I think this is where we need to use regulations. Requiring bottlers to use aluminum for containers even though it's more expensive isn't breaking their business model -- they can still sell disposable bottles of whatever, they just have to make the bottles out of aluminum.
They choose plastic because it's more profitable to them, but they're just pushing the externalities of using plastics onto the public in a way that makes them hard to deal with. If they have to switch to aluminum because of regulations, they can either eat the lost profit or raise prices.
Raising prices is in effect a targeted tax on consumers of disposable containers, something more difficult to do with plastic containers as a direct tax on plastic.
I think wealth and income inequality is a bigger problem than military spending.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were problematic in many ways, but for better or worse, the US has been the main guarantor of freedom of the seas and trade and a lot of the global economy wouldn't be what it is today if it wasn't for US power projection. So a lot of that military spending has basically been enabling the global commerce that China depends on.
My guess is if you had to zero-sum swap parts of the economy, I'd be inclined to have looked at taxation strategies that went after corporate profits and the windfalls the very wealthy have achieved vs. axing the military budget.
I think there's a lot of interesting things that a single non-volatile memory space (today's RAM + storage) could do.
The first thing that comes to mind is there's almost no difference between the computer being "on" or "off" -- in theory, powering off is just stopping execution. There's no programs to shut down or information in RAM that needs savings. This could make power management very interesting.
You could also have as many programs "open" at once as you wanted, limited only by the amount of NV storage you had -- you'd never close them, just stop executing them. In theory you could even transfer them to another machine through some other storage mechanism in their existing state.
Operating systems might need to gain some kind of new soft reboot capability that allowed them to perform the kind of housecleaning/reset that a "reboot" does now, but in a way that didn't actually require the computer to reboot. The same with applications, a means to "reset" an application to a new-launch state which is ordinarily obtained through the boot process.
Cops quit doing anything like neighborhood patrols years ago, partly as a result of the switch to squad cars and partly as a result of computerized crime fighting which put more cops in areas with statistically higher crime.
But even if they did more neighborhood patrols, it wouldn't do any good because the political changes prevent cops from doing any profiling at all. There's not even an existential risk of getting pulled over if you're stealing packages, even if you're black and driving a beater in an upscale white neighborhood.
You have to literally get caught red-handed and with a package not addressed to you to get caught, and I'm told that they open them immediately and toss the packaging and/or the contents (if its not salable). In years past the cops would have pulled most package thieves over for not fitting into the neighborhoods they were in and a junker filled with random new products would have put the thieves at least on the short list of possible crooks if not arrested.
The up side is that we have more efficient policing and less racial profiling. The downside is that mostly middle class neighborhoods have seen a reduction in crime prevention.
My guess is that it's a question of enforcement bias. The FBI has jurisdiction over bank thefts and they are unlikely to suddenly reject the longstanding practice of using dye packs. That the FBI has jurisdiction means that local police will never pursue charges against a bank that used a dye pack. Plus the dye packs are probably already rubber stamped by the FBI as "safe".
In theory, this should make civilian use of dye packs just as justifiable, but because it involves petty larceny instead of the federal felony of bank robbery it's unlikely this will ever happen.
Really? There's few jurisdictions where both fuzzy justifiable homicide laws and lax local prosecution would seriously allow someone to use deadly force to shoot someone running away with a package. At best its going to be misdemeanor larceny, at worst you're shooting someone in the back who's actively running away.
IF you're a well-connected person in some rural area you MIGHT get this covered up, but I seriously doubt if there was any publicity you'd be able to get away with it.
And really the problem with package thefts isn't some rural issue, it's mostly an urban issue. More houses, more theft opportunity, and most police departments lack the manpower to even bother with much in the way of patrols in basically low-crime neighborhoods. There's no way you're shooting and killing people anywhere in the US over package theft.
I can't help but think that modern anti-porn attitudes are driven by the same emotional impulses that drive puritan/religious inspired anti-porn attitudes. As rational arguments they may differ, drawing on different intellectual rationalizations and justifications. But the emotional impulses that inspire them are also the same.
Ultimately, I think a lot of it comes down to evolutionary reproductive biology. Sex is riskier for women because it can result in pregnancy, pregnancy is risky to the mother's health and survival, and caring for a child is burdensome. You kind of then want a partner who will hang in there and support you and your child rearing. Porn represents sexual promiscuity and promotes the idea that sex is free and women are disposable, basically the antithesis of what is valuable to women in terms of evolutionary reproductive biology.
Religion is a complex ritualization of these ideas, evolving in an era when the risks were more viscerally true (ie, people were living in a closer state of nature). Contemporary anti-porn gets to the same place, but uses the modern intellectual tools of feminism, psychology and literary criticism.
IMHO, I think a lot of contemporary anti-porn activism has been driven by lesbians. It's not that their intellectual analysis is wrong because of this, but I often wonder if they're actually driven by their own hostility to heterosexuality.
That reminds me of a (probably urban legend) story about a guy who was building a masonry building in a remote location. It was fantastically expensive to ship the masonry in. The location did have postal delivery, and the guy figured out he could flat-rate ship individual blocks for a total amount that was much less than regular shipping, so he wound up mailing them.
Given how cheap fairly powerful system on chip computers are these days, it seems like it wouldn't be very expensive to have discreet computers for car management, infotainment, etc.
In fact there's probably a reasonable argument that it's actually cheaper to have separate computers from an engineering standpoint; each one can be optimized for its specific function and debugged/improved more easily without having to worry about overhead from other contexts/processes/functionality.
That being said, I'm kind of surprised somebody like VMware hasn't gotten into this kind of computing application. I can see where it might be cheaper yet to have a car with a 2-3 node hypervisor cluster, giving each computing platform its own VM for isolation and the ability to power down nodes or gain fault tolerance. This might cut computing down without sacrificing some of the engineering advantages of distinct systems.
My money, though, is on the idea that SoCs are so cheap that there's no real cost savings in eliminating a few of them if it makes the entire computing platform more complicated.
That's an interesting chart, but do we have any way of knowing how true those predictions are? It's hard not to believe from an emotional perspective that if funding was significantly raised, fusion reactors would be achievable.
My problem has always been that even with solid funding, significant grid contributions from fusion reactors are 50+ years away. Generously, 20 years of well-funded research just to get a small-scale test plant built, and then another 10 years to build and get something grid-scale built and tested. In another 20 years, you have maybe 5-10 more plants built, assuming everything is a runaway success.
I think it should be seriously researched, but the timeline to actually gain anything civilization-impacting out of it seems something like a century away, and may be too late unless there is a miracle breakthrough.
Vegas is like that. The first time I went to Vegas, I saw billboards all over for this one guy and it was like "who the fuck is this guy? I have never heard of him." They seem to latch on to certain people and they end up like permanent fixtures.
I was really surprised the last time I was in Vegas to see Carrot Top on billboards as some kind of Vegas attraction. I mean, I get Cher, even Britney Spears, devolving to Vegas status. But who says "we need a really great recurring talent for our casino, I know, let's get fucking Carrot Top!"
Yes, Canada does have a difficult decision as to whether to kowtow to a foreign government that runs ethnic re-education camps and rolled tanks over its own protesting citizens.
Or it can cooperate with its immediate southern neighbor with which it shares one of the world's longest unfortified international borders, a common language, a deeply intertwined economy and a shared cultural heritage dating back centuries which includes a common language, a democratic system of government and many constitutional freedoms.
I can see where you'd find it a very hard decision for them to make and I'm sure that Canadians are very wary of sullying their clean-living international reputation by backing a totalitarian government half a world away vs. their democratic neighbor to the south.
There are very few 9 passenger puddle jumpers. Usually the smallest (like when I flew out of Devils Lake, North Dakota) were 50 passenger turboprops.
I'm inclined to share the skepticism of the parent poster. I could see this being a game changer with 20 passengers, especially if its actual operating costs were 20% of an equal sized turboprop or jet.
But even then, the cost of the aircraft itself isn't going to be 20% of the equivalent turboprop, and I'd guess the real efficiencies would come from ramping up the number of aircraft and further rationalizing schedules and destination. And flying more small planes may help with aviation costs, but the more planes you add the higher your labor costs.
Jeff Dean was a friend in high school and my roommate in college for a year. He's hardly a west coast elite, even now -- I had breakfast with him a year ago and he walked like 3 miles (his choice) to the restaurant.
He's also hands-down the smartest person I have ever met. He ported a multi-player D&D game written for a Control Data Cyber mainframe -- using an incomplete printout of the Pascal source code -- to a Sage IV p-system and the VAX 11/780 when he was in high school.
You're forgetting the security screening and requirement to have bought a ticket also keeps out, shall we say, the "riff raff" element who would mostly shoplift at a checkout-free store.
There has never been a fat person who did not shed massive weight when reduced intake is combined with real physical activity.
Go read Gary Taubes' book "Why we get fat". He has an entire section of the book that covers individual and population studies of people who did demanding physical labor and gained weight, everything from oil field workers to a group sedentary people who trained for and ran a marathon and dropped only an average of about 5 pounds. This is the larger problem with the obesity debate. So much emphasis is on calorie reduction, exercise and the inevitable character critique that comes from berating "lazy fat people" who can't lose weight and keep eating".
There's almost no emphasis on the nature of the calories consumed and their relationship to the body's metabolic processes of lipogenesis. We've known that insulin controls lipogenesis and what causes insulin production, yet we're still talking about only in terms of calories eaten.
I actually gave very low carb eating a try, and in about six months I'd dropped about 20-odd pounds without any exercising and without any calorie/intake regulation. I simply ate low carb foods when I was hungry. Say what you will, but it worked and I'm fairly convinced Taubes and low-carb are onto something.
What's kind of interesting and telling are the substantial number of people who are militantly opposed to anti-obesity strategies that don't involve caloric restriction and regimented exercise. It's like a religion. If they invented a cheap and safe pill that let people cut their weight without doing anything I'm convinced the diet-and-exercise crowd would still oppose it. Why? Most of diet-and-exercise is just moralizing. I'm sure we'd see arguments like "the anti-fat pill is bad for the environment because people are creating too much trash and sewage with their overconsumption." The responses are akin to telling a Catholic you can get into heaven without believing or praying to God.
You've obviously never had a car with a proximity key. It's extremely convenient. No more fishing for keys, taking off your gloves in the winter, screwing around with an ignition key. You just walk up, get in and push start. There are weeks that go by in the winter when I don't even take my keys out of my jacket pocket.
I know it seems only marginally more convenient than a button keyfob, but in use its fantastic, especially in the winter. It's probably arguably safer considering there's no signaling effect as to what car you're unlocking.
It'd be even better if the fobs were cheaper, like say $20-30 each. I'd buy a few more and just leave them in other coats, maybe my backpack.
I wish there were more buttons on the fob, though. I'd like one that would close all the windows and sunroof as well as an option for this to happen when I lock the car. I'd also like an auto lock feature that automatically locked all the doors (and windows/sunroof) when walking away from the car.
I figure you need some kind of innovation breakthrough akin to the transition from "cell phone" to smartphone, which might not even be a device that's principally a phone but just so happens to be able to replace the phone component of cell phones.
The problem is smartphones are so dominated by Apple and Samsung that neither one is likely to take much risk in terms of innovation lest they disturb the profit machine/technology paradigm they already dominate.
It's impossible to take most Slashdot cell phone article comments seriously.
All the comments are filled with people bragging (and probably exaggerating) how little they paid for their phones, their phone service, and then making snide comments about iPhones.
I don't get it -- seldom do you go to an enthusiast web site where people talk about how little they seem to care about the site's main topic. Why would a technology discussion forum be filled with people who are so under invested in technology?
This IS the business model. So MANY distinctions-without-a-difference editions of the same thing, each with its own crazy math licensing rules and costs.
Everybody ends up buying up to avoid getting too little and winds up buying more than they actually wanted. It's weaponized information asymmetry.
Many poor economies persist because of cultural biases, and the lack of self-interest in understanding that was universal; economics wasn't well understood by anybody in 1860. Racial superiority wouldn't have been enough to sustain an agricultural slave south in economic competition with a capitalist and industrialized north. The South would get bought out by the North.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this is where we need to use regulations. Requiring bottlers to use aluminum for containers even though it's more expensive isn't breaking their business model -- they can still sell disposable bottles of whatever, they just have to make the bottles out of aluminum.
They choose plastic because it's more profitable to them, but they're just pushing the externalities of using plastics onto the public in a way that makes them hard to deal with. If they have to switch to aluminum because of regulations, they can either eat the lost profit or raise prices.
Raising prices is in effect a targeted tax on consumers of disposable containers, something more difficult to do with plastic containers as a direct tax on plastic.
I'll see your polo shirt and raise you a Nehru jacket.
I think wealth and income inequality is a bigger problem than military spending.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were problematic in many ways, but for better or worse, the US has been the main guarantor of freedom of the seas and trade and a lot of the global economy wouldn't be what it is today if it wasn't for US power projection. So a lot of that military spending has basically been enabling the global commerce that China depends on.
My guess is if you had to zero-sum swap parts of the economy, I'd be inclined to have looked at taxation strategies that went after corporate profits and the windfalls the very wealthy have achieved vs. axing the military budget.
I think there's a lot of interesting things that a single non-volatile memory space (today's RAM + storage) could do.
The first thing that comes to mind is there's almost no difference between the computer being "on" or "off" -- in theory, powering off is just stopping execution. There's no programs to shut down or information in RAM that needs savings. This could make power management very interesting.
You could also have as many programs "open" at once as you wanted, limited only by the amount of NV storage you had -- you'd never close them, just stop executing them. In theory you could even transfer them to another machine through some other storage mechanism in their existing state.
Operating systems might need to gain some kind of new soft reboot capability that allowed them to perform the kind of housecleaning/reset that a "reboot" does now, but in a way that didn't actually require the computer to reboot. The same with applications, a means to "reset" an application to a new-launch state which is ordinarily obtained through the boot process.
It's a multi-factor problem.
Cops quit doing anything like neighborhood patrols years ago, partly as a result of the switch to squad cars and partly as a result of computerized crime fighting which put more cops in areas with statistically higher crime.
But even if they did more neighborhood patrols, it wouldn't do any good because the political changes prevent cops from doing any profiling at all. There's not even an existential risk of getting pulled over if you're stealing packages, even if you're black and driving a beater in an upscale white neighborhood.
You have to literally get caught red-handed and with a package not addressed to you to get caught, and I'm told that they open them immediately and toss the packaging and/or the contents (if its not salable). In years past the cops would have pulled most package thieves over for not fitting into the neighborhoods they were in and a junker filled with random new products would have put the thieves at least on the short list of possible crooks if not arrested.
The up side is that we have more efficient policing and less racial profiling. The downside is that mostly middle class neighborhoods have seen a reduction in crime prevention.
My guess is that it's a question of enforcement bias. The FBI has jurisdiction over bank thefts and they are unlikely to suddenly reject the longstanding practice of using dye packs. That the FBI has jurisdiction means that local police will never pursue charges against a bank that used a dye pack. Plus the dye packs are probably already rubber stamped by the FBI as "safe".
In theory, this should make civilian use of dye packs just as justifiable, but because it involves petty larceny instead of the federal felony of bank robbery it's unlikely this will ever happen.
Really? There's few jurisdictions where both fuzzy justifiable homicide laws and lax local prosecution would seriously allow someone to use deadly force to shoot someone running away with a package. At best its going to be misdemeanor larceny, at worst you're shooting someone in the back who's actively running away.
IF you're a well-connected person in some rural area you MIGHT get this covered up, but I seriously doubt if there was any publicity you'd be able to get away with it.
And really the problem with package thefts isn't some rural issue, it's mostly an urban issue. More houses, more theft opportunity, and most police departments lack the manpower to even bother with much in the way of patrols in basically low-crime neighborhoods. There's no way you're shooting and killing people anywhere in the US over package theft.
I can't help but think that modern anti-porn attitudes are driven by the same emotional impulses that drive puritan/religious inspired anti-porn attitudes. As rational arguments they may differ, drawing on different intellectual rationalizations and justifications. But the emotional impulses that inspire them are also the same.
Ultimately, I think a lot of it comes down to evolutionary reproductive biology. Sex is riskier for women because it can result in pregnancy, pregnancy is risky to the mother's health and survival, and caring for a child is burdensome. You kind of then want a partner who will hang in there and support you and your child rearing. Porn represents sexual promiscuity and promotes the idea that sex is free and women are disposable, basically the antithesis of what is valuable to women in terms of evolutionary reproductive biology.
Religion is a complex ritualization of these ideas, evolving in an era when the risks were more viscerally true (ie, people were living in a closer state of nature). Contemporary anti-porn gets to the same place, but uses the modern intellectual tools of feminism, psychology and literary criticism.
IMHO, I think a lot of contemporary anti-porn activism has been driven by lesbians. It's not that their intellectual analysis is wrong because of this, but I often wonder if they're actually driven by their own hostility to heterosexuality.
That reminds me of a (probably urban legend) story about a guy who was building a masonry building in a remote location. It was fantastically expensive to ship the masonry in. The location did have postal delivery, and the guy figured out he could flat-rate ship individual blocks for a total amount that was much less than regular shipping, so he wound up mailing them.
Given how cheap fairly powerful system on chip computers are these days, it seems like it wouldn't be very expensive to have discreet computers for car management, infotainment, etc.
In fact there's probably a reasonable argument that it's actually cheaper to have separate computers from an engineering standpoint; each one can be optimized for its specific function and debugged/improved more easily without having to worry about overhead from other contexts/processes/functionality.
That being said, I'm kind of surprised somebody like VMware hasn't gotten into this kind of computing application. I can see where it might be cheaper yet to have a car with a 2-3 node hypervisor cluster, giving each computing platform its own VM for isolation and the ability to power down nodes or gain fault tolerance. This might cut computing down without sacrificing some of the engineering advantages of distinct systems.
My money, though, is on the idea that SoCs are so cheap that there's no real cost savings in eliminating a few of them if it makes the entire computing platform more complicated.
That's an interesting chart, but do we have any way of knowing how true those predictions are? It's hard not to believe from an emotional perspective that if funding was significantly raised, fusion reactors would be achievable.
My problem has always been that even with solid funding, significant grid contributions from fusion reactors are 50+ years away. Generously, 20 years of well-funded research just to get a small-scale test plant built, and then another 10 years to build and get something grid-scale built and tested. In another 20 years, you have maybe 5-10 more plants built, assuming everything is a runaway success.
I think it should be seriously researched, but the timeline to actually gain anything civilization-impacting out of it seems something like a century away, and may be too late unless there is a miracle breakthrough.
Vegas is like that. The first time I went to Vegas, I saw billboards all over for this one guy and it was like "who the fuck is this guy? I have never heard of him." They seem to latch on to certain people and they end up like permanent fixtures.
I was really surprised the last time I was in Vegas to see Carrot Top on billboards as some kind of Vegas attraction. I mean, I get Cher, even Britney Spears, devolving to Vegas status. But who says "we need a really great recurring talent for our casino, I know, let's get fucking Carrot Top!"
Yes, Canada does have a difficult decision as to whether to kowtow to a foreign government that runs ethnic re-education camps and rolled tanks over its own protesting citizens.
Or it can cooperate with its immediate southern neighbor with which it shares one of the world's longest unfortified international borders, a common language, a deeply intertwined economy and a shared cultural heritage dating back centuries which includes a common language, a democratic system of government and many constitutional freedoms.
I can see where you'd find it a very hard decision for them to make and I'm sure that Canadians are very wary of sullying their clean-living international reputation by backing a totalitarian government half a world away vs. their democratic neighbor to the south.
There are very few 9 passenger puddle jumpers. Usually the smallest (like when I flew out of Devils Lake, North Dakota) were 50 passenger turboprops.
I'm inclined to share the skepticism of the parent poster. I could see this being a game changer with 20 passengers, especially if its actual operating costs were 20% of an equal sized turboprop or jet.
But even then, the cost of the aircraft itself isn't going to be 20% of the equivalent turboprop, and I'd guess the real efficiencies would come from ramping up the number of aircraft and further rationalizing schedules and destination. And flying more small planes may help with aviation costs, but the more planes you add the higher your labor costs.
Jeff Dean was a friend in high school and my roommate in college for a year. He's hardly a west coast elite, even now -- I had breakfast with him a year ago and he walked like 3 miles (his choice) to the restaurant.
He's also hands-down the smartest person I have ever met. He ported a multi-player D&D game written for a Control Data Cyber mainframe -- using an incomplete printout of the Pascal source code -- to a Sage IV p-system and the VAX 11/780 when he was in high school.
You're forgetting the security screening and requirement to have bought a ticket also keeps out, shall we say, the "riff raff" element who would mostly shoplift at a checkout-free store.
It's probably as big a deal as anything else.
There has never been a fat person who did not shed massive weight when reduced intake is combined with real physical activity.
Go read Gary Taubes' book "Why we get fat". He has an entire section of the book that covers individual and population studies of people who did demanding physical labor and gained weight, everything from oil field workers to a group sedentary people who trained for and ran a marathon and dropped only an average of about 5 pounds. This is the larger problem with the obesity debate. So much emphasis is on calorie reduction, exercise and the inevitable character critique that comes from berating "lazy fat people" who can't lose weight and keep eating".
There's almost no emphasis on the nature of the calories consumed and their relationship to the body's metabolic processes of lipogenesis. We've known that insulin controls lipogenesis and what causes insulin production, yet we're still talking about only in terms of calories eaten.
I actually gave very low carb eating a try, and in about six months I'd dropped about 20-odd pounds without any exercising and without any calorie/intake regulation. I simply ate low carb foods when I was hungry. Say what you will, but it worked and I'm fairly convinced Taubes and low-carb are onto something.
What's kind of interesting and telling are the substantial number of people who are militantly opposed to anti-obesity strategies that don't involve caloric restriction and regimented exercise. It's like a religion. If they invented a cheap and safe pill that let people cut their weight without doing anything I'm convinced the diet-and-exercise crowd would still oppose it. Why? Most of diet-and-exercise is just moralizing. I'm sure we'd see arguments like "the anti-fat pill is bad for the environment because people are creating too much trash and sewage with their overconsumption." The responses are akin to telling a Catholic you can get into heaven without believing or praying to God.
You've obviously never had a car with a proximity key. It's extremely convenient. No more fishing for keys, taking off your gloves in the winter, screwing around with an ignition key. You just walk up, get in and push start. There are weeks that go by in the winter when I don't even take my keys out of my jacket pocket.
I know it seems only marginally more convenient than a button keyfob, but in use its fantastic, especially in the winter. It's probably arguably safer considering there's no signaling effect as to what car you're unlocking.
It'd be even better if the fobs were cheaper, like say $20-30 each. I'd buy a few more and just leave them in other coats, maybe my backpack.
I wish there were more buttons on the fob, though. I'd like one that would close all the windows and sunroof as well as an option for this to happen when I lock the car. I'd also like an auto lock feature that automatically locked all the doors (and windows/sunroof) when walking away from the car.
The problem isn't simply honest vs. dishonesty, but that the system is rigid and authoritarian in ways that it's nearly impossible to compliant with.
I figure you need some kind of innovation breakthrough akin to the transition from "cell phone" to smartphone, which might not even be a device that's principally a phone but just so happens to be able to replace the phone component of cell phones.
The problem is smartphones are so dominated by Apple and Samsung that neither one is likely to take much risk in terms of innovation lest they disturb the profit machine/technology paradigm they already dominate.
It's impossible to take most Slashdot cell phone article comments seriously.
All the comments are filled with people bragging (and probably exaggerating) how little they paid for their phones, their phone service, and then making snide comments about iPhones.
I don't get it -- seldom do you go to an enthusiast web site where people talk about how little they seem to care about the site's main topic. Why would a technology discussion forum be filled with people who are so under invested in technology?
use confusing naming schemes and licensing tiers
This IS the business model. So MANY distinctions-without-a-difference editions of the same thing, each with its own crazy math licensing rules and costs.
Everybody ends up buying up to avoid getting too little and winds up buying more than they actually wanted. It's weaponized information asymmetry.
Many poor economies persist because of cultural biases, and the lack of self-interest in understanding that was universal; economics wasn't well understood by anybody in 1860. Racial superiority wouldn't have been enough to sustain an agricultural slave south in economic competition with a capitalist and industrialized north. The South would get bought out by the North.
I think it's fascinating how feminists and bible thumpers wind up advocating for the same thing.