>>With a realistic viewpoint, I'm sure the technology is progressing fine. It isn't quite matching that of the perpetual hype machine surrounding it, though. No surprise there.
>>People have been predicting it for decades, but the actual nuance of such an achievement is much more complex than most are able to comprehend
You haven't heard of Playstation Home? Second Life? Quake?
I used to work for a company that produced goggles for VR work (used mainly in the military as personal HUDs) and we produced some video games using them. It was fun, but in the consumer market people seemed to prefer just using a mouse to turn instead of having to snap one's head around to aim at an enemy sneaking up behind you in Quake. It's a mature technology (no hype needed, it works), but people just prefer the mouse, monitor, and keyboard approach to VR goggles and haptic gloves.
>>The "nasty, brutish, and short" comment was about man devoid of any form of governance such as the literary scenario he laid out for the condition of man in the past.
Or a man in the future, if government totally breaks down, and man enters a "state of war", in which man turns against brother, and reason itself is overthrown. Or something along those lines.
It's relevant to the discussion, since if we're doomed to Malthusian overpopulation (which we're not, but stipulating the point...) then at a certain point, people will enter a state of war as masses of people start starving to death.
>>What does this mean for open source phones? Does this mean that Android would be illegal in the US?
Android will need to learn the three laws of robotic phones: 1) Always beep when taking a picture 2) Never take a picture of a policeman doing anything illegal 3) Never dress up as a human, to live among us until the day the time has come for the apocalypse.
No, the point is this: greens are assigning a cost to coal power (CO2 emissions) that is not currently being billed for. Therefore the equilibrium price is set a certain way for dirty power. If society agrees, or the government mandates, a price point for clean energy, then it'll all magically work out in that scenario as well.
>>Joe Next Door loses when electricity rates go up in reponse to the increased electricity demand.
KWH prices scale based on individual consumption. If I go through a crazy amount of power in my house, the power company ends up charging me 10x the price per KWH that Conservationist Joe is paying next door. The reality is that the wasteful consumers end up subsidizing the conserving customers, who could be paying at or below cost. All the extra profit (should) go into capacity building, though with NIMBYs and broken environmental laws...
>>On the broader issue of global warming, waiting for the invisible hand to correct the market is a non-starter
No, you just need to price KWHs for whatever CO2 standard (or other hippie standard) you want. IIRC, zero-CO2 emission electricity is around 12c/KWH (about 3-4x the price of dirty coal plants, obviously depending on market), so you price your average power rates at that level, if it's important to you to do so. The invisible hand takes care of the rest. Consumption will fall somewhat, and if anyone wants to go buck-wild running their 60" Plasma TVs all year, then they're not destroying the environment, are they? More power to them. Literally.
They can't destroy the environment, and the power companies make a nice profit off them. Everyone wins.
It's a lot better than regulating the size or types of TVs sold in stores.
This is a beef I have with commuters. I'm always hearing demands from people who live 50 miles from work that I need to spend 20 billion dollars on highway improvements. Meanwhile I spend an extra $400 a month to live close to work and drive less than 10 miles and don't touch an interstate.
The people living further away are paying 36 cents + 8% in taxes on every gallon of fuel they spend. It's a tax that scales with usage, and is reasonably fair in that regard. The vehicle registration tax (or I guess it's called a fee here in California, since that way they can raise it without a 66% majority vote) is a little more unfair, though I guess it's closer to a property tax that scales based on the value of your car.
I think the EU's ban is rather silly. I support the EnergyStar stickers that show people how much they'll be paying a year in energy costs for an appliance, since that will indeed encourage people to buy more efficient appliances, but just banning them is silly. If I'm willing to pay the money to power my appliance, and the power company is making a profit off me, who exactly is losing? In France, it'd even be coming from nuclear power, so the hippies worrying about CO2 emissions and the like have nothing to worry about.
Seriously, it's the magic of the invisible hand that issues like that are taken care of.
My dad just finally upgraded out of the stone age (he'd been using MacOS 9.2 for about 7 or 8 years) after his iMac died. The shop transferred his files over to his brand spanking new Mac. However, the new Find Files option won't find anything from his old drive. If he knows where it is, he can browse to it, but my dad has horrible filing habits, and doesn't know where most of his stuff is.
I'm sure it's a problem like my mother was having when she upgraded to Vista - by default, it wasn't indexing the files in the folders that she kept her files in. It frustrated her to no end - "I know the files are on there, but I can't find them". I, being a computer science guy, when I visited, set her computer to search in all folders, instead of just Indexed ones, but, damn. We've had desktop machines for how many years now, and the fucking Find Files command is less useful now to the average user than it was in 1985?
>>Reference frames don't travel with respect to themselves. By definition.
Right. I'm glad someone else noticed that.
Relativity tells us that there's no absolute velocity. So while we say that the Earth is traveling very fast through space, if we set, say, London as our reference frame, there's no motion at all.
>>If this was about reducing emissions, they would pay more to get older, dirtier, and less fuel efficient cars off the road.
The sad fact is, older (10+ year old cars) are at least, if not more, fuel-efficient than modern cars. I drive a '98 Buick Regal. The equivalent 2009 model has 1MPG less efficiency than my model. Let alone cars like the early 90s Civic hatchbacks, which still have MPGs which are only reached, if at all, by hybrids nowadays. Do we really want to remove a 94 Civic from the road and replace it with a lower-MPG modern Civic?
Sure. But it was Paulson (former head of Goldman Sachs) who begged for a cool trill to hand out to Goldman Sachs and related friends, with no accountability, audits, or even records. They're not sure at all where all those TARP dollars went to. I find that shadiest.
Second shadiest is Obama, who was massively on the take from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and was involved in lawsuits (when he was working as a lawyer) suing banks to get them to make bad home loans.
But yeah, there's plenty of shade to go around. As our president, John Henry Eden says, Washington was ruined by a bunch of half-wits and incompetents.
So instead of giving out $300,000 per person to these corps that have already proven they don't know how to run a business (and now might be shuffling all the money offshore, THX BUSH!), couldn't we have just given $300,000 to each man, woman and child in America?
>>It seems to me a bit of a contradiction on your claim that Jewish marriage was primarily about procreation when you observe that it actually performed a role for providing what were essentially social services, caring for widows, maintaining the extended kinship network, etc
It was both. If a widow married a younger brother, the younger brother was not only obligated to take care of her, but to also have babies with her. I don't think it gets clearer than that... Onan's sin wasn't what it is normally thought of... it was because he was essentially refusing to make a baby in this situation, so God struck him down in the story.
>>Christians citing monogamous heterosexual marriage as something ordained by God, when the monogamous part of it was in fact pressed upon the Hebrews
In Old Testament Judaism, it was certainly anything but monogamous. A lot of their social system wouldn't have worked under monogamy. For example, widows were taken care of by being married off to the younger brother of the deceased husband. It wasn't anything kinky (though it may seem that way to us), but a way of making sure these people were taken care of, and didn't starve to death. Then you have countless other examples, with Abraham and Solomon being the most famous examples of non-monogaminity. Maimondes believed that only kings (like Solomon... dunno what he made of Abraham) could have concubines, though this belief of his might have been in reaction to the cultural norms of his time. Most Jewish scholars disagree, IIRC.
All that said, you have to remember that Christians believe in this guy named Jesus, who, among other things, did an Expounding of the Law, in which he talked about Jewish laws, and why and how they should be followed. ("You have heard it said that X, but I say to you Y...", that sort of stuff.) He said that the intention was for one man and one woman, which is why you hear Christians saying this. Jesus said a number of things like that, like that Divorce was given to man since man was imperfect, not because Divorce was a good thing. It's actually quite interesting.
That said, Paul said that you could be a polygamist and still be a Christian, so a thorough reading of the Christian Bible would result in something like, "Monogamy is preferred, but Polygamy is not going to send you to hell", or something like that.
>>Marriage was first and foremost about kinship ties and property rights in most civilizations, not about procreation.
If you're talking Jewish civilization, it really was about procreation. Do you remember God's promise to Abraham? If you believe in me, your offspring will be more numerous than the stars in the heavens. I think it really is important to look at Judaism through the lens of procreation - be fruitful and multiply is the only way that Judaism spreads. They don't proselytize.
It also explains why homosexuality is an abomination.
>>I paraphrase; as I remember it, Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil said that altruism is a disease of the ego and that those who would be allowed to feign altruistic motives to serve their own ends are the ultimate abominations a society can create
So in that case, all Christians should have voted for Prop 8, since voting against Prop 8 would have been an altruistic endeavor from the people who currently hold cultural hegemony in California.
>>All this talk of protecting the "sanctity of marriage" when they typically have the highest divorce rates, is laughable
Pretty much every stat on that page has issues with it. When you compare atheists vs. the general population (of which about 80% is Christian), you have a lot more important confounding factors (like SES and education) than religion. Also, claims that Christians do X at the same rate as the general population are ridiculous when you consider most of America IS Christian. There's been a longstanding belief that being Christian doesn't change teenage sex rates... when someone finally realized this problem with it and only examined self-described "devout" Christians vs the general population, there was about a three year difference in when the populations had sex for the first time. In a nutshell, almost all studies in this area use bad stats.
>>They are malformed individuals with god complexes who rightfully should be shamed in public
Yes, yes. Christians who believe in humility have so much more of a problem with hubris than sane, intellectual atheists like Hitchens or Dawkins.:p
>>You won't be allowed to see your same-sex partner in the hospital dying, because you're not "family"...
Nope, civil unions in California are accorded all the rights of marriage. So all your examples don't work.
The only difference between a civil union and a marriage in California is the name. Gay people want their Civil Unions to be called "Marriage", and religious people don't.
>>That's the textbook definition of religious discrimination and anyone ought to be able to see that it's a violation of the constitution.
The only actual discrimination I've seen in the gay marriage issue is against Christians.
Yeah, I've read Flashforward and Calculating God. Both good ideas, both poorly written. As you say, very dislikeable cardboard characters, and plots that are pretty miserable.
Actually, KDE4 wouldn't even run out of the box on my system off a fresh install of OpenSUSE. A couple hours of hacking got it to work... and yeah. I wiped the drive and installed KDE3 instead.
>>I meant this wouldn't happen regularly. So you have one bad instance and declare a pox on all of us?
I've made several hundred substantial edits to Wikipedia, so my sample size is fairly large, though not as large as others. The pattern I've noticed is that this sort of nonsense tends to happen on more controversial topics (Sacco and Venzetti, J. Edgar Hoover, etc.). Some editor with an agenda will start goal tending and reverting all edits to the article to keep it in some form that he approves of. I've seen it at least five or six times.
Slashdot Mirror
>>With a realistic viewpoint, I'm sure the technology is progressing fine. It isn't quite matching that of the perpetual hype machine surrounding it, though. No surprise there.
Fair enough. I saw Lawnmower Man.
>>People have been predicting it for decades, but the actual nuance of such an achievement is much more complex than most are able to comprehend
You haven't heard of Playstation Home? Second Life? Quake?
I used to work for a company that produced goggles for VR work (used mainly in the military as personal HUDs) and we produced some video games using them. It was fun, but in the consumer market people seemed to prefer just using a mouse to turn instead of having to snap one's head around to aim at an enemy sneaking up behind you in Quake. It's a mature technology (no hype needed, it works), but people just prefer the mouse, monitor, and keyboard approach to VR goggles and haptic gloves.
>>The "nasty, brutish, and short" comment was about man devoid of any form of governance such as the literary scenario he laid out for the condition of man in the past.
Or a man in the future, if government totally breaks down, and man enters a "state of war", in which man turns against brother, and reason itself is overthrown. Or something along those lines.
It's relevant to the discussion, since if we're doomed to Malthusian overpopulation (which we're not, but stipulating the point...) then at a certain point, people will enter a state of war as masses of people start starving to death.
>>What does this mean for open source phones? Does this mean that Android would be illegal in the US?
Android will need to learn the three laws of robotic phones:
1) Always beep when taking a picture
2) Never take a picture of a policeman doing anything illegal
3) Never dress up as a human, to live among us until the day the time has come for the apocalypse.
>>That means the market does not work.
No, the point is this: greens are assigning a cost to coal power (CO2 emissions) that is not currently being billed for. Therefore the equilibrium price is set a certain way for dirty power. If society agrees, or the government mandates, a price point for clean energy, then it'll all magically work out in that scenario as well.
>>Joe Next Door loses when electricity rates go up in reponse to the increased electricity demand.
KWH prices scale based on individual consumption. If I go through a crazy amount of power in my house, the power company ends up charging me 10x the price per KWH that Conservationist Joe is paying next door. The reality is that the wasteful consumers end up subsidizing the conserving customers, who could be paying at or below cost. All the extra profit (should) go into capacity building, though with NIMBYs and broken environmental laws...
>>On the broader issue of global warming, waiting for the invisible hand to correct the market is a non-starter
No, you just need to price KWHs for whatever CO2 standard (or other hippie standard) you want. IIRC, zero-CO2 emission electricity is around 12c/KWH (about 3-4x the price of dirty coal plants, obviously depending on market), so you price your average power rates at that level, if it's important to you to do so. The invisible hand takes care of the rest. Consumption will fall somewhat, and if anyone wants to go buck-wild running their 60" Plasma TVs all year, then they're not destroying the environment, are they? More power to them. Literally.
They can't destroy the environment, and the power companies make a nice profit off them. Everyone wins.
It's a lot better than regulating the size or types of TVs sold in stores.
This is a beef I have with commuters. I'm always hearing demands from people who live 50 miles from work that I need to spend 20 billion dollars on highway improvements. Meanwhile I spend an extra $400 a month to live close to work and drive less than 10 miles and don't touch an interstate.
The people living further away are paying 36 cents + 8% in taxes on every gallon of fuel they spend. It's a tax that scales with usage, and is reasonably fair in that regard. The vehicle registration tax (or I guess it's called a fee here in California, since that way they can raise it without a 66% majority vote) is a little more unfair, though I guess it's closer to a property tax that scales based on the value of your car.
I think the EU's ban is rather silly. I support the EnergyStar stickers that show people how much they'll be paying a year in energy costs for an appliance, since that will indeed encourage people to buy more efficient appliances, but just banning them is silly. If I'm willing to pay the money to power my appliance, and the power company is making a profit off me, who exactly is losing? In France, it'd even be coming from nuclear power, so the hippies worrying about CO2 emissions and the like have nothing to worry about.
Seriously, it's the magic of the invisible hand that issues like that are taken care of.
>>including a bogus list with 10 random apps I never heard of.
What, you've never heard of the Sorian AI Director for Supreme Commander??
Actually, that was the only one I recognized. The normal AI for the game sucked, so I looked up replacements for it when I played it back in the day.
My dad just finally upgraded out of the stone age (he'd been using MacOS 9.2 for about 7 or 8 years) after his iMac died. The shop transferred his files over to his brand spanking new Mac. However, the new Find Files option won't find anything from his old drive. If he knows where it is, he can browse to it, but my dad has horrible filing habits, and doesn't know where most of his stuff is.
I'm sure it's a problem like my mother was having when she upgraded to Vista - by default, it wasn't indexing the files in the folders that she kept her files in. It frustrated her to no end - "I know the files are on there, but I can't find them". I, being a computer science guy, when I visited, set her computer to search in all folders, instead of just Indexed ones, but, damn. We've had desktop machines for how many years now, and the fucking Find Files command is less useful now to the average user than it was in 1985?
I mean, seriously. Find.
>>Unfortunately, it's also a sad fact that the only thing that has any chance of making the national debt manageable is that very same inflation.
Bzzt, wrong.
When interest rates drop to 0% (as they are on T-Bills right now), you don't have to pay to service the national debt at all.
>>Reference frames don't travel with respect to themselves. By definition.
Right. I'm glad someone else noticed that.
Relativity tells us that there's no absolute velocity. So while we say that the Earth is traveling very fast through space, if we set, say, London as our reference frame, there's no motion at all.
No, the adjusted MPG, used on http://www.fueleconomy.gov/
There's been no noticeable gains in fuel economy in the last 10 years, except in hybrids. And even some of the hybrids are pretty underwhelming.
>>If this was about reducing emissions, they would pay more to get older, dirtier, and less fuel efficient cars off the road.
The sad fact is, older (10+ year old cars) are at least, if not more, fuel-efficient than modern cars. I drive a '98 Buick Regal. The equivalent 2009 model has 1MPG less efficiency than my model. Let alone cars like the early 90s Civic hatchbacks, which still have MPGs which are only reached, if at all, by hybrids nowadays. Do we really want to remove a 94 Civic from the road and replace it with a lower-MPG modern Civic?
Sure. But it was Paulson (former head of Goldman Sachs) who begged for a cool trill to hand out to Goldman Sachs and related friends, with no accountability, audits, or even records. They're not sure at all where all those TARP dollars went to. I find that shadiest.
Second shadiest is Obama, who was massively on the take from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and was involved in lawsuits (when he was working as a lawyer) suing banks to get them to make bad home loans.
But yeah, there's plenty of shade to go around. As our president, John Henry Eden says, Washington was ruined by a bunch of half-wits and incompetents.
$900B / 300M = 3,000. For the one bailout. Yeah, I was off by two zeroes. But it's macro economics, so that's close enough.
Still a lot more than $400 pp though.
So instead of giving out $300,000 per person to these corps that have already proven they don't know how to run a business (and now might be shuffling all the money offshore, THX BUSH!), couldn't we have just given $300,000 to each man, woman and child in America?
>>It seems to me a bit of a contradiction on your claim that Jewish marriage was primarily about procreation when you observe that it actually performed a role for providing what were essentially social services, caring for widows, maintaining the extended kinship network, etc
It was both. If a widow married a younger brother, the younger brother was not only obligated to take care of her, but to also have babies with her. I don't think it gets clearer than that... Onan's sin wasn't what it is normally thought of... it was because he was essentially refusing to make a baby in this situation, so God struck him down in the story.
>>Christians citing monogamous heterosexual marriage as something ordained by God, when the monogamous part of it was in fact pressed upon the Hebrews
In Old Testament Judaism, it was certainly anything but monogamous. A lot of their social system wouldn't have worked under monogamy. For example, widows were taken care of by being married off to the younger brother of the deceased husband. It wasn't anything kinky (though it may seem that way to us), but a way of making sure these people were taken care of, and didn't starve to death. Then you have countless other examples, with Abraham and Solomon being the most famous examples of non-monogaminity. Maimondes believed that only kings (like Solomon... dunno what he made of Abraham) could have concubines, though this belief of his might have been in reaction to the cultural norms of his time. Most Jewish scholars disagree, IIRC.
All that said, you have to remember that Christians believe in this guy named Jesus, who, among other things, did an Expounding of the Law, in which he talked about Jewish laws, and why and how they should be followed. ("You have heard it said that X, but I say to you Y...", that sort of stuff.) He said that the intention was for one man and one woman, which is why you hear Christians saying this. Jesus said a number of things like that, like that Divorce was given to man since man was imperfect, not because Divorce was a good thing. It's actually quite interesting.
That said, Paul said that you could be a polygamist and still be a Christian, so a thorough reading of the Christian Bible would result in something like, "Monogamy is preferred, but Polygamy is not going to send you to hell", or something like that.
>>Marriage was first and foremost about kinship ties and property rights in most civilizations, not about procreation.
If you're talking Jewish civilization, it really was about procreation. Do you remember God's promise to Abraham? If you believe in me, your offspring will be more numerous than the stars in the heavens. I think it really is important to look at Judaism through the lens of procreation - be fruitful and multiply is the only way that Judaism spreads. They don't proselytize.
It also explains why homosexuality is an abomination.
>>It's Leviticus, and no Christian that I know follows the rules laid out in Leviticus
It's also in the New Testament, along with prohibitions against adultery, bestiality, prostitution, etc., which Christians do follow.
There's a reasonably good overview of it here:
http://www.evergreensgv.org/audio/081026_2nd.mp3
>>I paraphrase; as I remember it, Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil said that altruism is a disease of the ego and that those who would be allowed to feign altruistic motives to serve their own ends are the ultimate abominations a society can create
So in that case, all Christians should have voted for Prop 8, since voting against Prop 8 would have been an altruistic endeavor from the people who currently hold cultural hegemony in California.
>>All this talk of protecting the "sanctity of marriage" when they typically have the highest divorce rates, is laughable
Pretty much every stat on that page has issues with it. When you compare atheists vs. the general population (of which about 80% is Christian), you have a lot more important confounding factors (like SES and education) than religion. Also, claims that Christians do X at the same rate as the general population are ridiculous when you consider most of America IS Christian. There's been a longstanding belief that being Christian doesn't change teenage sex rates... when someone finally realized this problem with it and only examined self-described "devout" Christians vs the general population, there was about a three year difference in when the populations had sex for the first time. In a nutshell, almost all studies in this area use bad stats.
>>They are malformed individuals with god complexes who rightfully should be shamed in public
Yes, yes. Christians who believe in humility have so much more of a problem with hubris than sane, intellectual atheists like Hitchens or Dawkins. :p
>>You won't be allowed to see your same-sex partner in the hospital dying, because you're not "family"...
Nope, civil unions in California are accorded all the rights of marriage. So all your examples don't work.
The only difference between a civil union and a marriage in California is the name. Gay people want their Civil Unions to be called "Marriage", and religious people don't.
>>That's the textbook definition of religious discrimination and anyone ought to be able to see that it's a violation of the constitution.
The only actual discrimination I've seen in the gay marriage issue is against Christians.
>>The Michigan Court of Appeals threw out Boomer's conviction and overturned the Michigan law
Damn Cylons. They're everywhere in our legal system nowadays...
Yeah, I've read Flashforward and Calculating God. Both good ideas, both poorly written. As you say, very dislikeable cardboard characters, and plots that are pretty miserable.
>>so I switched back to KDE 3.5.6.
That was basically my experience as well.
Actually, KDE4 wouldn't even run out of the box on my system off a fresh install of OpenSUSE. A couple hours of hacking got it to work... and yeah. I wiped the drive and installed KDE3 instead.
>>I meant this wouldn't happen regularly. So you have one bad instance and declare a pox on all of us?
I've made several hundred substantial edits to Wikipedia, so my sample size is fairly large, though not as large as others. The pattern I've noticed is that this sort of nonsense tends to happen on more controversial topics (Sacco and Venzetti, J. Edgar Hoover, etc.). Some editor with an agenda will start goal tending and reverting all edits to the article to keep it in some form that he approves of. I've seen it at least five or six times.