Boomers have the distinction that their parents sent them off to Vietnam to die. This is where the social contract (parent to child) started to unfold. Boomers had to rally in the streets to save their own skins. Their own parents wanted them to live in the jungles.
But, Boomers never passed this lesson along to their own children. Boomers assumed that since they won the hippie war, that Led Zeppelin would reign forever. Boomers never took into account the basic parenting principle, that your children are destined to do better.
Ultimately, because Boomers were abused, they regard all gains as entitlement. They have nothing to spare for the neighbor or the child. Everything is viewed in terms of how society is going to "pay me back" for what I have suffered.
In that sense, Boomers have failed. They created a peace based on their own disillusionment.
>they need to cut the social contract in such a manner that if your retirement income is above, say, $60,000 per year, you slowly lose benefits until income $100,000
Absolutely. The problem with SS is that it's not need-based. Everyone gets paid out, regardless of whether they are a multi-millionaire.
I have a real problem with SS, which is the idea that old people don't make as much money as the young. Actually, old people have more investments, more equity, and more business contacts. They are more likely to be managers.
If some destitute old person needs a handout, then fine. But the current terms are too generous. You could accomplish the SAME by being selective.
>Reform the tort laws, it isn't Christmas just because some doctor or medical establishment screwed up.
Huh? It's okay for professionals to screw up? You lost me here.
Medicaid is top-notch from what I've seen having 2 friends on it. The problem with Medicaid is that it's too good. You can get a $400 prescription for antidepressants and not be able to pay your rent. What's more important, really? Antidepressants or rent money.
>there are too many middlemen picking off a share of our money.
Right. In order to understand U.S. healthcare, you have to consider all of the premiums paid into insurance as "profit." Why? Because that money is discretionary.
When an insurance company pays out $X for surgery, that's a hospital's profit. When they pay out $Y for drugs, that's a drug company's profit.
Sure, it might not be the insurance company's profit, but it's somebody's profit. That aspect of the argument is ill-served when insurance companies come out and say, oh, well we only make 10% profit. What about doctors? That's a high-paying profession last I checked.
Wow, 200 comments and nobody mentioned the I Am Rich iPhone app?
I Am Rich was a legitimate application. It would have been completely legit if the description said, "Displays a red jewel." Instead, according to Wiki, it said, "a work of art with no hidden function at all." Vague, but not much different than this.
I Am Rich got pulled after 1 day and 8 sales. Scam? Apple pulled it for being worthless. I'm sure eBay could come to the same conclusion.
>I don't think the bulk of internet users agree with you.
Agreed. But if you read my other posts, you'll see that a) the bulk of internet users is 14-year-old girls and Latina housewives, and b) the Postal Service has been encrypting the majority of its traffic for over 100 years.
Welcome back Mr. Brucke. Try to be more contrarian.
Actually I think people do nothing because keeping the internet the same, gets more people online. It's over 15 years since I got online and it's only in the past year that people know what "Tivo" is. Hell, if I drove in to Kansas I bet they still don't. And they sure as hell don't have Tivo in Juarez, Mexico.
So at what point will there be a critical mass of people online where the internet can evolve again? Well, we've already seen one evolution - web forums and facebook. And both of them are stunningly stupid. The second evolution is YouTube and Hulu. Err. I'll take Hulu over Facebook, but these are more likely to kill television than create something superior.
I don't think IT is low-cost/low-budget. More like low standards. And it will only get worse with each new 14-year-old girl or Latina housewife who gets online. They offer nothing from an IT perspective except end-user testing. Which is valuable but, they can't build squat themselves.
Then don't use envelopes. Just send all your mail as postcards.
After all, it takes easily twice as long to open an envelope as it does to flip over a postcard and read it. And it costs more.
Funny that 99% of personal mail is in an envelope. I feel like we've tackled this problem before. Does an envelope serve a purpose other than security?
Meanwhile, we've lowered the cost of sending a letter from 42 cents to 0.01 cents by using email, and you're saying that cpu cycles cost too much? Dude, how did you ever afford stamps?
It would be fine if your FTP server wasn't connected to every user in China and Russia. It's kind of like hanging your underwear to dry on a clothesline in the backyard thinking, "I only have one neighbor, what's the chance he's going to see my underwear?"
Meanwhile, there's 6 BILLION people living at your neighbor's house. I mean, it's not a sure thing that you'll get robbed, it just goes to show that your FTP server is in a ghetto.
That's what people don't get about the internet. It's the ultimate shitty party. Everyone's invited. There's no way to keep anyone out.
I mostly agree with that, but I wouldn't mind read-only sites being encrypted as well. The way I see it, we're at a point now where all digital communications should be encrypted. Just how steep is the performance drop from HTTPS? With a 15 Mbit residential connection and a 2Ghz processor, I find it hard to believe that the performance drop will matter...to me.
To the server, maybe.
Oh, and what's wrong with a self-signed cert? The data is still encrypted, isn't it?
The web was built largely because people made websites for others out of the kindness of their hearts. From that, it's not a big step to turn on https.
>To get black holes to work you have to twiddle with general relativity and accept that values in a solution can by infinite in value, ie, density and gravity at the singularity. I think it was Einstein himself who said that if your math give you an infinite in your solution then there is something wrong in your math.
I don't see that "infinite gravity" has any practical meaning over, say, "infinite speed" (impossible) or "infinite mass" (also impossible).
The problem may be that you are trying to apply GR behind the event horizon. That could screw up anybody's math.
>Add in to that the issues about entropy and information loss, its ugly.
I'm still working on these, but the fact that I can't grok them after months of study implies to me that they are nothing but red herrings. Who cares if black holes destroy information? Really. Of all the things for people to waste their time on.
It sounds like holographic theory boils down to the idea that there's one less dimension than there really is. Funny, I'd take it in the opposite direction. I'd say that holographic theory is off by at least 2 dimensions or more. Which means it's doubly bogus.
Beware of people claiming to know what's on the opposite side of an event horizon. Holographic theory is based on the idea that we MUST reconcile black holes with the rest of the universe. And since black holes are really simple, the whole universe must be simple, too!
I doubt they need to be reconciled. They are two different theories operating under different domains. Anyone who sees a "conflict" between the two is probably trying to apply one theory to an inappropriate scenario.
>If you have 2 masses, they exhibit an attractive force upon each other. We call this phenomenon "gravity",
Yep. And somehow, the author of this article has no idea what it is.
Einstein defined gravity as "the curvature of space." It seems flatly unnecessary (and heretical) to try and re-define it as something else. Why do masses curve space? That's a better question.
>What nobody has satisfactorily explained is this: why are these two related?
From my armchair, they're not related. In fact they seem somewhat opposed. Because of inertia, a massive object will tend to stay in one place. But introduce another massive object, and now they will fall towards each other. Not exactly inertial, now is it?
>Well then what part of orbital dynamics suggest the inner planets would have crashed into the sun?
Nothing. According to that theory, everything always gets sucked into everything else, and the universe would be one giant star. Obviously that's not the case, so anyone operating under that theory has a screw loose.
>Therefore the impacts would be accellerative, and puhs the planetoid to a higher orbit.
They don't need to. We could have started from a higher orbit and fallen inward to where we are now. Of course this contradicts the accepted theory that God created humans 6,000 years ago along with the dinosaurs.
Mmm you should try googling my name. It's quite different from actually being Catholic. Has more of a sci-fi bent to it.
Sex abuse in the Roman Church is actually quite a problem. Maybe understandable since there's been 2 revolutions in Western thought since then (Muslim and Protestant). Three, if you count the Founding Fathers (agnostic).
Mmm, well try growing up (just) 40 miles from an urban center. In broadcast quality, CBS was terrible, so was ABC. You got used to liking NBC, FOX, WB, and UPN because they were relatively snow-free. It was like the weather. You turn on the TV to find out how crappy it was that day.
>In slashdot math, 180 lines is better then 480.
And yet a good VHS tape looks pretty sharp. What's the rez on Betamax? Wiki says 250. VHS = 250. Betacam was 300. None of them are 480.
Well, I did work with a guy who couldn't use his Sprint phone because it was "cooking my head." Since I had to check his voice mail, I was able to confirm that it was extremely hot.
I suspect you could measure the heating effect.
How much of this was IR from the screen or microwave from the signal? Hard to tell, since the outcome is the same (heat).
Anyway, 1 minute times 1000w is enough to destroy butter, or turn raw steak into well-done. What does 1w times 1000 minutes per month do? My head is raw. A good cell call can last over an hour. That's 16 seconds of microwave oven, enough to blast (refrigerated) butter into oblivion. There are many lipids in the body, most notably around cells. How do they respond to being liquefied?
BTW microwave ovens work very well on duty-cycle ("defrost" or "medium" setting). They cook more evenly, since the heat has time to spread. If you ever had a hot bowl of soup with a cold interior, I recommend it.
I get it, but $2 is still too much. That's my point. Filling a 40Gb iPod at 5Mb per song, $1 each, would cost you $8000.
By comparison, my 100 CD collection from high school cost about $1500. And that was quite a project.
Now if you take my suggestion and charge $0.10, filling the iPod costs $800. That's reasonable. And you're getting more for less. Considering mp3's are worse quality than CD, with no artwork included (i.e. NO re-sale value), that sounds about right.
First of all, if you live too long, you just need to have fewer kids.
Second, extra-long lives (on the order of 200-300 years) will be necessary for space travel. See the other poster.
I know there are a number of religious dogmatists who see extended aging as a threat to God and our "responsibility" to die off. But if you're serious about this, you need to start executing companies, governments, and societies that survive for more than 90 years.
Survival is a human right. In a universe barely above absolute zero, we are owed this much.
Slashdot Mirror
Boomers have the distinction that their parents sent them off to Vietnam to die. This is where the social contract (parent to child) started to unfold. Boomers had to rally in the streets to save their own skins. Their own parents wanted them to live in the jungles.
But, Boomers never passed this lesson along to their own children. Boomers assumed that since they won the hippie war, that Led Zeppelin would reign forever. Boomers never took into account the basic parenting principle, that your children are destined to do better.
Ultimately, because Boomers were abused, they regard all gains as entitlement. They have nothing to spare for the neighbor or the child. Everything is viewed in terms of how society is going to "pay me back" for what I have suffered.
In that sense, Boomers have failed. They created a peace based on their own disillusionment.
>they need to cut the social contract in such a manner that if your retirement income is above, say, $60,000 per year, you slowly lose benefits until income $100,000
Absolutely. The problem with SS is that it's not need-based. Everyone gets paid out, regardless of whether they are a multi-millionaire.
I have a real problem with SS, which is the idea that old people don't make as much money as the young. Actually, old people have more investments, more equity, and more business contacts. They are more likely to be managers.
If some destitute old person needs a handout, then fine. But the current terms are too generous. You could accomplish the SAME by being selective.
>Reform the tort laws, it isn't Christmas just because some doctor or medical establishment screwed up.
Huh? It's okay for professionals to screw up? You lost me here.
Medicaid is top-notch from what I've seen having 2 friends on it. The problem with Medicaid is that it's too good. You can get a $400 prescription for antidepressants and not be able to pay your rent. What's more important, really? Antidepressants or rent money.
>there are too many middlemen picking off a share of our money.
Right. In order to understand U.S. healthcare, you have to consider all of the premiums paid into insurance as "profit." Why? Because that money is discretionary.
When an insurance company pays out $X for surgery, that's a hospital's profit. When they pay out $Y for drugs, that's a drug company's profit.
Sure, it might not be the insurance company's profit, but it's somebody's profit. That aspect of the argument is ill-served when insurance companies come out and say, oh, well we only make 10% profit. What about doctors? That's a high-paying profession last I checked.
Wow, 200 comments and nobody mentioned the I Am Rich iPhone app?
I Am Rich was a legitimate application. It would have been completely legit if the description said, "Displays a red jewel." Instead, according to Wiki, it said, "a work of art with no hidden function at all." Vague, but not much different than this.
I Am Rich got pulled after 1 day and 8 sales. Scam? Apple pulled it for being worthless. I'm sure eBay could come to the same conclusion.
>I don't think the bulk of internet users agree with you.
Agreed. But if you read my other posts, you'll see that a) the bulk of internet users is 14-year-old girls and Latina housewives, and b) the Postal Service has been encrypting the majority of its traffic for over 100 years.
Welcome back Mr. Brucke. Try to be more contrarian.
Huh?
Do you dial in to Slashdot on a 486? I don't even get what you're saying.
Actually I think people do nothing because keeping the internet the same, gets more people online. It's over 15 years since I got online and it's only in the past year that people know what "Tivo" is. Hell, if I drove in to Kansas I bet they still don't. And they sure as hell don't have Tivo in Juarez, Mexico.
So at what point will there be a critical mass of people online where the internet can evolve again? Well, we've already seen one evolution - web forums and facebook. And both of them are stunningly stupid. The second evolution is YouTube and Hulu. Err. I'll take Hulu over Facebook, but these are more likely to kill television than create something superior.
I don't think IT is low-cost/low-budget. More like low standards. And it will only get worse with each new 14-year-old girl or Latina housewife who gets online. They offer nothing from an IT perspective except end-user testing. Which is valuable but, they can't build squat themselves.
Then don't use envelopes. Just send all your mail as postcards.
After all, it takes easily twice as long to open an envelope as it does to flip over a postcard and read it. And it costs more.
Funny that 99% of personal mail is in an envelope. I feel like we've tackled this problem before. Does an envelope serve a purpose other than security?
Meanwhile, we've lowered the cost of sending a letter from 42 cents to 0.01 cents by using email, and you're saying that cpu cycles cost too much? Dude, how did you ever afford stamps?
>Probably not the best attitude
It would be fine if your FTP server wasn't connected to every user in China and Russia. It's kind of like hanging your underwear to dry on a clothesline in the backyard thinking, "I only have one neighbor, what's the chance he's going to see my underwear?"
Meanwhile, there's 6 BILLION people living at your neighbor's house. I mean, it's not a sure thing that you'll get robbed, it just goes to show that your FTP server is in a ghetto.
That's what people don't get about the internet. It's the ultimate shitty party. Everyone's invited. There's no way to keep anyone out.
Oh wait, there is!
Thank you. Perfect example. Especially since it would happen.
>It's not needed.
You're clearly not anti-facist. Everybody says "oh, the criminals only go after what's important. Just protect that."
Actually, facists go after the mundane. In Germany it was your name that got you killed. Try encrypting that.
I mostly agree with that, but I wouldn't mind read-only sites being encrypted as well. The way I see it, we're at a point now where all digital communications should be encrypted. Just how steep is the performance drop from HTTPS? With a 15 Mbit residential connection and a 2Ghz processor, I find it hard to believe that the performance drop will matter...to me.
To the server, maybe.
Oh, and what's wrong with a self-signed cert? The data is still encrypted, isn't it?
The web was built largely because people made websites for others out of the kindness of their hearts. From that, it's not a big step to turn on https.
>In essence, they are trying to rewrite history.
Nope. Wrong answer. If Obama is trying to rewrite history, why would he come out and announce that he's doing it?
If all you can muster is "Let's not do this," then what's your response if he just went ahead and did it?
>To get black holes to work you have to twiddle with general relativity and accept that values in a solution can by infinite in value, ie, density and gravity at the singularity. I think it was Einstein himself who said that if your math give you an infinite in your solution then there is something wrong in your math.
I don't see that "infinite gravity" has any practical meaning over, say, "infinite speed" (impossible) or "infinite mass" (also impossible).
The problem may be that you are trying to apply GR behind the event horizon. That could screw up anybody's math.
>Add in to that the issues about entropy and information loss, its ugly.
I'm still working on these, but the fact that I can't grok them after months of study implies to me that they are nothing but red herrings. Who cares if black holes destroy information? Really. Of all the things for people to waste their time on.
It sounds like holographic theory boils down to the idea that there's one less dimension than there really is. Funny, I'd take it in the opposite direction. I'd say that holographic theory is off by at least 2 dimensions or more. Which means it's doubly bogus.
Beware of people claiming to know what's on the opposite side of an event horizon. Holographic theory is based on the idea that we MUST reconcile black holes with the rest of the universe. And since black holes are really simple, the whole universe must be simple, too!
I doubt they need to be reconciled. They are two different theories operating under different domains. Anyone who sees a "conflict" between the two is probably trying to apply one theory to an inappropriate scenario.
>If you have 2 masses, they exhibit an attractive force upon each other. We call this phenomenon "gravity",
Yep. And somehow, the author of this article has no idea what it is.
Einstein defined gravity as "the curvature of space." It seems flatly unnecessary (and heretical) to try and re-define it as something else. Why do masses curve space? That's a better question.
>What nobody has satisfactorily explained is this: why are these two related?
From my armchair, they're not related. In fact they seem somewhat opposed. Because of inertia, a massive object will tend to stay in one place. But introduce another massive object, and now they will fall towards each other. Not exactly inertial, now is it?
>Well then what part of orbital dynamics suggest the inner planets would have crashed into the sun?
Nothing. According to that theory, everything always gets sucked into everything else, and the universe would be one giant star. Obviously that's not the case, so anyone operating under that theory has a screw loose.
>Therefore the impacts would be accellerative, and puhs the planetoid to a higher orbit.
They don't need to. We could have started from a higher orbit and fallen inward to where we are now. Of course this contradicts the accepted theory that God created humans 6,000 years ago along with the dinosaurs.
Mmm you should try googling my name. It's quite different from actually being Catholic. Has more of a sci-fi bent to it.
Sex abuse in the Roman Church is actually quite a problem. Maybe understandable since there's been 2 revolutions in Western thought since then (Muslim and Protestant). Three, if you count the Founding Fathers (agnostic).
Mmm, well try growing up (just) 40 miles from an urban center. In broadcast quality, CBS was terrible, so was ABC. You got used to liking NBC, FOX, WB, and UPN because they were relatively snow-free. It was like the weather. You turn on the TV to find out how crappy it was that day.
>In slashdot math, 180 lines is better then 480.
And yet a good VHS tape looks pretty sharp. What's the rez on Betamax? Wiki says 250. VHS = 250. Betacam was 300. None of them are 480.
Even Laserdisc and Super VHS were only 420.
Well, I did work with a guy who couldn't use his Sprint phone because it was "cooking my head." Since I had to check his voice mail, I was able to confirm that it was extremely hot.
I suspect you could measure the heating effect.
How much of this was IR from the screen or microwave from the signal? Hard to tell, since the outcome is the same (heat).
Anyway, 1 minute times 1000w is enough to destroy butter, or turn raw steak into well-done. What does 1w times 1000 minutes per month do? My head is raw. A good cell call can last over an hour. That's 16 seconds of microwave oven, enough to blast (refrigerated) butter into oblivion. There are many lipids in the body, most notably around cells. How do they respond to being liquefied?
BTW microwave ovens work very well on duty-cycle ("defrost" or "medium" setting). They cook more evenly, since the heat has time to spread. If you ever had a hot bowl of soup with a cold interior, I recommend it.
I get it, but $2 is still too much. That's my point. Filling a 40Gb iPod at 5Mb per song, $1 each, would cost you $8000.
By comparison, my 100 CD collection from high school cost about $1500. And that was quite a project.
Now if you take my suggestion and charge $0.10, filling the iPod costs $800. That's reasonable. And you're getting more for less. Considering mp3's are worse quality than CD, with no artwork included (i.e. NO re-sale value), that sounds about right.
How do you expect it to work? It's VOIP - that's where the cheapness comes in. And in order to have VOIP, you need broadband to tap into.
First of all, if you live too long, you just need to have fewer kids.
Second, extra-long lives (on the order of 200-300 years) will be necessary for space travel. See the other poster.
I know there are a number of religious dogmatists who see extended aging as a threat to God and our "responsibility" to die off. But if you're serious about this, you need to start executing companies, governments, and societies that survive for more than 90 years.
Survival is a human right. In a universe barely above absolute zero, we are owed this much.