So you are of the opinion that the poor are generally just as irresponsible in their spending as the wealthy, the only difference being how much they start with?
All sorts of things suddenly become possible if one is willing to consider manufacturing chips via an industrial process that doesn't look almost exactly like the one already in use.
Yup, there you are. Quoting a factual statement, not even bothering to attempt to refute it (because you can't), and just attacking the messenger for saying something you don't like. At this point even "Nu Uh" would be a stronger argument than you've made.
That is 50 years later when the new players have all been raised on the propoganda of the old players. Do you know what would have happened to the USSR had capitalism taken over? Not much really. Do you know what would have happened to the US had communism taken over? About the same. So for the initial generation that invented the communism/capitalism is evil message and started creating all the propoganda to that effect, what was the motive? Why plant the seeds?
Anytime a populace is driven and united behind an ideal, ethical, moral, noble sounding, etc you can be 100% certain that ideal is NOT the underlying reason anything is happening. The people who lead and drive populations are sociopaths, they don't believe in ethics/morals/ideals, those things exist only as tools to direct the rest in a manner that they independently act toward the goals of those sociopaths without need for complicated conspiracies or micro-managing.
"That's ridiculous. The real reason is the US had a vision where the whole world was democratic like them. USSR had a vision where the whole world was communist like them. Both sides thought they had ethics on their side and the other side were unethical with an evil-dogma and they were protecting civilization."
That is what is ridiculous. I suppose you think Hitler hated Jews, Lincoln cared about the slaves, the senate in Rome or Caesar cared about the people, that Constantine really believed in Christ, or "the founding fathers" really cared about rule by the people. You should never make the mistake of confusing the ideology used to gather and drive the herd with the reasons the herd is being driven. After WWII both the US and the USSR absorbed Nazi technology part of this was war technology and part of it was the Nazi model of controlling the populace. Simply s/Jews/Capitalists/g or s/Jews/Communists/g. There is no particular reason the US supporting like minded allies and the USSR doing the same required viewing each other as evil, both nations had just discovered how effective polarizing a nation against a common enemy was at controlling a populace and getting them to act counter to their rational and individual interest.
Yes, Germany bit off more than it could chew. If it had focused exclusively on the USSR once it invaded, or not invaded the USSR and focused on the west it would likely have won.
You seem to think the only way to conquer a nation is to defeat every fragment of it's military. Once you take over the command structure in a few critical areas a nation is done for.
Yes, exactly. Now you are getting it. Even we are already at a point where not dying is a reasonably forseeable possibility. We have many paths, AI, singularity, effortings to engineer away aging. As we age timescale perception changes. A young person is in a rush to make every minute count and years feel like forever, to a middle aged person a year doesn't really seem like so long after all. Imagine time perception to a being a few million years old that is part of a civilization full of beings a million years old. Perhaps they are even all just copies of the same being that evolved the capability to split and replicate it's mind without having to reset generation after generation so there is an absolute feeling of confidence, competence, and shared self-interest. What difference does it make if it's 5 minutes lag or 5000 years lag? Stars last a hell of a lot longer than that, those timescales represent an acceptable rate of expansion to continue persisting on timescales that mean something even to you and represent distances that reduce threats likely to happen on timescales of millions of years that seem very real to you.
"If you can build megastructures around a star you can also slap engines on the things and get up to maybe 10% of lightspeed."
Maybe, maybe not. I'd contend we could build megastructures around a star already we just wouldn't do so.
Can you imagine the human race of today pursuing a project on a term of millenia building a megastructure composed of billions or trillions of small components flocking and interacting in unison to form of a megastructure? Lots of redundancy. I don't see any huge insurmountable technological obstacle to that, the logic is already being built into our cloud computing structures, the obstacles are social. I couldn't see modern man engaging in a project like the pyramids or the great wall either.
If we could somehow get the globe on board, possibly with an international pissing contest, we might get them to begin such a thing as an effort to terraform mars. Focus a big sun powered microwave at mars and you'd shake those water molecules up pretty good. Then we just keep expanding it bit by bit. In theory if it got ignored by the world for a bit the part that was already there should keep working until we start expanding on things again. Eventually we are doing a lot more than just terraforming mars.
"Meanwhile here on Earth we use chemical rockets."
Sure but it isn't like we haven't developed at least infant forms of these other technologies, our space program just sucks so we don't have opportunities to test and develop them. We have so few resources we can't afford to Edison it and discover all the ways not to build an FTL drive and go the next step and revisit all these techniques periodically to make sure we didn't rule them out prematurely because of some underlying tech that wasn't quite there yet.
Look at the space elevator concept, we have numerous materials theoretically strong enough now, nobody has attempted to build a space elevator yet. Why? Resources.
"Science is based on observations. Fiction is based on wild speculation. Combining the two makes for some interesting stories"
Yes, those stories are called hypothesis. Science is about observing and then speculating based on those observations, speculating on what else would be true if your speculation were correct, devising ways to test those something elses and observing the results. Rinse, repeat.
Science fiction tests nothing in the physical world although it often simulates such testing in a fictional world where the hypothesis have to be able to integrate coherently with everything else in that fictional world. This lab of the mind is arguably more exentisve than that of most scientists forming a hypothesis. Nobody would claim science fiction is science but science fiction contains hypothesis (even if they are more loosely founded than those of scientists) and inspires actual scientists who often later test those hypothesis and there is a reason science fiction often later becomes science fact.
"Exactly how close the Soviet Union came to losing is a matter of debate. It depended on the resilience of the Soviet government, which was sorely tested, and I consider it a matter of speculation how close it came to losing it."
Fair enough but they were certainly hard pressed with most of the country and nearly the capital under German control. Rommel was opposed to entry into the soviet union at the time they entered and opposed to leaving at the time he was pulled out. His assessment of the woefully inadequate defenses at Normandy was ignored and now that we know the British had cracked enigma it seems likely that was a double wammy because not only was he ignored his report likely became an assessment for the allies by the finest general in the world. Had Hitler let his general direct him in how to proceed in the war effort instead of the other way around we might well be speaking German. I highly doubt Britain or the US would have expended any serious energy defending the soviet union if the Germans had chosen to fight them as a single front instead of waging a three front war.
Additionally, the US before Pearl Harbor was no match for the Germans, the US war machine didn't crank up until after the attack and there was nothing for Roosevelt to use to inspire it. The soviet union and europe were very far far away to most Americans. One-on-One the soviet union would have been crushed by a focused Germany and given a moment to absorb the resources and soviet war machine the Germans would have been unstoppable. The same could likely have been said if they'd focused on the western front and not attacked the USSR but I think I think that big ocean would have made things more challenging in the day.
I also have to disagree with some of your assessments of allied naval development. The allies wouldn't have advanced their capabilities vs German weaponry if they weren't battling against German weaponry and the Germans were better at that game hands down. The germans invented jets, rockets, and usable subs and all three revolutionized war and remain the core of the allied weaponry today it seems likely had they kept going the germans would have invented all sorts of new weaponry whereas the allied nations that won are better suited to incremental improvements on existing technology than developing new and different.
"You do know that a whole lot of US global activity in that time was in response to Communist actions, right? It seems to me that the US paid much too much attention to the Communists, and should have been pursuing its own goals more than resisting Communist expansion. As late as Brezhnev, the Soviets were trying to take over, hence the Brezhnev doctrine that said that no Communist state would be allowed to stop being Communist."
It's odd that you take an opposing tone while making statements which agree with what you are responding to.
"You also seem awfully sure of what the Soviets were going to do with their nukes, and willing to project your hindsight on people at the time. Until the Cuban Missile Crisis was over, both sides had something of a "cowboy" attitude with their nukes. The development of decent missiles, particularly submarine-launched missiles, was a tremendous calming influence, because they made mutually assured destruction work."
Cowboy in the sense that the Soviets didn't use any in war? The soviets used nukes domestically for some things (as they helpfully revealed during our oil crisis in the gulf) and tested them. The soviets had cause to be alarmed the United States had an actual established cowboy attitude and an unprovoked hostitle attitude toward the soviets and their form of government/economic system. Given that the soviet union was decimated in the war and the US was one naval base short of being entirely untouched it's actually damned impressive the soviets faired as well as they did.
The US government had just seen the people rally to fight nazis and seen what a polarizing force giving everyone a common enemy is for centralizing government power. Hitler's own success illustrated the point nicely and why not steal that strategy along with German war technology. Just s/Jews/Communists/g and take out the genocide bit, most of the German people didn't know that was occuring so clearly it isn't actually needed to dupe them into giving up their autonomy and obeying. It was highly successful too, Reagan changed it up because people were no longer afraid of the Russians so he he s/Communists/drugs/g. Bush traded up again s/drugs/Terror/g.
That is already 30 years of the United States declaring war on the interests of an already war torn country without provocation. It's actually quite impressive they did as well as they did.
"This is a very convenient argument -- if two sides have horrible secrets to be exposed, but only one side's comes to light, then the other side benefits greatly from that."
You beg the question assuming that there is another side with horrible secrets to be exposed, further you beg the question in characterizing it as two opposed sides instead of merely being other parties. The only two sides are the people and their government guilty of crimes against them. Valid information is power, whoever is arming the people with information is their friend, whether or not that friend is someone's tool is irrelevant only the value of the information.
ROFL Wow you really swallowed the propoganda whole didn't you?
You do know almost all of that global activity on the part of the soviets was because of our pissing match with them, right?
"The Soviets were involved in every brushfire war happening in Africa and Asia, and even a few involvements in the Americas - Cuba and Nicaragua come to mind."
You can say the same of us.
"Dozens of nations around the world had Marxist regimes sustained by Soviet aid, and growing that sphere of influence to isolate and Finlandize the West - and specifically the United States - was the Soviet plan."
lol Yes, because going communist would destroy us!
The soviets had warheads because we had warheads. They had no more interest in actually using them than we did. Actually they had far less interest, we were the only nation evil enough to use nuclear weapons once nations understood what they did and we tested them so we knew before we used them.
"I lived in fear of those warheads ending society as I knew it for my first 20 years."
Right, because your government told you to be afraid of them. The same government that told you to be afraid of those evil commies and their nucs also told children that if one showed up they should climb under their desk or curled up in a ball lining the halls at school. They aren't actually gone you know any more than ours are. The only thing that is different is the fear mongering.
Ummm... yes, such as the agent I mentioned MI6 intentionally allowed to infiltrate the enigma code breaking effort as a form of under the table information exchange.
Having spies is well and good but it hardly compares with the information made available by cracking the code used for used for all secure German communications. The problem from that point was not getting intelligence but determining carefully how and when to utilize the information without the Germans suspecting their code had been cracked.
It would make no difference to me if Assange rolled out of Putin's bed each morning. The information leaked has proven to be true time and time again which is the only credibility that messenger needs.
Nothing leaked about those other nations, including Russia, would make the information leaked about Western governments and US suddenly be less bad.
Screaming "The Russians are coming!" and running around like your head is cut off isn't going to distract me from the content of the leaks any more than it distracted me when they revealed Hillary Clinton was guilty of a DNC conspiracy worse than anything Nixon even attempted. I certainly don't think anyone missed the part where the very morning this terrible scandal was revealed instead of questioning whether the delegates were going to do their duty and change the outcome on behalf of the disenfranchised voters they represented had nothing but a stream of major news outlets questioning whether Sanders was going to get his "supporters in line" or could "control his people" in a tone that very much said you "better get your bitch on a leash."
In fairness your view of Stalin is no doubt painted by more than a little Western propoganda while their view is colored by their own propoganda. The real Stalin was a short fat guy who lived in a bunker, was only allowed to sign the papers he was given, and had a cheeto fetish.
Hell, it was still working for Reagan. Although I think these days most people know Russia wasn't really the devil just the victim of the US propoganda machine. The US couldn't stomach a nation powerful enough we considered it a threat and an idealogoy that suggested the people doing all the work and not the lazy nobles who contribute nothing should get the fruits of labor was a serious challenge to the wealthy who did and still do run the country.
Slashdot Mirror
So you are of the opinion that the poor are generally just as irresponsible in their spending as the wealthy, the only difference being how much they start with?
Makes sense, that's what the rich do with their money. If they didn't have so much of it they couldn't blow it all on useless crap they'd starve.
All sorts of things suddenly become possible if one is willing to consider manufacturing chips via an industrial process that doesn't look almost exactly like the one already in use.
And why not manufacture three dimensional "chips" the size of an ATX power supply. Build the heat pipes right in.
"we'd need many square kilometers of total chip area and to use optical interconnects"
Based on what? Optics aren't faster than electrical interconnects.
Yup, there you are. Quoting a factual statement, not even bothering to attempt to refute it (because you can't), and just attacking the messenger for saying something you don't like. At this point even "Nu Uh" would be a stronger argument than you've made.
That is 50 years later when the new players have all been raised on the propoganda of the old players. Do you know what would have happened to the USSR had capitalism taken over? Not much really. Do you know what would have happened to the US had communism taken over? About the same. So for the initial generation that invented the communism/capitalism is evil message and started creating all the propoganda to that effect, what was the motive? Why plant the seeds?
Anytime a populace is driven and united behind an ideal, ethical, moral, noble sounding, etc you can be 100% certain that ideal is NOT the underlying reason anything is happening. The people who lead and drive populations are sociopaths, they don't believe in ethics/morals/ideals, those things exist only as tools to direct the rest in a manner that they independently act toward the goals of those sociopaths without need for complicated conspiracies or micro-managing.
"That's ridiculous. The real reason is the US had a vision where the whole world was democratic like them. USSR had a vision where the whole world was communist like them. Both sides thought they had ethics on their side and the other side were unethical with an evil-dogma and they were protecting civilization."
That is what is ridiculous. I suppose you think Hitler hated Jews, Lincoln cared about the slaves, the senate in Rome or Caesar cared about the people, that Constantine really believed in Christ, or "the founding fathers" really cared about rule by the people. You should never make the mistake of confusing the ideology used to gather and drive the herd with the reasons the herd is being driven. After WWII both the US and the USSR absorbed Nazi technology part of this was war technology and part of it was the Nazi model of controlling the populace. Simply s/Jews/Capitalists/g or s/Jews/Communists/g. There is no particular reason the US supporting like minded allies and the USSR doing the same required viewing each other as evil, both nations had just discovered how effective polarizing a nation against a common enemy was at controlling a populace and getting them to act counter to their rational and individual interest.
Yes, Germany bit off more than it could chew. If it had focused exclusively on the USSR once it invaded, or not invaded the USSR and focused on the west it would likely have won.
You seem to think the only way to conquer a nation is to defeat every fragment of it's military. Once you take over the command structure in a few critical areas a nation is done for.
"Slowly? You mean like thousands of years apart?"
Yes, exactly. Now you are getting it. Even we are already at a point where not dying is a reasonably forseeable possibility. We have many paths, AI, singularity, effortings to engineer away aging. As we age timescale perception changes. A young person is in a rush to make every minute count and years feel like forever, to a middle aged person a year doesn't really seem like so long after all. Imagine time perception to a being a few million years old that is part of a civilization full of beings a million years old. Perhaps they are even all just copies of the same being that evolved the capability to split and replicate it's mind without having to reset generation after generation so there is an absolute feeling of confidence, competence, and shared self-interest. What difference does it make if it's 5 minutes lag or 5000 years lag? Stars last a hell of a lot longer than that, those timescales represent an acceptable rate of expansion to continue persisting on timescales that mean something even to you and represent distances that reduce threats likely to happen on timescales of millions of years that seem very real to you.
Flying cars have been here for a long long time. Nobody actually wants them in practice.
"If you can build megastructures around a star you can also slap engines on the things and get up to maybe 10% of lightspeed."
Maybe, maybe not. I'd contend we could build megastructures around a star already we just wouldn't do so.
Can you imagine the human race of today pursuing a project on a term of millenia building a megastructure composed of billions or trillions of small components flocking and interacting in unison to form of a megastructure? Lots of redundancy. I don't see any huge insurmountable technological obstacle to that, the logic is already being built into our cloud computing structures, the obstacles are social. I couldn't see modern man engaging in a project like the pyramids or the great wall either.
If we could somehow get the globe on board, possibly with an international pissing contest, we might get them to begin such a thing as an effort to terraform mars. Focus a big sun powered microwave at mars and you'd shake those water molecules up pretty good. Then we just keep expanding it bit by bit. In theory if it got ignored by the world for a bit the part that was already there should keep working until we start expanding on things again. Eventually we are doing a lot more than just terraforming mars.
"Meanwhile here on Earth we use chemical rockets."
Sure but it isn't like we haven't developed at least infant forms of these other technologies, our space program just sucks so we don't have opportunities to test and develop them. We have so few resources we can't afford to Edison it and discover all the ways not to build an FTL drive and go the next step and revisit all these techniques periodically to make sure we didn't rule them out prematurely because of some underlying tech that wasn't quite there yet.
Look at the space elevator concept, we have numerous materials theoretically strong enough now, nobody has attempted to build a space elevator yet. Why? Resources.
"Science is based on observations. Fiction is based on wild speculation. Combining the two makes for some interesting stories"
Yes, those stories are called hypothesis. Science is about observing and then speculating based on those observations, speculating on what else would be true if your speculation were correct, devising ways to test those something elses and observing the results. Rinse, repeat.
Science fiction tests nothing in the physical world although it often simulates such testing in a fictional world where the hypothesis have to be able to integrate coherently with everything else in that fictional world. This lab of the mind is arguably more exentisve than that of most scientists forming a hypothesis. Nobody would claim science fiction is science but science fiction contains hypothesis (even if they are more loosely founded than those of scientists) and inspires actual scientists who often later test those hypothesis and there is a reason science fiction often later becomes science fact.
We don't know that at all, warp is theoretically possible and so are worm holes.
"Exactly how close the Soviet Union came to losing is a matter of debate. It depended on the resilience of the Soviet government, which was sorely tested, and I consider it a matter of speculation how close it came to losing it."
Fair enough but they were certainly hard pressed with most of the country and nearly the capital under German control. Rommel was opposed to entry into the soviet union at the time they entered and opposed to leaving at the time he was pulled out. His assessment of the woefully inadequate defenses at Normandy was ignored and now that we know the British had cracked enigma it seems likely that was a double wammy because not only was he ignored his report likely became an assessment for the allies by the finest general in the world. Had Hitler let his general direct him in how to proceed in the war effort instead of the other way around we might well be speaking German. I highly doubt Britain or the US would have expended any serious energy defending the soviet union if the Germans had chosen to fight them as a single front instead of waging a three front war.
Additionally, the US before Pearl Harbor was no match for the Germans, the US war machine didn't crank up until after the attack and there was nothing for Roosevelt to use to inspire it. The soviet union and europe were very far far away to most Americans. One-on-One the soviet union would have been crushed by a focused Germany and given a moment to absorb the resources and soviet war machine the Germans would have been unstoppable. The same could likely have been said if they'd focused on the western front and not attacked the USSR but I think I think that big ocean would have made things more challenging in the day.
I also have to disagree with some of your assessments of allied naval development. The allies wouldn't have advanced their capabilities vs German weaponry if they weren't battling against German weaponry and the Germans were better at that game hands down. The germans invented jets, rockets, and usable subs and all three revolutionized war and remain the core of the allied weaponry today it seems likely had they kept going the germans would have invented all sorts of new weaponry whereas the allied nations that won are better suited to incremental improvements on existing technology than developing new and different.
"You do know that a whole lot of US global activity in that time was in response to Communist actions, right? It seems to me that the US paid much too much attention to the Communists, and should have been pursuing its own goals more than resisting Communist expansion. As late as Brezhnev, the Soviets were trying to take over, hence the Brezhnev doctrine that said that no Communist state would be allowed to stop being Communist."
It's odd that you take an opposing tone while making statements which agree with what you are responding to.
"You also seem awfully sure of what the Soviets were going to do with their nukes, and willing to project your hindsight on people at the time. Until the Cuban Missile Crisis was over, both sides had something of a "cowboy" attitude with their nukes. The development of decent missiles, particularly submarine-launched missiles, was a tremendous calming influence, because they made mutually assured destruction work."
Cowboy in the sense that the Soviets didn't use any in war? The soviets used nukes domestically for some things (as they helpfully revealed during our oil crisis in the gulf) and tested them. The soviets had cause to be alarmed the United States had an actual established cowboy attitude and an unprovoked hostitle attitude toward the soviets and their form of government/economic system. Given that the soviet union was decimated in the war and the US was one naval base short of being entirely untouched it's actually damned impressive the soviets faired as well as they did.
The US government had just seen the people rally to fight nazis and seen what a polarizing force giving everyone a common enemy is for centralizing government power. Hitler's own success illustrated the point nicely and why not steal that strategy along with German war technology. Just s/Jews/Communists/g and take out the genocide bit, most of the German people didn't know that was occuring so clearly it isn't actually needed to dupe them into giving up their autonomy and obeying. It was highly successful too, Reagan changed it up because people were no longer afraid of the Russians so he he s/Communists/drugs/g. Bush traded up again s/drugs/Terror/g.
That is already 30 years of the United States declaring war on the interests of an already war torn country without provocation. It's actually quite impressive they did as well as they did.
"This is a very convenient argument -- if two sides have horrible secrets to be exposed, but only one side's comes to light, then the other side benefits greatly from that."
You beg the question assuming that there is another side with horrible secrets to be exposed, further you beg the question in characterizing it as two opposed sides instead of merely being other parties. The only two sides are the people and their government guilty of crimes against them. Valid information is power, whoever is arming the people with information is their friend, whether or not that friend is someone's tool is irrelevant only the value of the information.
ROFL Wow you really swallowed the propoganda whole didn't you?
You do know almost all of that global activity on the part of the soviets was because of our pissing match with them, right?
"The Soviets were involved in every brushfire war happening in Africa and Asia, and even a few involvements in the Americas - Cuba and Nicaragua come to mind."
You can say the same of us.
"Dozens of nations around the world had Marxist regimes sustained by Soviet aid, and growing that sphere of influence to isolate and Finlandize the West - and specifically the United States - was the Soviet plan."
lol Yes, because going communist would destroy us!
The soviets had warheads because we had warheads. They had no more interest in actually using them than we did. Actually they had far less interest, we were the only nation evil enough to use nuclear weapons once nations understood what they did and we tested them so we knew before we used them.
"I lived in fear of those warheads ending society as I knew it for my first 20 years."
Right, because your government told you to be afraid of them. The same government that told you to be afraid of those evil commies and their nucs also told children that if one showed up they should climb under their desk or curled up in a ball lining the halls at school. They aren't actually gone you know any more than ours are. The only thing that is different is the fear mongering.
Ummm... yes, such as the agent I mentioned MI6 intentionally allowed to infiltrate the enigma code breaking effort as a form of under the table information exchange.
Having spies is well and good but it hardly compares with the information made available by cracking the code used for used for all secure German communications. The problem from that point was not getting intelligence but determining carefully how and when to utilize the information without the Germans suspecting their code had been cracked.
It would make no difference to me if Assange rolled out of Putin's bed each morning. The information leaked has proven to be true time and time again which is the only credibility that messenger needs.
Nothing leaked about those other nations, including Russia, would make the information leaked about Western governments and US suddenly be less bad.
Screaming "The Russians are coming!" and running around like your head is cut off isn't going to distract me from the content of the leaks any more than it distracted me when they revealed Hillary Clinton was guilty of a DNC conspiracy worse than anything Nixon even attempted. I certainly don't think anyone missed the part where the very morning this terrible scandal was revealed instead of questioning whether the delegates were going to do their duty and change the outcome on behalf of the disenfranchised voters they represented had nothing but a stream of major news outlets questioning whether Sanders was going to get his "supporters in line" or could "control his people" in a tone that very much said you "better get your bitch on a leash."
In fairness your view of Stalin is no doubt painted by more than a little Western propoganda while their view is colored by their own propoganda. The real Stalin was a short fat guy who lived in a bunker, was only allowed to sign the papers he was given, and had a cheeto fetish.
Hell, it was still working for Reagan. Although I think these days most people know Russia wasn't really the devil just the victim of the US propoganda machine. The US couldn't stomach a nation powerful enough we considered it a threat and an idealogoy that suggested the people doing all the work and not the lazy nobles who contribute nothing should get the fruits of labor was a serious challenge to the wealthy who did and still do run the country.