"The green reasons don't drive the passion. They're strong arguments, but that's not the answer you were looking for. The passion comes from the denial for purely political reasons."
I don't understand what you mean by the phrase "purely political". If you mean "a majority of voters in a democracy don't want it"... well, DUH. When it comes down to it, everything that happens in a society which has to do with human choices is "political" in that sense.
The reason why nuclear power is rejected by the majority is fear, and that fear comes from very valid reasons: the deep military-level secrecy and corruption shrouding even the basic science as well as the technolgoy of nuclear physics, and the proven failures of some nuclear power companies from the 1970s to the 1990s to administer their plants to the required level of competence.
"When it's important enough, we can keep stuff out of the wrong hands"
That however, is a very big "if". When we thought it was important enough, we were also able to go to the Moon with slide rules. However, things change, infrastructure decays, and we don't currently have even Apollo technology; so do you really want to bet on the lives of your citizens not only that "when it's important" you can keep a massively complicated and inherently dangerous power-generating infrastructure safe, but that you can promise and deliver this safety for generations afterwards, even through social upheavals? Because that's what you have to able to do.
The really big problem with nuclear power, and what generates so much fear around it - and yes, it is a "political" issue in that it deals with the geometries of social power and centralisation vs decentralisation, bureaucracy vs democracy, issues that all geeks should be concerned about - is that nuclear fission is an *inherently unsafe* technology. It can be MADE safe, within certain tolerances, but only after the fact, by adding various countermeasures. Those all add risk, cost and centralisation, putting social power in the hands of a few. Do we really want to go down that route?
Ionizing radiation is inherently hostile to carbon-based life. That's the bottom line. No, it won't kill you instantly, but it's there and it's not part of the normal Earth ecosystem. To make fission power work, you have to find ways of blocking, neutralising, or containing that radiation. You have to take it out of the eco-loop somehow. You have to build technological walls and ghettos, create danger zones, invent safety protocols. None of which are needed with other forms of power, to the same extent. It just seems like going about things the wrong way and asking for trouble.
"Because there are no valid reasons to say "no""
Yes, there are, and I've listed them above. Inherent risk, and forced centralisation vs decentralisation of generation infrastructure. Both are unacceptable to my way of thinking.
"As a general clarification, ounce for ounce, coal ash released from a power plant delivers more radiation than nuclear waste shielded via water or dry cask storage."
That's a fairly big qualification, though, isn't it? Raw coal ash vs *shielded* nuclear waste?
I don't think many environmental protestors are claiming that nuclear waste, if shielded, emits radiation. The worries are about whether the shielding actually survives and doesn't break down over years, leach into groundwater, etc.
"He pointed out that people do in fact pay for music online, even when using a site such as ThePirateBay. They pay their ISPs every month. They are will to pay for this content. He called this the "swindle of the century". "
Your brother's argument restated, in the 1970s, when cassette tapes first arose:
"People DO pay for music. They pay their power utility, their hi-fi manufacturers, their living room lounge chair manufacturers, their carpet installers, their landlord/mortgage company, their supermarket... so we should add a 'music bill' to all of these.
Or maybe just your electrical power company - they're the prime culprit. When you think about it, paying for electricity without paying a music licence is outright theft!"
The problem is that an ISP isn't selling a content licence; they're just selling the service of moving bits, and they shouldn't care what those bits represent. And as the copyright industry has long been at pains to grind into us, bits are not licences.
If you're going to roll bits in WITH content licences, then the price for equivalent Internet service is going to go way up. We'll all have to have mandatory long-term subscriptions to iTunes, or the equivalent. (In which case, if you want to go that route, funding it through taxes might be a sensible proposition; since what you would have created would be a natural monopoly, to which efficiencies of scale and fairness/equal access would need to apply, and a national government seems like the best institution created to address such issues.)
"I know there are TONS of holes in these lines of though, but the madness has got to stop. People are paying for all of this content but it is not getting to the people that actually make the content."
No, they're not paying for the content at present, so nobody's actually being 'swindled'. That's the whole problem. Consumers (and servers; nobody's getting a free bandwidth ride) are merely paying the marginal cost of *distributing* that content, which is near-zero, and makes no discrimination between 'free' and 'copy-restricted' content. What is wanted is a system that somehow funds the much bigger *creation* cost of content (at least for certain types of capital-heavy content like studio recordings; webcomics and funny blog posts might have distribution costs that actually outweigh their creation costs), preferably without setting up an industrialised, automated prison-state system to ensure compliance with your Mandatory Monthly Potential Happiness Bill.
And yet a camel is adapted perfectly for a very hostile environment, and carries an entire civilisation's history and commerce on its back with great efficiency.
Yeah, I don't agree that King's experiment has anything much to do with Street Performer Protocol (which is what we're talking about).
I participated. I read his first chapter for free, decided I did not like it and was not going to read any more, and declined to pay. Neither have I bought the book version, or read any pirated versions of The Plant. It just wasn't my thing.
I did exactly as he asked, and yet he considered that a 'failure' because he was counting 'percentage of conversions of reads to pays', so my 'I read it, I don't like it, I won't pay' was counted by him as one of the 'freeloaders'.
This is the wrong methodology, so it's not surprising he got the wrong results.
Re:It's actually kind of scary
on
Lost In the Cloud
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"Really? It's illegal>/i> to develop a browser for the iPhone? Can you point me to the state or federal statute that criminalized creating an iPhone browser?"
"Thus, releasing anything that's substandard is self-defeating. Losing control of subsequent re-use, too, is self-defeating if it allows someone to put my work into some crappy collage or print it incompetently. (That last one really drives traditional wedding photographers crazy.) "
Why? You're afraid of 'losing control' of SOMEONE ELSE'S memories of their special moment? Control freak much?
Disclaimer: I am not a professional photographer and I guess it shows, and maybe there's an explanation for this, but this attitude just absolutely shocks me to the core. You're the guy hired to take photos of someone else, they pay you for it, and then YOU want to control what THEY do with that image of THEM forever after????
I can't grasp the frame of mind that thinks this is acceptable. Sorry. If this is standard for the photography industry, it just seems like something that needs to change, like right now. You do the job, you get it done, you go away, bye. What happens afterwards with those pictures isn't and shouldn't be any of your concern, surely.
"If I transfered to you the copyright, I would be giving up my own rights to the images, meaning I could not, without your permission, sell printed copies to your friends and family (and they may prefer images retouched and enhanced by a trained artist and then printed at a professional lab, as opposed to a drug-store photomat or home inkjet) or use the images in my own portfolio or enter them in competitions. So I'm not going to do that."
No! Fail! Wrong! That's the very definition of "work for hire".
Surely if any kind of photography is "work for hire" then it's wedding photography. It's someone else's special day, you're just the person hired to take images of it and hand them over.
"I think that's a pretty fair deal, and is probably more like what you're after."
No, I don't think it's a fair deal at all. It's OUR wedding, it's OUR memory, WE want to have the rights. You were just there looking through the lens. You didn't create the moment, you didn't organise the catering, you didn't buy the outfits. You're just an interchangeable cog delivering a service, so please deliver it and then get the heck out.
And for goodness sakes don't later try to reproduce pictures in a photo contest or something without our permission! They shouldn't be YOUR pictures because IT'S NOT YOUR WEDDING!!!
So charge extra if you need to, but man. Why is this so hard to understand? Is there some kind of weird wedding photographer mafia cartel or something?
Gather round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun, A man whose allegiance Is ruled by expedience. Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown. "Ha, Nazi Schmazi," says Wernher von Braun.
Don't say that he's hypocritical, Say rather that he's apolitical.
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.
"the only thing that makes it NOT truly Turing-complete is the absence of infinite storage"
I've never really understood this part of 'Turing-complete'. If an algorithm requires infinite storage, isn't it also going to take infinite time to access that storage? Therefore it will never complete, therefore it's undecidable, surely. Or did you mean 'finite but unbounded, just slightly bigger than the (computable) problem at hand requires'?
The blots! I hear scratching at the door as I write this last entry in my journal. I only pray no poor fool will read this and repeat my experiments with certain hypercomplex geometries of extended Cayley numbers. I already fear I have exposed the world to too much danger, as the mad prophet Rorshach foretold. The blots! The hideous inkblots! I should have burned them. Even the outlines may be... Now the door is opening of its own...... Mom???
1. Batman 2. Batman kissing Catwoman 3. Batman getting out of the Batmobile 4. Batman 5. Batman 6. Batman on Gotham City Bridge 7. Mr Freeze 8. The Joker 9. The Joker 10. Dead Joker
By the time you have decent neural I/O, you'll have a world of simulators to choose from. Nobody's going to kidnap anybody if they can experience the same thing with a cheap simulation.
Well, unless the simulation itself is sentient, and they want to kidnap *that* in the hopes the meat-you (or the master simulation with bank authority) will care... see several Greg Egan stories.
"But as someone who has degrees in both philosophy and mathematics, I've got to say this: belief in fictional, mythological spirits can only be damaging to serious discussions about any subject area."
That would be a sensible and rational conclusion if spirits and the realm they inhabit *were* fictional and mythological and all scientific evidence pointed toward a purely material universe.
However, that's not the case, as investigations into extra-sensory perception, remote viewing, anomalous cognition, and other paranormal phenomena have revealed. And in the last few years, a number of researchers have started documenting this evidence for a new generation.
The modern age of Spiritualism - since the Fox sisters in 1848 - launched the Society for Psychical Research, which gathered an immense amount of extraordinary data. Since then, there have been a number of independent scientific programs evaluating the 'spiritual', and the data is very interesting.
Ignorance of this field among the scientifically-educated who are not parapsychologists is understandable - given the hostility of gatekeeper publications like Scientific American and anti-psi advocacy groups like CSICOP/CSI - but, well, it's now 2009, we have the Internet, and if you really do have an open mind and would like to look at the data yourself rather than having your mind made up for you by others, now is a wonderful time to dive in and explore.
The mother of all textbooks on the subject is Kelly & Kelly et al's Irreducible Mind with a wall of footnotes, aimed at a college-level audience - if you want a more approachable entree to the subject, I highly recommend the late Elizabeth Mayer's Extraordinary Knowing, Chris Carter's (not the X-files guy, someone else) Parapsychology and the Skeptics, or Dean Radin's .
Don't limit yourself by irrationally saying 'well this stuff is impossible therefore I won't even look at the data'. Instead, try looking at the data and then ask 'if this stuff really occurs, then what does this imply about the nature of the universe?' If you open that door, and investigate the material, you'll find there's an extraordinary reality inside. But be warned that it will change you.
'and last time I checked, people like you are busily screaming that we're going to murder the planet unless everybody does exactly as the GW crowd says they should do."
Yes, and? What if we *are* murdering the planet?
Your sentence seems to suggest that you think 'screaming that we're going to murder the planet' is, in itself, reason to reject the argument, because.... why, exactly? Because 'we're killing the planet' is too hard to grasp? Too big an idea? Too horrible to contemplate? But humans have already done some pretty horrible things on very large scales in the 20th century, and geocide is the logical extension of our technological and social trajectory since WW2.
I confess that I can't grasp the state of mind necessary to deliberate reject knowlede of an atrocity on the grounds that its advocates are too intense.
If we're murdering the planet, the correct rational response IS to scream, and if 'the Global Warming crowd' are correct then OF COURSE they should be telling us to do exactly what they're telling us to do!
"if their clients get owned, it looks bad on the vendor, but you cant force your clients to do anything."
That's because it IS bad on the vendor. End of story.
The vendor should have taken all due precautions to prevent security flaws in their code BEFORE they released it. They didn't. Any ownage is now entirely their fault, regardless of patching. It should never be the client's responsibility to apply a patch.
We don't tolerate 'apply a patch after the fact' as an answer in other disciplines. We shouldn't tolerate it in computing. Do it once, do it right, zero tolerance for security bugs.
If your language (*cough* C, C++) does not help you do this then stop using that language and use/create appropriate tools.
Slashdot Mirror
"The green reasons don't drive the passion. They're strong arguments, but that's not the answer you were looking for. The passion comes from the denial for purely political reasons."
I don't understand what you mean by the phrase "purely political". If you mean "a majority of voters in a democracy don't want it"... well, DUH. When it comes down to it, everything that happens in a society which has to do with human choices is "political" in that sense.
The reason why nuclear power is rejected by the majority is fear, and that fear comes from very valid reasons: the deep military-level secrecy and corruption shrouding even the basic science as well as the technolgoy of nuclear physics, and the proven failures of some nuclear power companies from the 1970s to the 1990s to administer their plants to the required level of competence.
"When it's important enough, we can keep stuff out of the wrong hands"
That however, is a very big "if". When we thought it was important enough, we were also able to go to the Moon with slide rules. However, things change, infrastructure decays, and we don't currently have even Apollo technology; so do you really want to bet on the lives of your citizens not only that "when it's important" you can keep a massively complicated and inherently dangerous power-generating infrastructure safe, but that you can promise and deliver this safety for generations afterwards, even through social upheavals? Because that's what you have to able to do.
The really big problem with nuclear power, and what generates so much fear around it - and yes, it is a "political" issue in that it deals with the geometries of social power and centralisation vs decentralisation, bureaucracy vs democracy, issues that all geeks should be concerned about - is that nuclear fission is an *inherently unsafe* technology. It can be MADE safe, within certain tolerances, but only after the fact, by adding various countermeasures. Those all add risk, cost and centralisation, putting social power in the hands of a few. Do we really want to go down that route?
Ionizing radiation is inherently hostile to carbon-based life. That's the bottom line. No, it won't kill you instantly, but it's there and it's not part of the normal Earth ecosystem. To make fission power work, you have to find ways of blocking, neutralising, or containing that radiation. You have to take it out of the eco-loop somehow. You have to build technological walls and ghettos, create danger zones, invent safety protocols. None of which are needed with other forms of power, to the same extent. It just seems like going about things the wrong way and asking for trouble.
"Because there are no valid reasons to say "no""
Yes, there are, and I've listed them above. Inherent risk, and forced centralisation vs decentralisation of generation infrastructure. Both are unacceptable to my way of thinking.
"As a general clarification, ounce for ounce, coal ash released from a power plant delivers more radiation than nuclear waste shielded via water or dry cask storage."
That's a fairly big qualification, though, isn't it? Raw coal ash vs *shielded* nuclear waste?
I don't think many environmental protestors are claiming that nuclear waste, if shielded, emits radiation. The worries are about whether the shielding actually survives and doesn't break down over years, leach into groundwater, etc.
"He pointed out that people do in fact pay for music online, even when using a site such as ThePirateBay. They pay their ISPs every month. They are will to pay for this content. He called this the "swindle of the century". "
Your brother's argument restated, in the 1970s, when cassette tapes first arose:
"People DO pay for music. They pay their power utility, their hi-fi manufacturers, their living room lounge chair manufacturers, their carpet installers, their landlord/mortgage company, their supermarket... so we should add a 'music bill' to all of these.
Or maybe just your electrical power company - they're the prime culprit. When you think about it, paying for electricity without paying a music licence is outright theft!"
The problem is that an ISP isn't selling a content licence; they're just selling the service of moving bits, and they shouldn't care what those bits represent. And as the copyright industry has long been at pains to grind into us, bits are not licences.
If you're going to roll bits in WITH content licences, then the price for equivalent Internet service is going to go way up. We'll all have to have mandatory long-term subscriptions to iTunes, or the equivalent. (In which case, if you want to go that route, funding it through taxes might be a sensible proposition; since what you would have created would be a natural monopoly, to which efficiencies of scale and fairness/equal access would need to apply, and a national government seems like the best institution created to address such issues.)
"I know there are TONS of holes in these lines of though, but the madness has got to stop. People are paying for all of this content but it is not getting to the people that actually make the content."
No, they're not paying for the content at present, so nobody's actually being 'swindled'. That's the whole problem. Consumers (and servers; nobody's getting a free bandwidth ride) are merely paying the marginal cost of *distributing* that content, which is near-zero, and makes no discrimination between 'free' and 'copy-restricted' content. What is wanted is a system that somehow funds the much bigger *creation* cost of content (at least for certain types of capital-heavy content like studio recordings; webcomics and funny blog posts might have distribution costs that actually outweigh their creation costs), preferably without setting up an industrialised, automated prison-state system to ensure compliance with your Mandatory Monthly Potential Happiness Bill.
""A camel is a horse designed by comittee""
And yet a camel is adapted perfectly for a very hostile environment, and carries an entire civilisation's history and commerce on its back with great efficiency.
Something to think about.
Maybe it's now a refunct business model!
If that's not a word, it should be.
Yeah, I don't agree that King's experiment has anything much to do with Street Performer Protocol (which is what we're talking about).
I participated. I read his first chapter for free, decided I did not like it and was not going to read any more, and declined to pay. Neither have I bought the book version, or read any pirated versions of The Plant. It just wasn't my thing.
I did exactly as he asked, and yet he considered that a 'failure' because he was counting 'percentage of conversions of reads to pays', so my 'I read it, I don't like it, I won't pay' was counted by him as one of the 'freeloaders'.
This is the wrong methodology, so it's not surprising he got the wrong results.
"Really? It's illegal>/i> to develop a browser for the iPhone? Can you point me to the state or federal statute that criminalized creating an iPhone browser?"
Hmm. Is it illegal to break a signed contract?
Wouldn't that be more like a 'lukewarmbed'?
"Thus, releasing anything that's substandard is self-defeating. Losing control of subsequent re-use, too, is self-defeating if it allows someone to put my work into some crappy collage or print it incompetently. (That last one really drives traditional wedding photographers crazy.) "
Why? You're afraid of 'losing control' of SOMEONE ELSE'S memories of their special moment? Control freak much?
Disclaimer: I am not a professional photographer and I guess it shows, and maybe there's an explanation for this, but this attitude just absolutely shocks me to the core. You're the guy hired to take photos of someone else, they pay you for it, and then YOU want to control what THEY do with that image of THEM forever after????
I can't grasp the frame of mind that thinks this is acceptable. Sorry. If this is standard for the photography industry, it just seems like something that needs to change, like right now. You do the job, you get it done, you go away, bye. What happens afterwards with those pictures isn't and shouldn't be any of your concern, surely.
"If I transfered to you the copyright, I would be giving up my own rights to the images, meaning I could not, without your permission, sell printed copies to your friends and family (and they may prefer images retouched and enhanced by a trained artist and then printed at a professional lab, as opposed to a drug-store photomat or home inkjet) or use the images in my own portfolio or enter them in competitions. So I'm not going to do that."
No! Fail! Wrong! That's the very definition of "work for hire".
Surely if any kind of photography is "work for hire" then it's wedding photography. It's someone else's special day, you're just the person hired to take images of it and hand them over.
"I think that's a pretty fair deal, and is probably more like what you're after."
No, I don't think it's a fair deal at all. It's OUR wedding, it's OUR memory, WE want to have the rights. You were just there looking through the lens. You didn't create the moment, you didn't organise the catering, you didn't buy the outfits. You're just an interchangeable cog delivering a service, so please deliver it and then get the heck out.
And for goodness sakes don't later try to reproduce pictures in a photo contest or something without our permission! They shouldn't be YOUR pictures because IT'S NOT YOUR WEDDING!!!
So charge extra if you need to, but man. Why is this so hard to understand? Is there some kind of weird wedding photographer mafia cartel or something?
In the immortal words of Tom Lehrer:
Gather round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun,
A man whose allegiance
Is ruled by expedience.
Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown.
"Ha, Nazi Schmazi," says Wernher von Braun.
Don't say that he's hypocritical,
Say rather that he's apolitical.
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.
On the other hand, you don't fly in a Shuttle once every six months for several years on end.
Darn directors cuts! I *liked* the old version where you could see the Vaseline blur under the LM, and Armstrong shot first.
This is your act of terrorism. (Boom!)
This is your act of terrorism on drugs. (Wheee! Sploink. Moo?! )
Any questions?
"the only thing that makes it NOT truly Turing-complete is the absence of infinite storage"
I've never really understood this part of 'Turing-complete'. If an algorithm requires infinite storage, isn't it also going to take infinite time to access that storage? Therefore it will never complete, therefore it's undecidable, surely. Or did you mean 'finite but unbounded, just slightly bigger than the (computable) problem at hand requires'?
The blots! I hear scratching at the door as I write this last entry in my journal. I only pray no poor fool will read this and repeat my experiments with certain hypercomplex geometries of extended Cayley numbers. I already fear I have exposed the world to too much danger, as the mad prophet Rorshach foretold. The blots! The hideous inkblots! I should have burned them. Even the outlines may be... Now the door is opening of its own ... ... Mom???
1. Batman
2. Batman kissing Catwoman
3. Batman getting out of the Batmobile
4. Batman
5. Batman
6. Batman on Gotham City Bridge
7. Mr Freeze
8. The Joker
9. The Joker
10. Dead Joker
You sound angry. Tell me how you feel about this.
Does it please you to believe that I sound angry tell you how I feel about this?
By the time you have decent neural I/O, you'll have a world of simulators to choose from. Nobody's going to kidnap anybody if they can experience the same thing with a cheap simulation.
Well, unless the simulation itself is sentient, and they want to kidnap *that* in the hopes the meat-you (or the master simulation with bank authority) will care... see several Greg Egan stories.
"I mean, for pete sake people, what possible gain would there be in trying to break into a mechanical leg?"
One word: Lolz.
Markup d'oh. Dean Radin's Entangled Minds.
"But as someone who has degrees in both philosophy and mathematics, I've got to say this: belief in fictional, mythological spirits can only be damaging to serious discussions about any subject area."
That would be a sensible and rational conclusion if spirits and the realm they inhabit *were* fictional and mythological and all scientific evidence pointed toward a purely material universe.
However, that's not the case, as investigations into extra-sensory perception, remote viewing, anomalous cognition, and other paranormal phenomena have revealed. And in the last few years, a number of researchers have started documenting this evidence for a new generation.
The modern age of Spiritualism - since the Fox sisters in 1848 - launched the Society for Psychical Research, which gathered an immense amount of extraordinary data. Since then, there have been a number of independent scientific programs evaluating the 'spiritual', and the data is very interesting.
Ignorance of this field among the scientifically-educated who are not parapsychologists is understandable - given the hostility of gatekeeper publications like Scientific American and anti-psi advocacy groups like CSICOP/CSI - but, well, it's now 2009, we have the Internet, and if you really do have an open mind and would like to look at the data yourself rather than having your mind made up for you by others, now is a wonderful time to dive in and explore.
The mother of all textbooks on the subject is Kelly & Kelly et al's Irreducible Mind with a wall of footnotes, aimed at a college-level audience - if you want a more approachable entree to the subject, I highly recommend the late Elizabeth Mayer's Extraordinary Knowing, Chris Carter's (not the X-files guy, someone else) Parapsychology and the Skeptics, or Dean Radin's .
Don't limit yourself by irrationally saying 'well this stuff is impossible therefore I won't even look at the data'. Instead, try looking at the data and then ask 'if this stuff really occurs, then what does this imply about the nature of the universe?' If you open that door, and investigate the material, you'll find there's an extraordinary reality inside. But be warned that it will change you.
'and last time I checked, people like you are busily screaming that we're going to murder the planet unless everybody does exactly as the GW crowd says they should do."
Yes, and? What if we *are* murdering the planet?
Your sentence seems to suggest that you think 'screaming that we're going to murder the planet' is, in itself, reason to reject the argument, because.... why, exactly? Because 'we're killing the planet' is too hard to grasp? Too big an idea? Too horrible to contemplate? But humans have already done some pretty horrible things on very large scales in the 20th century, and geocide is the logical extension of our technological and social trajectory since WW2.
I confess that I can't grasp the state of mind necessary to deliberate reject knowlede of an atrocity on the grounds that its advocates are too intense.
If we're murdering the planet, the correct rational response IS to scream, and if 'the Global Warming crowd' are correct then OF COURSE they should be telling us to do exactly what they're telling us to do!
"if their clients get owned, it looks bad on the vendor, but you cant force your clients to do anything."
That's because it IS bad on the vendor. End of story.
The vendor should have taken all due precautions to prevent security flaws in their code BEFORE they released it. They didn't. Any ownage is now entirely their fault, regardless of patching. It should never be the client's responsibility to apply a patch.
We don't tolerate 'apply a patch after the fact' as an answer in other disciplines. We shouldn't tolerate it in computing. Do it once, do it right, zero tolerance for security bugs.
If your language (*cough* C, C++) does not help you do this then stop using that language and use/create appropriate tools.
"So, the end of that slippery slope? We're there. The sled ride is over."
Francis Fukuyama, is that you?
Oh wait, he changed his mind a few years later.