I hope you don't think this decision was reached without considerable input from the oil industry and its captains and advisers (one of whom happens to be a high ranking republican in a high seat...)
Normally I let crap like this go by, but this time I'm calling you out. Prove it. JUST PROVE IT. And no, cynicism is not proof (aka "I just know and you would too if you weren't so naive").
Of course, it CAN'T be that the electric car TOTALLY F'ING SUCKS. It can't be that battery technology is not even close to being ready (6.5 hour charging time, 100 mile range?).
It can't be that every car manufacture has invested 100s of millions, if not billions (GM) in electric cars, and have TOTALLY FAILED.
Of course, we JUST KNOW that oil companies will "buy off" car companies. Never mind that car companies MAKE CARS and the first one that really makes a practical electric car will make a ton of money. Never mind that car companies DON'T PRODUCE OIL and do give a shit about how cars are powered, as long as they sell cars.
And by the way...
There is just not an infinte supply of petroleum.
Sorry, but yes, there IS AN INFINITE SUPPLY OF PETROLEUM. Yes, I said infinite. WE WILL NEVER RUN OUT OF PETROLEUM. Never. Ever. You know why?
Very simple. Because as the reserves get lower, it simply gets more expensive to pull out of the ground. Eventually, the price is higher than alternatives, and we start using alternatives. WE WILL NEVER RUN OUT OF OIL. EVER.
And even if we could, please explain to me exactly why it would be a bad thing if we ran out of oil in the ground. Big deal. We use something else.
Oh, well, that's good. We all know that "3G" and "4G" are such important, well defined engineering terms.
Coming soon to the CS department "Software engineering principles of version 2 and version 3 software.
Re:Freedom and the USA
on
Want Freedom?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
freedom to express my opinions without fear of harrassment by the authorities.
Unless you live in Germany, and want to express your opinion that the holocaust didn't happen (that opinion is illegal, by the way).
Unless you live in France and want to use English words in a French broadcast, or want to own Nazi memoribilia.
Then we could talk about the freedom to buy medical care, or the economic freedom of reasonable taxation, or the freedom to own personal firearms.
Hell, it wasn't until recently that the UK finally got rid of election-by-birthright in the house of lords.
Re:Freedom and the USA
on
Want Freedom?
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· Score: 2
I would be willing to bet that if you randomly chose a kid from any high school in the US and asked them to point out, say, Portugal or Sweden or something slightly less obvious than Italy/UK/Germany/France on a map, they wouldn't be able to do it.
And if I asked a random kid from Europe where Djibouti was, they would be able to tell me? Get over yourselves. Your countries are fine and all, but exactly why are you important enough for me to know exactly where you are on a map?
Re:Freedom and the USA
on
Want Freedom?
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
Americans didn't invent freedom, Americans implemented freedom. Which is arguably much, much, much more difficult. Of course, we're still waiting for Europe to implement it.
Mis-using them when one means "godlike" or "existance" is simply inexcusable from an intelligent person engaging in any sort of public dialogue.
Well, I don't know if I'd call it "inexcusable". That's a bit strong. I suppose it might have been clearer if he had said "Mother nature does not play dice" rather than "God does not play dice".
Thinking about it some more, I think he IS using the word in a reasonable way. You, as a Christian might not think so, but Christians don't have a monopoly on defining the nature of God. If Einstein wants to define "God" as "that which describes the nature of the universe" and is not a literal, sentient being, I think that's his and anyone's right. I think that's as good a definition of God as any.
Sheesh, not this old myth again. Here's one of the many pages that kill it. To quote Einstein,
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it." - Albert Einstein in Albert Einstein: The Human Side
When Einstein used the word "God", he used it as a methaphor for existence.
Do you think that is all right? Do you think programming a computer is easier or harder than walking down a runway?
"Which is harder" has nothing to do with anything. The only question is which is more valuable in monetary terms. The model isn't getting paid to walk, the model is getting paid to use her physical assets to promote the fashion designer's product. If the fashion design didn't think it was worth it, she wouldn't get paid. Now how many people have the physical assets to do that, versus how many people can crank out code? That's why she makes $50K and you don't. Supply and demand rules all.
And by the way, if you're going to complain that she's "just" using her beauty that she was lucky enough to be born with, and turn up your nose about how superior you are, be sure and realize that you are just using a particular mental talent that you were lucky enough to be born with.
The classic examples are always cited--Perl, gcc, Emacs, Apache, the Linux kernel--but for a model that's supposed to be so superior, the success stories are fewer than you'd expect.
And even those examples aren't really that pure. Perl is (arguably) the work one one loan, mad genius, and is not GPL.
The gcc compiler is by far not the best compiler for any platform. It's sole advantage is that it's portable.
Emacs is, well, Emacs. I'll refrain from commenting because of my personal biases.:)
Apache is not GPL, so it doesn't reflect on the GPL, but it's probably the one application that is truly a success story. The reason, of course is that it filled a need when there was a huge demand for web servers and not many to fill the void. One can even make the argument that Apache represents the best web server, although you find plenty of argument about that in specific cases.
The Linux kernel is certainly successful -- but far from innovative. No one (hopefully) claims that Linux represents even close to the "best" implementation of a Unix kernel. Still, you have to give props to the "usefulness" of Linux.
Does the movie start? No, you have to understand how to manipulate menus (which differ on every DVD) to get from the stupid-ass opening menu to the actual movie.
I don't know about your DVD player, but mine has a play button on both the remote control and the unit. You don't normally have to go through the "stupid-ass" menus.
My accountant actually asked me to email him my figures for the year.... Umm no
Make this sound like your accountant should care about this issue. First of all, theoretically someone could spy on your e-mail, but in practice the odds are just about zero. Second of all, unless your circumstances are unique in some way (doubtful), your accounting figures just don't matter very much. Who the hell cares if someone saw them or not. Hey! Someone might hijack the courier that's carrying your accounting figures to your accountant! Better have them transported in an armored car.
I guess this is just what somewhat annoys me about all this. People for whatever reason feel the need to inflate their own importance.
Interesting article, but it's too top-heavy on nanotechnology for my taste. You don't have to go to the extreme of nanotech to support the Fermi paradox. 1960's level technology is fine.
Personally, I think sci-fi-level nanotech is fantasy on the order of transporters and "infinite reality drive". Sure, we might have self-replicating machines someday (I mean, it's called biology at this point), but "universal assemblers" ain't ever gonna happen, much less in "20 or 30 years" I think the article said.
Any sort of self-replicating von-neumann probe is going to be a very large scale machine, not a very small scale machine.
If you watch some of the old shows, it's interesting how they phrased the advertising: "The Shadow Knows! Brought to you by Johnson's Floor Wax! Keep your floors sparkling clean with Johnson's Floor Wax!" or some such.
The thing is, the way they phrased it, they made the relationship about who's paying the bills much more up-front, rather than the typical modern "We'll be back after a few messages" (translation: "We'll be back after wasting some of your time"). It's like the people on whatever show don't even respect the advertisers.
It seems like in the old days, people actually appreciated advertisers paying the bills, and responded by trying the product. Nowadays, it's almost an adversarial relationship. People go out of their way to get as far away from them as possible. Maybe it's just because there are so many more advertisers, and the advertising is much slicker. Personally, I think people just don't conciously make the connection between advertiser money and how these multi-million dollar productions get made.
I wonder if there is a way to make advertising a bit more of a "sponsorship" type of thing.
Sure, you can come up with as many scenerios on why someone wouldn't do it as you want. But do you doubt that a couple million years from now humans won't have populated the whole galaxy, even at sublight speeds? I don't. So what are the odds that the potential thousand or million (depending on who you ask) intelligent species in the galaxy are ALL non-expansionistic? We're the only one? That seems highly unlikely.
but the reality is that all we can do at the moment is make the assumption that they aren't based upon the fact that we can't conclusively demonstrate that they are.
You can make up all kinds of conspiracy scenerios, but the fact remains that the only statement we can make about other intelligent life is that we have zero evidence of any other intelligent life. That's not just "lack of evidence", that is positive evidence that implies that there is no other life in the galaxy, based on Fermi's paradox. In other words, Fermi's paradox predicts with a reasonable degree of certainty that if our planet shows no signs of having been visited in the past, therefore, we are the only ones in the galaxy.
The problem with the "maybe everyone" scenerios (maybe everyone destroys themselves, maybe everyone doesn't have an expansion desire, maybe no one likes planets like Earth) is that it only takes one. It only takes one civilization with an expansion desire and relatively low technology (cryo-sleep or just long lived, no FTL, etc) to fill the galaxy in a short (relatively speaking to the age of the universe) amount of time.
I can sympathize with those who just don't want to face the logic of Fermi's Paradox. I would really like it to be not true, but the logic is just inescapable. A million years to fill a galaxy at sublight speeds, give or take. Billions of years of time. If the galaxy was teaming with intelligent life, where the hell are they? Why didn't they take over the earth a long time ago?
This is truly new, and means a SETI "hit" comes into the realm of the probable, IMO.
Well, let's not go off the deep end. "Possible", maybe. "Probable", probably not. The evidence suggests that we are totally alone in the galaxy. Fermi's Paradox has pretty much convinced me.
My gut feeling that "life" might be somewhat common, but intelligent, self-aware life is hugely, unbelievably unlikely, if not completely unique in the universe. Self-awareness is just too complex to be common. Of course, it happened here, but that says nothing about how common it is. We could have gone through 1e57 universe cycles (assuming a cyclical universe model) before it happened.
This is why I wrote "If you don't understand the Internet, stay the fuck away."
In the same vein, let me answer this with: "No, fuck YOU".
I suppose you might make the argument that the "early Internet" was this way (although you're full of crap if you think "anything you can exploit is OK"), but so what? I'm sure you can find early primitive societies where everything was shared. So what? What works for a small community doesn't necessarily work for a large community. And guess what? The Internet is a large community now. The rules have changed, and no one cares what the old rules were, because they're irrelevent.
In other words, let me put it succinctly: STAY THE FUCK OUT OF MY COMPUTER UNLESS I WANT YOU THERE. If some l33t teenager was caught breaking into my computer, I would have absolutely no hesitation in prosecuting him to the fullest extent of the law. We need to make some examples out of these idiots.
Nevertheless I'll reserve the right to post signs all over town in the dead of night saying your door is unlocked because you're really stupid.
Yeah, because who the hell would want to live in society where you could leave your door unlocked? Much better to punish anyone who dares try to make such a society.
you make the implication that programming for fun means having no life, making your true colors shine through.
No, you're twisting my statement in order to make me seem to have that implication. I'm pretty certain you know that I didn't mean that.
The point is that one can have a life OUTSIDE of programming, and still be an excellent programmer. The implication that if I don't write code outside of work, then that means I don't enjoy programming is just absurd. It is possible to balance one's life so that they do multiple things they enjoy.
If the government can monitor our phone calls, internet emails, conversations, etc. then why can't we spy on the government to?
Because there are things that the general public should not know. An obvious example would be the list of people in witness relocation program. Obviously there are a lot of military information that is not in our best interest for our enemies to know as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I hope you don't think this decision was reached without considerable input from the oil industry and its captains and advisers (one of whom happens to be a high ranking republican in a high seat...)
Normally I let crap like this go by, but this time I'm calling you out. Prove it. JUST PROVE IT. And no, cynicism is not proof (aka "I just know and you would too if you weren't so naive").
Of course, it CAN'T be that the electric car TOTALLY F'ING SUCKS. It can't be that battery technology is not even close to being ready (6.5 hour charging time, 100 mile range?).
It can't be that every car manufacture has invested 100s of millions, if not billions (GM) in electric cars, and have TOTALLY FAILED.
Of course, we JUST KNOW that oil companies will "buy off" car companies. Never mind that car companies MAKE CARS and the first one that really makes a practical electric car will make a ton of money. Never mind that car companies DON'T PRODUCE OIL and do give a shit about how cars are powered, as long as they sell cars.
And by the way...
There is just not an infinte supply of petroleum.
Sorry, but yes, there IS AN INFINITE SUPPLY OF PETROLEUM. Yes, I said infinite. WE WILL NEVER RUN OUT OF PETROLEUM. Never. Ever. You know why?
Very simple. Because as the reserves get lower, it simply gets more expensive to pull out of the ground. Eventually, the price is higher than alternatives, and we start using alternatives. WE WILL NEVER RUN OUT OF OIL. EVER.
And even if we could, please explain to me exactly why it would be a bad thing if we ran out of oil in the ground. Big deal. We use something else.
//end rant.
3G and 4G Wireless
Oh, well, that's good. We all know that "3G" and "4G" are such important, well defined engineering terms.
Coming soon to the CS department "Software engineering principles of version 2 and version 3 software.
freedom to express my opinions without fear of harrassment by the authorities.
Unless you live in Germany, and want to express your opinion that the holocaust didn't happen (that opinion is illegal, by the way).
Unless you live in France and want to use English words in a French broadcast, or want to own Nazi memoribilia.
Then we could talk about the freedom to buy medical care, or the economic freedom of reasonable taxation, or the freedom to own personal firearms.
Hell, it wasn't until recently that the UK finally got rid of election-by-birthright in the house of lords.
I would be willing to bet that if you randomly chose a kid from any high school in the US and asked them to point out, say, Portugal or Sweden or something slightly less obvious than Italy/UK/Germany/France on a map, they wouldn't be able to do it.
And if I asked a random kid from Europe where Djibouti was, they would be able to tell me? Get over yourselves. Your countries are fine and all, but exactly why are you important enough for me to know exactly where you are on a map?
Americans didn't invent freedom, Americans implemented freedom. Which is arguably much, much, much more difficult. Of course, we're still waiting for Europe to implement it.
Mis-using them when one means "godlike" or "existance" is simply inexcusable from an intelligent person engaging in any sort of public dialogue.
Well, I don't know if I'd call it "inexcusable". That's a bit strong. I suppose it might have been clearer if he had said "Mother nature does not play dice" rather than "God does not play dice".
Thinking about it some more, I think he IS using the word in a reasonable way. You, as a Christian might not think so, but Christians don't have a monopoly on defining the nature of God. If Einstein wants to define "God" as "that which describes the nature of the universe" and is not a literal, sentient being, I think that's his and anyone's right. I think that's as good a definition of God as any.
Albert Einstein, for instance, was one of them.
Sheesh, not this old myth again. Here's one of the many pages that kill it. To quote Einstein,
When Einstein used the word "God", he used it as a methaphor for existence.
Do you think that is all right? Do you think programming a computer is easier or harder than walking down a runway?
"Which is harder" has nothing to do with anything. The only question is which is more valuable in monetary terms. The model isn't getting paid to walk, the model is getting paid to use her physical assets to promote the fashion designer's product. If the fashion design didn't think it was worth it, she wouldn't get paid. Now how many people have the physical assets to do that, versus how many people can crank out code? That's why she makes $50K and you don't. Supply and demand rules all.
And by the way, if you're going to complain that she's "just" using her beauty that she was lucky enough to be born with, and turn up your nose about how superior you are, be sure and realize that you are just using a particular mental talent that you were lucky enough to be born with.
The classic examples are always cited--Perl, gcc, Emacs, Apache, the Linux kernel--but for a model that's supposed to be so superior, the success stories are fewer than you'd expect.
And even those examples aren't really that pure. Perl is (arguably) the work one one loan, mad genius, and is not GPL.
The gcc compiler is by far not the best compiler for any platform. It's sole advantage is that it's portable.
Emacs is, well, Emacs. I'll refrain from commenting because of my personal biases. :)
Apache is not GPL, so it doesn't reflect on the GPL, but it's probably the one application that is truly a success story. The reason, of course is that it filled a need when there was a huge demand for web servers and not many to fill the void. One can even make the argument that Apache represents the best web server, although you find plenty of argument about that in specific cases.
The Linux kernel is certainly successful -- but far from innovative. No one (hopefully) claims that Linux represents even close to the "best" implementation of a Unix kernel. Still, you have to give props to the "usefulness" of Linux.
Does the movie start? No, you have to understand how to manipulate menus (which differ on every DVD) to get from the stupid-ass opening menu to the actual movie.
I don't know about your DVD player, but mine has a play button on both the remote control and the unit. You don't normally have to go through the "stupid-ass" menus.
Not the ol' Beta-superiority-undone-by-better-marketing myth.
Beta was superior in ONE WAY: it had slightly better quality. Yes, I said slightly.
VHS, on the other hand, had a LOT of advantages:
a) Longer recording length, which is what really killed Beta
b) Less expensive players
c) Less expensive media
d) Non-proprietary
Bottom line, VHS was far superior in the areas that mattered.
My accountant actually asked me to email him my figures for the year.... Umm no
Make this sound like your accountant should care about this issue. First of all, theoretically someone could spy on your e-mail, but in practice the odds are just about zero. Second of all, unless your circumstances are unique in some way (doubtful), your accounting figures just don't matter very much. Who the hell cares if someone saw them or not. Hey! Someone might hijack the courier that's carrying your accounting figures to your accountant! Better have them transported in an armored car.
I guess this is just what somewhat annoys me about all this. People for whatever reason feel the need to inflate their own importance.
Look at the logo at the top of this story (the blue and white globe). Now rotate the global to the left and fill in the missing part.
Well, I've always said they were a Mickey Mouse organization. Just look at the logo! :)
infinite reality drive
Yikes! Douglas Adams is rolling in his grave. That should be Infinite Improbability Drive.
I recommend Nick Bostrom's essay on it
Interesting article, but it's too top-heavy on nanotechnology for my taste. You don't have to go to the extreme of nanotech to support the Fermi paradox. 1960's level technology is fine.
Personally, I think sci-fi-level nanotech is fantasy on the order of transporters and "infinite reality drive". Sure, we might have self-replicating machines someday (I mean, it's called biology at this point), but "universal assemblers" ain't ever gonna happen, much less in "20 or 30 years" I think the article said.
Any sort of self-replicating von-neumann probe is going to be a very large scale machine, not a very small scale machine.
If you watch some of the old shows, it's interesting how they phrased the advertising: "The Shadow Knows! Brought to you by Johnson's Floor Wax! Keep your floors sparkling clean with Johnson's Floor Wax!" or some such.
The thing is, the way they phrased it, they made the relationship about who's paying the bills much more up-front, rather than the typical modern "We'll be back after a few messages" (translation: "We'll be back after wasting some of your time"). It's like the people on whatever show don't even respect the advertisers.
It seems like in the old days, people actually appreciated advertisers paying the bills, and responded by trying the product. Nowadays, it's almost an adversarial relationship. People go out of their way to get as far away from them as possible. Maybe it's just because there are so many more advertisers, and the advertising is much slicker. Personally, I think people just don't conciously make the connection between advertiser money and how these multi-million dollar productions get made.
I wonder if there is a way to make advertising a bit more of a "sponsorship" type of thing.
I'm sure somebody else can come up with more.
Sure, you can come up with as many scenerios on why someone wouldn't do it as you want. But do you doubt that a couple million years from now humans won't have populated the whole galaxy, even at sublight speeds? I don't. So what are the odds that the potential thousand or million (depending on who you ask) intelligent species in the galaxy are ALL non-expansionistic? We're the only one? That seems highly unlikely.
but the reality is that all we can do at the moment is make the assumption that they aren't based upon the fact that we can't conclusively demonstrate that they are.
You can make up all kinds of conspiracy scenerios, but the fact remains that the only statement we can make about other intelligent life is that we have zero evidence of any other intelligent life. That's not just "lack of evidence", that is positive evidence that implies that there is no other life in the galaxy, based on Fermi's paradox. In other words, Fermi's paradox predicts with a reasonable degree of certainty that if our planet shows no signs of having been visited in the past, therefore, we are the only ones in the galaxy.
I'm not convinced. Maybe everyone goes "Dyson".
The problem with the "maybe everyone" scenerios (maybe everyone destroys themselves, maybe everyone doesn't have an expansion desire, maybe no one likes planets like Earth) is that it only takes one. It only takes one civilization with an expansion desire and relatively low technology (cryo-sleep or just long lived, no FTL, etc) to fill the galaxy in a short (relatively speaking to the age of the universe) amount of time.
I can sympathize with those who just don't want to face the logic of Fermi's Paradox. I would really like it to be not true, but the logic is just inescapable. A million years to fill a galaxy at sublight speeds, give or take. Billions of years of time. If the galaxy was teaming with intelligent life, where the hell are they? Why didn't they take over the earth a long time ago?
This is truly new, and means a SETI "hit" comes into the realm of the probable, IMO.
Well, let's not go off the deep end. "Possible", maybe. "Probable", probably not. The evidence suggests that we are totally alone in the galaxy. Fermi's Paradox has pretty much convinced me.
My gut feeling that "life" might be somewhat common, but intelligent, self-aware life is hugely, unbelievably unlikely, if not completely unique in the universe. Self-awareness is just too complex to be common. Of course, it happened here, but that says nothing about how common it is. We could have gone through 1e57 universe cycles (assuming a cyclical universe model) before it happened.
This is why I wrote "If you don't understand the Internet, stay the fuck away."
In the same vein, let me answer this with: "No, fuck YOU".
I suppose you might make the argument that the "early Internet" was this way (although you're full of crap if you think "anything you can exploit is OK"), but so what? I'm sure you can find early primitive societies where everything was shared. So what? What works for a small community doesn't necessarily work for a large community. And guess what? The Internet is a large community now. The rules have changed, and no one cares what the old rules were, because they're irrelevent.
In other words, let me put it succinctly: STAY THE FUCK OUT OF MY COMPUTER UNLESS I WANT YOU THERE. If some l33t teenager was caught breaking into my computer, I would have absolutely no hesitation in prosecuting him to the fullest extent of the law. We need to make some examples out of these idiots.
Nevertheless I'll reserve the right to post signs all over town in the dead of night saying your door is unlocked because you're really stupid.
Yeah, because who the hell would want to live in society where you could leave your door unlocked? Much better to punish anyone who dares try to make such a society.
you make the implication that programming for fun means having no life, making your true colors shine through.
No, you're twisting my statement in order to make me seem to have that implication. I'm pretty certain you know that I didn't mean that.
The point is that one can have a life OUTSIDE of programming, and still be an excellent programmer. The implication that if I don't write code outside of work, then that means I don't enjoy programming is just absurd. It is possible to balance one's life so that they do multiple things they enjoy.
Then they should understand that there are things that the government should not know and stop spying on us.
Well, then you'll be happy to know that they aren't spying on "us". They spy on suspected criminals with permission from the judiciary.
If the government can monitor our phone calls, internet emails, conversations, etc. then why can't we spy on the government to?
Because there are things that the general public should not know. An obvious example would be the list of people in witness relocation program. Obviously there are a lot of military information that is not in our best interest for our enemies to know as well.