The Borg of course, their transportation costs are astronomical. The justice league only have a few vehicles and their budget easily covers the fuel costs.
but electric opens up the possibility of using alternative energy sources
I understand that in the wonderful utopian future we will all have as much energy as we want. My argument was referring more to the actual reality of now though. Your battery to wheels efficiency statistics conveniently left out the efficiency of the coal power plant that charged the batteries. I did however clearly refer to power production in the post you were replying to so the only kind assumption is that you are just pretending to be ignorant.
While on the subject of future fantasy technologies that will solve all our transportation problems: I am a big fan of building a world wide teleporter network. Oh and a space elevator.
That seems to sum up the vast majority of this thread, and the alternative energy debate in a very concise way.
Let me take this opportunity to summarise the thread:
30 pages of people arguing about the safety of hydrogen. 20 pages of people arguing about their opinions of Elon Musk.
Let me now summarise the issue:
A) Danger is not the issue, yes hydrogen tanks are dangerous, but we are talking about private transportation here. If we cared about safety we would have banned all of it decades ago. No one really cares if a few people get torn to pieces by a car.
B) Hydrogen fuel cells are a bad idea because the production of hydrogen is hugely inefficient. The thermal efficiency is only about 50% and that is ignoring the massive compression that would be required for private transport, as well as distribution costs. This means hydrogen powered cars will use significantly more energy than other alternatives, energy that is generated in power stations, mostly through burning fossil fuels. The issue we have with cars is that they use too much energy. Neither Musk's electric cars nor any hydrogen technology currently on the market do anything to change this at all. It is all a huge PR lie so that all the happy consumers will feel good in the fluffy cotton wool illusion that they are saving the planet.
C) Quit the celebrity worship, hundreds of people have quite clearly explained the pro's and cons of hydrogen fuel cells and we should not care more about this guy's opinion just because he is rich and famous. We could care about his opinion because he has a physics degree, but then again there are a great many people with physics degrees who have opinions on hydrogen fuel cells.
Well it changes the definition of free will slightly. If you take the many universes approach as suggested above then we have the emergent illusion of time and therefore the emergent illusion of being able to choose which perspective of the universe we experience next. It also means that the words 'free' and 'will' have no objective meaning. Subjectively however I find it useful to believe in such illusory things as my own existence, time, causality, etc. and within this logical framework which I use most of the time I have free will.
It is just as true to say 'free will exists' as it is to say 'parallel lines cross at infinity'. Within a certain logical framework it exists. Furthermore without any logical framework at all no language has meaning, let alone truth, and no coherent thoughts are possible. In fact everything anyone ever experienced is an illusion, and therefore it exists as such.
In case this was not clear I am disputing your first claim (that the reader does not have free will), and agreeing with your second one (that free will is an illusion). I also see them as directly contradicting each other.
As for TFA...how about making games that don't suck? How about that? Make smaller games that target a market instead of some crazy costing AAA title that you have to make as generic as possible to have "broad appeal" which is pretty much a codeword for "boring generic crap"
I had the opportunity recently to discuss game pitching protocols with a publisher reprasentative, he said "if you can't explain the idea in 5 minutes it is no good". I responded that this is only true for storyline/setting pitches, and suggested that a technical idea about how to implement new gameplay could not necessarily be explained in 5 minutes. He agreed. Does this publisher have a protocol for pitching innovative new gameplay? No. Do they even employ anyone who could understand a technical description of new gameplay mechanics? No. Are they deciding what game my company makes next? Yes.
I think you are all over thinking things. The answer is much more simple: The media. The modern news media are an outrage manufacturing network. When they want us to be outraged about something we are. This is the answer to all questions that start with "Why aren't the public more outraged about X". Every time I hear of some new atrocity or idiocy I wonder this for a second. Then I wonder for a second why the media doesn't cover it. But the answer to that is just as easy: there is no longer any vested interest in the news media in having a well informed public. In a system where most interactions are based on greed, there is only a vested interest in ignorance.
I have a browser plugin that solves all the annoyances of facebook. Noscript, set specifically to block any content from facebook. Deleting my account removed 99% of facebook annoyance but noscript clears up those last few like buttons.
So close.
The statistical correlation actually points to poverty as the main cause of crime. Obviously only those crimes that the trolls accuse certain minorities of. Things like serious fraud, war crimes, treason and perjury are not so well correlated to poverty.
Sadly there will always be some doubt that there's still a hidden cache of it somewhere, just waiting for the day.
Yeah, that fact is not being disputed.
From Wikipedia
"The United States ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention which came into force in April 1997. This banned the possession of most types of chemical weapons"
"According to the U.S. Army Chemical Materials Agency by January, 2012, the United States had destroyed 89.75% of the original stockpile of nearly 31,100 metric tons (30,609 long tons) of nerve and mustard agents declared in 1997."
So when are the US going to destroy the rest of their stockpiles of chemical weapons? If my arithmetic is correct they are still sitting on 3,187.75 metric tons of the stuff.
but democratic values are less likely to be transmitted if I use Office?
If you are a teacher, yes. If you learn office at a young age, it becomes very unlikely you will switch to anything else. It can be difficult for some people too, as the interface is different. Once the students go home and have to set up their own computer they will likely use office. They will either pay for it or not pay for it. If they don't pay they are committing a crime which can be severely punished if they get caught. If they pay then the school is basically training them to give money to a large corporation. Not only that, a specific corporation, with a partial monopoly in that market. Evidenced by the fact that you write 'Office' with a capital O and take it as a given that everyone knows you mean Microsoft® Office®.
Training kids to give money to support a monopolistic corporation does not seem to be directly in line with the principles of democracy.
Oh, and this myth of rampart anti-US sentiments in Germany isn't really true, either.
It is in Berlin. It is more of a resigned complaining about depressing facts than any kind of personal dislike. I think most people would love to see the US overcome its problems and move forward, but they just don't believe it will happen.
It seems to me that this has never been valve's behaviour in the past. Their business model seems to be based on making buying more convenient than torrenting, and also on multiplayer server use as DRM. I don't think there is a single game on my steam account that I couldn't have pirated a single player only version of, and I am not averse to piracy at all, yet I bought some games. If you can't get past steam DRM you aren't trying at all. I did it by accident the other day.
On the other hand, operations which topple democratic governments, install anti-leftist dictators, support smaller third world dictatorships in their abuses, grab the resources of a country, fund terrorists to keep on destabilizing a country, etc., etc., these are not mentioned in the policing context.
This would be logical. The weird thing is they are. I have seen for example Vietnam, Cuba and Chile used in exactly the context you describe, including here on slashdot. It appears that most people in the US don't actually understand the details of what happened in those cases so people get away with such absurd and outrageous nonsense without being called on it.
No thanks, I'm more afraid of the Government than Terrorists.
Of course you are, just look at the statistics: Number of people killed by terrorists each year vs. number of people killed by governments each year. It is like comparing marijuana to cigarettes.
Didn't you read the summary? In this particular case the capitalist country was shipping it to a poorer country, and they were taking the initiative and finding a use for it. Now the poorer country doesn't want it anymore and the capitalist country still has no idea what to do with it. Perhaps when you said 'would' you meant 'should'?
If you are a scientist, maybe you can explain what this article is even about. I read the summary and just boggled. So I went and read TFA. That was not very enlightening either. I went to the wikipedia article about Thioredoxin which turns out to be a useful and common protein.
How oh how do we counter these academic papers that show us individualism is the path to failure?
Hey, I know, with empirical evidence!
Stalin
Mao
Pol Pot
and last but not least, a couple of hundred million dead in the name of social justice, equality, and cooperation.
It is rather depressing here on slashdot lately. I week or so ago I used exactly those three names when a discussion came up about social equality. Someone claimed that social equality is the same as oppression. I made the point that conflating those dictators' policies with equality showed a profound lack of education, and left it at that. I expected to get yelled at for going too far by including pol pot, as no realistic thinking person with even the most basic knowledge of history could realistically argue that pol pot had anything to do with social equality. But no, I got yelled at because I made a point without backing it up with arguments. As though common sense and a basic primary school knowledge of history could be taught by a slashdot comment. Well this time I am going to try to explain it. Pol Pot is the easiest. Pol Pot's government was not communist, it was a despotism. Despotism is where a group or individual takes over all the resources and uses the control of those resources to gain power. It was a semi-feudal despotism. Feudalism means that there is a top class of people who are given power, and an underclass of peasants or serfs who work very hard and get nothing. Stalin and Mao created similar systems, but slightly less brutal. Despotism is a form of government that has been popular throughout history, and characterises Europe in the dark ages.
High social equality on the other hand, can be characterised by (to take a completely random example) the USA in the 1950's and 60's. Tax rates were higher and income equality was higher. It is harder to get nice graphs on government oppression during this period in the US, but I am sure we can all agree that less people were executed than under Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. Other countries that have had a high rate of social equality in the last century are Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Finland, Iceland, New Zealand. This is not an exhaustive list.
For more information on the statistical correlation between social equality and general wellbeing please see the following statistics lecture.
Not only this, but as someone who has lived in countries with systems designed to encourage small parties (NZ, DE), I have seen the difference it can make. The third parties almost never get into government (it can happen, but it is not the point of voting for them), instead what happens is the bigger parties change their policies to try to capture the votes off them. We have two big parties that are within a few percentage points of each other. One election some newcomers calling themselves the pirate party suddenly get a few percent of the vote after being basically unheard of until then. Their platform is based on internet neutrality. The media starts talking about internet neutrality. The big parties start wondering if it would be clever to start developing internet neutrality policies in order to pull those few percent. Those few percent would help big party X get ahead of big party Y, and wouldn't effect their current voter base much. Suddenly the small party has changed government policy without even getting into power.
If a third party candidate in the US got 10% of the vote, the entire political campaign system would shift into a new gear and start trying to pander directly to those 10%.
It is actually depressingly common in Germany for people to do this, they send letters in the hope that you will settle out of court for a small amount. I have never heard of them going after a website, it is usually individuals with downloads, but maybe since it was ruled unconstitutional here for ISPs to save the information of users that might have become more difficult. At least he is trying something new. German/European courts are quite fair, they also do not tolerate frivolous lawsuits. Private litigation is not anywhere near as common or as easy as in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
The Borg of course, their transportation costs are astronomical. The justice league only have a few vehicles and their budget easily covers the fuel costs.
but electric opens up the possibility of using alternative energy sources
I understand that in the wonderful utopian future we will all have as much energy as we want. My argument was referring more to the actual reality of now though. Your battery to wheels efficiency statistics conveniently left out the efficiency of the coal power plant that charged the batteries. I did however clearly refer to power production in the post you were replying to so the only kind assumption is that you are just pretending to be ignorant.
While on the subject of future fantasy technologies that will solve all our transportation problems: I am a big fan of building a world wide teleporter network. Oh and a space elevator.
Whoosh?
That seems to sum up the vast majority of this thread, and the alternative energy debate in a very concise way.
Let me take this opportunity to summarise the thread:
30 pages of people arguing about the safety of hydrogen. 20 pages of people arguing about their opinions of Elon Musk.
Let me now summarise the issue:
A) Danger is not the issue, yes hydrogen tanks are dangerous, but we are talking about private transportation here. If we cared about safety we would have banned all of it decades ago. No one really cares if a few people get torn to pieces by a car.
B) Hydrogen fuel cells are a bad idea because the production of hydrogen is hugely inefficient. The thermal efficiency is only about 50% and that is ignoring the massive compression that would be required for private transport, as well as distribution costs. This means hydrogen powered cars will use significantly more energy than other alternatives, energy that is generated in power stations, mostly through burning fossil fuels. The issue we have with cars is that they use too much energy. Neither Musk's electric cars nor any hydrogen technology currently on the market do anything to change this at all. It is all a huge PR lie so that all the happy consumers will feel good in the fluffy cotton wool illusion that they are saving the planet.
C) Quit the celebrity worship, hundreds of people have quite clearly explained the pro's and cons of hydrogen fuel cells and we should not care more about this guy's opinion just because he is rich and famous. We could care about his opinion because he has a physics degree, but then again there are a great many people with physics degrees who have opinions on hydrogen fuel cells.
Well it changes the definition of free will slightly. If you take the many universes approach as suggested above then we have the emergent illusion of time and therefore the emergent illusion of being able to choose which perspective of the universe we experience next. It also means that the words 'free' and 'will' have no objective meaning. Subjectively however I find it useful to believe in such illusory things as my own existence, time, causality, etc. and within this logical framework which I use most of the time I have free will.
It is just as true to say 'free will exists' as it is to say 'parallel lines cross at infinity'. Within a certain logical framework it exists. Furthermore without any logical framework at all no language has meaning, let alone truth, and no coherent thoughts are possible. In fact everything anyone ever experienced is an illusion, and therefore it exists as such.
In case this was not clear I am disputing your first claim (that the reader does not have free will), and agreeing with your second one (that free will is an illusion). I also see them as directly contradicting each other.
If time is an emergent phenomenon, then how does the first event happen?
Funniest thing I have seen all day, and I watched the surgeon simulator video so that is saying something.
As for TFA...how about making games that don't suck? How about that? Make smaller games that target a market instead of some crazy costing AAA title that you have to make as generic as possible to have "broad appeal" which is pretty much a codeword for "boring generic crap"
I had the opportunity recently to discuss game pitching protocols with a publisher reprasentative, he said "if you can't explain the idea in 5 minutes it is no good". I responded that this is only true for storyline/setting pitches, and suggested that a technical idea about how to implement new gameplay could not necessarily be explained in 5 minutes. He agreed. Does this publisher have a protocol for pitching innovative new gameplay? No. Do they even employ anyone who could understand a technical description of new gameplay mechanics? No. Are they deciding what game my company makes next? Yes.
I think you are all over thinking things. The answer is much more simple: The media. The modern news media are an outrage manufacturing network. When they want us to be outraged about something we are. This is the answer to all questions that start with "Why aren't the public more outraged about X". Every time I hear of some new atrocity or idiocy I wonder this for a second. Then I wonder for a second why the media doesn't cover it. But the answer to that is just as easy: there is no longer any vested interest in the news media in having a well informed public. In a system where most interactions are based on greed, there is only a vested interest in ignorance.
I have a browser plugin that solves all the annoyances of facebook. Noscript, set specifically to block any content from facebook. Deleting my account removed 99% of facebook annoyance but noscript clears up those last few like buttons.
Beyond culture, it's hope or lack of hope.
So close.
The statistical correlation actually points to poverty as the main cause of crime. Obviously only those crimes that the trolls accuse certain minorities of. Things like serious fraud, war crimes, treason and perjury are not so well correlated to poverty.
Yeah: about 3 months ago they should have been done.
Sadly there will always be some doubt that there's still a hidden cache of it somewhere, just waiting for the day.
Yeah, that fact is not being disputed.
From Wikipedia
"The United States ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention which came into force in April 1997. This banned the possession of most types of chemical weapons"
"According to the U.S. Army Chemical Materials Agency by January, 2012, the United States had destroyed 89.75% of the original stockpile of nearly 31,100 metric tons (30,609 long tons) of nerve and mustard agents declared in 1997."
So when are the US going to destroy the rest of their stockpiles of chemical weapons? If my arithmetic is correct they are still sitting on 3,187.75 metric tons of the stuff.
but democratic values are less likely to be transmitted if I use Office?
If you are a teacher, yes. If you learn office at a young age, it becomes very unlikely you will switch to anything else. It can be difficult for some people too, as the interface is different. Once the students go home and have to set up their own computer they will likely use office. They will either pay for it or not pay for it. If they don't pay they are committing a crime which can be severely punished if they get caught. If they pay then the school is basically training them to give money to a large corporation. Not only that, a specific corporation, with a partial monopoly in that market. Evidenced by the fact that you write 'Office' with a capital O and take it as a given that everyone knows you mean Microsoft® Office®.
Training kids to give money to support a monopolistic corporation does not seem to be directly in line with the principles of democracy.
The joke was that Africa is still, for the most part, a poor 3rd world continent but whatever.
Yes I find poverty hilarious too. Good joke.
Oh, and this myth of rampart anti-US sentiments in Germany isn't really true, either.
It is in Berlin. It is more of a resigned complaining about depressing facts than any kind of personal dislike. I think most people would love to see the US overcome its problems and move forward, but they just don't believe it will happen.
US never executed millions and millions of people for a long collection of random, bullshit reasons.
Are you sure? A couple of million here, a half a million there, it adds up.
It seems to me that this has never been valve's behaviour in the past. Their business model seems to be based on making buying more convenient than torrenting, and also on multiplayer server use as DRM. I don't think there is a single game on my steam account that I couldn't have pirated a single player only version of, and I am not averse to piracy at all, yet I bought some games. If you can't get past steam DRM you aren't trying at all. I did it by accident the other day.
On the other hand, operations which topple democratic governments, install anti-leftist dictators, support smaller third world dictatorships in their abuses, grab the resources of a country, fund terrorists to keep on destabilizing a country, etc., etc., these are not mentioned in the policing context.
This would be logical. The weird thing is they are. I have seen for example Vietnam, Cuba and Chile used in exactly the context you describe, including here on slashdot. It appears that most people in the US don't actually understand the details of what happened in those cases so people get away with such absurd and outrageous nonsense without being called on it.
Making it easier to get a real gun than to simulate one on your phone
No thanks, I'm more afraid of the Government than Terrorists.
Of course you are, just look at the statistics: Number of people killed by terrorists each year vs. number of people killed by governments each year.
It is like comparing marijuana to cigarettes.
Didn't you read the summary? In this particular case the capitalist country was shipping it to a poorer country, and they were taking the initiative and finding a use for it. Now the poorer country doesn't want it anymore and the capitalist country still has no idea what to do with it. Perhaps when you said 'would' you meant 'should'?
If you are a scientist, maybe you can explain what this article is even about. I read the summary and just boggled. So I went and read TFA. That was not very enlightening either. I went to the wikipedia article about Thioredoxin which turns out to be a useful and common protein.
What did the researchers do specifically?
How oh how do we counter these academic papers that show us individualism is the path to failure?
Hey, I know, with empirical evidence!
Stalin Mao Pol Pot
and last but not least, a couple of hundred million dead in the name of social justice, equality, and cooperation.
It is rather depressing here on slashdot lately. I week or so ago I used exactly those three names when a discussion came up about social equality. Someone claimed that social equality is the same as oppression. I made the point that conflating those dictators' policies with equality showed a profound lack of education, and left it at that. I expected to get yelled at for going too far by including pol pot, as no realistic thinking person with even the most basic knowledge of history could realistically argue that pol pot had anything to do with social equality. But no, I got yelled at because I made a point without backing it up with arguments. As though common sense and a basic primary school knowledge of history could be taught by a slashdot comment. Well this time I am going to try to explain it. Pol Pot is the easiest. Pol Pot's government was not communist, it was a despotism. Despotism is where a group or individual takes over all the resources and uses the control of those resources to gain power. It was a semi-feudal despotism. Feudalism means that there is a top class of people who are given power, and an underclass of peasants or serfs who work very hard and get nothing. Stalin and Mao created similar systems, but slightly less brutal. Despotism is a form of government that has been popular throughout history, and characterises Europe in the dark ages.
High social equality on the other hand, can be characterised by (to take a completely random example) the USA in the 1950's and 60's. Tax rates were higher and income equality was higher. It is harder to get nice graphs on government oppression during this period in the US, but I am sure we can all agree that less people were executed than under Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. Other countries that have had a high rate of social equality in the last century are Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Finland, Iceland, New Zealand. This is not an exhaustive list.
For more information on the statistical correlation between social equality and general wellbeing please see the following statistics lecture.
Not only this, but as someone who has lived in countries with systems designed to encourage small parties (NZ, DE), I have seen the difference it can make. The third parties almost never get into government (it can happen, but it is not the point of voting for them), instead what happens is the bigger parties change their policies to try to capture the votes off them. We have two big parties that are within a few percentage points of each other. One election some newcomers calling themselves the pirate party suddenly get a few percent of the vote after being basically unheard of until then. Their platform is based on internet neutrality. The media starts talking about internet neutrality. The big parties start wondering if it would be clever to start developing internet neutrality policies in order to pull those few percent. Those few percent would help big party X get ahead of big party Y, and wouldn't effect their current voter base much. Suddenly the small party has changed government policy without even getting into power.
If a third party candidate in the US got 10% of the vote, the entire political campaign system would shift into a new gear and start trying to pander directly to those 10%.
It is actually depressingly common in Germany for people to do this, they send letters in the hope that you will settle out of court for a small amount. I have never heard of them going after a website, it is usually individuals with downloads, but maybe since it was ruled unconstitutional here for ISPs to save the information of users that might have become more difficult. At least he is trying something new. German/European courts are quite fair, they also do not tolerate frivolous lawsuits. Private litigation is not anywhere near as common or as easy as in the US.
"Is Sauron in the gov there?"
Sauron has been the US president for some time. "One Spy-Ring to rule them all", etc, etc.
I think John Key is better compared with Gríma Wormtongue. Which would make David Cameron Saruman.