Would you care to explain yourself? What exactly is physically impossible about a hydrogen based economy? So some random Slashdotters' estimates on time and money are a bit off, but that doesn't preclude the scenario from actually happening. The guy didn't even claim that the infrastructure would be completely replaced, just off to a good start. There are obviously tons of scientific, engineering, and logistical issues that need to be solved, but that shouldn't stop us from moving forward. You are aware that oil will run out, probably within your lifetime. What do you propose we do? Revert back to a local agrarian economy? Or invest in the research and development of new energy sources (nuclear, wind, solar, etc) and storage mechanisms (hydrogen, batteries, etc). For all you confused folks - hydrogen is not a source of energy, again, it is a storage mechanism. Yes, some energy is lost in the storage of hydrogen, but it is also lost in other forms as well.
I'm not following you guys. If the money was not there, what was the $300 billion spent on the war so far? Monopoly money??? I understand that it wasn't there on the positivie side of the balance sheet, but it was there in reality, as money went from the government to the military, weapons manufacturers, contractors, mercinaries, the iraqi government, etc. Regardless of debt or where it came from, there WAS money given to these guys, no matter how much you want to twist words. It may have been borrowed money, but it was still spent, and as long as money is being spent, the point made earlier is that it could have been spent more wisely.
I'm sorry, but it IS that situation. The money already spent on Thing A has surpassed $300 billion. The money was there. Why could it have not been used on Thing B?
Every tool has it's purpose. If you wish to waste your time writing a tool in C/C++ that will parse text files or organize your mp3 collection, then have at it. Not every application's bottleneck is the CPU (in fact, most aren't), in which case the speed of compiled code is moot. And even some of those tasks that need speed can be managed by higher level languages, because many of their modules are written in C/C++ and/or assembly. Also, why must you choose between high and low level languages? They are just tools, not mutually exclusive religions. Put both in your "tool belt".
a.) web-applications rely on high-speed-always-on internet connections (I'll be in an airplane this afternoon, no text processing for me then?)
That may be the case now, but give a few years or so (3-7 years maybe), and high speed wireless internet will be ubiquitous. Also, the final forms of these applications will probably involve some kind a hybrid between desktop and web applications, with some kind of caching mechanism for when no connectivity is available.
b.) Will always offer less features and a bad UI compared to classical desktop applications, because restricted by web browser capablilites
Current browser companies/groups, standards organizations, and OS vendors are all well aware of the current browser's limitations and are working feverishly to create full-fledged networked baeed application frameworks. You can already see bits and pieces with XAML, XUL, SVG, AJAX, etc. Yes, we're not there yet, but it's inevitable.
c.) are currently much harder to code than classical desktop apps (e.g. editable drop down boxes anyone? Easy thing in NetBeans/VS.NET, very tough in webapps or server-pushing information to the client, requires long-lasting GET requests filtered by many firewalls)
long-lasting GET requests? I'm not sure what you are talking about here - is this something that is utilized with AJAX? Regarding the rest of this bulletpoint, see my response to (b). Also, I'm sure as web apps become more critical to businesses, firewall software as well as their admistrators' configuration preferences will adapt.
d.) collaborative features are easily added to classical desktop apps
You are kidding right? This is the big *advantage* of web-based apps. Have you tried using Google's spreadsheets yet? Contacting a user through g-mail and sharing the same spreadsheet... it doesn't get any more collaborative than that.
Converting incoming.doc files to Open Document XML format, for example.
It's quite possible to completely solve this problem.
Completely? That's a strong word. What if someone finds a vulnerability in the jail code, or a buffer overflow in the Open Document XML parser? Everyone thought images were completely safe because there's no code, but a vulnerability was found nonetheless.
*sigh*, you really are a "rainman", just staring at your own nose and spouting back facts. You know, when I saw the mention in this article that this could help reduce dependency on oil, I specifically skimmed the posts to find someone who would bring up your tired point, and then berate them. But alas I have not the energy, and a couple others have already shot you down. Ok, i can't resist. We are talking HYPOTHETICALS... i.e. replacing internal combustion with battery power. This has not happened yet on a wide scale. It's a "WHAT IF" and a WISH for the future. While we are in the realm of "WHAT IF" we might as well also hypothesize that the coal plants are replaced with other forms of clean centralized energy. Here's an analogy of your thought process: "We should put parents who abuse their children into prison". Your response: "But the children will be alone at home, who will take care of them?" You're not looking at the big picture. What is your solution? That we just sit and wait, and not try to innovate? Every industry should just wait in lock-step for everyone else to come up to speed at the same exact moment in time?
If you think that chicks don't notice you noticing them, and that they don't know what you are thinking, then you are saddly mistaken, and that explains why you are still a virgin.
Seeing as this is an article about another article's comments, a post about Slashdot and it's users is very relevant.
It appears that Slashdot's editors and the vast majority of it's users have a very strong opinion against the possibility of telepathy. They refer to anyone even just considering the possibility of such a phenomenon as "these people", "charlatans", "nutcases", "wasters of taxpayer's money", etc, going so far as to compare it to the study of intelligent design. That doesn't make sense to me, as telephathy is easily scientifically testable, whereas intelligent design is not, so I don't get the comparison, but that's beside the point. Anyway, what I find interesting is that I think something can be said about the population of Slashdot which makes them so virulently, irrationaly hostile towards any possibility of telepathy.
The Slashdot crowd are self-proclaimed nerds and geeks, and for the most part take science as a religion, and fantasy as a method for escaping reality. This obsession with science-fiction/fantasy could be attributed as an escape from the simple and depressing view on reality they you locked yourself into, encapsulating every last bit of it into science, slaughtering your soul upon the alter of science, even though science is not a religion, but a tool - science springs from reality, not the other way around.
Whenever ADHD or Asperger's syndrome comes up, you nerds and geeks boil with excitment and joy relating your experiences categorizing yourself into the ranks of the diseased, so as to explain away your anti-social behavior as well as your fears of relating with the opposite sex. Why do you nerds and geeks so fear a phenomenon that implies that another person can know your inner private lives? You do not understand yourself, and you are afraid to understand yourself, and you loath the thought that someone else could understand you more than you do, and flash a spotlight in your dark, moldy corner, showing that you are simply an automaton and not the savior of humanity you subconsiously imagine yourself to be.
Telepathy may or may not exist, but a lot more can be told about a person based on careful observation than you may think, before any telepathy is involved.
This story was tagged as a dupe, but after reloading the story, the "dupe" tag disappeared and was replaced with "firefox, mozilla". I assume the editors edit the tags, as they used to often say "bullshit", "stupid", etc, but now seem to be a lot more tame...
Ok, as a "rational" person not interested in emotive political arguments, what are you doing arguing with this guy on Slashdot? You used insults in your first post as well. Aren't Ad Hominem attacks also a basic logical fallacy?
HAHAHA I grew up in a predominantly Mexican town in Southern California. I was the only computer geek for miles (this was the 80s mind you), and everything I learned through BBS bulletin boards. For years I also thought warez was pronounce "juarez"...
You haven't been to China, have you? I regulary smoke (and it's not tobacco) on the street, in cabs, and in restaurants here in Beijing, and have not been harassed once by the cops who regularly pass me by. I'm an American, and I know in the U.S. when the cops drive by I get very paranoid. I see their beady eyes scanning everyone, and I've been harassed several times for no reason. The cops here in China don't give a shit what you do as long as you aren't disrupting anyone.
You represent the protestant puritan mindset that drives the drug war. Who are you to say that work is a more important endeavor than listening to music?
Considering that privacy and security are big concerns for every large software project these days, I believe that Firefox's default update setting should be changed. If you go to Tools --> Options --> Advanced --> Update, and you haven't changed your default settings, you will find that it is set to "Automatically download and install the update". Even Microsoft wouldn't do this, so why is it acceptable in Firefox? It should default to "Ask me what I want to do.", and during the first update, a checkbox should be provided asking the user if he wants automatic updates from then on.
I don't think the average user should have to worry about "memory management". Memory is something that should be abstracted away and not exposed to anyone but an advanced user. If in normal usage the caching features cause undesirable behavior, I consider this a defect in the design, if not the implementation.
I would think that deciding whether the play the saxophone while skydiving is not something to bother with until you've reached a certain level of mastery at either.
There's actually nothing wrong with mingling with those of the same interest, in fact quite the opposite. As an analogy, if you are learning how to play the saxophone, are you gonna mingle with sky divers, or other saxophonists?
If you have no goal or purpose, then meeting random people is a great way to be introduced to new ideas and perspectives. But if you do have a goal or purpose, then you are simply losing focus and wasting time by being a dilettante.
Your point boils down to this: "Ok peacenik, if we get rid of the military, then who is gonna defend you when the invaders come?"
The flaw with this argument? The military ARE the invaders, no matter what side they are on. The military, and invaders, and terrorists and other violent criminals across the world are all in the same class of people, and pacifists want to see this entire class converted to peaceful peoples, not just in their own country, but across the world. Of course getting rid of the military and its negative trappings in only your country would be a suicidal move. Now eliminating this class of people across the world would result in no more invaders, and therefore no need to defend the walls, or even have walls for that matter.
Is this realistic? Definitely not in the short term, probably not even in the next century. This is because you can't just get rid of violence. With the current mindset the violent class has, they will take advantage of anyone else putting down their weapons. You would have to change the culture and the way people look at the world to a more brotherly, helpful, empathetic view, instead of a competitive, hierarchical, selfish view. In fact, as a realist, I believe we will likely annihilate ourselves before ever achieving world peace. Anyway, my point is that you don't understand where the pacifist is coming from.
Slashdot Mirror
Would you care to explain yourself? What exactly is physically impossible about a hydrogen based economy? So some random Slashdotters' estimates on time and money are a bit off, but that doesn't preclude the scenario from actually happening. The guy didn't even claim that the infrastructure would be completely replaced, just off to a good start. There are obviously tons of scientific, engineering, and logistical issues that need to be solved, but that shouldn't stop us from moving forward. You are aware that oil will run out, probably within your lifetime. What do you propose we do? Revert back to a local agrarian economy? Or invest in the research and development of new energy sources (nuclear, wind, solar, etc) and storage mechanisms (hydrogen, batteries, etc). For all you confused folks - hydrogen is not a source of energy, again, it is a storage mechanism. Yes, some energy is lost in the storage of hydrogen, but it is also lost in other forms as well.
LS
I'm not following you guys. If the money was not there, what was the $300 billion spent on the war so far? Monopoly money??? I understand that it wasn't there on the positivie side of the balance sheet, but it was there in reality, as money went from the government to the military, weapons manufacturers, contractors, mercinaries, the iraqi government, etc. Regardless of debt or where it came from, there WAS money given to these guys, no matter how much you want to twist words. It may have been borrowed money, but it was still spent, and as long as money is being spent, the point made earlier is that it could have been spent more wisely.
LS
I'm sorry, but it IS that situation. The money already spent on Thing A has surpassed $300 billion. The money was there. Why could it have not been used on Thing B?
You seem to have forgotton that Bush and his gang are brain damaged.
Every tool has it's purpose. If you wish to waste your time writing a tool in C/C++ that will parse text files or organize your mp3 collection, then have at it. Not every application's bottleneck is the CPU (in fact, most aren't), in which case the speed of compiled code is moot. And even some of those tasks that need speed can be managed by higher level languages, because many of their modules are written in C/C++ and/or assembly. Also, why must you choose between high and low level languages? They are just tools, not mutually exclusive religions. Put both in your "tool belt".
LS
I believe that your points are flawed:
.NET, very tough in webapps or server-pushing information to the client, requires long-lasting GET requests filtered by many firewalls)
a.) web-applications rely on high-speed-always-on internet connections (I'll be in an airplane this afternoon, no text processing for me then?)
That may be the case now, but give a few years or so (3-7 years maybe), and high speed wireless internet will be ubiquitous. Also, the final forms of these applications will probably involve some kind a hybrid between desktop and web applications, with some kind of caching mechanism for when no connectivity is available.
b.) Will always offer less features and a bad UI compared to classical desktop applications, because restricted by web browser capablilites
Current browser companies/groups, standards organizations, and OS vendors are all well aware of the current browser's limitations and are working feverishly to create full-fledged networked baeed application frameworks. You can already see bits and pieces with XAML, XUL, SVG, AJAX, etc. Yes, we're not there yet, but it's inevitable.
c.) are currently much harder to code than classical desktop apps (e.g. editable drop down boxes anyone? Easy thing in NetBeans/VS
long-lasting GET requests? I'm not sure what you are talking about here - is this something that is utilized with AJAX? Regarding the rest of this bulletpoint, see my response to (b). Also, I'm sure as web apps become more critical to businesses, firewall software as well as their admistrators' configuration preferences will adapt.
d.) collaborative features are easily added to classical desktop apps
You are kidding right? This is the big *advantage* of web-based apps. Have you tried using Google's spreadsheets yet? Contacting a user through g-mail and sharing the same spreadsheet... it doesn't get any more collaborative than that.
LS
Converting incoming .doc files to Open Document XML format, for example.
It's quite possible to completely solve this problem.
Completely? That's a strong word. What if someone finds a vulnerability in the jail code, or a buffer overflow in the Open Document XML parser? Everyone thought images were completely safe because there's no code, but a vulnerability was found nonetheless.
LS
*sigh*, you really are a "rainman", just staring at your own nose and spouting back facts. You know, when I saw the mention in this article that this could help reduce dependency on oil, I specifically skimmed the posts to find someone who would bring up your tired point, and then berate them. But alas I have not the energy, and a couple others have already shot you down. Ok, i can't resist. We are talking HYPOTHETICALS... i.e. replacing internal combustion with battery power. This has not happened yet on a wide scale. It's a "WHAT IF" and a WISH for the future. While we are in the realm of "WHAT IF" we might as well also hypothesize that the coal plants are replaced with other forms of clean centralized energy. Here's an analogy of your thought process: "We should put parents who abuse their children into prison". Your response: "But the children will be alone at home, who will take care of them?" You're not looking at the big picture. What is your solution? That we just sit and wait, and not try to innovate? Every industry should just wait in lock-step for everyone else to come up to speed at the same exact moment in time?
I counted the number of times the girls said "cute" and "like" in that front page video. Here's the rough numbers:
cute: 11111111
like: 111111111111
If you think that chicks don't notice you noticing them, and that they don't know what you are thinking, then you are saddly mistaken, and that explains why you are still a virgin.
Seeing as this is an article about another article's comments, a post about Slashdot and it's users is very relevant.
It appears that Slashdot's editors and the vast majority of it's users have a very strong opinion against the possibility of telepathy. They refer to anyone even just considering the possibility of such a phenomenon as "these people", "charlatans", "nutcases", "wasters of taxpayer's money", etc, going so far as to compare it to the study of intelligent design. That doesn't make sense to me, as telephathy is easily scientifically testable, whereas intelligent design is not, so I don't get the comparison, but that's beside the point. Anyway, what I find interesting is that I think something can be said about the population of Slashdot which makes them so virulently, irrationaly hostile towards any possibility of telepathy.
The Slashdot crowd are self-proclaimed nerds and geeks, and for the most part take science as a religion, and fantasy as a method for escaping reality. This obsession with science-fiction/fantasy could be attributed as an escape from the simple and depressing view on reality they you locked yourself into, encapsulating every last bit of it into science, slaughtering your soul upon the alter of science, even though science is not a religion, but a tool - science springs from reality, not the other way around.
Whenever ADHD or Asperger's syndrome comes up, you nerds and geeks boil with excitment and joy relating your experiences categorizing yourself into the ranks of the diseased, so as to explain away your anti-social behavior as well as your fears of relating with the opposite sex. Why do you nerds and geeks so fear a phenomenon that implies that another person can know your inner private lives? You do not understand yourself, and you are afraid to understand yourself, and you loath the thought that someone else could understand you more than you do, and flash a spotlight in your dark, moldy corner, showing that you are simply an automaton and not the savior of humanity you subconsiously imagine yourself to be.
Telepathy may or may not exist, but a lot more can be told about a person based on careful observation than you may think, before any telepathy is involved.
slashdot .... is my sanctuary from the rest of the internet.
Woah, that might make sense if consider the internet to be Dante's hell and Slashdot is the outer circle.
This story was tagged as a dupe, but after reloading the story, the "dupe" tag disappeared and was replaced with "firefox, mozilla". I assume the editors edit the tags, as they used to often say "bullshit", "stupid", etc, but now seem to be a lot more tame...
LS
God is your reality skewed if you categorize Einstein and Crichton together...
Ok, as a "rational" person not interested in emotive political arguments, what are you doing arguing with this guy on Slashdot? You used insults in your first post as well. Aren't Ad Hominem attacks also a basic logical fallacy?
HAHAHA I grew up in a predominantly Mexican town in Southern California. I was the only computer geek for miles (this was the 80s mind you), and everything I learned through BBS bulletin boards. For years I also thought warez was pronounce "juarez"...
You haven't been to China, have you? I regulary smoke (and it's not tobacco) on the street, in cabs, and in restaurants here in Beijing, and have not been harassed once by the cops who regularly pass me by. I'm an American, and I know in the U.S. when the cops drive by I get very paranoid. I see their beady eyes scanning everyone, and I've been harassed several times for no reason. The cops here in China don't give a shit what you do as long as you aren't disrupting anyone.
So are you saying that you did not make a comment on this person's Yoda-speak simply so that you wouldn't feel compelled to go outside???
LS
You represent the protestant puritan mindset that drives the drug war. Who are you to say that work is a more important endeavor than listening to music?
You all know that Firefox, BY DEFAULT, checks for updates and installs them before letting the user know right?
Where are the cries of foul here?
LS
Considering that privacy and security are big concerns for every large software project these days, I believe that Firefox's default update setting should be changed. If you go to Tools --> Options --> Advanced --> Update, and you haven't changed your default settings, you will find that it is set to "Automatically download and install the update". Even Microsoft wouldn't do this, so why is it acceptable in Firefox? It should default to "Ask me what I want to do.", and during the first update, a checkbox should be provided asking the user if he wants automatic updates from then on.
My 2 cents.
LS
I don't think the average user should have to worry about "memory management". Memory is something that should be abstracted away and not exposed to anyone but an advanced user. If in normal usage the caching features cause undesirable behavior, I consider this a defect in the design, if not the implementation.
LS
I would think that deciding whether the play the saxophone while skydiving is not something to bother with until you've reached a certain level of mastery at either.
There's actually nothing wrong with mingling with those of the same interest, in fact quite the opposite. As an analogy, if you are learning how to play the saxophone, are you gonna mingle with sky divers, or other saxophonists?
If you have no goal or purpose, then meeting random people is a great way to be introduced to new ideas and perspectives. But if you do have a goal or purpose, then you are simply losing focus and wasting time by being a dilettante.
LS
Your point boils down to this: "Ok peacenik, if we get rid of the military, then who is gonna defend you when the invaders come?"
The flaw with this argument? The military ARE the invaders, no matter what side they are on. The military, and invaders, and terrorists and other violent criminals across the world are all in the same class of people, and pacifists want to see this entire class converted to peaceful peoples, not just in their own country, but across the world. Of course getting rid of the military and its negative trappings in only your country would be a suicidal move. Now eliminating this class of people across the world would result in no more invaders, and therefore no need to defend the walls, or even have walls for that matter.
Is this realistic? Definitely not in the short term, probably not even in the next century. This is because you can't just get rid of violence. With the current mindset the violent class has, they will take advantage of anyone else putting down their weapons. You would have to change the culture and the way people look at the world to a more brotherly, helpful, empathetic view, instead of a competitive, hierarchical, selfish view. In fact, as a realist, I believe we will likely annihilate ourselves before ever achieving world peace. Anyway, my point is that you don't understand where the pacifist is coming from.