>>By 2050 disease and war will have reduced the global population to a fraction of what it is today
I am fascinated with your ability to predict the future and would like to subscribe to your RSS feed.
If anything, though, diseases and war have been trending down in the last 60 years. The only real threats these days is some sort of unknown superbug, or a rogue state engineering a superAIDS virus (or just getting nuclear weapons and dropping it on us).
>>We simply need to decrease the surplus population of ravenously resource-hungry bourgeoisie
Yes, comrade! We must destroy the rapacious bourgeoisie that are breeding like rats and... oh, wait, what? All affluent countries are having problems with population *decreases* instead of exponential growth? Damn, I guess all you people stuck in the 1800s with Malthus are wrong, huh?
The only people still undergoing large population expansions are the uneducated poor - and if you make the poor educated and wealthy, they magically stop having as many kids (well, it's maybe birth control instead of magic, but you get my point, comrade).
>>What we really need is a Chinese-style one child policy, or better yet incentives for no children at all.
Lord, you're just a walking stereotype of the tyrannical communist, aren't you? Weren't you supposed to have been purged back in the 40s alongside all your other fellow true believer Stalinists?
Most of the war and the fights in the world that has lead to people suffering, also by hunger. Has been communism against democracy. And I don't know who to blame the most. To me it seems that the "Democratic" countries has done more damage than good. Look at vietnam, somalia etc etc.
You don't know who to blame the most?
Here's a clue: the Khmer Rouge murdered a million or two of their own people. And their numbers were vastly exceeded by the Soviets and the Red Chinese.
Nothing the US or other democracies did can ever compare with the scope of genocides, atrocities, and mass starvations caused by communism in the 20th century.
>>Maybe by then we will have figured out that its OK if government does something good for the people just fucking once because it is the right thing to do.
Yes, let's double the people's cost of power! They'll thank us for it, comrade!/sigh...
It *is* possible to have green energy without major subsidies - it's called nuclear power. Wind and solar currently require too large a subsidy to be cost competitive, though I'm certainly taking advantage of it and converting my house to solar next week. Thanks, taxpayers!
At $250 a barrel, it becomes tremendously profitable to convert coal into gasoline. This drives up production, which will drive down cost. The only way we'll run out of gas is if politicians block alternative sources.
>>I can't think of a single instance where upgrading to a newer version of Java caused an existing application to break.
It breaks on platforms that have older versions of the JDK. All your newer version stuff doesn't work.
And since they thought Java would be "write once, run anywhere" you can't use the same tricks C had for dealing with platform differences like that (preprocessor defines and macros).
I guess if you're just using java on a single platform, it's not an issue, but we had to support IRIX machines, which were stuck with the original version of Java. So none of those fancy "StringBuffer" things those whippersnappers are using nowadays...
>>You are implying that if you donate to the IRS, the IRS will refund the "neighbors" that the GP is concerned with...
The neighbors are nebulous and identical in both cases.
Basically, if you're worried about taking from your neighbors with tax credits, you should also realize you're subsidizing "them" with your taxes as well, which you have no control over choosing.
The ops? Not necessarily. But there's natural leaders in every group, whether explicit or implicit. It doesn't mean there has to be a formal structure, but whereas you might hear about a topless flash mob at Abercrombie and text a few of your friends about it, there's going to be some people that will text 100 or 1000. And when you get there, there's a guy with a bullhorn organizing the thing, or handing out Guy Fawkes masks or something. Those are the leaders.
Out of curiosity, is there a penalty for lying on a warrant? If there is, how does they get away with it? If not, why not?
The EFF recently found massive abuse of the system by the FBI, but it's not exactly new news. The ATF lied about the Branch Davidians (saying they were drug runners) in order to get all that nifty heavy military equipment you saw at Waco, but they were never held accountable for their lie.
Something like this, where the government can so casually shut down free speech sites by the thousands... really concerns me. If they can just allege something on a warrant and shut down the internet, our society is less free in this regard than Egypt. They got internet access back after 5 days. Waiting for a lawsuit to resolve itself in America takes... longer.
And delays on internet sites or computer equipment is like dog years, except more so.
When a friend's 486 got seized by the FBI (not for something he did, but for information on it), he got it back in the Pentium 2 days. Great, thanks. A delay that long is the equivalent of destruction of property.
>>The usefulness of an auction site depends upon the number of users
Self publishing, dude. For a lot of companies producing content, though, they can often sell their content at significant discounts compared with Kindle or Nook versions.
An acquaintance of mine is an author, who wrote/is writing a pretty good fantasy series (Maxwell Alexander Drake - Genesis of Oblivion). Amazon/Kindle takes something like 70% of the sales, so his $10 ebook on Amazon his publisher sells on their website for $5, and he still makes a better profit on it.
But the margins are no better in physical books, really. He ends up making about the same no matter where the sale comes from.
It did. When they arrested the Drink or Die guys (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Buccaneer), IIRC, piracy dropped significantly.
In any organization, the 90/10 rule applies - 90% of the work is done by 10% of the people. If they arrested those 10% of the Anonymous cowards, I'd expect to see their activities drop significantly.
>>Some people who HAVE grouped together have used the name for themselves BUT by that they have seized to become Anonymous.
Rather, some Anonymous have been seized. =)
>>Anonymous has no organization, it cannot by its very nature
TFA talked about Anonymous IRC channels, so there you go. There's no way to assemble flash mobs without some form of organization. It might not be a traditional organization, of course, but there must be a system in place. Otherwise it's just a guy talking to himself in his closet.
>>These are the petty criminals of the cyber world. They're a nuisance, but they aren't about to disrupt the Internet
TFA that wrote that was amazingly stupid. Robert Morris took down the internet, and he was basically the stereotypical rogue hacker described in the article. Ditto the guys that wrote Melissa (David Smith), Sasser (Sven Jaschan), and so forth.
Over the years, there have been multiple ways found to "disrupt the internet" and some have been exploited (negative routing table entries being a famous way) and some haven't been.
>>I was reading through the comments getting extremely aggravated waiting to see how long it would take someone to point out he's naming types of crackers, not hackers. Stop allowing people to use the word hacker as a negative word without making them informed.
I was scanning through the comments wondering when people, once again, would blame redneck hicks for all of our criminal computer activity.
Seriously, pedants - "crackers" is a stupid word, and this is why your War on Terminology failed. Black Hats sounds much cooler, and is more popular thereby.
>>Anyone promoting mass transit in sprawling suburbs needs their head examined. Sprawling suburbs are beyond redemption. There is no hope for them. Your 75MPH road today will be down to 15 soon enough an you'll have to make them 20 lanes wide before the cycle of induced traffic begins again.
While you're right that mass transit was a total failure, the success of Orange County keeping its roads moderately usable in contrast with LA's hopeless and perpetual snarl means that road development can actually work at keeping traffic under control.
>>There are probably a few connections in the US where starting a high speed network would make sense. Clearly, making coast-to-coast isn't really among those. Connecting the big cities along the coasts seems an obvious first start.
It would be kind of cool if we could sponsor a race between east coast and west coast teams, trying to build railway track to connect the two networks
I'd love to be able to travel across the continental US in a single train! Maybe we could award the winning team a golden spike or something.
>>If you're like most Europeans, you have no real idea how BIG the US actually is, in square miles
Indeed. America is big. Really really big. Europeans just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to America.
High speed rail only makes sense in densely populated areas that can support enough ridership to make it vaguely successful. I also voted for it in California because LA traffic sucks such monumentally large balls due to an interstate road system untouched since the late 1960s.
>>Roads fill to capacity no matter how big you build them
Eh, the Orange County / LA difference is quite profound. The OC has been upgrading its roads consistently for the last 30 years. LA killed interstate improvements back in the 70s, IIRC, because Tom Bradley wanted to focus on light rail and bus transportation instead of cars (he had an attitude like yours).
So when you go from the congested, stop-and-go LA traffic to Orange County, it's like night and day. Suddenly the roads all widen up, and traffic goes from 15 to 75 in the span of a mile. Coming back the other way, it's a nightmare at most daylight hours.
I have to drive between Fresno and San Diego round trip about twice a month, and I tend to leave at 2AM simply to avoid LA traffic. While I think Bradley's decision was boneheaded, I do support the California high speed rail system, simply because it will provide a way around the LA nightmare.
The constitution is a combination of positive rights and negative rights for the government and people.
For example, it mandates the creation of the US Post Office, and calls upon the government to ensure domestic tranquility and promote the useful sciences.
That said, an internet kill switch would be anathema to everything the United States stands for. However, the government does have the right to isolate.gov and.mil if they feel they're under attack. But they can't/shouldn't be able to do more than that.
>>If your car suddenly accelerates and you cannot shift into neutral or press the brakes to stop it, you are not qualified to operate a motor vehicle.
When it happened to me, the brakes did not work. They felt very hard, and even stomping on them with both feet was not enough to push the pedal down very much, and it didn't do enough to slow the car down.
I did kill the engine after a few terrifying seconds of almost killing people, but not everyone knows you can do that when the car is moving, I guess.
I had a bout of uncontrolled acceleration in my 84 Caprice Classic, which was supposedly caused by a short in the cruise control system causing it to try to accelerate to arbitrarily high speeds.
I also had the throttle cable break on me, another time, and limped home in Drive.
I really wish people on here would stop pretending to be experts and claiming uncontrolled acceleration can "never happen". It can, it does, and it's terrifying to have your car unresponsive to your commands and refusing to brake. I killed my engine, but not everyone has the presence of mind to do that.
Slashdot Mirror
>>By 2050 disease and war will have reduced the global population to a fraction of what it is today
I am fascinated with your ability to predict the future and would like to subscribe to your RSS feed.
If anything, though, diseases and war have been trending down in the last 60 years. The only real threats these days is some sort of unknown superbug, or a rogue state engineering a superAIDS virus (or just getting nuclear weapons and dropping it on us).
>>We simply need to decrease the surplus population of ravenously resource-hungry bourgeoisie
Yes, comrade! We must destroy the rapacious bourgeoisie that are breeding like rats and... oh, wait, what? All affluent countries are having problems with population *decreases* instead of exponential growth? Damn, I guess all you people stuck in the 1800s with Malthus are wrong, huh?
The only people still undergoing large population expansions are the uneducated poor - and if you make the poor educated and wealthy, they magically stop having as many kids (well, it's maybe birth control instead of magic, but you get my point, comrade).
>>What we really need is a Chinese-style one child policy, or better yet incentives for no children at all.
Lord, you're just a walking stereotype of the tyrannical communist, aren't you? Weren't you supposed to have been purged back in the 40s alongside all your other fellow true believer Stalinists?
You don't know who to blame the most?
Here's a clue: the Khmer Rouge murdered a million or two of their own people. And their numbers were vastly exceeded by the Soviets and the Red Chinese.
Nothing the US or other democracies did can ever compare with the scope of genocides, atrocities, and mass starvations caused by communism in the 20th century.
>>Maybe by then we will have figured out that its OK if government does something good for the people just fucking once because it is the right thing to do.
Yes, let's double the people's cost of power! They'll thank us for it, comrade! /sigh...
It *is* possible to have green energy without major subsidies - it's called nuclear power. Wind and solar currently require too large a subsidy to be cost competitive, though I'm certainly taking advantage of it and converting my house to solar next week. Thanks, taxpayers!
>>Hopefully before crude oil hits $250 a barrel (which will happen sometime around 2035 or later) and the world spins out of control.
Riiiiight. Because there are no other sources for gasoline, right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_shale
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_sands
At $250 a barrel, it becomes tremendously profitable to convert coal into gasoline. This drives up production, which will drive down cost. The only way we'll run out of gas is if politicians block alternative sources.
>>I can't think of a single instance where upgrading to a newer version of Java caused an existing application to break.
It breaks on platforms that have older versions of the JDK. All your newer version stuff doesn't work.
And since they thought Java would be "write once, run anywhere" you can't use the same tricks C had for dealing with platform differences like that (preprocessor defines and macros).
I guess if you're just using java on a single platform, it's not an issue, but we had to support IRIX machines, which were stuck with the original version of Java. So none of those fancy "StringBuffer" things those whippersnappers are using nowadays...
>>You are implying that if you donate to the IRS, the IRS will refund the "neighbors" that the GP is concerned with...
The neighbors are nebulous and identical in both cases.
Basically, if you're worried about taking from your neighbors with tax credits, you should also realize you're subsidizing "them" with your taxes as well, which you have no control over choosing.
The ops? Not necessarily. But there's natural leaders in every group, whether explicit or implicit. It doesn't mean there has to be a formal structure, but whereas you might hear about a topless flash mob at Abercrombie and text a few of your friends about it, there's going to be some people that will text 100 or 1000. And when you get there, there's a guy with a bullhorn organizing the thing, or handing out Guy Fawkes masks or something. Those are the leaders.
Out of curiosity, is there a penalty for lying on a warrant? If there is, how does they get away with it? If not, why not?
The EFF recently found massive abuse of the system by the FBI, but it's not exactly new news. The ATF lied about the Branch Davidians (saying they were drug runners) in order to get all that nifty heavy military equipment you saw at Waco, but they were never held accountable for their lie.
Something like this, where the government can so casually shut down free speech sites by the thousands... really concerns me. If they can just allege something on a warrant and shut down the internet, our society is less free in this regard than Egypt. They got internet access back after 5 days. Waiting for a lawsuit to resolve itself in America takes... longer.
And delays on internet sites or computer equipment is like dog years, except more so.
When a friend's 486 got seized by the FBI (not for something he did, but for information on it), he got it back in the Pentium 2 days. Great, thanks. A delay that long is the equivalent of destruction of property.
Yeah, no kidding! It was all of our troops on foreign soil that caused 9/11.
Those Al Qaeda blokes were really chuffed about our lads in Germany and South Korea.
>>The usefulness of an auction site depends upon the number of users
Self publishing, dude. For a lot of companies producing content, though, they can often sell their content at significant discounts compared with Kindle or Nook versions.
An acquaintance of mine is an author, who wrote/is writing a pretty good fantasy series (Maxwell Alexander Drake - Genesis of Oblivion). Amazon/Kindle takes something like 70% of the sales, so his $10 ebook on Amazon his publisher sells on their website for $5, and he still makes a better profit on it.
But the margins are no better in physical books, really. He ends up making about the same no matter where the sale comes from.
>>because it worked so well in the warez scene?
It did. When they arrested the Drink or Die guys (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Buccaneer), IIRC, piracy dropped significantly.
In any organization, the 90/10 rule applies - 90% of the work is done by 10% of the people. If they arrested those 10% of the Anonymous cowards, I'd expect to see their activities drop significantly.
>>Yes, but there is the whole "boy who cried wolf" aspect to constantly calling everything you don't like "fascism."
Seriously. Some ravers I knew got together to sue to the police for shutting down one of their parties, crying the whole time about fascism.
If we were living in an actual fascist society that move would have been... unproductive.
People use the word "fascist" to mean, "Anything relating to authority that I don't like."
>>Some people who HAVE grouped together have used the name for themselves BUT by that they have seized to become Anonymous.
Rather, some Anonymous have been seized. =)
>>Anonymous has no organization, it cannot by its very nature
TFA talked about Anonymous IRC channels, so there you go. There's no way to assemble flash mobs without some form of organization. It might not be a traditional organization, of course, but there must be a system in place. Otherwise it's just a guy talking to himself in his closet.
>>These are the petty criminals of the cyber world. They're a nuisance, but they aren't about to disrupt the Internet
TFA that wrote that was amazingly stupid. Robert Morris took down the internet, and he was basically the stereotypical rogue hacker described in the article. Ditto the guys that wrote Melissa (David Smith), Sasser (Sven Jaschan), and so forth.
Over the years, there have been multiple ways found to "disrupt the internet" and some have been exploited (negative routing table entries being a famous way) and some haven't been.
Or, in other words, the author is stupid.
>>I was reading through the comments getting extremely aggravated waiting to see how long it would take someone to point out he's naming types of crackers, not hackers. Stop allowing people to use the word hacker as a negative word without making them informed.
I was scanning through the comments wondering when people, once again, would blame redneck hicks for all of our criminal computer activity.
Seriously, pedants - "crackers" is a stupid word, and this is why your War on Terminology failed. Black Hats sounds much cooler, and is more popular thereby.
>>Anyone promoting mass transit in sprawling suburbs needs their head examined. Sprawling suburbs are beyond redemption. There is no hope for them. Your 75MPH road today will be down to 15 soon enough an you'll have to make them 20 lanes wide before the cycle of induced traffic begins again.
While you're right that mass transit was a total failure, the success of Orange County keeping its roads moderately usable in contrast with LA's hopeless and perpetual snarl means that road development can actually work at keeping traffic under control.
>>avatar is a good movie, well done.
>>it was a story by james cameron that was greatly anticipated
Mod parent +5 Funny.
>>There are probably a few connections in the US where starting a high speed network would make sense. Clearly, making coast-to-coast isn't really among those. Connecting the big cities along the coasts seems an obvious first start.
It would be kind of cool if we could sponsor a race between east coast and west coast teams, trying to build railway track to connect the two networks
I'd love to be able to travel across the continental US in a single train! Maybe we could award the winning team a golden spike or something.
>>If you're like most Europeans, you have no real idea how BIG the US actually is, in square miles
Indeed. America is big. Really really big. Europeans just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to America.
High speed rail only makes sense in densely populated areas that can support enough ridership to make it vaguely successful. I also voted for it in California because LA traffic sucks such monumentally large balls due to an interstate road system untouched since the late 1960s.
>>Roads fill to capacity no matter how big you build them
Eh, the Orange County / LA difference is quite profound. The OC has been upgrading its roads consistently for the last 30 years. LA killed interstate improvements back in the 70s, IIRC, because Tom Bradley wanted to focus on light rail and bus transportation instead of cars (he had an attitude like yours).
So when you go from the congested, stop-and-go LA traffic to Orange County, it's like night and day. Suddenly the roads all widen up, and traffic goes from 15 to 75 in the span of a mile. Coming back the other way, it's a nightmare at most daylight hours.
I have to drive between Fresno and San Diego round trip about twice a month, and I tend to leave at 2AM simply to avoid LA traffic. While I think Bradley's decision was boneheaded, I do support the California high speed rail system, simply because it will provide a way around the LA nightmare.
Err, sorta.
The constitution is a combination of positive rights and negative rights for the government and people.
For example, it mandates the creation of the US Post Office, and calls upon the government to ensure domestic tranquility and promote the useful sciences.
That said, an internet kill switch would be anathema to everything the United States stands for. However, the government does have the right to isolate .gov and .mil if they feel they're under attack. But they can't/shouldn't be able to do more than that.
I did first, and the engine redlined, so I turned it off. Steering wasn't an issue in any event.
>>If your car suddenly accelerates and you cannot shift into neutral or press the brakes to stop it, you are not qualified to operate a motor vehicle.
When it happened to me, the brakes did not work. They felt very hard, and even stomping on them with both feet was not enough to push the pedal down very much, and it didn't do enough to slow the car down.
I did kill the engine after a few terrifying seconds of almost killing people, but not everyone knows you can do that when the car is moving, I guess.
I had a bout of uncontrolled acceleration in my 84 Caprice Classic, which was supposedly caused by a short in the cruise control system causing it to try to accelerate to arbitrarily high speeds.
I also had the throttle cable break on me, another time, and limped home in Drive.
I really wish people on here would stop pretending to be experts and claiming uncontrolled acceleration can "never happen". It can, it does, and it's terrifying to have your car unresponsive to your commands and refusing to brake. I killed my engine, but not everyone has the presence of mind to do that.