Active conspiracy theories have yet to be proven as actually happening or have happened.
This definition sets us up for a long argument trying to classify edge cases, which may or may not result in me demonstrating a nice clean example of something that you class as a conspiracy theory later being shown to be factual. That would be an interesting point to make, but not one that I'm willing to spend a bunch of time researching right now.
I'm much more interested in cases where things that do not meet that definition - because they are well documented - get classified as conspiracy theories and dismissed. A good example is Herman and Chomsky's Propaganda Model and the associated claim that the US mainstream media act - to a very large extent - as propaganda outlets for the US DOD. This claim doesn't fit your definition at all. It doesn't even involve a conspiracy. But it still tends to get reflexively categorized and dismissed.
I liked the conspiracy theories better. Rational thought isn't all that much fun sometimes.
"Conspiracy theories" can be entirely rational. People working together secretly towards nefarious ends is not only possible, it happens in practice. It is almost certainly the case that at least a few of the claims that get dismissed as "tinfoil hat delusions" are true.
"Space jews did WTC, wake up sheeple" is significantly lamer as an anti-conspiracy troll then it would be as an honest claim. In the later case, it's simply foolish. In the former case, it's political chaff that disrupts legitimate discussion on at least two relatively serious political issues: US government secrecy and our relationship with Israel.
Windows is popular in schools (as is mac) because the experience is more seamless then it is in a flavour of Linux.
In what way? An office suite that doesn't even have menus? Media players that have completely unique UI elements? Every application needing to be installed separately and maintained through a separately developed installation program?
As soon as you have to explain to teaching staff that Gnome isn't Linux isn't GNU isn't RedHat...
Oh, wait. I'm being trolled. I'll just be on my way.
I dislike Microsoft as much as anyone, but they do occasionally make good technical decisions - and the ribbon in Office 2007 is one of them. It's drastically ahead of what it replaces. Office 2003 *randomly hid menu items* to try to simplify the UI.
Now, I'm not saying that Office 2007 is better than Open Office, and it's certainly nice that a big UI change like the ribbon will push users to OpenOffice, but that doesn't mean that the ribbon was a bad design choice on the part of the Office team. If anything, they should be congratulated for making a relatively drastic improvement like that in spite of the break in user familiarity.
What's the big difference in IPC? I mean... shared memory is shared memory. Network sockets are network sockets. Any clever Windows thing should be wrappable in shared memory and semaphores and work fine on POSIX with only a thin compatibility layer.
After a month, 50% of games are in the bargain bin.
This used to be true, but actually seems to be less true now than it was. When I went to buy a game at Best Buy recently, some of the games with good stock, good display space, and $30+ prices were more than a year old.
The development cost on a tier-1 computer game is high enough now that not many of them get released. There isn't another game to put in the shelf slot if they take down Crysis, and there won't be for another year or so.
We really need to be able to have laws that let people and corporations claim extra-terrestrial property as their own.
No government has jurisdiction. If you claim it (with a full time human presence) it'll be yours, regardless of what the treaties say, unless you try to claim some thing unique and worth contesting. The absolute worst case would be needing a flag of convenience for your earthbound legal presence.
Space exploration, intended to lead to significant off-planet industry and settlement in the long term, is essential for the future progress of humanity as a whole. Exactly what the benifits will be isn't something that can be usefully predicted, but simply ignoring the resources of almost all of our solar system is clearly not a reasonable plan.
Currently only major governments have the resources to mount any sort of space exploration efforts. Since it's essential, and only major governments can do it, major governments must do it. That will remain true until it becomes viable for smaller organizations to take up the burden.
In order for government funded exploration to effectively lead towards future off-planet industry and settlement, the exploration effort must contribute towards lowering the price of and broadening access to space exploration technology. Meaningful off-planet industry and settlement won't occur at major-government-only price points, and it won't occur with major governments as the gatekeepers.
A military space program would be unlikely to meet these requirements. Technology would be kept secret rather than being shared, which would fail to contribute to advances by private sector entities and smaller governments. Flashy exploration spectacles would likely still occur - perhaps even more efficiently - but the main benefit to a government run space program would be lost.
A government funded space program's primary task should be to provide seed knowledge and technology for future private space exploration. It will have succeeded when there are multiple separately owned private sector moonbases, asteroid mines, orbital power stations, and long term research habitats. A military space program would subvert this goal through misallocation of resources and refusal to publicly disclose publicly funded developments.
the worst case scenario from a nuclear power plant demonstrated to date is the rendering of 3000 Sqkms of land uninhabitable and nuclear fallout over an entire continent. That is the reality of a nuclear power plant, terror strike, design failure, operator error or whatever.
So your logic is that because a first generation nuclear power plant, from the 1950's, with terrible design properties, failed catastrophically when every operational safety procedure was violated at once - therefore a nuclear battery design being proposed in the 2000's must be equally dangerous?
Gas stations don't contain radioactive elements, the way a reactor core does. Do you actually have a valid argument to make?
I stand by my argument. Radioactive elements aren't magical superweapons. Gas stations can explode. Gas tankers can explode. A small scale nuclear battery can't. QED
The reality is that deploying reactors in this manner just increases the available target count and presents enormous infrastructure issues in terms of constant monitoring to keep them safe, transport, refuelling issues and so on. Any one of these points in the chain are a terrorist target.
So... do you oppose gas stations too? They're similarly dangerous as terrorist targets.
Whose to say a terrorist attack couldn't be mounted *after* the reactor is dug up and put on a truck when it contains the most radioactive elements, provoked into a run-away reaction and simply driven into a large city.
Nuclear batteries aren't bombs. Nuclear power plants aren't bombs. They aren't even potential bombs.
Making a nuclear bomb is very difficult. Engineers have worked very hard to make sure that nuclear power devices are nothing like bombs.
This is like saying that every solar power installation is dangerous because it's a potential death ray, or that every coal plant is hugely dangerous because it will transform into a giant steampunk robot death machine. It's not just silly, it's crazy paranoid Luddite delusion.
I see that Israel is doing pretty well on their side of the propaganda war. Your comment is pretty much exactly what Israel is saying, and it's completely different from what the Palestinians are saying. Israel has traditionally had a lock on the news coverage of this dispute, especially in the United States. The interesting part about the Web in this story is that Palestine is managing to get their side out somewhat more effectively than usual - see, for example, http://www.reddit.com/r/politics
Well that depends on the terrorist object doesn't it? maybe they would just want to render the area un-inhabitable for the next 10000 years and increase cancer rates causing ongoing casualties for the next hundred years.
If they want to do that, there are perfectly good chemical plants near densely populated areas they could bomb. Some of them have really big tanks of highly toxic and blatantly carcinogenic stuff. Full size nuclear power plants might be an especially juicy target. Little nuclear batteries aren't.
The "hacking" part is a distraction from the important part of this story: A massive propaganda war. And the outcome of that propaganda war could be as significant to the outcome of the conflict as the bombs. Even if it just makes either side shy away from targeting civilians, it's still hugely important.
You don't seem to grasp the key concept here: If there were really terrorists who wanted to do a lot of damage they'd have done it already. There are much "better" targets than a nuclear battery already available. Do you know what would happen if terrorists hit a natural gas refinery? Big mushroom cloud. A nuclear battery just isn't that big a deal - it'd be like bombing a toxic waste dump: expensive to clean up, three casualties.
But we are FAR from solving the waste disposal problems. As stated earlier today, the correct solution would be to launch it all into the sun, but a launch failure causing poisonous scatter is the problem with that utopia.
The right thing to do is to store it in a concrete building under heavy water for, at most, 50 - 100 years while pouring money into fuel recycling technology and strengthening the environmental regulations on uranium mining. That "nuclear waste" will be a gold mine just as soon as it's economical to recycle it, since it still has 90%+ of its energy content.
There are indeed people who fit this stereotype, but harping on it is not an intelligent way to respond to thoughtful, well-educated people with legitimate concerns about nuclear waste disposal, WMD proliferation, and accidental releases of radiation. If nuclear proponents stopped this ad hominem crap and started honestly addressing people's concerns (assuming that it's possible to do so; I haven't seen a lot of hard facts between the insults) then maybe, maybe you'll stop getting a NIMBY response every time you use the word "nuclear".
Everything that even vaguely resembles a legitimate concern has been addressed over and over again. Modern nuclear technology solves the waste and proliferation concerns. Dangerous radiation releases aren't a realistic threat. But every time someone with the appropriate credentials says these things, and presents the evidence to support it, they're dismissed as being biased by their education or their personal links to the development of nuclear technology.
If you personally want to actually understand the issue, I suggest you go read up on it. Some topics of interest are nuclear fuel cycles, weapons-grade vs. fuel grade materials, and the actual effects of historical nuclear accidents. Greenpeace probably isn't an unbiased source. If you haven't seen two or three designs for modern fast-neutron breeder reactors and understood why they're claimed to be proliferation resistant, you haven't spent enough time reading.
Communism is a loaded propaganda term that's basically meaningless, but I'm guessing you mean "strong state socialism", which is an economic system. Strong state socialism with free communication and democracy would be an interesting experiment - we can see weak state socialism, working great, in Northern Europe.
Saying that Communism means Totalitarian Socialism would be like saying Capitalism means Fascism. It's certainly the way it was presented as a propaganda term during the cold war, but it's not terribly useful to accept that meaning.
If you're so afraid of other people's opinions on how to raise their kids, what makes you think that your opinions are any good?
More importantly, you don't seem to grasp what is destroyed by preventing schools from determining their own curriculum. Rather than thinking of the worst case, think of the best case; it's prevented just as effectively.
Now consider some unexpected cases - what if a small rural school district is short a teacher and there's an educated person they can try to recruit. But the educated person isn't a teacher, and has no interest in the universal curriculum. Maybe they're a civil engineer and want to talk about building dams. Maybe they're a retired university philosophy professor and want to run through the first half of their old Philosophy 101 course. Maybe they're a retired archaeologist and want to teach about the history of the Roman occupation of Europe with discussion of specific archaeological finds.
Any one of those things is likely to be more interesting and educational than *any* specific chunk of a mandated curriculum taught by a generalist teacher. But woe be it if someone misses mandatory "social studies" for something interesting. That sort of deviation isn't allowed.
Actually, you are quite missing my point, which is to state that none of these actions that are being conducted are meddlesome. All federal funds can be refused by a state, and any state could refuse to submit their data to the department of education.
With the amount of funds that the federal government takes, this isn't a realistic way of looking at it. It would make a lot more sense if the states that opted-out got their citizens out of a chunk of taxes (that could then be collected at the state level to fund the same services - or not).
Slashdot Mirror
This definition sets us up for a long argument trying to classify edge cases, which may or may not result in me demonstrating a nice clean example of something that you class as a conspiracy theory later being shown to be factual. That would be an interesting point to make, but not one that I'm willing to spend a bunch of time researching right now.
I'm much more interested in cases where things that do not meet that definition - because they are well documented - get classified as conspiracy theories and dismissed. A good example is Herman and Chomsky's Propaganda Model and the associated claim that the US mainstream media act - to a very large extent - as propaganda outlets for the US DOD. This claim doesn't fit your definition at all. It doesn't even involve a conspiracy. But it still tends to get reflexively categorized and dismissed.
"Conspiracy theories" can be entirely rational. People working together secretly towards nefarious ends is not only possible, it happens in practice. It is almost certainly the case that at least a few of the claims that get dismissed as "tinfoil hat delusions" are true.
"Space jews did WTC, wake up sheeple" is significantly lamer as an anti-conspiracy troll then it would be as an honest claim. In the later case, it's simply foolish. In the former case, it's political chaff that disrupts legitimate discussion on at least two relatively serious political issues: US government secrecy and our relationship with Israel.
In what way? An office suite that doesn't even have menus? Media players that have completely unique UI elements? Every application needing to be installed separately and maintained through a separately developed installation program?
Oh, wait. I'm being trolled. I'll just be on my way.
I dislike Microsoft as much as anyone, but they do occasionally make good technical decisions - and the ribbon in Office 2007 is one of them. It's drastically ahead of what it replaces. Office 2003 *randomly hid menu items* to try to simplify the UI.
Now, I'm not saying that Office 2007 is better than Open Office, and it's certainly nice that a big UI change like the ribbon will push users to OpenOffice, but that doesn't mean that the ribbon was a bad design choice on the part of the Office team. If anything, they should be congratulated for making a relatively drastic improvement like that in spite of the break in user familiarity.
What's the big difference in IPC? I mean... shared memory is shared memory. Network sockets are network sockets. Any clever Windows thing should be wrappable in shared memory and semaphores and work fine on POSIX with only a thin compatibility layer.
This used to be true, but actually seems to be less true now than it was. When I went to buy a game at Best Buy recently, some of the games with good stock, good display space, and $30+ prices were more than a year old.
The development cost on a tier-1 computer game is high enough now that not many of them get released. There isn't another game to put in the shelf slot if they take down Crysis, and there won't be for another year or so.
Anywhere. The selection of decent mid-range cards at low-end price points (less than $150) is better today than I've ever seen it before.
Take a look at Tom's Hardware's "Best Cards for The Money" for a good overview.
No government has jurisdiction. If you claim it (with a full time human presence) it'll be yours, regardless of what the treaties say, unless you try to claim some thing unique and worth contesting. The absolute worst case would be needing a flag of convenience for your earthbound legal presence.
Space exploration, intended to lead to significant off-planet industry and settlement in the long term, is essential for the future progress of humanity as a whole. Exactly what the benifits will be isn't something that can be usefully predicted, but simply ignoring the resources of almost all of our solar system is clearly not a reasonable plan.
Currently only major governments have the resources to mount any sort of space exploration efforts. Since it's essential, and only major governments can do it, major governments must do it. That will remain true until it becomes viable for smaller organizations to take up the burden.
In order for government funded exploration to effectively lead towards future off-planet industry and settlement, the exploration effort must contribute towards lowering the price of and broadening access to space exploration technology. Meaningful off-planet industry and settlement won't occur at major-government-only price points, and it won't occur with major governments as the gatekeepers.
A military space program would be unlikely to meet these requirements. Technology would be kept secret rather than being shared, which would fail to contribute to advances by private sector entities and smaller governments. Flashy exploration spectacles would likely still occur - perhaps even more efficiently - but the main benefit to a government run space program would be lost.
A government funded space program's primary task should be to provide seed knowledge and technology for future private space exploration. It will have succeeded when there are multiple separately owned private sector moonbases, asteroid mines, orbital power stations, and long term research habitats. A military space program would subvert this goal through misallocation of resources and refusal to publicly disclose publicly funded developments.
So your logic is that because a first generation nuclear power plant, from the 1950's, with terrible design properties, failed catastrophically when every operational safety procedure was violated at once - therefore a nuclear battery design being proposed in the 2000's must be equally dangerous?
I stand by my argument. Radioactive elements aren't magical superweapons. Gas stations can explode. Gas tankers can explode. A small scale nuclear battery can't. QED
So... do you oppose gas stations too? They're similarly dangerous as terrorist targets.
Nuclear batteries aren't bombs. Nuclear power plants aren't bombs. They aren't even potential bombs.
Making a nuclear bomb is very difficult. Engineers have worked very hard to make sure that nuclear power devices are nothing like bombs.
This is like saying that every solar power installation is dangerous because it's a potential death ray, or that every coal plant is hugely dangerous because it will transform into a giant steampunk robot death machine. It's not just silly, it's crazy paranoid Luddite delusion.
I see that Israel is doing pretty well on their side of the propaganda war. Your comment is pretty much exactly what Israel is saying, and it's completely different from what the Palestinians are saying. Israel has traditionally had a lock on the news coverage of this dispute, especially in the United States. The interesting part about the Web in this story is that Palestine is managing to get their side out somewhat more effectively than usual - see, for example, http://www.reddit.com/r/politics
If they want to do that, there are perfectly good chemical plants near densely populated areas they could bomb. Some of them have really big tanks of highly toxic and blatantly carcinogenic stuff. Full size nuclear power plants might be an especially juicy target. Little nuclear batteries aren't.
The "hacking" part is a distraction from the important part of this story: A massive propaganda war. And the outcome of that propaganda war could be as significant to the outcome of the conflict as the bombs. Even if it just makes either side shy away from targeting civilians, it's still hugely important.
It certainly isn't true of Solar Thermal. But when people say "solar" they usually mean photovoltaic, which has always been pretty expensive.
You don't seem to grasp the key concept here: If there were really terrorists who wanted to do a lot of damage they'd have done it already. There are much "better" targets than a nuclear battery already available. Do you know what would happen if terrorists hit a natural gas refinery? Big mushroom cloud. A nuclear battery just isn't that big a deal - it'd be like bombing a toxic waste dump: expensive to clean up, three casualties.
The right thing to do is to store it in a concrete building under heavy water for, at most, 50 - 100 years while pouring money into fuel recycling technology and strengthening the environmental regulations on uranium mining. That "nuclear waste" will be a gold mine just as soon as it's economical to recycle it, since it still has 90%+ of its energy content.
Everything that even vaguely resembles a legitimate concern has been addressed over and over again. Modern nuclear technology solves the waste and proliferation concerns. Dangerous radiation releases aren't a realistic threat. But every time someone with the appropriate credentials says these things, and presents the evidence to support it, they're dismissed as being biased by their education or their personal links to the development of nuclear technology.
If you personally want to actually understand the issue, I suggest you go read up on it. Some topics of interest are nuclear fuel cycles, weapons-grade vs. fuel grade materials, and the actual effects of historical nuclear accidents. Greenpeace probably isn't an unbiased source. If you haven't seen two or three designs for modern fast-neutron breeder reactors and understood why they're claimed to be proliferation resistant, you haven't spent enough time reading.
How much power does the off-chip memory controller draw on that 95-watt core 2 quad?
If they punish people for what they write, they're evil. When it comes to evil governments, that's one of the obvious clues.
Communism is a loaded propaganda term that's basically meaningless, but I'm guessing you mean "strong state socialism", which is an economic system. Strong state socialism with free communication and democracy would be an interesting experiment - we can see weak state socialism, working great, in Northern Europe.
Saying that Communism means Totalitarian Socialism would be like saying Capitalism means Fascism. It's certainly the way it was presented as a propaganda term during the cold war, but it's not terribly useful to accept that meaning.
If you're so afraid of other people's opinions on how to raise their kids, what makes you think that your opinions are any good?
More importantly, you don't seem to grasp what is destroyed by preventing schools from determining their own curriculum. Rather than thinking of the worst case, think of the best case; it's prevented just as effectively.
Now consider some unexpected cases - what if a small rural school district is short a teacher and there's an educated person they can try to recruit. But the educated person isn't a teacher, and has no interest in the universal curriculum. Maybe they're a civil engineer and want to talk about building dams. Maybe they're a retired university philosophy professor and want to run through the first half of their old Philosophy 101 course. Maybe they're a retired archaeologist and want to teach about the history of the Roman occupation of Europe with discussion of specific archaeological finds.
Any one of those things is likely to be more interesting and educational than *any* specific chunk of a mandated curriculum taught by a generalist teacher. But woe be it if someone misses mandatory "social studies" for something interesting. That sort of deviation isn't allowed.
With the amount of funds that the federal government takes, this isn't a realistic way of looking at it. It would make a lot more sense if the states that opted-out got their citizens out of a chunk of taxes (that could then be collected at the state level to fund the same services - or not).