Also, you might consider printing out a few of these Gift Exemption Vouchers to hand out (or mail) at xmas time so that other people might better understand how you feel about the exchange of needless consumer shit.
You can get a good idea of what media's popular by scrolling down this list of BitTorrents. Most of the time it's predictable what most people are drawn to (NEW and SHINY and MAINSTREAM!), but sometimes you'd be suprised what floats to the top.
Sadly supersonic travel will remain the province of the military and the rich unless someone can work out a way for a plane to travel supersonic economically
It won't be a plane that revives supersonic global travel, it'll be a train.:-)
Seriously, we're more likely to see subsurface tunnels like the transatlantic tunnel built than the return of supersonic aircraft. Trains are much cheaper, more reliable, and a vacuum tunnel means no air resistance for the maglev train to push through.
One day it will be ultra-cheap to bore these tunnels (with nanomachines), and our planet will be like swiss cheese with main artery tunnels between city-hubs and capillaries to rural areas.
(I wanted to link to a short story about some people who used such a tunnel system to travel west, "back in time", to see multiple sunsets, but I can't seem to find it).
Don't stay so focused on outer space that you forget about the trend toward inner space. There's room for <Carl Sagan's Voice>trillions, and trillions, and trillions</Sagan> of humans (of current intelligence) to live in virtual space and it just may just be the answer to Fermi's Paradox.
Why fight two gravity wells to ferry gold back to Earth? If the moon was truly made of Gold we'd have probably engineered a plan to send an automated mining operation and mass driver to the Moon, once, then collect the raining nuggets for use in electronics (but not jewelry! oh, no! we must protect that market!:)
Whereas I'd be inclined to see this as healthy self-regulation, she saw it as irresponsibility on behalf of the editors.
Slashdot's self-moderation system is the major reason I still visit this site, and others of its type. The upside of knowing that/.'s speech is completely uncensored gives me a warm-fuzzy that keeps me coming back, despite the smaller downside of some AnonymousMorons.
Forums with "moderator-nazi's" just leave a sour taste in my mouth. I feel like I'm in highschool again with all the moderator brown-nosing, post deletions/moves, stern warnings, and whatnot (kind of like IRC).
I hope you managed to explain to your girlfriend that the net doesn't need top-down command and control to function.
some new way of handling "money" that allows for everyone to eat, but still encourages productivity and prevents rampant inflation.
Replace money with "whuffie" and you have a meritocracy where your incentive to be productive is to increase your respect/reputation (which is a better measure than money) such that you can "buy" something that's actually scarce, with the tax on it depending on your continued rep.
e.g. If you find the cure for cancer, society might deem you worthy enough to "buy" 100,000 acres of prime beachfront property, with only 0.1% rep "tax." But if you tell everyone to "Get the hell of MY lawn!" and then you discover The Ultimate Doomsday Device, your rep will plummet and your property tax rockets upward.
Nowadays most people aren't really religious the way you think. It's just another social network to belong to with a lot of traditional momentum behind it. Joining the group is often advantageous socially, economically, and psychologically. Granted there's a few zealots, but there's a larger number who just want some "mental comfort" - not that there's anything wrong with that. (I'm agnostic myself).
We simply don't have enough "real" jobs to employ everyone in society.
True, and it's set to get a LOT worse in the coming years with offshoring and increased automation replacing most bluecollar and service level jobs. Not everyone can "simply retrain" for a "new economy" job. Eventually only a tiny minority of intelligent, highly trained people will be doing any useful work, and they'll either hoard the vastly disproportionate wealth (risking revolution), or share the fruits of automated production more fairly.
Social Welfare doesn't have to be a dirty word.
(btw, can you introduce me to your sister Jolene? Thanks!)
Well, once there's a molecular manufacturing machine in every household, it will be quite easy to avoid the vast majority of old-economy corporations, because they'll cease to exist -- everyone will be able to feed and clothe themselves for "free"(*) with such a machine, and the molecular "blueprints" for any object you want will be as easily available as an mp3, except this time nobody's complaining about starving to death because you "stole" their "IP."
(*) Free as in free solar energy, recycled molecules, and volunteer design of material items (just as with current OSS).
I've heard your argument before, and it boils down to: "YOU can't really know that YOU are YOU anymore, so nobody should look be looking forward to transhumanism." I don't buy that FUD.
The computing space/time necessary to simulate a current, naturally-evolved human is nil compared to the resources our advanced selves will use, so there's every reason to believe that there will be "ethically manditory" backups made to compare against. I think we'll be intelligent enough to KNOW what exactly we've lost and to KNOW how different we are than our former unmodified selves. I would also argue that I could be a kind of "we" with my former primitive self running in parallel.
I'm not the same person I was 7 years ago anyway, or 1 year ago, or 1 second ago. I'm still conscious of "ME" though, and fully aware of those changes.
I just want to know what the hullabaloo about buy nothing day really is.
It's to get you thinking about what the fuck you're doing with your life and the world around you.
Why are you filling your life up with useless shit (made by slave-labor in China)? What's the point? Are you charging it to a credit card that you've never had a zero balance on? Does it make you feel happier than no-money fun with friends/family? Why is that?
It is outright negligence to not be monitoring your child's activity online and the law agrees with me.
Did you remember to body search your kid for his new Wi-Fi card? Odd that he never uses the home computer as much as he used to, isn't it?
Also, a parents responsibility for their kids' actions isn't black and white, it's grey. A kid shares some genetics/memetics with their parents, but outside influences and just plain fate play a much larger role. Then again, blaming parents is easier.
I plan to make my kids - should I ever have any - aware that I'll be logging everything they do on their computer until the day that they move out, and if they want to move out before they're 18
Question for you: When you discover that your resentful children are using encrypted tunnels to communicate in private, would you go so far as to install a keylogger to snarf their passphrase? And when they bypass that?
In any case, you're off my friends list. I hate authoritarian snoops, even in the name of "legally responsible parenting". I understand what it means to be a parent, and 24/7 monitoring is criminal - it's psychological abuse in my book. Buy hey, it's your choice to help the gov't condition your kids to accept the surveillance society right? right.
I haven't heard of any alloys made by man that could endure 10 minutes under those conditions.
We'll be able to synthesize cheap diamond in mass very soon; its the hardest substance known, and it melts at the insanely high temp of 3546 degrees C. The Earth's mantle is ~3km deep and is "only" 2200 degrees C at its hottest.
or iii) have unimaginable technology such as planet wide deflector shields
With "unimaginable technology" why would you assume the majority of life will still be living in fragile bio-based bodies at the bottom of gravity wells with tons of wasted molecular building material beneath our feet?
I say we rip the Earth apart to put it to better use - sentimental value be damned!:)
My viewpoint on this is far from mainstream (for now), but I just wanted to say that it would be extremely unlucky for humankind to be wiped out by an asteroid impact -- of all things -- in the next ~30-50 years that matters most in our technological evolution.
It is far, far more likely that our exponentionally advancing technology will destroy us before we've had a chance to leave the nest, and transcend to a safer form (non-bio) minus some of our outmoded evolutionary jungle-brain baggage.
Slashdot Mirror
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(it's probably just me).
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(Glad it's dead.)
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Thankfully, it's the rare person who thinks that this actually protects anything, so it's not very widespread.
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Buy Nothing Day is the day after Thanksgiving (the 28th).
Also, you might consider printing out a few of these Gift Exemption Vouchers to hand out (or mail) at xmas time so that other people might better understand how you feel about the exchange of needless consumer shit.
--
--
anti-semite!
--
It won't be a plane that revives supersonic global travel, it'll be a train. :-)
Seriously, we're more likely to see subsurface tunnels like the transatlantic tunnel built than the return of supersonic aircraft. Trains are much cheaper, more reliable, and a vacuum tunnel means no air resistance for the maglev train to push through.
One day it will be ultra-cheap to bore these tunnels (with nanomachines), and our planet will be like swiss cheese with main artery tunnels between city-hubs and capillaries to rural areas.
(I wanted to link to a short story about some people who used such a tunnel system to travel west, "back in time", to see multiple sunsets, but I can't seem to find it).
--
Don't stay so focused on outer space that you forget about the trend toward inner space. There's room for <Carl Sagan's Voice>trillions, and trillions, and trillions</Sagan> of humans (of current intelligence) to live in virtual space and it just may just be the answer to Fermi's Paradox.
--
--
Slashdot's self-moderation system is the major reason I still visit this site, and others of its type. The upside of knowing that /.'s speech is completely uncensored gives me a warm-fuzzy that keeps me coming back, despite the smaller downside of some AnonymousMorons.
Forums with "moderator-nazi's" just leave a sour taste in my mouth. I feel like I'm in highschool again with all the moderator brown-nosing, post deletions/moves, stern warnings, and whatnot (kind of like IRC).
I hope you managed to explain to your girlfriend that the net doesn't need top-down command and control to function.
--
Replace money with "whuffie" and you have a meritocracy where your incentive to be productive is to increase your respect/reputation (which is a better measure than money) such that you can "buy" something that's actually scarce, with the tax on it depending on your continued rep.
e.g. If you find the cure for cancer, society might deem you worthy enough to "buy" 100,000 acres of prime beachfront property, with only 0.1% rep "tax." But if you tell everyone to "Get the hell of MY lawn!" and then you discover The Ultimate Doomsday Device, your rep will plummet and your property tax rockets upward.
Just musing; I'm no economist. :)
--
Nowadays most people aren't really religious the way you think. It's just another social network to belong to with a lot of traditional momentum behind it. Joining the group is often advantageous socially, economically, and psychologically. Granted there's a few zealots, but there's a larger number who just want some "mental comfort" - not that there's anything wrong with that. (I'm agnostic myself).
--
True, and it's set to get a LOT worse in the coming years with offshoring and increased automation replacing most bluecollar and service level jobs. Not everyone can "simply retrain" for a "new economy" job. Eventually only a tiny minority of intelligent, highly trained people will be doing any useful work, and they'll either hoard the vastly disproportionate wealth (risking revolution), or share the fruits of automated production more fairly.
Social Welfare doesn't have to be a dirty word.
(btw, can you introduce me to your sister Jolene? Thanks!)
--
(*) Free as in free solar energy, recycled molecules, and volunteer design of material items (just as with current OSS).
--
Italian: Kraft Italian Dressing, HBO's Sopranos, Italian Marble, Cadillac
Great stuff! :)
--
The computing space/time necessary to simulate a current, naturally-evolved human is nil compared to the resources our advanced selves will use, so there's every reason to believe that there will be "ethically manditory" backups made to compare against. I think we'll be intelligent enough to KNOW what exactly we've lost and to KNOW how different we are than our former unmodified selves. I would also argue that I could be a kind of "we" with my former primitive self running in parallel.
I'm not the same person I was 7 years ago anyway, or 1 year ago, or 1 second ago. I'm still conscious of "ME" though, and fully aware of those changes.
--
--
It's to get you thinking about what the fuck you're doing with your life and the world around you.
Why are you filling your life up with useless shit (made by slave-labor in China)? What's the point? Are you charging it to a credit card that you've never had a zero balance on? Does it make you feel happier than no-money fun with friends/family? Why is that?
--
Did you remember to body search your kid for his new Wi-Fi card? Odd that he never uses the home computer as much as he used to, isn't it?
Also, a parents responsibility for their kids' actions isn't black and white, it's grey. A kid shares some genetics/memetics with their parents, but outside influences and just plain fate play a much larger role. Then again, blaming parents is easier.
--
Question for you: When you discover that your resentful children are using encrypted tunnels to communicate in private, would you go so far as to install a keylogger to snarf their passphrase? And when they bypass that?
In any case, you're off my friends list. I hate authoritarian snoops, even in the name of "legally responsible parenting". I understand what it means to be a parent, and 24/7 monitoring is criminal - it's psychological abuse in my book. Buy hey, it's your choice to help the gov't condition your kids to accept the surveillance society right? right.
--
--
We'll be able to synthesize cheap diamond in mass very soon; its the hardest substance known, and it melts at the insanely high temp of 3546 degrees C. The Earth's mantle is ~3km deep and is "only" 2200 degrees C at its hottest.
--
With "unimaginable technology" why would you assume the majority of life will still be living in fragile bio-based bodies at the bottom of gravity wells with tons of wasted molecular building material beneath our feet?
I say we rip the Earth apart to put it to better use - sentimental value be damned! :)
--
It is far, far more likely that our exponentionally advancing technology will destroy us before we've had a chance to leave the nest, and transcend to a safer form (non-bio) minus some of our outmoded evolutionary jungle-brain baggage.
--