Wrong. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loopholes_in_Bell_test_experiments. Note, however, that while that page gives lots of accurate information, it also is somewhat biased by referring to the whole subject as "loopholes". A more accurate statement is to say that no test of Bell's inequality has ever been performed; that by making a set of "supplementary assumptions" (several of which are discussed on that page), you can derive a different inequality that is similar in form to Bell's inequality; and it is only that latter inequality that has been experimentally tested.
There are more assumptions underlying Bell's inequality than just locality. Some of them are very subtle and hard of even realize they're assumptions, until you come across a theory that doesn't share them.
Time reversible interpretations are about as "unspooky" as they get. They're simple, deterministic, local, and generally very easy to understand. Their only "strange" feature is that you have to let go of your presentist view of time (which we've known for a century is almost certainly wrong, since it isn't compatible with relativity), and accept that information can flow both directions in time. The future influences the past in exactly the same way that the past influences the future.
Not true: tests of Bell's inequality have only ruled out some very limited classes of hidden variable theories. There are still lots of them that are very much on the table.
In fact, the whole concept of "weak measurements" originally came from studies of the two state vector model of quantum mechanics, which is a hidden variable theory. It arises very naturally from this model (and from other time reversible interpretations of quantum mechanics, all of which are hidden variable theories). It was later shown that standard QM also predicts the same results, but only through a complicated, seemingly miraculous set of cancellations. It's often been pointed out that, although standard QM does predict weak measurements should work, it's unlikely anyone would ever have discovered that if time reversible QM hadn't made the prediction first.
Like many non-rigorous descriptions, the summary makes the mistake of describing the uncertainty principle as if it is a measurement problem, where the lack of precision somehow arises from inadequate measurement technology. This is not a correct statement of the uncertainty principle.
That's not quite right. Heisenberg's "uncertainty principle", as originally fomulated by Heisenberg, is a measurement problem. Heisenberg observed that any measurement will disturb the system being measured, such that its states before and after are different. This limits your ability to perform multiple measurements in a row. Physicists later came to identify the uncertainty with the intrinsic impossibility of having a system be in eigenstates of two non-conjugate variables at the same time. But these really are different things, and it was the former that Heisenberg originally proposed as his "uncertainty principle", not the latter.
As for not being able to patent it, The USPTO issued them a patent, so your protestations to the contrary are moot.
If that were true, our patent system would be even more fatally broken than it is. Patentability is determined by law (and ultimately by the courts), not by the incompetence of a patent examiner. Sadly, there are far too many incompetent patent examiners who approve a steady flood of bad patents on things that, by law, are not patentable. Those then need to get appealed, litigated, and ultimately rescinded at enormous cost. This is just the latest example.
And you missed my point about the quote. It doesn't say that no one has ever combined these elements before, only that there exist services that are missing one or more of these elements. There also are lots of existing services that do combine all of them and aren't missing any of them. Lots of other people in this thread have cited examples, so I won't repeat them.
Wow. You have no clue just how much evidence there is. We see new species evolving constantly, everywhere around us. There are countless examples of species that are, at this very moment, in the process of splitting into multiple species. There are countless examples of splits where we can positively identify when the split took place, often within the past 10,000 years or so.
Please get the facts. Don't go around asserting things that just aren't true. If you haven't taken the time to learn about a subject, just be honest and say, "I don't know about this." That's fine. But don't go making things up to fill in for your ignorance. You owe it to yourself to do better than that. Your claims above are so absurdly far from the truth, it makes me sad for the state of science education in the world today.
Wait - did you actually READ what you just posted?
Look again at the text you quoted: "these systems may be limited in their flexibility for allowing modifications," which implies they also may not be. "Further, the customer may not be able to schedule the recurring orders for the same time and day," which implies they also may. All they say is that some existing delivery systems don't have these properties. But plenty of others do, and they don't even deny that. (Guess what? You can tell your newspaper company, "Don't deliver my paper for the next three days, since I'll be away," and they'll do it. There is nothing whatsoever novel in this. Just because some existing delivery systems don't have a certain property (but others do), that doesn't mean you can patent it!
The summary and title confuse two very different things: open access, which means anyone anywhere can read your paper and learn from it, and open source, which means people can take your words, figures, etc. and reuse them in their own papers and other works, or add their own words into the middle of your paper. Most scientists I know strongly favor open access. That does not mean they want their papers treated as open source. They usually view each paper as a carefully crafted finished product. Other papers will build on it and the science will move on, but the paper remains as a permanent statement of what they had to say on a particular subject at a particular point in time. It's not written to be a living document that keeps evolving and getting modified the way open source software does.
What do you consider to be "not within the realm of science"? Why? How do you set the boundaries? How do you distinguish between things that no one has yet thought of a way to test, and things that fundamentally cannot ever be tested?
Let me give some concrete examples.
the rules of science work for those things which are natural, repeatable, measurable, objective and observable, but can say little about that which is not, say, observable.
Scientists study all sorts of things that are not observable. Atoms, for example. No human has ever directly observed an atom with their unaided senses, yet scientists already knew a lot about atoms by the late 1800's. They couldn't observe atoms, but they could observe effects that resulted from objects being made of atoms. Even today, you may look at a picture from an atomic force microscope and think you are "seeing atoms", but you aren't. You're seeing an image on a computer screen generated through the operation of a complex machine and a whole lot of mathematics.
Science is not limited to studying observable things. It can study anything whose existence produces observable effects.
If something's existence produces absolutely no observable effects of any sort, in what sense can it actually be said to "exist"?
science takes as a fundamental assumption that the laws of science are true in every time and place.
No, that's a conclusion they've drawn based on observation and experiment. If the laws of nature (there's no such thing as "the laws of science" - science is a process, not a set of laws) were different in different times and places, that should produce observable effects. No one has yet managed to find any such effects, but they're still looking.
Religion deals with...the nature of things beyond the boundaries of the universe
What does it mean to be "beyond the boundaries of the universe"? Scientists generally define "the universe" as "everything that exists". If something is not part of the universe, then by definition it does not exist. How do you define "the universe"? Or are you just using mystical sounding language without having ever clarified in your mind exactly what you meant by it?
...and other concepts which are generally not objective, or not natural
What does it mean for something to be "not natural"? How do you define "nature"? Scientists are very careful to precisely define all their terms so they know exactly what they're saying. Religion, on the other hand, goes out of its way to avoid ever defining anything. (Please define "God".) But if you use words whose meanings are undefined, you aren't actually saying anything at all, no matter how deep or mystical your pronouncements may sound.
OpenGL ES is essentially OpenGL with the parts which embedded hardware can't handle removed
Not true. OpenGL ES is essentially OpenGL with all the obsolete cruft removed. That's especially true of OpenGL ES 2.0, which ditched the entire fixed function pipeline. OpenGL has been around for a long time, and it's accumulated dozens of specialized features that were needed to take advantage of some particular capability in the greatest new GPUs of some ancient generation. Today, those features are completely unneeded, because you can do the same thing with two lines of shader code, but they can't remove them without breaking backward compatibility. But since OpenGL ES wasn't trying to be backward compatible, they took the opportunity to give the whole API a thorough cleaning.
There are no "missing desktop graphics card features". In fact, there is very little difference between mobile and desktop GPUs anymore, except for having different clock rates and different numbers of compute units.
Point and click adventure games (all the TellTale games, old Monkey Island games, Sam and Max, etc.) work really well for playing together. It doesn't matter if one person is better at them, because you're working together to solve the puzzles, and two heads really are better than one when it comes to these games.
This has nothing to do with freedom of the press. CBS has the right to review or not review any products they like, and CNET is nothing more than a division of CBS. Journalistic integrity is another matter...
Though I don't agree with your viewpoint, it demonstrates perfectly why this proposal is absurd: it wouldn't satisfy anyone. Gun rights advocates are hardly going to accept guns that can be disabled at any time by the government. And gun control advocates won't be too impressed if you say, "Don't worry, this gun has a computer that will only let you shoot adults with it, not children!" Each side of the debate has its own goals and concerns, and this proposal doesn't address any of them.
I'd argue that python at the shell is pretty simple, but most people can't or aren't motivated to do even that.
That's the essence of it. It's not that people can't learn to program. They just have no motivation to do it.
Bring up a Python interpreter and you can teach someone the basics in a few minutes. "Look, it's a calculator." Type 1+1 and show that it prints 2. Nothing anyone will find confusing. "It lets you define variables". Type x=5, then type x+2, and show that it prints 7. Again, nothing very confusing. Show a few more examples, introduce them to some built in math functions, show how variables are useful for saving intermediate calculations. "But you aren't limited to the built in functions. You can define any new function you want." Show them how to do it. "Isn't that cool???"
At which point they will smile politely and suggest doing something else instead, because really, what do they need a super powerful calculator for? They're completely capable of learning. They just don't see any reason to want to.
To be fair, I found my VCR's clock pretty baffling. Programming in C was no problem. But the VCR? It was like they specifically designed it to be confusing.
Ok, I haven't read Kuhn, so maybe I'm misunderstanding. (For once, my signature line should be taken literally, not sarcastically!) But this sounds to me like nothing more than a disagreement over the definitions of words. Kuhn (as far as I understand) defined the word "revolution" to mean a paradigm shift. Dyson wants to use the same word for other things too. Neither is right or wrong. Words are just words, they mean whatever we define them to mean, but if we don't agree on definitions then it gets hard to communicate.
Real scientific change is complicated. For example, the field of biology is currently advancing faster than at any previous point in history. Does that count as a "revolution"? That advancement has many causes and many manifestations. Here are some of the more important ones:
1. High throughput experimental techniques for sequencing, genomics, proteomics, etc. have completely changed how many biologists do their day-to-day work. The tools used to study biology are radically different today than 20 years ago.
2. Those techniques have produced huge amounts of data. We know much much more than we used to. Questions like, "What genetic variations are associated with this disease?" or, "What other molecules does this protein interact with?" have become far easier to answer. So because of the new techniques, our knowledge is growing at an incredible rate.
3. Some of what we've learned from that data has dramatically changed how we think about biological processes. Epigenetics is a good example of this. What we've learned isn't just what particular molecules are involved in what mechanisms, but that there are whole classes of molecules and mechanisms we didn't know existed before.
So which of these, if any, counts as a revolution? Or do all of them together add up to a revolution? The third one seems closest to Kuhn's definition, whereas the first one seems to match Dyson's idea of a tool-driven revolution. Or does it matter? It seems to me that the really important thing is just what I said before: that biology is advancing faster than at any other point in history, whatever you choose to call that.
You don't need anyone's permission to post an app to Google Play. You simply post it yourself and it's immediately available. It could still get taken down at some later point if Google decides it violates their terms of service, but I don't know of any cases where they've done that just because they didn't like a game making a political statement.
But as you point out, what really matters is that you aren't restricted to Google Play. You can get apps from other places if you want. I don't object to Apple setting standards for what they will or won't sell in their store, but I strongly object to them locking down devices so you can't get apps from anywhere but their store.
We've had about 15 years of near stasis, and recent results show that the heat isn't 'hiding' in the ocean - it simply doesn't exist, though CO2 continues to rise.
Please stop making up "facts" and pretending they're real. It's trivially easy to find actual data on the subject. Fact: every single year from 2001 on has been hotter than every single year on record prior to that, with the sole exception of 1998. No, the climate did not magically stop getting warmer in 1997.
This sounds like a good idea to me. Sen. Rockefeller clearly thinks he knows how the results will come out, but I tend to trust the National Academy of Sciences to do an honest study of the subject, not just write a rationalization for someone's preconceived beliefs. If there really is a connection between violent video games and real world violence, I want to know about it. I'm not going to deny the possibility just because it conflicts with my preconceptions. And if they conclude there's no connection, maybe Sen. Rockefeller will even accept that. (Yeah, right, but I can still dream!)
Disclaimer: I'm a gamer. And frankly, I find some of the more violent games out there pretty disturbing and choose not to play them.
But the simple, plain fact of the matter is that, unless its being subsidised by the taxpayer, oil costs more than your solar panels for the next 15-30 years, depending on where you are and how capable your system is.
There, fixed that for you. It depends where you live, of course. But oil is very heavily subsidized, and that does a lot to make it seem cheaper than it really is.
That's part of what I meant by "but not entirely". There certainly are exceptions. You aren't really talking about "most of human history", though, just about the advanced civilizations that have appeared in the last 6000 years or so since the development of agriculture. In tribal hunter/gather societies (most of human history), even the leaders are usually expected to work.
Exactly. The real problem is our assumption that every single person should work, and if they don't, they're a drain on society. For all of human history that has largely (but not entirely) been true. But once you reach a point where a machine is better suited than a human to do a particular job, the rational decision is to have a machine do it. And as the fraction of jobs that are best done by machines steadily grows, the need for humans to do them will decline. And that's a fine thing. It's the reason we created those machines in the first place. They exist to serve humanity, not the other way around.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loopholes_in_Bell_test_experiments. Note, however, that while that page gives lots of accurate information, it also is somewhat biased by referring to the whole subject as "loopholes". A more accurate statement is to say that no test of Bell's inequality has ever been performed; that by making a set of "supplementary assumptions" (several of which are discussed on that page), you can derive a different inequality that is similar in form to Bell's inequality; and it is only that latter inequality that has been experimentally tested.
There are more assumptions underlying Bell's inequality than just locality. Some of them are very subtle and hard of even realize they're assumptions, until you come across a theory that doesn't share them.
Time reversible interpretations are about as "unspooky" as they get. They're simple, deterministic, local, and generally very easy to understand. Their only "strange" feature is that you have to let go of your presentist view of time (which we've known for a century is almost certainly wrong, since it isn't compatible with relativity), and accept that information can flow both directions in time. The future influences the past in exactly the same way that the past influences the future.
Not true: tests of Bell's inequality have only ruled out some very limited classes of hidden variable theories. There are still lots of them that are very much on the table.
In fact, the whole concept of "weak measurements" originally came from studies of the two state vector model of quantum mechanics, which is a hidden variable theory. It arises very naturally from this model (and from other time reversible interpretations of quantum mechanics, all of which are hidden variable theories). It was later shown that standard QM also predicts the same results, but only through a complicated, seemingly miraculous set of cancellations. It's often been pointed out that, although standard QM does predict weak measurements should work, it's unlikely anyone would ever have discovered that if time reversible QM hadn't made the prediction first.
Like many non-rigorous descriptions, the summary makes the mistake of describing the uncertainty principle as if it is a measurement problem, where the lack of precision somehow arises from inadequate measurement technology. This is not a correct statement of the uncertainty principle.
That's not quite right. Heisenberg's "uncertainty principle", as originally fomulated by Heisenberg, is a measurement problem. Heisenberg observed that any measurement will disturb the system being measured, such that its states before and after are different. This limits your ability to perform multiple measurements in a row. Physicists later came to identify the uncertainty with the intrinsic impossibility of having a system be in eigenstates of two non-conjugate variables at the same time. But these really are different things, and it was the former that Heisenberg originally proposed as his "uncertainty principle", not the latter.
As for not being able to patent it, The USPTO issued them a patent, so your protestations to the contrary are moot.
If that were true, our patent system would be even more fatally broken than it is. Patentability is determined by law (and ultimately by the courts), not by the incompetence of a patent examiner. Sadly, there are far too many incompetent patent examiners who approve a steady flood of bad patents on things that, by law, are not patentable. Those then need to get appealed, litigated, and ultimately rescinded at enormous cost. This is just the latest example.
And you missed my point about the quote. It doesn't say that no one has ever combined these elements before, only that there exist services that are missing one or more of these elements. There also are lots of existing services that do combine all of them and aren't missing any of them. Lots of other people in this thread have cited examples, so I won't repeat them.
Wow. You have no clue just how much evidence there is. We see new species evolving constantly, everywhere around us. There are countless examples of species that are, at this very moment, in the process of splitting into multiple species. There are countless examples of splits where we can positively identify when the split took place, often within the past 10,000 years or so.
Please get the facts. Don't go around asserting things that just aren't true. If you haven't taken the time to learn about a subject, just be honest and say, "I don't know about this." That's fine. But don't go making things up to fill in for your ignorance. You owe it to yourself to do better than that. Your claims above are so absurdly far from the truth, it makes me sad for the state of science education in the world today.
Wait - did you actually READ what you just posted?
Look again at the text you quoted: "these systems may be limited in their flexibility for allowing modifications," which implies they also may not be. "Further, the customer may not be able to schedule the recurring orders for the same time and day," which implies they also may. All they say is that some existing delivery systems don't have these properties. But plenty of others do, and they don't even deny that. (Guess what? You can tell your newspaper company, "Don't deliver my paper for the next three days, since I'll be away," and they'll do it. There is nothing whatsoever novel in this. Just because some existing delivery systems don't have a certain property (but others do), that doesn't mean you can patent it!
The summary and title confuse two very different things: open access, which means anyone anywhere can read your paper and learn from it, and open source, which means people can take your words, figures, etc. and reuse them in their own papers and other works, or add their own words into the middle of your paper. Most scientists I know strongly favor open access. That does not mean they want their papers treated as open source. They usually view each paper as a carefully crafted finished product. Other papers will build on it and the science will move on, but the paper remains as a permanent statement of what they had to say on a particular subject at a particular point in time. It's not written to be a living document that keeps evolving and getting modified the way open source software does.
What do you consider to be "not within the realm of science"? Why? How do you set the boundaries? How do you distinguish between things that no one has yet thought of a way to test, and things that fundamentally cannot ever be tested?
Let me give some concrete examples.
the rules of science work for those things which are natural, repeatable, measurable, objective and observable, but can say little about that which is not, say, observable.
Scientists study all sorts of things that are not observable. Atoms, for example. No human has ever directly observed an atom with their unaided senses, yet scientists already knew a lot about atoms by the late 1800's. They couldn't observe atoms, but they could observe effects that resulted from objects being made of atoms. Even today, you may look at a picture from an atomic force microscope and think you are "seeing atoms", but you aren't. You're seeing an image on a computer screen generated through the operation of a complex machine and a whole lot of mathematics.
Science is not limited to studying observable things. It can study anything whose existence produces observable effects.
If something's existence produces absolutely no observable effects of any sort, in what sense can it actually be said to "exist"?
science takes as a fundamental assumption that the laws of science are true in every time and place.
No, that's a conclusion they've drawn based on observation and experiment. If the laws of nature (there's no such thing as "the laws of science" - science is a process, not a set of laws) were different in different times and places, that should produce observable effects. No one has yet managed to find any such effects, but they're still looking.
Religion deals with...the nature of things beyond the boundaries of the universe
What does it mean to be "beyond the boundaries of the universe"? Scientists generally define "the universe" as "everything that exists". If something is not part of the universe, then by definition it does not exist. How do you define "the universe"? Or are you just using mystical sounding language without having ever clarified in your mind exactly what you meant by it?
...and other concepts which are generally not objective, or not natural
What does it mean for something to be "not natural"? How do you define "nature"? Scientists are very careful to precisely define all their terms so they know exactly what they're saying. Religion, on the other hand, goes out of its way to avoid ever defining anything. (Please define "God".) But if you use words whose meanings are undefined, you aren't actually saying anything at all, no matter how deep or mystical your pronouncements may sound.
OpenGL ES is essentially OpenGL with the parts which embedded hardware can't handle removed
Not true. OpenGL ES is essentially OpenGL with all the obsolete cruft removed. That's especially true of OpenGL ES 2.0, which ditched the entire fixed function pipeline. OpenGL has been around for a long time, and it's accumulated dozens of specialized features that were needed to take advantage of some particular capability in the greatest new GPUs of some ancient generation. Today, those features are completely unneeded, because you can do the same thing with two lines of shader code, but they can't remove them without breaking backward compatibility. But since OpenGL ES wasn't trying to be backward compatible, they took the opportunity to give the whole API a thorough cleaning.
There are no "missing desktop graphics card features". In fact, there is very little difference between mobile and desktop GPUs anymore, except for having different clock rates and different numbers of compute units.
And 2012 was the warmest La Nina year ever recorded. Obviously the planet has stopped warming!
Mathematica. Just wow. But also forgotten precursors such as TK! Solver.
Macsyma predated it by 20 years, did most of the same things, and is still widely used and actively developed today (renamed to Maxima).
No, but the steady flow of water coming from the condenser on my furnace is a pretty good clue that it is removing water.
Point and click adventure games (all the TellTale games, old Monkey Island games, Sam and Max, etc.) work really well for playing together. It doesn't matter if one person is better at them, because you're working together to solve the puzzles, and two heads really are better than one when it comes to these games.
This has nothing to do with freedom of the press. CBS has the right to review or not review any products they like, and CNET is nothing more than a division of CBS. Journalistic integrity is another matter...
Though I don't agree with your viewpoint, it demonstrates perfectly why this proposal is absurd: it wouldn't satisfy anyone. Gun rights advocates are hardly going to accept guns that can be disabled at any time by the government. And gun control advocates won't be too impressed if you say, "Don't worry, this gun has a computer that will only let you shoot adults with it, not children!" Each side of the debate has its own goals and concerns, and this proposal doesn't address any of them.
I'd argue that python at the shell is pretty simple, but most people can't or aren't motivated to do even that.
That's the essence of it. It's not that people can't learn to program. They just have no motivation to do it.
Bring up a Python interpreter and you can teach someone the basics in a few minutes. "Look, it's a calculator." Type 1+1 and show that it prints 2. Nothing anyone will find confusing. "It lets you define variables". Type x=5, then type x+2, and show that it prints 7. Again, nothing very confusing. Show a few more examples, introduce them to some built in math functions, show how variables are useful for saving intermediate calculations. "But you aren't limited to the built in functions. You can define any new function you want." Show them how to do it. "Isn't that cool???"
At which point they will smile politely and suggest doing something else instead, because really, what do they need a super powerful calculator for? They're completely capable of learning. They just don't see any reason to want to.
To be fair, I found my VCR's clock pretty baffling. Programming in C was no problem. But the VCR? It was like they specifically designed it to be confusing.
Ok, I haven't read Kuhn, so maybe I'm misunderstanding. (For once, my signature line should be taken literally, not sarcastically!) But this sounds to me like nothing more than a disagreement over the definitions of words. Kuhn (as far as I understand) defined the word "revolution" to mean a paradigm shift. Dyson wants to use the same word for other things too. Neither is right or wrong. Words are just words, they mean whatever we define them to mean, but if we don't agree on definitions then it gets hard to communicate.
Real scientific change is complicated. For example, the field of biology is currently advancing faster than at any previous point in history. Does that count as a "revolution"? That advancement has many causes and many manifestations. Here are some of the more important ones:
1. High throughput experimental techniques for sequencing, genomics, proteomics, etc. have completely changed how many biologists do their day-to-day work. The tools used to study biology are radically different today than 20 years ago.
2. Those techniques have produced huge amounts of data. We know much much more than we used to. Questions like, "What genetic variations are associated with this disease?" or, "What other molecules does this protein interact with?" have become far easier to answer. So because of the new techniques, our knowledge is growing at an incredible rate.
3. Some of what we've learned from that data has dramatically changed how we think about biological processes. Epigenetics is a good example of this. What we've learned isn't just what particular molecules are involved in what mechanisms, but that there are whole classes of molecules and mechanisms we didn't know existed before.
So which of these, if any, counts as a revolution? Or do all of them together add up to a revolution? The third one seems closest to Kuhn's definition, whereas the first one seems to match Dyson's idea of a tool-driven revolution. Or does it matter? It seems to me that the really important thing is just what I said before: that biology is advancing faster than at any other point in history, whatever you choose to call that.
You don't need anyone's permission to post an app to Google Play. You simply post it yourself and it's immediately available. It could still get taken down at some later point if Google decides it violates their terms of service, but I don't know of any cases where they've done that just because they didn't like a game making a political statement.
But as you point out, what really matters is that you aren't restricted to Google Play. You can get apps from other places if you want. I don't object to Apple setting standards for what they will or won't sell in their store, but I strongly object to them locking down devices so you can't get apps from anywhere but their store.
We've had about 15 years of near stasis, and recent results show that the heat isn't 'hiding' in the ocean - it simply doesn't exist, though CO2 continues to rise.
Please stop making up "facts" and pretending they're real. It's trivially easy to find actual data on the subject. Fact: every single year from 2001 on has been hotter than every single year on record prior to that, with the sole exception of 1998. No, the climate did not magically stop getting warmer in 1997.
This sounds like a good idea to me. Sen. Rockefeller clearly thinks he knows how the results will come out, but I tend to trust the National Academy of Sciences to do an honest study of the subject, not just write a rationalization for someone's preconceived beliefs. If there really is a connection between violent video games and real world violence, I want to know about it. I'm not going to deny the possibility just because it conflicts with my preconceptions. And if they conclude there's no connection, maybe Sen. Rockefeller will even accept that. (Yeah, right, but I can still dream!)
Disclaimer: I'm a gamer. And frankly, I find some of the more violent games out there pretty disturbing and choose not to play them.
But the simple, plain fact of the matter is that, unless its being subsidised by the taxpayer, oil costs more than your solar panels for the next 15-30 years, depending on where you are and how capable your system is.
There, fixed that for you. It depends where you live, of course. But oil is very heavily subsidized, and that does a lot to make it seem cheaper than it really is.
That's part of what I meant by "but not entirely". There certainly are exceptions. You aren't really talking about "most of human history", though, just about the advanced civilizations that have appeared in the last 6000 years or so since the development of agriculture. In tribal hunter/gather societies (most of human history), even the leaders are usually expected to work.
Exactly. The real problem is our assumption that every single person should work, and if they don't, they're a drain on society. For all of human history that has largely (but not entirely) been true. But once you reach a point where a machine is better suited than a human to do a particular job, the rational decision is to have a machine do it. And as the fraction of jobs that are best done by machines steadily grows, the need for humans to do them will decline. And that's a fine thing. It's the reason we created those machines in the first place. They exist to serve humanity, not the other way around.