, it is about as convenient as waiting for your show to come on tv and watching it..
No lamer than Tivo is, and people love Tivo. The trick is that you aren't waiting for the show to download, you are asleep or at work or viewing some other video file, while the download happens in the background. When you come back later, all your shows are now cached locally, waiting for you to view them without any network delays.
streaming is the way to go.
I got one phrase for you: "buffering 5%, please wait". No thanks!
No, you've got it wrong. Imagine using your Tivo, except that instead of choosing your favorite TV shows from a list of local TV stations, you are choosing your favorite TV shows off a list of Blogs.
Kyoto wasn't about emissions since it didn't apply to China and let India and Eastern Europe slide as well. It was about attempting to immediately stop American production.
Okay, for the sake of argument let's say that is the case. What, then, is the Bush Administration's alternative plan to stop global warming and reduce CO2 emissions? Since they didn't like Kyoto, surely they've come up with a better alternative approach?
No, of course not -- their plan is to continue to ignore the problem for as long as possible, because that's how they can maximize the short-term profits of their corporate supporters.
Must be tough to be a leftie these days.
It sure is -- the hardest part is trying to ignore the constant ad hominem attacks from the newly empowered and insufferably smug right wing.
Any chance that Samba4 will have quick/intelligent remote file operations? By this I mean that I could do the following:
Mount remote-share-drive-A, open A's shared folder as a window in KDE
Mount remote-share-drive-B, open B's shared folder as a window in KDE
Drag the icon for a 1GB file from A's window to B's window
Have the file's data be copied directly from remote-drive-A to remote-drive-B, instead of having it all go (from drive A, over the network, to my client machine, then back over the network again, to drive B)... (which as you can imagine takes forever!)
Umm, sure, but what business of yours is it what the Chinese or Indians do with their environment?
Mainly it's our business because it's also our environment -- we do all live on the same planet, you know. Of course, this argument works both ways, and so it's a difficult argument for the US to make these days, given the Bush Administration's "fuck you" posture on Kyoto, global warming, mercury emissions, etc.
He may not have meant for it to come out like he invented the Internet, but it sure sounds like it
And that's close enough for a good smear campaign, isn't it?
If you ever wonder why politicians so often sound like robots when they are speaking in public, this is why: because they have to constantly watch every single word they utter, to make sure that nothing they say (and no subset of anything they say) can be taken out of context and twisted against them. So instead of just speaking their position, they have to run this expensive (O(N^2)) political-defense algorithm on everything they say -- and since very few people can run that algorithm in real time, most politicians end up just repeating a few pre-vetted canned phrases over and over again.
Hey, it's the Karl Rove two-step, right here on Slashdot!
Smear your opponent with a distortion, exaggeration, or outright falsehood.
If anyone attempts to correct your distortion, find some tidbit from their past that can be used to prove they are "biased" and "untrustworthy" and loudly accuse them of partisan hackery. You can do this regardless of whether their current argument is valid or not -- that's too fine a distinction for the audience to care about.
At this point, the debate will move to discussing whether or not the countering party is trustworthy or not. Now no matter which way this debate goes, you've won! Your original accusation is now taken for granted, and another if the third party ever tries to correct your accusations again, you can now point to the current "debate" (that you just manufactured) to discredit them (and change the subject) even more quickly the next time.
Granted, that article is correct, but their credibility was killed long ago.
See, it works! No need to discuss facts anymore -- just say that the messenger has no credibility, and the facts are irrelevant!
Don't forget the unintentional stack smashing, which is all too easy to do when you're writing tricky pointer code in C, and damned hard to find, especially when you barely understand the code you just wrote in the first place.
For stuff like this, a wonderful debugging tool is valgrind -- it takes about 5 minutes to download and install (GPL, Linux/x86), and will find all kinds of memory-usage bugs in your program that you never even knew existed.
When they protest at research reactors dedicated to making nuclear power safer
This is a fair criticism, although protesting research reactors is defensible if you believe that it is impossible to make nuclear reactors "safe enough" (mainly due to nuclear-proliferation and waste-disposal issues), and so research reactors only serve to lead us further down the garden path and distract us from better solutions. (Note that I'm not sure I believe that, but it is a valid position)
when they show up(from their decimated city environment) to twelve thousand kilometers of forest to protest trees being cut down
Are you saying that living in a city means you have no right to criticize environmental destruction? I'd say that living in a city means you know exactly how much the environment has to lose. In any case, living on Earth is qualification enough to have your views considered -- when the environment suffers, we all suffer eventually.
There are good environmentalists who are actually making real changes by working with government and industry, and there are people who join protests because it makes them feel better about living on seven kilometers of concrete.
Consider that the only reason the "good environmentalists" are able to "work with the government" -- the only reason that the government listens to them at all -- is because they have significant political support from the environmentally aware public. Without other people working to raise public awareness about environmental issues, the government would be free to say "screw you and screw the environment, we're going to take what we want". (Come to think of it, that's about what the government is doing these days)
Just what we need -- no, there'd be no practical problems, except for the greenpeace protesters on your lawn going "save the heat!" or somesuch!
All hail the straw man! By inventing ridiculous arguments and placing them into your opponents' mouths, you are now free to ignore any and all valid arguments they may have. This will save you the significant time and effort that would have otherwise gone into thinking about the problems the world faces and trying to solve them.
For what it's worth, Greenpeace and other environmentalist groups are all for using geothermal energy, since it is clean and renewable and can be used to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. But don't let any inconvenient facts get in the way of your entertaining stereotype!
The current system won't work since it can't hold hydrogen.
Hmm. I wonder if there is some way to treat/modify/transform/package hydrogen so that it can be shipped through the pipelines of the current system? I'm imagining placing the hydrogen into very tiny balloons and sending them floating through the pipes, which is kind of silly... but perhaps there is some chemical equivalent to that, which would work.
Why not put the nuclear power plant way out in the boonies (i.e., no one's back yard) and run pipelines to where hydrogen is needed?
Sounds like a good idea to me, but one thing to keep in mind is that hydrogen tends to leak out of just about any container you try and keep it in, so over a long distance pipeline you might lose a significant portion of your hydrogen to the atmosphere.
Slashdot Mirror
By that definition, anarchy is a "stable society". I'd say that in a stable society, schoolyards don't get gunned down in the first place.
True, but the photons that rain down from heaven, every day, automatically, for free, guaranteed for the next billion years, is about as close as it gets to AFL. All we need is a practical way to convert them into fuel.
Actually, the "fair use" provisions of copyright law do let you distribute short snippets of someone else's work, under certain circumstances.
It would be convenient if that were true, but for a long time they didn't think about us ("us" meaning the USA in this case) at all, because we weren't involved in their regional politics. And even if they had hated us, they had no resources to do anything about it, because they weren't sitting on top of a mountain of money that we gave them in return for supplying us with our nation's drug of choice.
Before complaining about the liberals, you should consider how many of your own positions are actually based on facts, and how many are just ignorant post-hoc rationalizations of the status quo.
Convert (electricity+water) into hydrogen to fuel cars with. (Yes, I'm aware there are engineering problems to be solved before this method is practical, but sooner or later they will be solved)
Mainly, the same thing that stops us from building a space elevator: the necessary materials don't exist (yet).
I disagree -- windmills are beautiful. Smog, now that's an eyesore.
Read my post again. I specifically said that I thought locking people up was not a good solution. It's not even an efficient solution.
--
Evil is as Evil Does.
I think your
Since most people think that option (a) is unacceptable, we are left with (b) -- and so our money goes to bail out the drug addicts. Therefore, it is our business, and we have the prerogative to do what we can to discourage people from getting addicted to drugs.
(Not that I think throwing them in jail is a very effective way to discourage them, mind you)
In particular, you appreciate being able to use their meaningless token contributions as a fig leaf to justify your government's unjustifiable, unprovoked, and unilateral invasion. Unfortunately the only person you are fooling is yourself.
It's actually very much like tivo. Tivo "downloads" shows over your cable connection to its internal hard drive, and then you can later watch them at your convenience. This product would download shows over your Internet connection to the internal hard drive, and then you can later watch them at your convenience.
the concept is pretty lame anyways since you have to wait for your show to download, it is about as convenient as waiting for your show to come on tv and watching it..
No lamer than Tivo is, and people love Tivo. The trick is that you aren't waiting for the show to download, you are asleep or at work or viewing some other video file, while the download happens in the background. When you come back later, all your shows are now cached locally, waiting for you to view them without any network delays.
streaming is the way to go.
I got one phrase for you: "buffering 5%, please wait". No thanks!
No, you've got it wrong. Imagine using your Tivo, except that instead of choosing your favorite TV shows from a list of local TV stations, you are choosing your favorite TV shows off a list of Blogs.
The U.S. Department of Energy says otherwise.
Kyoto wasn't about emissions since it didn't apply to China and let India and Eastern Europe slide as well. It was about attempting to immediately stop American production.
Okay, for the sake of argument let's say that is the case. What, then, is the Bush Administration's alternative plan to stop global warming and reduce CO2 emissions? Since they didn't like Kyoto, surely they've come up with a better alternative approach?
No, of course not -- their plan is to continue to ignore the problem for as long as possible, because that's how they can maximize the short-term profits of their corporate supporters.
Must be tough to be a leftie these days.
It sure is -- the hardest part is trying to ignore the constant ad hominem attacks from the newly empowered and insufferably smug right wing.
Mainly it's our business because it's also our environment -- we do all live on the same planet, you know. Of course, this argument works both ways, and so it's a difficult argument for the US to make these days, given the Bush Administration's "fuck you" posture on Kyoto, global warming, mercury emissions, etc.
What I want to know is, what exactly are "Lords a-leaping", and where can I buy them on line?
And that's close enough for a good smear campaign, isn't it?
If you ever wonder why politicians so often sound like robots when they are speaking in public, this is why: because they have to constantly watch every single word they utter, to make sure that nothing they say (and no subset of anything they say) can be taken out of context and twisted against them. So instead of just speaking their position, they have to run this expensive (O(N^2)) political-defense algorithm on everything they say -- and since very few people can run that algorithm in real time, most politicians end up just repeating a few pre-vetted canned phrases over and over again.
At this point, the debate will move to discussing whether or not the countering party is trustworthy or not. Now no matter which way this debate goes, you've won! Your original accusation is now taken for granted, and another if the third party ever tries to correct your accusations again, you can now point to the current "debate" (that you just manufactured) to discredit them (and change the subject) even more quickly the next time.
Granted, that article is correct, but their credibility was killed long ago.
See, it works! No need to discuss facts anymore -- just say that the messenger has no credibility, and the facts are irrelevant!
For stuff like this, a wonderful debugging tool is valgrind -- it takes about 5 minutes to download and install (GPL, Linux/x86), and will find all kinds of memory-usage bugs in your program that you never even knew existed.
You say that like it's a bad thing...
This is a fair criticism, although protesting research reactors is defensible if you believe that it is impossible to make nuclear reactors "safe enough" (mainly due to nuclear-proliferation and waste-disposal issues), and so research reactors only serve to lead us further down the garden path and distract us from better solutions. (Note that I'm not sure I believe that, but it is a valid position)
when they show up(from their decimated city environment) to twelve thousand kilometers of forest to protest trees being cut down
Are you saying that living in a city means you have no right to criticize environmental destruction? I'd say that living in a city means you know exactly how much the environment has to lose. In any case, living on Earth is qualification enough to have your views considered -- when the environment suffers, we all suffer eventually.
There are good environmentalists who are actually making real changes by working with government and industry, and there are people who join protests because it makes them feel better about living on seven kilometers of concrete.
Consider that the only reason the "good environmentalists" are able to "work with the government" -- the only reason that the government listens to them at all -- is because they have significant political support from the environmentally aware public. Without other people working to raise public awareness about environmental issues, the government would be free to say "screw you and screw the environment, we're going to take what we want". (Come to think of it, that's about what the government is doing these days)
All hail the straw man! By inventing ridiculous arguments and placing them into your opponents' mouths, you are now free to ignore any and all valid arguments they may have. This will save you the significant time and effort that would have otherwise gone into thinking about the problems the world faces and trying to solve them.
For what it's worth, Greenpeace and other environmentalist groups are all for using geothermal energy, since it is clean and renewable and can be used to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. But don't let any inconvenient facts get in the way of your entertaining stereotype!
Hmm. I wonder if there is some way to treat/modify/transform/package hydrogen so that it can be shipped through the pipelines of the current system? I'm imagining placing the hydrogen into very tiny balloons and sending them floating through the pipes, which is kind of silly... but perhaps there is some chemical equivalent to that, which would work.
Sounds like a good idea to me, but one thing to keep in mind is that hydrogen tends to leak out of just about any container you try and keep it in, so over a long distance pipeline you might lose a significant portion of your hydrogen to the atmosphere.