what twaddle. Grenpeace dont even swear at people let along blow them apart with semtex. Its funny to see slashdotters suddenly get their knickers in a twist about peaceful disobedience of the law when its greenpeace, and then within minutes post a "Fuck the RIAA you cant stop me filesharing" rant about how its every citizens right to break the law if they disagree with it.
Thankfully, I am not the person "Slashdot". So when the person "Slashdot" does something that is seemingly hypocritical, you can rest assure that the person running around calling them self "Slashdot" isn't me. In this case, while the person "Slashdot" might share files and have a problem with vandalism, I do not. I have a problem with vandalism and I don't pirate. I don't buy music either. There is plenty of legal music in this world such that you don't need to pirate OR buy from the RIAA.
If you would rather events like the exxon valdez disaster or bhopal just got quietly ignored as they would be without GP, then thats a matter for your conscience. As far as I know Exxon mobil havent paid a single dollar in compensation for that valdez shipwreck, and thats even after GPS campaigns. Without people like GP, they would probably be trying to sue the seagulls for stealing their oil.
Greenpeace does not have a monopoly on publicizing these disasters. There are plenty of other organizations that have put in the effort to improve the environment without resorting to publicity stunts that far from bringing attention to the problem, tend to piss off allies. Having Greenpeace on your side is the left wing equivalent of getting a local militia group that threatens to shoot cops and tax collectors on site to endorse your program to cut back taxes. It is counter productive.
Greenpeace plays to their own whacko brand of quasi-religious environmentalism. Hell, I think this quote sums up their position:
"We are putting Monsanto on notice, along with each and every Biotech firm that is contaminating our fields and our food supply now - or has future plans to introduce GE seeds - this is the beginning, we will not stop until France is declared a GE free zone."
This is what they say on their own frigging page. This shit ISN'T what wins over anyone but your fellow quasi-religious-environmentalist nut jobs. This is like declaring that you are going to go disrupt Jewish religious services until all the heathens convert to Christianity.
Greenpeace has done more to make "environmentalist" be spat out like a curse word then any other group out there. Calling yourself an environmentalist is slowly losing its stigma, but it is losing its stigma DESPITE Greenpeace, not because of it. Greenpeace is a curse on the environmentalist movement. Greenpeace is a blessing to every corporate dumper out there. While Greenpeace is out there, these corporations point to their stupid and dangerous stunts as proof that the other side is just made up of stupid college kids with too much time on their hands. I bet Exxon executives wake up every single day and thank god for Greenpeace and jump for joy when one of those idiots performs some act of vandalism that they can then take to a congressmen as proof that the other side is nuts.
That doesn't surprise me much. Giving money to any orginization that overly performs illegal acts and then goes and publishes their exploits is likely to raise eyebrows when you are trying to get a security clearence. Why would this be a surprise?
"Terrorist" is harsher then what Greenpeace deservers. That said, at the very least they vandalize equipment, trespass, and have performed more then one dangerous asinine stunt at sea. Greenpeace is by no stretch of the imagination the Sierra Club. These are people that happily violate the law and use terrorist like tactics. Running your snowmobile through an oil drilling site is dangerous for all involved. Having activist storm a laboratory Hell, just look at Greenpeace's own press releases. They read like ransom demands.
"We are putting Monsanto on notice, along with each and every Biotech firm that is contaminating our fields and our food supply now - or has future plans to introduce GE seeds - this is the beginning, we will not stop until France is declared a GE free zone." Said Olivier Keller, national secretary of the Confederation Paysanne.
Is this a terrorist act? No, not really. Do people immediately pick up on the similarities between how these minority groups are trying to use corrosion to bring about some sort of social change? Hell yes. So yes, I'll agree that Greenpeace is not a terrorist organization. That said, they only way that they are different from your average run of the mill terrorist organization is that they make a reasonable effort to avoid harming people. Outside of the "not killing people" part (which admittedly is a big part), they operate in much the same way as any other crazy terrorist group does.
"Terrorist" is a bit harsh to be calling Greenpeace folks. That said, they absolutely do vandalize property, regularly trespass, and some of their stunts are down right dangerous for all parties involved. Greenpeace is no Sierra Club.
Personally, I loath Greenpeace. The little productive work they do in terms of raising awareness is offset by their vandal tactics that make being associated with them undesirable. While they are not "terrorist", the methods that they use have roughly the same affect. They go out and do something illegal and/or distasteful to get attention. The attention they get though is almost universally negative. It is like slamming an airplane into a building might bring attention to the plight of Middle Eastern nations, but getting attention that way sure as shit isn't going to result in a favorable reaction. If anything, it is going to result in people that might normally be sympathetic come out looking for blood.
Greenpeace sullies the reputation of environmentalist. Greenpeace looks like a bunch of immature jobless juveniles and burnt out hippies performing pranks for the sake of attention under the excuse of the "environment". That, or they hold such a fervent environmentalist fanaticism that you can rest assure they won't be happy until every human is running naked through a forest.
Greenpeace does nothing but harm to the environmentalist movement. Having Greenpeace on your side is the left wing equivalent of having the local bat shit crazy right wing militia group that wants to violently form an independent nation state on your side. Yes, they might also agree that taxes need to be reduced, but they also run around in the forest playing war games and threaten to shoot tax collectors and police who enter their property.
Hell, Thomas Friedman is doing more productive work for the environment then Greenpeace is right now by running around preaching oil as our doom. When a single crazy quasi-libertarian economist is doing more for the environment then your entire well funded enviro-vandal organization is doing, it is time to take a step back and reevaluate your methods.
1) Online shows results in more people watching the show online at the expense of the network broadcast because people would rather watch it on demand then at a set time. 2) Online shows have no effect on the amount of people watching the broadcast 3) Online shows increase the viewership of the broadcast show because people are able to keep up to the story and jump in half way.
All three of those possibilities are good things. Even scenario 1 isn't a bad thing as if people are viewing it online instead of during a broadcast they are still viewing it. If the commercials are built in you still are receiving ad revenue.
If anything, online showings should be MORE popular. Other then through surveys, there is no way to tell who is watching what at any given time. For advertisers network commercials are a complete crapshoot. They can only guess at who watched their commercials and if there was any response to the commercials. Now consider the possibilities for online advertising during a show.
If you air the show online, you can make people sign in. This means that you can track individual viewers viewing habits. Hell, make them take a small survey and give advertisers a wealth of information. Instead of guessing how many people watched a show, you can KNOW how many people watched the show. Further, you can judge responses to commercials. If during a commercial you can click on the commercial to learn more, you can track if people have any sort of response to the commercials they are viewing. Interactive, traceable, online advertising linked to demographic data is an advertisers wet dream.
Is there some small element of risk involved? Sure. Perhaps this pussyfooted first step is the networks way of testing the waters. Personally though, I think it is a grievous mistake to enter the waters so timidly. I don't think there is any doubt in anyone's mind that on demand is absolutely here to stay. Refusing to jump in and get wet is just giving someone else the chance to cash in before you do.
I was excited when I first heard about this. I have heard great things about Lost and have wanted to start watching. Of course, being a netflix subscribe I completely reject the idea of starting a TV show in the middle. I was hoping that this would mean that I could watch Lost from episode 1 onwards. I don't mind sitting through commercials, I just want to see the story in order. Perhaps I am simply missing the right button, but as far as I can tell I can only watch last weeks episode.
WTF is wrong with these networking people? I WANT to watch their shows complete with commercials. The only demand I make is that I watch the show in order when I want to watch it. I don't have any intention of starting a story half way through, nor do I want to plan my life around the schedule of the TV.
The capacity to do this already exists. If I wanted to I could go to the pirate's bay right now and find exactly what I want and then some. I simply fail to see what is gained by making piracy the only way to watch a TV show on your own schedule. If they simply let people watch their damn TV shows, complete with ads, I imagine the number of people watching would skyrocket as people like me who otherwise would not be bothered to live by a TVs schedule start watching.
What sort of bone headed idiocy is preventing this from happening? Is it really fear of piracy? Do they fail to see that the piracy already exists and that failing to offer their own commercial filled version is NOT going to make the piracy go away?
I swear it almost seems like they want for controls sake, not because of any rational reason behind withholding making their content available.
WTF?! Bombed? Maybe with the crowd, but he was bloody brilliant. Fucking balls of steel to say what he did with the president a few feet away. Most other comediens would turn on the fake chuminess, "oh schucks, you know I'm just kidding" after every bland joke, and then kiss and make up with old Georgy boy.
That is kind of the point. It might have taken balls of steel, but it wasn't all that funny. I have developed a strong distaste for comedians during politically intense times because comedians seem to be under the delusion that I come to them for political advice.
One of my girlfriend's favorite comedians is Margaret Cho. I like Margaret Cho too, but my girlfriend really loves her. I took her to go see Margaret Cho just before the last election. A comedian that normally has me in tears left me pissed off that I had spent money to get in the door. Hell, it was so bad I wouldn't have seen it for free.
The entire set was a series of Bush jokes. For the first few minutes I chuckled because yes, Bush does act like a fucking idiot more often then not and it is fun to point and laugh at the stupid kid who is trying really hard. After about 3 minutes of it though, I was done. There are only so many ways you can reword "Bush is stupid" before it really stops being funny. To add insult to injury, the already shitty jokes were delivered with absolutely painful mind numblingly bad timing. After about 5 minutes of sitting there I realize that I had just blown 45 bucks for a a shitty drink with no alcohol in it and an anti-Bush rally. Sufficient to say, I was not all that happy.
Watching Colbert at the dinner (w00t C-Span) was like watching Margaret Cho. I tried chuckling the minute or two and then simply gave up. If his goal was to preach, he did a great job. If his goal was to actually be funny, he failed miserably. You could sit there and nod in agreement with his message but still recognize that what he was saying wasn't even a little funny. His timing was absolutely atrocious and the jokes themselves were lame and predictable.
I think people are blowing this out of proportion. People didn't laugh not because they were pissed off, but simply because it wasn't funny.
Music is not an example of a "free" market. It is a market to be sure, but it is hardly free. These companies have been given a government enforced monopoly that has dragged the prices artificially high. If this was a true free market that wasn't protected by government enforced monopolies the cost of music would drop like a rock.
Maybe Wii has some deep meaning in Japanese, but it is a fucking stupid name for the English market. Wii sounds like a word a child uses for piss or a comment on someone's penis size; either way it isn't good. This almost reminds me of a story I heard years back about how an American car company put out a car under the American name in South America that name sound like "junk", "broken" or something like that in spanish.
Whatever the case, this is just a stupid move. It would be nice to think that people would pick a product on merit alone, but there is a reality that perception is influenced by advertising. Part of advertising is the name you give to your product. Dumb move Nintendo.
The American have a secret weapon though. We will enter one of your clean cities fully armed and then when confronted we will start to litter. As you Canadians desperately try to pick up our empty cans of shitty American beer and bring them to a recycling station you will be completely vulnerable to our cop killing FMJ semi-automatic assault rifles, grotesquely large hand guns, and the odd red neck wielding a bazooka or machine gun that he bought before they were made illegal.
Canadians fleeing to the recycling station with shitty American beer cans in hand will be easy picking off by our highly skilled red neck population. While our gansta/thug population might be a little questionable in their aim, they will make up for it with round output and shear enthusiasm at being given the chance to bust a cap in yo cracker ass. To the Canadians defense though, our skinny white guy wanna be rappers from the 'burbs will likely take out a few Americans as they hold guns bigger then their head sideways and shoot like fucking retards.
We will send then send in the upper middle suburban punks dressed in 200+ dollar outfits of pre-ripped black jeans, black shirts with an obscure band on it, and metal studs randomly glued on to their clothing to clean up the mess. They will hunt down the surviving Canadians in a desperate attempt to retrieve the empty cans of shitty American beer in the hopes of draining the last drops of swill that might be left at the bottom of the can. The wrist scarred (across the street style, not down the highway) teenaged girls , feminine teenaged guys, and sketchy 40 year old men goths at that point will come out to add insult to injury by read shitty poetry about death and try to one up each other by doing grotesque things to the corpses.
Have no fear though, us Americans are not without compassion and mercy. We will blast some shitty (is there any other type?) emo music over the battlefield and send the emo kids out. They will promptly start to cry. True, they are crying at the memory of their long lost sixth grade girlfriend and lamenting at the difficulty of their inhumanly difficult life living in suburban America, but we can pretend they are crying for lost Canadian souls.
Oh hell, what is a little karma. At least I amuse myself.
The nice thing about CO2 is that it doesn't really matter where it is dumped. There might be some local affects going on, but it really is an issue of the net amount dumped into the world's atmosphere. Plenty of nations have CO2 markets that are much better managed then in the US. Europe in particular has a pretty hot CO2 market. As it turns out, buying up CO2 futures has become a hot commodity market in Europe.
If you really are hell bent on doing something for the environment, really are willing to drop a few thousand to do it, and won't feel bad about your lost bragging rights about your new hybrid, just pick a functional CO2 market and start buying. Hell, I would be willing to wager an arm and a leg that there is an environmentalist organization or two out there already doing this that would happily accept donations to buy up more and spare you the trouble of doing it yourself. I know for a fact that there are many environmentalist organizations that happily take donations to buy up forests to prevent them from being logged both domestically and world wide.
Most of your objections is about current implementations of electric car. The fragility of frame isn't really dependant on being electric car.
The fragility of the frame comes from the fact that electric cars are underpowered. The electric car FTA is what your average electric car is. A really fucking light car that has had all basic car safety devices stripped from it except for a seatbelt. They don't have crumple zones, a strong frame, airbags, anti-lock breaks, hell it doesn't even have a heater much less a radio. These are not cars. These are electric engines with a light built and a seat built around it. You can get a gas powered car to have incredible MPG too if you strip it down enough. We call these mop heads.
First thing I'd do is BAN on sales of new SUVs and give relatively large GAS tax, inorder to get rid of them from the traffic. Remember I'm saying that society needs to transform to electric cars not one individual.
SUVs are an issue, but even if you banned all non-essential SUV usage tomorrow, you still would only dent the problem. Gas taxes are notoriously regressive and an excellent way to make the rich shrug in indifference and the poor unable to work and afford a car.
The issue in the US is infrastructure. The US is built from the ground up to use cars. There is absolutely nothing that can be done about the infrastructure problem that wont spark a rebellion. Americans don't want to live in cities. They want to own a home with a yard and some breathing room from the neighbors. These is nothing you can do to convince them that the ideal way to live is on top of each other in a city in a rented apartment. Americans live in a big nation that is spread far apart. Public transportation will never be the answer in such a place, nor will an electric car that is as (un)safe as a motor cycle and can't make it work and back under the above specified conditions.
The engine technology is pretty good already. Fast electric car gets from 0 to 60Mph in 4 seconds, and is trying to break the speed record of gasoline powered car. Also the slowing down and increasing speed isn't such a problem for electric car as the engines work as generators also, the same thing that makes hybrids so efficient work with pure electric vehicles too.
Increases of speed are still an issue. You can't make energy appear. Any energy you try and generate while accelerating is taking at the very least that much energy out of powering the wheels. You can make back some energy breaking though, as losing energy is what you are after.
More to the point, fast electric cars are not cars. They are engines with a light weight unsafe frame and a seat. Show me an electric car the same size, weight, and safety as your generic Honda Civic that can do 300 miles on one tank, and you might actually have something. Show me that glorified motorcycle FTA and you have a joke on your hands (at least in the US).
The charging time is limited primarily by the capacity of the grid connection. Normal household connection inside US is 1.5Kw while in 240v its 3Kw.
That is completely and utterly untrue. The limit on charging a battery is not the grid. The limit on charging a battery is how fast you can charge a battery. Batteries can only be charged so fast or they explode. That said, a group out of Mass. "claims" to have solved this problem and can charge a computer battery to full in 5 minutes. If there claims turns out to be true and cost effective, you might very well see electric cars come into their own. Until then, the biggest problem with an electric car is that its range is far too small for a REAL car (radio, AC, heater, air bags, roll cage, crumple zones, anti-lock breaks, exc). Cars are either stuck with very low acceleration, low top speeds, or low range. You can defeat one or two of the above, but not all three at once.
Battery technology is indeed coming along, but it simply isn't anywhere close enough to meeting the demands o
I can't wait for Spore!
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EA's E3 Lineup
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I bet it will be super awesome just like Black and White was!
You would think people would learn by now. Take the hype, divide it by 100, and that is what you really get in the end. Spore is going to promise the world and then deliver a rough facsimile of a tiny sliver of the world it promised. If the hype involves AI in a video game, divide that hype by 1000.
I am not saying that it this game will suck. On the contrary, it might very well rock. I am just saying that the bullshit hype they are spewing right now is nothing but that, bullshit hype. The closest game I have seen to really living up to such hype has been Oblivion, and even then demons of Oblivion's "radiant AI" could have been renamed "AI in the magical kingdom of scripting".
All of that said, I really do hope that some fresh ideas come out. Game developers have made me sick with the lack of originality and balls in their games over the past year or two. The only really guts project to come out in the past couple of years has been Oblivion. Outside of that, these past couple of years have been thoroughly underwhelming.
Oh look, what is that? Another Halo with blandly generic FPS style gameplay that has been around since Doom and the original Quake? Yawn.
The issue is that video game programmers make substantially less then other programmers. The reason why this is so is because a lot of people want to specifically do video game programming instead of some other more lucrative type. In this case, their low wages really are their own fault.
The key to happiness in this world is to find something that brings you some satisfaction and that pays enough to keep you happy. Some people are have very low needs and are happy with $20,000 and a job they find fully rewarding. Other people are happy making $100,000 on a job they would quit without even the curtsy of a two weeks notice they ever won the lottery.
A few lucky people get the best of both worlds and work a high paying job that they love. I have met workaholic business owners that fill this exact category. One guy in particular that I know well over 80 hours a week owns a massive house with a dozen cars that he never uses because he is only home for more then a few days a month. He is probably going to die of a heart attack in the next 10 years, but he truly loves what he does and would probably do it for much less. I have also met people that dropped out of high school, got no education, and are working shit jobs that they hate for shit pay.
Most people though, they really fall somewhere in-between. They balance self fulfillment in the working world with money. You don't go to school for a sociology major expecting to get out of college and run into a pile of money. People make their choices. This programs are no different. They have intentionally picked a field with poor pay. Using the education they already have they have the option of finding higher paid work. If making video games is what they really love to do though, then they need to find a balance. Is the shit pay worth the job? If it isn't, get the fuck out.
You miss the point of carbon credits. The idea is that you create a certain limit on how much carbon the nation can dump. You then start to sell the rights to dump that carbon. If only a few people need to dump carbon, there is very little demand for carbon credits and the price falls. If on the other hand there is a high demand for carbon the price shoots up as people try and outbid each other the remaining carbon. The idea is to induce some supply and demand effects so that you don't have a tragedy of the commons on your hands.
Now, you might very well have never seen a company declare that they couldn't sell because they had run out of carbon credits. What you have seen, regardless if you realize it or not, is businesses that simply go out of business. If the price keeps rising on carbon credits because the demand is high for a limited resource, companies have two options. They can either pay out of pocket an ever increasing price, or they can take steps to cut their emissions.
If this still is not making any sense, then think of this as a pollution tax. If you buy up carbon credits, you are effectively making everyone else have to pay more. When you take a piece from the pie, you make everyone else have to pay more for the pie that is left. You are basically upping the tax on carbon dumping.
A rational environmentalist would buy a cheap car and then take the difference and buy up carbon credits. Of course, since when were humans rational or really all that altruistic? If you buy a hybrid you can show it off and tell everyone what a green fellow you are because you spend a few bucks less on gas then the ass hole with the normal Honda civic. If you buy up a few million metric tons of CO2 dumping rights and don't use them you will be nowhere near as trendy, find it hard to brag about your "greenness", and in general be lucky to even have people understand what it is you actually did.
If you want to be trendy and "green" to your friends, buy a hybrid. If you want to really make a real difference, buy a Honda civic (the gas drinking type) and spend the difference on doing something useful for the environment. I suspect most people would rather be seen as environmentalist then altruistically putting their money to use and making a real difference. Bragging about your hybrid is a lot easier then bragging about your carbon credits.
Perhaps as simple as mandating each gas station to have electric outlet with restrictions on premium the gas station owners can take from electricity. The chicken/egg problem would be solved and the electric cars could become slowly more common.
This would solve nothing. The problem is not and never has been finding and outlet. If there was any demand at all, it wouldn't be much of a pain to simply install a plug everywhere. This isn't like hydrogen where you need a new infrastructure. The infrastructure is there, you just need to throw in an outlet for a few bucks.
The real issue is that you can't fill up one of these cars at a gas station unless you feel like stopping for 5 hours. If it takes 5 hours to fill up one of these cars, that means you have to fill it up when you have no intention of using it. Namely, parking lots would need electrical outlets and a way to charge for the fill up because that is where these cars would be fueled.
Even that isn't the real problem though. If you could have a car that goes 300 miles on a single charge, you are probably doing okay. Sure, you would be hard pressed to take this car on a road trip, but it could do almost everything else. The real issue are all the other problems that such cars have. Is this car safe? My old 1990 Honda Accord can get slammed in the rear from an SUV (or any car for that matter) and so long as the speed difference is less then 30 MPH, I will walk away with nothing worse then a headache. Most of these electric cars though are built so light that a 30 MPH hit from the rear would result in the car disintegrating. They are simply unsafe. You might as well just drive a motor cycle if you are going to throw safety to the wind.
They have other problems too. Its REAL distance tends to be a real issue. Sure, it can go 300 miles, but only if you remain at constant velocity and don't turn your heater on. What if it needs to stop and start or it is being used some place very hot or cold?
Then there is the issue of performance. Can this thing accelerate? Performance is more important then for just enjoyment of the drive. If the car takes a long time to get up to speed, or is so light that it can't turn hard without flipping, that is a safety hazard. If I need to get into a fast moving stream of traffic, I don't want a car that takes half a minute to get to 60 because I will be dead before it gets there.
Electric cars have a lot of problems. The truth is that they are NOT the solution. We simply can't make batteries big enough, safe enough, and fast charging enough to get the kind of required performance. What we really need is a way to create renewable energy that then can be converted into some other fuel.
My issue is that I live in Boston. I have an old beat to piss 1990 Honda Accord these days. Since I have been in Boston (5 years), I have been in four crashes. All four of them involved me getting rammed from the rear. Two of them took place while going 65 mph. On top of these four crashes, the shitty pothole marked streets of Boston also managed to snap my axel in half. I thankfully didn't crash because I was going slow, but if I had been on a highway instead of a city street it would have been a terribly dangerous situation. Thankfully, other then a busted axel and some scratched paint, none of the 4 crashes and 1 mechanical failures that I have experienced result in any real harm.
I need to drive 50 miles round trip each day. This isn't a choice. The tech jobs are outside of the city. My girlfriend whom I live with has her job inside the city and uses public transportation. Someone has to commute or ditch their job for bugger flipping. You would have to put a gun to my head to convince me to make the commute in one of those suicide vehicles. I think that this is where most Americans stand.
Yes, there are plenty of SUVs rumbling around, but there are plenty of little Honda Accords. Will a Honda Accord beat an SUV in a head on? Probably not. Can it take a tap from behind by an SUV and not kill everyone inside? Hell yes.
No one is advocating running around in SUVs. What people are advocating is not taking horribly unsafe vehicles to and from work. Motor cycles are suicide machines, pure and simple. I don't care if there is not a single other person on the road, a motor cycle is dangerous. If you lose control for a single second while going highway speeds, you die. End of story. Hell, a loss of control at normal road speeds is risking death and begging for a few snapped limbs.
These electric cars are not much better then a motor cycle. They are more stable, but if crash going 65 mph, you are dead. If another car broadsides you while crossing the street, you are dead. These cars are a complete joke. It doesn't offer the performance that might entice an idiot with a death wish to drive it, and it sure as shit doesn't offer enough safety for the average bloke who just wants to come home from work each night without ending up a red smear on the road.
What made the hybrid cars actually sell was the fact that it they were not offering a crippled car that was suicide to drive. They offered a car with reasonable performance and reasonable safety. It still might not win in a head on with an SUV, but at least it can take a fender bender without massacring everyone inside. If car companies want to tap into the green market, they can't do so under the delusion that being green is enough. I'll happily buy a greener car next time I buy a car, but it better not break my already limited budget and more important then anything else, it better not be a death wish machine.
Robots and AIs will always be limited in what they can do (or what we'll allow them to do). And in any case, someone has to design them.
What on earth makes you think this? Do you really believe that the human mind is the pinnacle of creativity and thought and will never be surpassed? The simple fact of the mater is that barring mysticism you and I are machines. Horrifically complex machines, but machines none the less. Complex chemical and electrical reactions drive your mind, not magic. If nature can do it using the guess and check method, you better believe that intelligence can do it much quicker.
Who says someone has to design AI? Sure, someone has to be a creator somewhere at the bottom of the chain, but alls that it takes is for a creator to build one AI that can turn around and build a better AI which in turn builds a better AI so on and so forth.
AIs will one day be more intelligent then humans. I would sooner pompously declare that heavier then aircraft are impossible then declare that something that has already been done in biology shall never be repeated and then improved on.
There really is no alternative as evidenced by the fact that people who preach its destruction have no idea what might take it's place.
Sure there are alternatives. If a machine can do anything that a human can do better and cheaper, then you really have no choice but to change. If human work has no value the capitalist system breaks. Don't get me wrong; I am not anti-capitalist, but I recognize that capitalism breaks the second human labor has no value. If a machine can do any job including building more machines, planning, research, creative tasks, exc cheaper and more productively then any human, what do the humans do?
Human work will always have value as long as there are people who don't want to work or there are people incapable of producing anything. And that will always be the case.
Human work only has value so long as it is economical. The second a machine can do labor cheaper then a human and has an equal or greater capacity for creativity and planning, human work has no value. Why pay a human extra to do an inferior job if a machine can do it cheaper and quicker? A paralyzed brain dead human has no value economically because healthy humans can do infinitely more. When the day comes that a human is the equivalent to a paralyzed brain dead person when put up next to an AI, you can pretty much rest assure that capitalism is done for.
Lets play a game. Lets take your sentence and rework it so that it fits every other religion in the world.
He said in the book that everyone's life is in danger and aliens are taking over. Your only way out is to join FLG.
He said in the book that everyone's life is in danger and demons are taking over. Your only way out is to give yourself to Christ.
Wow. A religion promising salvation and making money off of it? Holy shit! This is a revelation (ha ha, get it revelation)! Maybe the Catholics could try this. If they did they could collect enough money to own a sovereign state in the middle of Italy filled with some of the most expensive and extravagant structures in the world... oh wait. They do.
Your arguments against FLG can be made about any religion. You can argue that it is full of shit, it has no proof, they are making money off of people, and brain washing them. That fits the definition of pretty much every single modern religion. I might not fully agree with it, but hunting down, imprisoning, and in some cases killing these people is certainly not the answer. Generally killing someone or making them disappear into the black hole of China's political "judicial" system is not a great quality of life improvement.
I wager China in particular is positioning itself to supplant the U.S. as the world's dominant power and may just pull it off especially since the U.S. is increasingly being run by complete morons, with no vision, in both government and business.
Are you joking me? You think that China has a better run government then the US and that is why it will overtake the US? China is exploding inspite of its government, not because of it. The Chinese government is completely corrupt and ineffective. Government and business are tied together in ways that would cause a revolt in the US. Bribery, blatant disregard for labor laws and environmental laws, are just a few examples of the problems that the Chinese are dealing with. If wealth imbalance is the root of social revolution, China better buckle down and get ready, because the wealth imbalance in China is massive and exploding at a rate that leaves the US in the dust.
China has a lot going for it, but none of it comes from good governance. All of the problems that the US has in terms of good governance are hundreds of times worse in China. The only thing that the Chinese government has done to spur their economy is to hook into the world economy and convince the west to not suffocate China with sanctions the way it did the USSR.
China is a complete mess. They are exploding, but only because of weak labor laws, a massive population desperate for work, a complete disregard for the environment, and a willingness to confiscate property from landowners and give it corporations without even bothering to go through even the pretense of legal formalities.
If China is the model, then what the US and Europe needs to do is clear. They need to slash the minimum wage, make unions illegal except for a single 'state' union, slash environmental regulations, provide massive subsidies to corporations, and regularly confiscate land without any sort of due process and hand it over to corporations.
There will eventually be a tipping point where a few percent will be filthy rich, everyone else will be hovering around the poverty line and eventually that 90+% will realized they've been had and they outnumber the rich fat cat.
What is that saying? It is something like "revolution is just three meals away".
The problem with "revolution" in the US if you have never left the US in your life you have probably never seen someone miss three meals because they couldn't afford it. You certainly have never seen someone miss a weeks worth of food because they couldn't afford it if you have never left the US. A few people being really rich doesn't spawn revolutions. It takes broad discontent and despair to spawn a revolution. In a nation where you are more likely to die by a lightening strike then die of starvation and there are three cars for every four people, that just isn't going to happen. Suburban soccer mom's and dad's don't wield AK-47s. Ever.
If the US ever breaks, it will be because technology broke it. If we become so productive with robots and AI that humans stop being economical and unemployment soars, I could certainly see the capitalist system dismantling itself. If human work has no value, the capitalist system breaks. In a democracy, when the capitalist system breaks it is swept aside by a super majority.
Capitalism will certainly destroy itself one day. It isn't going to end in Marxist revolt though, and it won't die because a few are exceedingly rich. It is simply going to out produce itself. It will produce until it breaks the paradigm that human work has value. Once that happens a new system will be formed that is not based around human work having value. I don't really see this as a bad thing.
And no matter who you choose, there will be more DRM, more anti-terrorist measures (so that they can map you in more detail), and more invasions abroad.
There will be more of the things you consider bad because there are not enough people who agree with you. The government does respond to pressure. The problem is that DRM has no pressure from the masses and so gets no loving. Welcome to democracy.
There is plenty that politicians might love to do but can't because of the pressure of democracy. A draft will not be reinstated no matter how fucked up Iraq looks and no matter how badly politicians want to "fix" it. This will never come to pass simply because advocating a draft would be political suicide.
I am not saying that this is a perfect system by any stretch of the imagination. Democracy is far from an idiot proof system. If your masses are either uneducated, apathetic, or both, then a lot of "bad" things can be pushed through on the basis of pure apathy. What I am saying that unlike the Chinese system, it DOES respond to pressure from the masses. There are some very hard and definite limits on the government of a functional democracy set in place simply because the people will throw your ass out of office if you try to enact certain laws. When the whole country collectively moves in a certain direction, the government is powerless to stop such movement.
9/11 is a perfect example. I don't give a shit what person was elected president, after 9/11 there is not a single US president that could have chosen to NOT invade Afghanistan. The Taliban and Al-Qaeda looked guilty and a super majority of the American people wanted blood. If the president hadn't order an invasion, then congress would have passed a law compelling him to do so. If the president refused to follow such an order, he would have been impeached. If the people really demand something in a unified voice in the US (and most other stable democracies), they get, consequences be damned.
In the end, the government of a democracy truly is powerless against its people. Only apathy, a lack of consensus, and stupidity keep the people from forcing the government to do what they want it to do. When democracies fail to act in the right manner, in the end it is entirely the fault of the people.
If you are using a P2P network you are both distribute and receiving pirated material. They sue you like you are distributing the works because by being on the P2P network you are acting as a distributor. It turns out that number is $125,000 per song according to this news story: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,96797,00.html As a fun aside, this is also an article about a 12 year old girl being sued.
You are better off to saw off someone's legs instead of removing their tonsils then downloading a 12 song CD which would score you a 1.5 million dollar lawsuit.
I think FLG sounds as bat shit crazy as any other religion. We have Mormons, Scientologist, and Christian Scientist who all expose views that in the context of normal modes of thinking are utterly insane and flagrantly self-destructive in some cases.
Hell, even your average and boring vanilla Christian sounds crazy if you were not raised to accept their views as normal. Their religion is built around a Jewish cult leader who they are utterly convinced was killed, was raised from the dead, ascended to a magical utopian paradise with a being of pure love, and they believe that this person will return to Earth brining an apocalypse that will shatter humanity. That is a pretty fucking crazy view to hold if you are not brought up with it.
Further, if you listen to what FLG advocates, what they are doing makes perfect sense. They have done the same thing every other religion has done. They have taken some old religious beliefs (a form of old Chinese mysticism in this case), modified them, and used them to explain the things in this world that they don't understand and don't believe that there is an rational explanation for. In the case of FLG, they have developed a mystical explanation as to why the Chinese government is so brutal, the environment is degrading, and why people don't feel self fulfilled. Is their explanation insane? Sure, it is as insane as any religious explanation. Are the things they are trying to explain insane? Hell no.
In the same way an early Jew or Christian might blame demons, the devil, or God for things that we later have come to accept as having rational scientific explanations, these people have done the same. They worry about government corruption and repression, the degradation of the family, the environment, and the downward spiral that they see humanity in. The only difference between the FLG and any other person who worries about these things is that the FLG have assigned a mystical (aliens in this case) explanation to why things are going as they have.
If you take a step back and replace the word "aliens" with the more familiar "demons", then their beliefs suddenly become absolutely no more crazy sounding then some extreme Christian religions. Arguing that "demons" are ruining the world is hardly a new thought. They have just modernized it by replacing the word "demons" with "aliens".
Look, I am not saying you should go sign up for FLG. They are, in my opinion, utterly insane. That said, they are no more insane then any other religion out there. Just because you and I find their beliefs crazy doesn't mean that their followers should be chased down, imprisoned, repressed, and in some cases murdered by the Chinese government. I don't want to see FLG persecuted any more then I want to see Mormons, Scientologist, and Methodist persecuted.
Further, the actions of the Chinese government just incite these people into believing their dogma. If you held the belief that aliens (replace "aliens" with "demons" if that makes you more comfortable) are corrupting humanity, and suddenly the government starts to brutally repress you despite the fact that FLG is pretty damn peaceful and benign in what it advocates, would that might not affirm your beliefs that aliens/demons are out to get you?
Not to feed the original grandparent troll, but science should be working in the exclusion of supernatural. Something that is supernatural is by definition not testable. If one day we discovered that humans have telepathy, a scientist wouldn't accept a supernatural explanation. A scientist would strive to find a mechanism to explain telepathy.
The best a scientist can do to "prove" the supernatural is to show, in so far as much is possible, that a certain phenomenon happens in defiance of the laws of nature as we currently understand them. This of course proves nothing and a good scientist would never accept such a conclusion. A good scientist goes back and tries to find a new way of understanding nature.
General relativity would seem to be the supernatural working in a Newtonian world. That doesn't make relativity supernatural. It just meant that once we discovered that Newtonian physics was wrong that we had to go back rethink our entire understanding of nature.
That isn't to say that you can't see something that scientist can't explain and decide on your own that you are simply going to accept it as supernatural, it is just that such a conclusion isn't scientific.
Slashdot Mirror
what twaddle. Grenpeace dont even swear at people let along blow them apart with semtex. Its funny to see slashdotters suddenly get their knickers in a twist about peaceful disobedience of the law when its greenpeace, and then within minutes post a "Fuck the RIAA you cant stop me filesharing" rant about how its every citizens right to break the law if they disagree with it.
Thankfully, I am not the person "Slashdot". So when the person "Slashdot" does something that is seemingly hypocritical, you can rest assure that the person running around calling them self "Slashdot" isn't me. In this case, while the person "Slashdot" might share files and have a problem with vandalism, I do not. I have a problem with vandalism and I don't pirate. I don't buy music either. There is plenty of legal music in this world such that you don't need to pirate OR buy from the RIAA.
If you would rather events like the exxon valdez disaster or bhopal just got quietly ignored as they would be without GP, then thats a matter for your conscience. As far as I know Exxon mobil havent paid a single dollar in compensation for that valdez shipwreck, and thats even after GPS campaigns. Without people like GP, they would probably be trying to sue the seagulls for stealing their oil.
Greenpeace does not have a monopoly on publicizing these disasters. There are plenty of other organizations that have put in the effort to improve the environment without resorting to publicity stunts that far from bringing attention to the problem, tend to piss off allies. Having Greenpeace on your side is the left wing equivalent of getting a local militia group that threatens to shoot cops and tax collectors on site to endorse your program to cut back taxes. It is counter productive.
Greenpeace plays to their own whacko brand of quasi-religious environmentalism. Hell, I think this quote sums up their position:
"We are putting Monsanto on notice, along with each and every Biotech firm that is contaminating our fields and our food supply now - or has future plans to introduce GE seeds - this is the beginning, we will not stop until France is declared a GE free zone."
This is what they say on their own frigging page. This shit ISN'T what wins over anyone but your fellow quasi-religious-environmentalist nut jobs. This is like declaring that you are going to go disrupt Jewish religious services until all the heathens convert to Christianity.
Greenpeace has done more to make "environmentalist" be spat out like a curse word then any other group out there. Calling yourself an environmentalist is slowly losing its stigma, but it is losing its stigma DESPITE Greenpeace, not because of it. Greenpeace is a curse on the environmentalist movement. Greenpeace is a blessing to every corporate dumper out there. While Greenpeace is out there, these corporations point to their stupid and dangerous stunts as proof that the other side is just made up of stupid college kids with too much time on their hands. I bet Exxon executives wake up every single day and thank god for Greenpeace and jump for joy when one of those idiots performs some act of vandalism that they can then take to a congressmen as proof that the other side is nuts.
That doesn't surprise me much. Giving money to any orginization that overly performs illegal acts and then goes and publishes their exploits is likely to raise eyebrows when you are trying to get a security clearence. Why would this be a surprise?
"Terrorist" is harsher then what Greenpeace deservers. That said, at the very least they vandalize equipment, trespass, and have performed more then one dangerous asinine stunt at sea. Greenpeace is by no stretch of the imagination the Sierra Club. These are people that happily violate the law and use terrorist like tactics. Running your snowmobile through an oil drilling site is dangerous for all involved. Having activist storm a laboratory Hell, just look at Greenpeace's own press releases. They read like ransom demands.
e ases/massive-police-presence-as-act
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/press/rel
"We are putting Monsanto on notice, along with each and every Biotech firm that is contaminating our fields and our food supply now - or has future plans to introduce GE seeds - this is the beginning, we will not stop until France is
declared a GE free zone." Said Olivier Keller, national secretary of the Confederation Paysanne.
Is this a terrorist act? No, not really. Do people immediately pick up on the similarities between how these minority groups are trying to use corrosion to bring about some sort of social change? Hell yes. So yes, I'll agree that Greenpeace is not a terrorist organization. That said, they only way that they are different from your average run of the mill terrorist organization is that they make a reasonable effort to avoid harming people. Outside of the "not killing people" part (which admittedly is a big part), they operate in much the same way as any other crazy terrorist group does.
"Terrorist" is a bit harsh to be calling Greenpeace folks. That said, they absolutely do vandalize property, regularly trespass, and some of their stunts are down right dangerous for all parties involved. Greenpeace is no Sierra Club.
Personally, I loath Greenpeace. The little productive work they do in terms of raising awareness is offset by their vandal tactics that make being associated with them undesirable. While they are not "terrorist", the methods that they use have roughly the same affect. They go out and do something illegal and/or distasteful to get attention. The attention they get though is almost universally negative. It is like slamming an airplane into a building might bring attention to the plight of Middle Eastern nations, but getting attention that way sure as shit isn't going to result in a favorable reaction. If anything, it is going to result in people that might normally be sympathetic come out looking for blood.
Greenpeace sullies the reputation of environmentalist. Greenpeace looks like a bunch of immature jobless juveniles and burnt out hippies performing pranks for the sake of attention under the excuse of the "environment". That, or they hold such a fervent environmentalist fanaticism that you can rest assure they won't be happy until every human is running naked through a forest.
Greenpeace does nothing but harm to the environmentalist movement. Having Greenpeace on your side is the left wing equivalent of having the local bat shit crazy right wing militia group that wants to violently form an independent nation state on your side. Yes, they might also agree that taxes need to be reduced, but they also run around in the forest playing war games and threaten to shoot tax collectors and police who enter their property.
Hell, Thomas Friedman is doing more productive work for the environment then Greenpeace is right now by running around preaching oil as our doom. When a single crazy quasi-libertarian economist is doing more for the environment then your entire well funded enviro-vandal organization is doing, it is time to take a step back and reevaluate your methods.
There are three possibilities:
1) Online shows results in more people watching the show online at the expense of the network broadcast because people would rather watch it on demand then at a set time.
2) Online shows have no effect on the amount of people watching the broadcast
3) Online shows increase the viewership of the broadcast show because people are able to keep up to the story and jump in half way.
All three of those possibilities are good things. Even scenario 1 isn't a bad thing as if people are viewing it online instead of during a broadcast they are still viewing it. If the commercials are built in you still are receiving ad revenue.
If anything, online showings should be MORE popular. Other then through surveys, there is no way to tell who is watching what at any given time. For advertisers network commercials are a complete crapshoot. They can only guess at who watched their commercials and if there was any response to the commercials. Now consider the possibilities for online advertising during a show.
If you air the show online, you can make people sign in. This means that you can track individual viewers viewing habits. Hell, make them take a small survey and give advertisers a wealth of information. Instead of guessing how many people watched a show, you can KNOW how many people watched the show. Further, you can judge responses to commercials. If during a commercial you can click on the commercial to learn more, you can track if people have any sort of response to the commercials they are viewing. Interactive, traceable, online advertising linked to demographic data is an advertisers wet dream.
Is there some small element of risk involved? Sure. Perhaps this pussyfooted first step is the networks way of testing the waters. Personally though, I think it is a grievous mistake to enter the waters so timidly. I don't think there is any doubt in anyone's mind that on demand is absolutely here to stay. Refusing to jump in and get wet is just giving someone else the chance to cash in before you do.
I was excited when I first heard about this. I have heard great things about Lost and have wanted to start watching. Of course, being a netflix subscribe I completely reject the idea of starting a TV show in the middle. I was hoping that this would mean that I could watch Lost from episode 1 onwards. I don't mind sitting through commercials, I just want to see the story in order. Perhaps I am simply missing the right button, but as far as I can tell I can only watch last weeks episode.
WTF is wrong with these networking people? I WANT to watch their shows complete with commercials. The only demand I make is that I watch the show in order when I want to watch it. I don't have any intention of starting a story half way through, nor do I want to plan my life around the schedule of the TV.
The capacity to do this already exists. If I wanted to I could go to the pirate's bay right now and find exactly what I want and then some. I simply fail to see what is gained by making piracy the only way to watch a TV show on your own schedule. If they simply let people watch their damn TV shows, complete with ads, I imagine the number of people watching would skyrocket as people like me who otherwise would not be bothered to live by a TVs schedule start watching.
What sort of bone headed idiocy is preventing this from happening? Is it really fear of piracy? Do they fail to see that the piracy already exists and that failing to offer their own commercial filled version is NOT going to make the piracy go away?
I swear it almost seems like they want for controls sake, not because of any rational reason behind withholding making their content available.
WTF?! Bombed? Maybe with the crowd, but he was bloody brilliant. Fucking balls of steel to say what he did with the president a few feet away. Most other comediens would turn on the fake chuminess, "oh schucks, you know I'm just kidding" after every bland joke, and then kiss and make up with old Georgy boy.
That is kind of the point. It might have taken balls of steel, but it wasn't all that funny. I have developed a strong distaste for comedians during politically intense times because comedians seem to be under the delusion that I come to them for political advice.
One of my girlfriend's favorite comedians is Margaret Cho. I like Margaret Cho too, but my girlfriend really loves her. I took her to go see Margaret Cho just before the last election. A comedian that normally has me in tears left me pissed off that I had spent money to get in the door. Hell, it was so bad I wouldn't have seen it for free.
The entire set was a series of Bush jokes. For the first few minutes I chuckled because yes, Bush does act like a fucking idiot more often then not and it is fun to point and laugh at the stupid kid who is trying really hard. After about 3 minutes of it though, I was done. There are only so many ways you can reword "Bush is stupid" before it really stops being funny. To add insult to injury, the already shitty jokes were delivered with absolutely painful mind numblingly bad timing. After about 5 minutes of sitting there I realize that I had just blown 45 bucks for a a shitty drink with no alcohol in it and an anti-Bush rally. Sufficient to say, I was not all that happy.
Watching Colbert at the dinner (w00t C-Span) was like watching Margaret Cho. I tried chuckling the minute or two and then simply gave up. If his goal was to preach, he did a great job. If his goal was to actually be funny, he failed miserably. You could sit there and nod in agreement with his message but still recognize that what he was saying wasn't even a little funny. His timing was absolutely atrocious and the jokes themselves were lame and predictable.
I think people are blowing this out of proportion. People didn't laugh not because they were pissed off, but simply because it wasn't funny.
Music is not an example of a "free" market. It is a market to be sure, but it is hardly free. These companies have been given a government enforced monopoly that has dragged the prices artificially high. If this was a true free market that wasn't protected by government enforced monopolies the cost of music would drop like a rock.
Maybe Wii has some deep meaning in Japanese, but it is a fucking stupid name for the English market. Wii sounds like a word a child uses for piss or a comment on someone's penis size; either way it isn't good. This almost reminds me of a story I heard years back about how an American car company put out a car under the American name in South America that name sound like "junk", "broken" or something like that in spanish.
Whatever the case, this is just a stupid move. It would be nice to think that people would pick a product on merit alone, but there is a reality that perception is influenced by advertising. Part of advertising is the name you give to your product. Dumb move Nintendo.
The American have a secret weapon though. We will enter one of your clean cities fully armed and then when confronted we will start to litter. As you Canadians desperately try to pick up our empty cans of shitty American beer and bring them to a recycling station you will be completely vulnerable to our cop killing FMJ semi-automatic assault rifles, grotesquely large hand guns, and the odd red neck wielding a bazooka or machine gun that he bought before they were made illegal.
Canadians fleeing to the recycling station with shitty American beer cans in hand will be easy picking off by our highly skilled red neck population. While our gansta/thug population might be a little questionable in their aim, they will make up for it with round output and shear enthusiasm at being given the chance to bust a cap in yo cracker ass. To the Canadians defense though, our skinny white guy wanna be rappers from the 'burbs will likely take out a few Americans as they hold guns bigger then their head sideways and shoot like fucking retards.
We will send then send in the upper middle suburban punks dressed in 200+ dollar outfits of pre-ripped black jeans, black shirts with an obscure band on it, and metal studs randomly glued on to their clothing to clean up the mess. They will hunt down the surviving Canadians in a desperate attempt to retrieve the empty cans of shitty American beer in the hopes of draining the last drops of swill that might be left at the bottom of the can. The wrist scarred (across the street style, not down the highway) teenaged girls , feminine teenaged guys, and sketchy 40 year old men goths at that point will come out to add insult to injury by read shitty poetry about death and try to one up each other by doing grotesque things to the corpses.
Have no fear though, us Americans are not without compassion and mercy. We will blast some shitty (is there any other type?) emo music over the battlefield and send the emo kids out. They will promptly start to cry. True, they are crying at the memory of their long lost sixth grade girlfriend and lamenting at the difficulty of their inhumanly difficult life living in suburban America, but we can pretend they are crying for lost Canadian souls.
Oh hell, what is a little karma. At least I amuse myself.
The nice thing about CO2 is that it doesn't really matter where it is dumped. There might be some local affects going on, but it really is an issue of the net amount dumped into the world's atmosphere. Plenty of nations have CO2 markets that are much better managed then in the US. Europe in particular has a pretty hot CO2 market. As it turns out, buying up CO2 futures has become a hot commodity market in Europe.
If you really are hell bent on doing something for the environment, really are willing to drop a few thousand to do it, and won't feel bad about your lost bragging rights about your new hybrid, just pick a functional CO2 market and start buying. Hell, I would be willing to wager an arm and a leg that there is an environmentalist organization or two out there already doing this that would happily accept donations to buy up more and spare you the trouble of doing it yourself. I know for a fact that there are many environmentalist organizations that happily take donations to buy up forests to prevent them from being logged both domestically and world wide.
Most of your objections is about current implementations of electric car.
The fragility of frame isn't really dependant on being electric car.
The fragility of the frame comes from the fact that electric cars are underpowered. The electric car FTA is what your average electric car is. A really fucking light car that has had all basic car safety devices stripped from it except for a seatbelt. They don't have crumple zones, a strong frame, airbags, anti-lock breaks, hell it doesn't even have a heater much less a radio. These are not cars. These are electric engines with a light built and a seat built around it. You can get a gas powered car to have incredible MPG too if you strip it down enough. We call these mop heads.
First thing I'd do is BAN on sales of new SUVs and give relatively large GAS tax, inorder to get rid of them from the traffic. Remember I'm saying that society needs to transform to electric cars not one individual.
SUVs are an issue, but even if you banned all non-essential SUV usage tomorrow, you still would only dent the problem. Gas taxes are notoriously regressive and an excellent way to make the rich shrug in indifference and the poor unable to work and afford a car.
The issue in the US is infrastructure. The US is built from the ground up to use cars. There is absolutely nothing that can be done about the infrastructure problem that wont spark a rebellion. Americans don't want to live in cities. They want to own a home with a yard and some breathing room from the neighbors. These is nothing you can do to convince them that the ideal way to live is on top of each other in a city in a rented apartment. Americans live in a big nation that is spread far apart. Public transportation will never be the answer in such a place, nor will an electric car that is as (un)safe as a motor cycle and can't make it work and back under the above specified conditions.
The engine technology is pretty good already. Fast electric car gets from 0 to 60Mph in 4 seconds, and is trying to break the speed record of gasoline powered car. Also the slowing down and increasing speed isn't such a problem for electric car as the engines work as generators also, the same thing that makes hybrids so efficient work with pure electric vehicles too.
Increases of speed are still an issue. You can't make energy appear. Any energy you try and generate while accelerating is taking at the very least that much energy out of powering the wheels. You can make back some energy breaking though, as losing energy is what you are after.
More to the point, fast electric cars are not cars. They are engines with a light weight unsafe frame and a seat. Show me an electric car the same size, weight, and safety as your generic Honda Civic that can do 300 miles on one tank, and you might actually have something. Show me that glorified motorcycle FTA and you have a joke on your hands (at least in the US).
The charging time is limited primarily by the capacity of the grid connection. Normal household connection inside US is 1.5Kw while in 240v its 3Kw.
That is completely and utterly untrue. The limit on charging a battery is not the grid. The limit on charging a battery is how fast you can charge a battery. Batteries can only be charged so fast or they explode. That said, a group out of Mass. "claims" to have solved this problem and can charge a computer battery to full in 5 minutes. If there claims turns out to be true and cost effective, you might very well see electric cars come into their own. Until then, the biggest problem with an electric car is that its range is far too small for a REAL car (radio, AC, heater, air bags, roll cage, crumple zones, anti-lock breaks, exc). Cars are either stuck with very low acceleration, low top speeds, or low range. You can defeat one or two of the above, but not all three at once.
Battery technology is indeed coming along, but it simply isn't anywhere close enough to meeting the demands o
I bet it will be super awesome just like Black and White was!
You would think people would learn by now. Take the hype, divide it by 100, and that is what you really get in the end. Spore is going to promise the world and then deliver a rough facsimile of a tiny sliver of the world it promised. If the hype involves AI in a video game, divide that hype by 1000.
I am not saying that it this game will suck. On the contrary, it might very well rock. I am just saying that the bullshit hype they are spewing right now is nothing but that, bullshit hype. The closest game I have seen to really living up to such hype has been Oblivion, and even then demons of Oblivion's "radiant AI" could have been renamed "AI in the magical kingdom of scripting".
All of that said, I really do hope that some fresh ideas come out. Game developers have made me sick with the lack of originality and balls in their games over the past year or two. The only really guts project to come out in the past couple of years has been Oblivion. Outside of that, these past couple of years have been thoroughly underwhelming.
Oh look, what is that? Another Halo with blandly generic FPS style gameplay that has been around since Doom and the original Quake? Yawn.
The issue is that video game programmers make substantially less then other programmers. The reason why this is so is because a lot of people want to specifically do video game programming instead of some other more lucrative type. In this case, their low wages really are their own fault.
The key to happiness in this world is to find something that brings you some satisfaction and that pays enough to keep you happy. Some people are have very low needs and are happy with $20,000 and a job they find fully rewarding. Other people are happy making $100,000 on a job they would quit without even the curtsy of a two weeks notice they ever won the lottery.
A few lucky people get the best of both worlds and work a high paying job that they love. I have met workaholic business owners that fill this exact category. One guy in particular that I know well over 80 hours a week owns a massive house with a dozen cars that he never uses because he is only home for more then a few days a month. He is probably going to die of a heart attack in the next 10 years, but he truly loves what he does and would probably do it for much less. I have also met people that dropped out of high school, got no education, and are working shit jobs that they hate for shit pay.
Most people though, they really fall somewhere in-between. They balance self fulfillment in the working world with money. You don't go to school for a sociology major expecting to get out of college and run into a pile of money. People make their choices. This programs are no different. They have intentionally picked a field with poor pay. Using the education they already have they have the option of finding higher paid work. If making video games is what they really love to do though, then they need to find a balance. Is the shit pay worth the job? If it isn't, get the fuck out.
You miss the point of carbon credits. The idea is that you create a certain limit on how much carbon the nation can dump. You then start to sell the rights to dump that carbon. If only a few people need to dump carbon, there is very little demand for carbon credits and the price falls. If on the other hand there is a high demand for carbon the price shoots up as people try and outbid each other the remaining carbon. The idea is to induce some supply and demand effects so that you don't have a tragedy of the commons on your hands.
Now, you might very well have never seen a company declare that they couldn't sell because they had run out of carbon credits. What you have seen, regardless if you realize it or not, is businesses that simply go out of business. If the price keeps rising on carbon credits because the demand is high for a limited resource, companies have two options. They can either pay out of pocket an ever increasing price, or they can take steps to cut their emissions.
If this still is not making any sense, then think of this as a pollution tax. If you buy up carbon credits, you are effectively making everyone else have to pay more. When you take a piece from the pie, you make everyone else have to pay more for the pie that is left. You are basically upping the tax on carbon dumping.
A rational environmentalist would buy a cheap car and then take the difference and buy up carbon credits. Of course, since when were humans rational or really all that altruistic? If you buy a hybrid you can show it off and tell everyone what a green fellow you are because you spend a few bucks less on gas then the ass hole with the normal Honda civic. If you buy up a few million metric tons of CO2 dumping rights and don't use them you will be nowhere near as trendy, find it hard to brag about your "greenness", and in general be lucky to even have people understand what it is you actually did.
If you want to be trendy and "green" to your friends, buy a hybrid. If you want to really make a real difference, buy a Honda civic (the gas drinking type) and spend the difference on doing something useful for the environment. I suspect most people would rather be seen as environmentalist then altruistically putting their money to use and making a real difference. Bragging about your hybrid is a lot easier then bragging about your carbon credits.
Perhaps as simple as mandating each gas station to have electric outlet with restrictions on premium the gas station owners can take from electricity. The chicken/egg problem would be solved and the electric cars could become slowly more common.
This would solve nothing. The problem is not and never has been finding and outlet. If there was any demand at all, it wouldn't be much of a pain to simply install a plug everywhere. This isn't like hydrogen where you need a new infrastructure. The infrastructure is there, you just need to throw in an outlet for a few bucks.
The real issue is that you can't fill up one of these cars at a gas station unless you feel like stopping for 5 hours. If it takes 5 hours to fill up one of these cars, that means you have to fill it up when you have no intention of using it. Namely, parking lots would need electrical outlets and a way to charge for the fill up because that is where these cars would be fueled.
Even that isn't the real problem though. If you could have a car that goes 300 miles on a single charge, you are probably doing okay. Sure, you would be hard pressed to take this car on a road trip, but it could do almost everything else. The real issue are all the other problems that such cars have. Is this car safe? My old 1990 Honda Accord can get slammed in the rear from an SUV (or any car for that matter) and so long as the speed difference is less then 30 MPH, I will walk away with nothing worse then a headache. Most of these electric cars though are built so light that a 30 MPH hit from the rear would result in the car disintegrating. They are simply unsafe. You might as well just drive a motor cycle if you are going to throw safety to the wind.
They have other problems too. Its REAL distance tends to be a real issue. Sure, it can go 300 miles, but only if you remain at constant velocity and don't turn your heater on. What if it needs to stop and start or it is being used some place very hot or cold?
Then there is the issue of performance. Can this thing accelerate? Performance is more important then for just enjoyment of the drive. If the car takes a long time to get up to speed, or is so light that it can't turn hard without flipping, that is a safety hazard. If I need to get into a fast moving stream of traffic, I don't want a car that takes half a minute to get to 60 because I will be dead before it gets there.
Electric cars have a lot of problems. The truth is that they are NOT the solution. We simply can't make batteries big enough, safe enough, and fast charging enough to get the kind of required performance. What we really need is a way to create renewable energy that then can be converted into some other fuel.
My issue is that I live in Boston. I have an old beat to piss 1990 Honda Accord these days. Since I have been in Boston (5 years), I have been in four crashes. All four of them involved me getting rammed from the rear. Two of them took place while going 65 mph. On top of these four crashes, the shitty pothole marked streets of Boston also managed to snap my axel in half. I thankfully didn't crash because I was going slow, but if I had been on a highway instead of a city street it would have been a terribly dangerous situation. Thankfully, other then a busted axel and some scratched paint, none of the 4 crashes and 1 mechanical failures that I have experienced result in any real harm.
I need to drive 50 miles round trip each day. This isn't a choice. The tech jobs are outside of the city. My girlfriend whom I live with has her job inside the city and uses public transportation. Someone has to commute or ditch their job for bugger flipping. You would have to put a gun to my head to convince me to make the commute in one of those suicide vehicles. I think that this is where most Americans stand.
Yes, there are plenty of SUVs rumbling around, but there are plenty of little Honda Accords. Will a Honda Accord beat an SUV in a head on? Probably not. Can it take a tap from behind by an SUV and not kill everyone inside? Hell yes.
No one is advocating running around in SUVs. What people are advocating is not taking horribly unsafe vehicles to and from work. Motor cycles are suicide machines, pure and simple. I don't care if there is not a single other person on the road, a motor cycle is dangerous. If you lose control for a single second while going highway speeds, you die. End of story. Hell, a loss of control at normal road speeds is risking death and begging for a few snapped limbs.
These electric cars are not much better then a motor cycle. They are more stable, but if crash going 65 mph, you are dead. If another car broadsides you while crossing the street, you are dead. These cars are a complete joke. It doesn't offer the performance that might entice an idiot with a death wish to drive it, and it sure as shit doesn't offer enough safety for the average bloke who just wants to come home from work each night without ending up a red smear on the road.
What made the hybrid cars actually sell was the fact that it they were not offering a crippled car that was suicide to drive. They offered a car with reasonable performance and reasonable safety. It still might not win in a head on with an SUV, but at least it can take a fender bender without massacring everyone inside. If car companies want to tap into the green market, they can't do so under the delusion that being green is enough. I'll happily buy a greener car next time I buy a car, but it better not break my already limited budget and more important then anything else, it better not be a death wish machine.
Robots and AIs will always be limited in what they can do (or what we'll allow them to do). And in any case, someone has to design them.
What on earth makes you think this? Do you really believe that the human mind is the pinnacle of creativity and thought and will never be surpassed? The simple fact of the mater is that barring mysticism you and I are machines. Horrifically complex machines, but machines none the less. Complex chemical and electrical reactions drive your mind, not magic. If nature can do it using the guess and check method, you better believe that intelligence can do it much quicker.
Who says someone has to design AI? Sure, someone has to be a creator somewhere at the bottom of the chain, but alls that it takes is for a creator to build one AI that can turn around and build a better AI which in turn builds a better AI so on and so forth.
AIs will one day be more intelligent then humans. I would sooner pompously declare that heavier then aircraft are impossible then declare that something that has already been done in biology shall never be repeated and then improved on.
There really is no alternative as evidenced by the fact that people who preach its destruction have no idea what might take it's place.
Sure there are alternatives. If a machine can do anything that a human can do better and cheaper, then you really have no choice but to change. If human work has no value the capitalist system breaks. Don't get me wrong; I am not anti-capitalist, but I recognize that capitalism breaks the second human labor has no value. If a machine can do any job including building more machines, planning, research, creative tasks, exc cheaper and more productively then any human, what do the humans do?
Human work will always have value as long as there are people who don't want to work or there are people incapable of producing anything. And that will always be the case.
Human work only has value so long as it is economical. The second a machine can do labor cheaper then a human and has an equal or greater capacity for creativity and planning, human work has no value. Why pay a human extra to do an inferior job if a machine can do it cheaper and quicker? A paralyzed brain dead human has no value economically because healthy humans can do infinitely more. When the day comes that a human is the equivalent to a paralyzed brain dead person when put up next to an AI, you can pretty much rest assure that capitalism is done for.
Lets play a game. Lets take your sentence and rework it so that it fits every other religion in the world.
He said in the book that everyone's life is in danger and aliens are taking over. Your only way out is to join FLG.
He said in the book that everyone's life is in danger and demons are taking over. Your only way out is to give yourself to Christ.
Wow. A religion promising salvation and making money off of it? Holy shit! This is a revelation (ha ha, get it revelation)! Maybe the Catholics could try this. If they did they could collect enough money to own a sovereign state in the middle of Italy filled with some of the most expensive and extravagant structures in the world... oh wait. They do.
Your arguments against FLG can be made about any religion. You can argue that it is full of shit, it has no proof, they are making money off of people, and brain washing them. That fits the definition of pretty much every single modern religion. I might not fully agree with it, but hunting down, imprisoning, and in some cases killing these people is certainly not the answer. Generally killing someone or making them disappear into the black hole of China's political "judicial" system is not a great quality of life improvement.
I wager China in particular is positioning itself to supplant the U.S. as the world's dominant power and may just pull it off especially since the U.S. is increasingly being run by complete morons, with no vision, in both government and business.
Are you joking me? You think that China has a better run government then the US and that is why it will overtake the US? China is exploding inspite of its government, not because of it. The Chinese government is completely corrupt and ineffective. Government and business are tied together in ways that would cause a revolt in the US. Bribery, blatant disregard for labor laws and environmental laws, are just a few examples of the problems that the Chinese are dealing with. If wealth imbalance is the root of social revolution, China better buckle down and get ready, because the wealth imbalance in China is massive and exploding at a rate that leaves the US in the dust.
China has a lot going for it, but none of it comes from good governance. All of the problems that the US has in terms of good governance are hundreds of times worse in China. The only thing that the Chinese government has done to spur their economy is to hook into the world economy and convince the west to not suffocate China with sanctions the way it did the USSR.
China is a complete mess. They are exploding, but only because of weak labor laws, a massive population desperate for work, a complete disregard for the environment, and a willingness to confiscate property from landowners and give it corporations without even bothering to go through even the pretense of legal formalities.
If China is the model, then what the US and Europe needs to do is clear. They need to slash the minimum wage, make unions illegal except for a single 'state' union, slash environmental regulations, provide massive subsidies to corporations, and regularly confiscate land without any sort of due process and hand it over to corporations.
There will eventually be a tipping point where a few percent will be filthy rich, everyone else will be hovering around the poverty line and eventually that 90+% will realized they've been had and they outnumber the rich fat cat.
What is that saying? It is something like "revolution is just three meals away".
The problem with "revolution" in the US if you have never left the US in your life you have probably never seen someone miss three meals because they couldn't afford it. You certainly have never seen someone miss a weeks worth of food because they couldn't afford it if you have never left the US. A few people being really rich doesn't spawn revolutions. It takes broad discontent and despair to spawn a revolution. In a nation where you are more likely to die by a lightening strike then die of starvation and there are three cars for every four people, that just isn't going to happen. Suburban soccer mom's and dad's don't wield AK-47s. Ever.
If the US ever breaks, it will be because technology broke it. If we become so productive with robots and AI that humans stop being economical and unemployment soars, I could certainly see the capitalist system dismantling itself. If human work has no value, the capitalist system breaks. In a democracy, when the capitalist system breaks it is swept aside by a super majority.
Capitalism will certainly destroy itself one day. It isn't going to end in Marxist revolt though, and it won't die because a few are exceedingly rich. It is simply going to out produce itself. It will produce until it breaks the paradigm that human work has value. Once that happens a new system will be formed that is not based around human work having value. I don't really see this as a bad thing.
And no matter who you choose, there will be more DRM, more anti-terrorist measures (so that they can map you in more detail), and more invasions abroad.
There will be more of the things you consider bad because there are not enough people who agree with you. The government does respond to pressure. The problem is that DRM has no pressure from the masses and so gets no loving. Welcome to democracy.
There is plenty that politicians might love to do but can't because of the pressure of democracy. A draft will not be reinstated no matter how fucked up Iraq looks and no matter how badly politicians want to "fix" it. This will never come to pass simply because advocating a draft would be political suicide.
I am not saying that this is a perfect system by any stretch of the imagination. Democracy is far from an idiot proof system. If your masses are either uneducated, apathetic, or both, then a lot of "bad" things can be pushed through on the basis of pure apathy. What I am saying that unlike the Chinese system, it DOES respond to pressure from the masses. There are some very hard and definite limits on the government of a functional democracy set in place simply because the people will throw your ass out of office if you try to enact certain laws. When the whole country collectively moves in a certain direction, the government is powerless to stop such movement.
9/11 is a perfect example. I don't give a shit what person was elected president, after 9/11 there is not a single US president that could have chosen to NOT invade Afghanistan. The Taliban and Al-Qaeda looked guilty and a super majority of the American people wanted blood. If the president hadn't order an invasion, then congress would have passed a law compelling him to do so. If the president refused to follow such an order, he would have been impeached. If the people really demand something in a unified voice in the US (and most other stable democracies), they get, consequences be damned.
In the end, the government of a democracy truly is powerless against its people. Only apathy, a lack of consensus, and stupidity keep the people from forcing the government to do what they want it to do. When democracies fail to act in the right manner, in the end it is entirely the fault of the people.
If you are using a P2P network you are both distribute and receiving pirated material. They sue you like you are distributing the works because by being on the P2P network you are acting as a distributor. It turns out that number is $125,000 per song according to this news story: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,96797,00.html As a fun aside, this is also an article about a 12 year old girl being sued.
You are better off to saw off someone's legs instead of removing their tonsils then downloading a 12 song CD which would score you a 1.5 million dollar lawsuit.
I think FLG sounds as bat shit crazy as any other religion. We have Mormons, Scientologist, and Christian Scientist who all expose views that in the context of normal modes of thinking are utterly insane and flagrantly self-destructive in some cases.
Hell, even your average and boring vanilla Christian sounds crazy if you were not raised to accept their views as normal. Their religion is built around a Jewish cult leader who they are utterly convinced was killed, was raised from the dead, ascended to a magical utopian paradise with a being of pure love, and they believe that this person will return to Earth brining an apocalypse that will shatter humanity. That is a pretty fucking crazy view to hold if you are not brought up with it.
Further, if you listen to what FLG advocates, what they are doing makes perfect sense. They have done the same thing every other religion has done. They have taken some old religious beliefs (a form of old Chinese mysticism in this case), modified them, and used them to explain the things in this world that they don't understand and don't believe that there is an rational explanation for. In the case of FLG, they have developed a mystical explanation as to why the Chinese government is so brutal, the environment is degrading, and why people don't feel self fulfilled. Is their explanation insane? Sure, it is as insane as any religious explanation. Are the things they are trying to explain insane? Hell no.
In the same way an early Jew or Christian might blame demons, the devil, or God for things that we later have come to accept as having rational scientific explanations, these people have done the same. They worry about government corruption and repression, the degradation of the family, the environment, and the downward spiral that they see humanity in. The only difference between the FLG and any other person who worries about these things is that the FLG have assigned a mystical (aliens in this case) explanation to why things are going as they have.
If you take a step back and replace the word "aliens" with the more familiar "demons", then their beliefs suddenly become absolutely no more crazy sounding then some extreme Christian religions. Arguing that "demons" are ruining the world is hardly a new thought. They have just modernized it by replacing the word "demons" with "aliens".
Look, I am not saying you should go sign up for FLG. They are, in my opinion, utterly insane. That said, they are no more insane then any other religion out there. Just because you and I find their beliefs crazy doesn't mean that their followers should be chased down, imprisoned, repressed, and in some cases murdered by the Chinese government. I don't want to see FLG persecuted any more then I want to see Mormons, Scientologist, and Methodist persecuted.
Further, the actions of the Chinese government just incite these people into believing their dogma. If you held the belief that aliens (replace "aliens" with "demons" if that makes you more comfortable) are corrupting humanity, and suddenly the government starts to brutally repress you despite the fact that FLG is pretty damn peaceful and benign in what it advocates, would that might not affirm your beliefs that aliens/demons are out to get you?
Not to feed the original grandparent troll, but science should be working in the exclusion of supernatural. Something that is supernatural is by definition not testable. If one day we discovered that humans have telepathy, a scientist wouldn't accept a supernatural explanation. A scientist would strive to find a mechanism to explain telepathy.
The best a scientist can do to "prove" the supernatural is to show, in so far as much is possible, that a certain phenomenon happens in defiance of the laws of nature as we currently understand them. This of course proves nothing and a good scientist would never accept such a conclusion. A good scientist goes back and tries to find a new way of understanding nature.
General relativity would seem to be the supernatural working in a Newtonian world. That doesn't make relativity supernatural. It just meant that once we discovered that Newtonian physics was wrong that we had to go back rethink our entire understanding of nature.
That isn't to say that you can't see something that scientist can't explain and decide on your own that you are simply going to accept it as supernatural, it is just that such a conclusion isn't scientific.