If someone in 1980 had told me that in the 21st century we'd all have to work harder, for longer hours, and longer into our lives in order to survive, I would have thought they were crazy. But that's where they're at.
I don't think that's where we are at. The stuff you can buy for the same amount of adjusted for inflation dollars are higher quality. Everything is better. Cars are better. Food is better. Computers are better. Televisions are better. building standards are better. Everything is better.
Sure you have to work harder to make enough money to have this new higher standard of living that is possible today, but that doesn't mean we were better off in the 80's. You can live like how e lived in the 80's pretty cheaply. TV's from the 80's are more than free. People will pay you to take them away.
Even violence and crime is much lower now than the 80's.
You don't need an army of accountants, managers or other people who provide only a drain on resources for no increase in value.
So if all these people add no increase in value, and simply drain resources (i.e. they lower the profits for the owner of a business), why do they exist? Do all these big corporations not know how to maximize their profit? Is their greed not a powerful enough motivation to figure out that they could just fire all these useless people and keep the extra profits for themselves?
Well the fact that our legislative branch is dysfunctional is probably not a good reason to give up entirely on finding good solutions to problems.
And in general... just how would one arrive at an accurate external cost of carbon/pollution?
I am not an expert, but my initial thought is that they should be the cost of reversing or preventing the effects of burning that fuel (e.g. planting trees, paying brazilians not to cut down rainforests, etc).
A Blue State might have the political will to create an external cost for non-desireable energy sources, but it would basically have the exact same effect as subsidies for green energy, right? You either make one more expensive, or the other less expensive. Same difference in the end right?
There is the idea of making sure different types of fuels do not have an unfair advantage over eachother, but there is also the idea of having the right cost of energy in general. Having the price of every type of energy based on it's cost solves 2 big problems. It makes the playing field level between energy types, and it creates the correct incentives to reduce energy consumption to an appropriate level.
If energy prices are too high, then we will be causing more energy to be consumed than would otherwise. If energy prices are too high, then we are unnecessarily hurting the economy.
If you make physical pictures, they can always be stolen. Everything you own, physical or digital can be stolen.
The minutia of how much safer your physical house is, or how safe a physical safe is, compared to how safe the cloud is, is ultimately irrelevant. The internet could become safer with new technologies. Human beings will still be the weakest link in any security chain.
I must insist that the real societal problem is indeed the one I raised, and not the one you raised.
It's not as if 64 bit is only double the space of 32 bit. It's 4 billion times as much. We are getting into the territory where we are passed millions and billions, etc, and I have to look up what a number that big is called.
I do sympathize with each and every actress and this must be a nightmare
It probably is a nightmare for them. But really the problem is our own society. For some reason we decide to attach shame to the human body. In some countries a woman might be punished (often by her own family) for the shame of displaying her face in public. I'm sure many of those women actually do feel the shame they were intended to feel by their societies. Should they?
It is absolutely wrong to invade people's privacy. The level of shame you decide to feel after some of your body parts are seen *can* be up to you. This is not meant to exonerate the perpetrators or blame the victim. I feel like this attitude could be empowering to the victim.
Obviously it's not all that much, but we're all paying a price for the low hardware functionality requirements.
We are, but if the requirements were higher, then we'd all be paying the price for high hardware requirements. These costs would include being forced to upgrade hardware more frequently, as opposed to now when you can just decide that your old junker just isn't quite repsponsive enough for your tastes.
We pay the price of this compromise regardless of what actual compromise is made. People who buy a new computer every year are going to have different priorities than people who's computers are older.
Windows is an operating system. It's job is to allow other applications to be executed simultaneously. All of the resources windows consumes are resources denied to other applications. I'm not saying that we need to be stingy like in the bad old days when programmers where more concerned about saving clock cycles than writing scalable, maintainable, and reusable code. But now that we are passed all that, there is no sense in wasting cycles frivolously. Let the applications do that.
The other 2 things that could stop us are, the vastness of the universe, and the lifespan of our civilization. I'm sure there are countless other civilizations of intelligent life in the universe. If we had infinite time to look, we would be guaranteed to find one eventually. But we do not have infinite time.
1. The lifespan of a human being is rather short. I personally do not expect to see contact with an intelligent alien race in my lifetime.
2. The lifespan of our civilization. Maybe we will continue to prosper for billions of years. Maybe we will just nuke the whole planet before we ever manage to have any sustainable colonies outside earth.
3. The lifespan of our plant. At some point our sun will turn into a red giant and kill everything on earth. That is pretty much a hard deadline for us to be ready to find a new home.
4. The expansion of the universe due to dark energy. At some point our galaxy will be the last one we can even see, ass all other galaxies will be moving away from us at a rate faster than the speed of light.
5. The slow heat death of the universe. It some point it there will be no more usable energy left for anything including life.
Imagine an easter egg hunt where you have 1 second to look for easter eggs before the all the oxygen disappears. Maybe you'll find an egg. Maybe you won't. But your success seems more to do with luck (how close the eggs are to you, and how many there are, and how well hidden they are) than how good of an egg hunter you are.
Because everyone claims the 2nd is to keep the 4th (and others) from being repressed.
The 1st amendment right to freedom of speech and freedom of the press is also supposed to keep the 4th (and others) from being repressed by allowing people to raise awareness. I guess the 1st amendment should be abandoned as well since it too is not working.
To put it another way, it's OK for the TSA to shove their fingers up your ass as long as you're holding a gun while it is happening.
Go find me a bunch of 2nd amendment supporters that have anything nice to say about the TSA. You'll have trouble finding me anyone who has naything nice to say about the TSA. What's your point?
I don't often agree with stoddart, but put up or shut up!
What exactly am I supposed to "put up" according to you? I am advocating the rule of law.
If we can detect the planets, we already have means of detecting large amounts of oxygen on a planet.
Those seem like 2 separate claims, and I don't see why one would imply the other.
Granted, we may only be able to detect a subset and even a small subset of life on planets with life, but with millions of planets, we are bound to find some
There are way more than millions of planets out there. There are probably way more than millions of planets with life on them. That doesn't mean planets with life are common, given the size of the universe. And it doesn't mean that we will be able to find any by 2045.
How common is life that produces oxygen in mass quantity?
It doesn't matter unless you have a way of showing that on a given planet, the oxygen was produced by life. OR if you just want to assume that any planet with a lot of oxygen must contain life.
And how good will our detection methodology be in the year 2045?
Probably a bit better than it is now. 2045 is only 31 years in the future.
Because in the rest of the world, cops and soldiers are the only ones walking around with weapons, and the only places where people walk around with weapons have generally degraded into a fairly lawless state.
That may be true. But there is an even higher correlation between lawless states and the rejection of the rule of law itself. In the united states it is a protected right to own a gun. The argument that the correct way to democratically "fix" this situation if one finds it disagreeable, is to change the law (i.e. the 2nd amendment), rather than simply abandoning the rule of law.
Some are. There is a whole movement dedicated to the idea that child abuse should be illegal, but that information depicting abuse is not the same as the actual abuse that took place.
There are similar lines of reasoning for allowing snuff films, videos of rape, etc.
Or are you under the illusion that this one amendment is sacrosanct while they crap all over the rest of it?
Because blanket surveillance, property seizure because police lie and say they suspected drugs, and parallel construction are pretty much in violation of your Constitution as well.
I have yet to see a single comment from anyone (democrat or republican) arguing that the US government is properly following the 4th amendment.
I'm not sure how this makes not following the 2nd amendment in addition to not following the 4th ok.
The constitution absolutely allowed slavery. It didn't condone it, but allowing the states to decide to have slavery is "allowing" it (i.e. not prohibiting it).
So is what you are saying, that if one were to look for any historical documents linking the 2nd amendment with trying to prevent tyranny, that none would be found because none exist?
The freedom loving patriots in the south never rose up to free the black slaves - that took a fucking government army.
I don't think this is a good example. You refer to the slaves in the south as "enslaved citizens". But they weren't really citizens if they were not granted the rights of citizens. For example, they were certainly not granted the rights conferred by the 2nd amendment.
You can't criticize the 2nd amendment for not solving a situation where it was not even in effect. It would be one thing if the slaves were all given guns and slavery just continued to persist.
You might as well criticize the 2nd amendment for not helping the people of North Korea overthrow their government.
I'm sure we will have better telescopes in 2045. We probably would not even be able to detect life on the moon (if it existed) with 2045 telescopes. The reason we can try to detect life on the moon and mars, is because of our ability to send machines with sensors to those places. There is a big difference between having your sensor millimeters away from what you are trying to sense, and light years. The nearest star is 4.2 light years away.
If we are talking about not just life, but intelligent life that wants to be found (e.g. it's broadcasting a signal), that's probably not so common. Even if we found a signal coming from some far away planet that was 100% proof of intelligent life, there is a very good chance that that civilization is long extinct, given the speed of light, and the distance the signal needed to travel.
There is probably a near 100% chance that we are not the only intelligent life in the universe. The chances of us finding one of those other intelligent life forms seems to be pretty low.
Intelligence is the only thing separating theists and atheists
I find that offensive - and I'm an atheist. In the past we've had people claim that whites are smarter than blacks, men are smarter than women, democrats are smarter than republicans and vice versa.
I don't find it offensive. I think it's just wrong, which has nothing to do with whether something is offensive.
I suspect that the people making such claims are the stupid ones. Not in the sense of IQ, but in the sense of being dumb-asses looking to affirm their "I'm better than someone else" beliefs, same as some religious people have internalized a "holier-than-thou" attitude and look down on other religions and the "unwashed heathen".
I think there is probably a high correlation between being wrong and being stupid. I wouldn't say that I expect religious people to be that much dumber than non-religious people. I just think they are simply wrong about 1 more thing on average.
Slashdot Mirror
If someone in 1980 had told me that in the 21st century we'd all have to work harder, for longer hours, and longer into our lives in order to survive, I would have thought they were crazy. But that's where they're at.
I don't think that's where we are at. The stuff you can buy for the same amount of adjusted for inflation dollars are higher quality. Everything is better. Cars are better. Food is better. Computers are better. Televisions are better. building standards are better. Everything is better.
Sure you have to work harder to make enough money to have this new higher standard of living that is possible today, but that doesn't mean we were better off in the 80's. You can live like how e lived in the 80's pretty cheaply. TV's from the 80's are more than free. People will pay you to take them away.
Even violence and crime is much lower now than the 80's.
It also dragged the the bottom up a little bit.
You don't need an army of accountants, managers or other people who provide only a drain on resources for no increase in value.
So if all these people add no increase in value, and simply drain resources (i.e. they lower the profits for the owner of a business), why do they exist? Do all these big corporations not know how to maximize their profit? Is their greed not a powerful enough motivation to figure out that they could just fire all these useless people and keep the extra profits for themselves?
This dude should call the wife of the comcast CEO and "discuss" her husband (i.e. convince her to divorce him). That will show him.
Well the fact that our legislative branch is dysfunctional is probably not a good reason to give up entirely on finding good solutions to problems.
And in general... just how would one arrive at an accurate external cost of carbon/pollution?
I am not an expert, but my initial thought is that they should be the cost of reversing or preventing the effects of burning that fuel (e.g. planting trees, paying brazilians not to cut down rainforests, etc).
A Blue State might have the political will to create an external cost for non-desireable energy sources, but it would basically have the exact same effect as subsidies for green energy, right? You either make one more expensive, or the other less expensive. Same difference in the end right?
There is the idea of making sure different types of fuels do not have an unfair advantage over eachother, but there is also the idea of having the right cost of energy in general. Having the price of every type of energy based on it's cost solves 2 big problems. It makes the playing field level between energy types, and it creates the correct incentives to reduce energy consumption to an appropriate level.
If energy prices are too high, then we will be causing more energy to be consumed than would otherwise. If energy prices are too high, then we are unnecessarily hurting the economy.
If you make physical pictures, they can always be stolen. Everything you own, physical or digital can be stolen.
The minutia of how much safer your physical house is, or how safe a physical safe is, compared to how safe the cloud is, is ultimately irrelevant. The internet could become safer with new technologies. Human beings will still be the weakest link in any security chain.
I must insist that the real societal problem is indeed the one I raised, and not the one you raised.
It's not as if 64 bit is only double the space of 32 bit. It's 4 billion times as much. We are getting into the territory where we are passed millions and billions, etc, and I have to look up what a number that big is called.
64 wasn't just a little bit of breathing room. 64 bit is probably enough address space until the end of the century.
I wouldn't say this is technically true, but it is probably a good idea to act is if it were, like treating every gun as if it were loaded.
I do sympathize with each and every actress and this must be a nightmare
It probably is a nightmare for them. But really the problem is our own society. For some reason we decide to attach shame to the human body. In some countries a woman might be punished (often by her own family) for the shame of displaying her face in public. I'm sure many of those women actually do feel the shame they were intended to feel by their societies. Should they?
It is absolutely wrong to invade people's privacy. The level of shame you decide to feel after some of your body parts are seen *can* be up to you. This is not meant to exonerate the perpetrators or blame the victim. I feel like this attitude could be empowering to the victim.
Obviously it's not all that much, but we're all paying a price for the low hardware functionality requirements.
We are, but if the requirements were higher, then we'd all be paying the price for high hardware requirements. These costs would include being forced to upgrade hardware more frequently, as opposed to now when you can just decide that your old junker just isn't quite repsponsive enough for your tastes.
We pay the price of this compromise regardless of what actual compromise is made. People who buy a new computer every year are going to have different priorities than people who's computers are older.
I think you are inferring a lot of things from this one statement that are not actually implied.
Exactly what rich features are missing?
Windows is an operating system. It's job is to allow other applications to be executed simultaneously. All of the resources windows consumes are resources denied to other applications. I'm not saying that we need to be stingy like in the bad old days when programmers where more concerned about saving clock cycles than writing scalable, maintainable, and reusable code. But now that we are passed all that, there is no sense in wasting cycles frivolously. Let the applications do that.
The other 2 things that could stop us are, the vastness of the universe, and the lifespan of our civilization. I'm sure there are countless other civilizations of intelligent life in the universe. If we had infinite time to look, we would be guaranteed to find one eventually. But we do not have infinite time.
1. The lifespan of a human being is rather short. I personally do not expect to see contact with an intelligent alien race in my lifetime.
2. The lifespan of our civilization. Maybe we will continue to prosper for billions of years. Maybe we will just nuke the whole planet before we ever manage to have any sustainable colonies outside earth.
3. The lifespan of our plant. At some point our sun will turn into a red giant and kill everything on earth. That is pretty much a hard deadline for us to be ready to find a new home.
4. The expansion of the universe due to dark energy. At some point our galaxy will be the last one we can even see, ass all other galaxies will be moving away from us at a rate faster than the speed of light. 5. The slow heat death of the universe. It some point it there will be no more usable energy left for anything including life.
Imagine an easter egg hunt where you have 1 second to look for easter eggs before the all the oxygen disappears. Maybe you'll find an egg. Maybe you won't. But your success seems more to do with luck (how close the eggs are to you, and how many there are, and how well hidden they are) than how good of an egg hunter you are.
Because everyone claims the 2nd is to keep the 4th (and others) from being repressed.
The 1st amendment right to freedom of speech and freedom of the press is also supposed to keep the 4th (and others) from being repressed by allowing people to raise awareness. I guess the 1st amendment should be abandoned as well since it too is not working.
To put it another way, it's OK for the TSA to shove their fingers up your ass as long as you're holding a gun while it is happening.
Go find me a bunch of 2nd amendment supporters that have anything nice to say about the TSA. You'll have trouble finding me anyone who has naything nice to say about the TSA. What's your point?
I don't often agree with stoddart, but put up or shut up!
What exactly am I supposed to "put up" according to you? I am advocating the rule of law.
If we can detect the planets, we already have means of detecting large amounts of oxygen on a planet.
Those seem like 2 separate claims, and I don't see why one would imply the other.
Granted, we may only be able to detect a subset and even a small subset of life on planets with life, but with millions of planets, we are bound to find some
There are way more than millions of planets out there. There are probably way more than millions of planets with life on them. That doesn't mean planets with life are common, given the size of the universe. And it doesn't mean that we will be able to find any by 2045.
How common is life that produces oxygen in mass quantity?
It doesn't matter unless you have a way of showing that on a given planet, the oxygen was produced by life. OR if you just want to assume that any planet with a lot of oxygen must contain life.
And how good will our detection methodology be in the year 2045?
Probably a bit better than it is now. 2045 is only 31 years in the future.
Because in the rest of the world, cops and soldiers are the only ones walking around with weapons, and the only places where people walk around with weapons have generally degraded into a fairly lawless state.
That may be true. But there is an even higher correlation between lawless states and the rejection of the rule of law itself. In the united states it is a protected right to own a gun. The argument that the correct way to democratically "fix" this situation if one finds it disagreeable, is to change the law (i.e. the 2nd amendment), rather than simply abandoning the rule of law.
Some are. There is a whole movement dedicated to the idea that child abuse should be illegal, but that information depicting abuse is not the same as the actual abuse that took place.
There are similar lines of reasoning for allowing snuff films, videos of rape, etc.
Or are you under the illusion that this one amendment is sacrosanct while they crap all over the rest of it?
Because blanket surveillance, property seizure because police lie and say they suspected drugs, and parallel construction are pretty much in violation of your Constitution as well.
I have yet to see a single comment from anyone (democrat or republican) arguing that the US government is properly following the 4th amendment.
I'm not sure how this makes not following the 2nd amendment in addition to not following the 4th ok.
The constitution absolutely allowed slavery. It didn't condone it, but allowing the states to decide to have slavery is "allowing" it (i.e. not prohibiting it).
So is what you are saying, that if one were to look for any historical documents linking the 2nd amendment with trying to prevent tyranny, that none would be found because none exist?
The freedom loving patriots in the south never rose up to free the black slaves - that took a fucking government army.
I don't think this is a good example. You refer to the slaves in the south as "enslaved citizens". But they weren't really citizens if they were not granted the rights of citizens. For example, they were certainly not granted the rights conferred by the 2nd amendment.
You can't criticize the 2nd amendment for not solving a situation where it was not even in effect. It would be one thing if the slaves were all given guns and slavery just continued to persist.
You might as well criticize the 2nd amendment for not helping the people of North Korea overthrow their government.
I'm sure we will have better telescopes in 2045. We probably would not even be able to detect life on the moon (if it existed) with 2045 telescopes. The reason we can try to detect life on the moon and mars, is because of our ability to send machines with sensors to those places. There is a big difference between having your sensor millimeters away from what you are trying to sense, and light years. The nearest star is 4.2 light years away.
If we are talking about not just life, but intelligent life that wants to be found (e.g. it's broadcasting a signal), that's probably not so common. Even if we found a signal coming from some far away planet that was 100% proof of intelligent life, there is a very good chance that that civilization is long extinct, given the speed of light, and the distance the signal needed to travel.
There is probably a near 100% chance that we are not the only intelligent life in the universe. The chances of us finding one of those other intelligent life forms seems to be pretty low.
Intelligence is the only thing separating theists and atheists
I find that offensive - and I'm an atheist. In the past we've had people claim that whites are smarter than blacks, men are smarter than women, democrats are smarter than republicans and vice versa.
I don't find it offensive. I think it's just wrong, which has nothing to do with whether something is offensive.
I suspect that the people making such claims are the stupid ones. Not in the sense of IQ, but in the sense of being dumb-asses looking to affirm their "I'm better than someone else" beliefs, same as some religious people have internalized a "holier-than-thou" attitude and look down on other religions and the "unwashed heathen".
I think there is probably a high correlation between being wrong and being stupid. I wouldn't say that I expect religious people to be that much dumber than non-religious people. I just think they are simply wrong about 1 more thing on average.