Slashdot doesn't have the capacity to carry the conversation required to educate you; you are necessarily profoundly ignorant on the subject given your previous post.
"You really need to know why" is shorthand for "Go take a series of courses in economics before you want to argue about economics". Understanding the current working theories is important before you want to credibly claim the theories are wrong.
If your position is that in your ignorance you know more than people who have dedicated years to studying economies and examining the findings of those who have gone before them... there's no hope for you.
Modest inflation is part of a healthy economy. You really need to understand why before you start calling for the implementation of methods to eliminate it (or even, at a minimum, government control of it via diluting of currency in circulation).
There's no social benefit to blockchain-based 'coins', and they encourage ransomware and fraud.
Just outlaw the exchange of currency for blockchain-based mediums of exchange and it will no longer have any value as a ransomware tool.
Anyone who still wants to play with the technology can do so, anybody who wants to mine or barter on the black market can do so (with a legal risk if caught, of course... it's still the 'black market'). But if people with deep pockets aren't permitted to acquire the stuff legally, attempting to extort it from them will quickly become pointless.
And honestly, society loses nothing of value except the time it takes our legislators to draft and pass the required law.
I agree in theory, but until we drastically reduce the human population it's an excellent way to distribute more protein with less negative impact on the environment, with a bonus of not having to kill animals for food (not that nature isn't already nasty in the wild, but at least we don't need to have blood on OUR hands).
Unless we all want to turn vegan. Personally, I like eating animal flesh (especially certain cuts of cow wrapped in certain bits of pig), and I'm pretty sure I'm evolved to be an omnivore and not a herbivore.
> Hate groups exists because we give them an audience.
Hate groups exist because people like simple cause-and-effect relationships, and our primate brains are also wired for 'us vs. them'. In other words, we loves us some scapegoats. Didn't you guys coin that term a few thousand years ago?:)
Anyway, when someone's frustrated for whatever reason (and this is true rich or poor, weak or powerful), they almost always look for someone other than themselves to blame. If there's a 'them' around, sometimes they pick that person or group. And then, because we're also social creatures that like to form groups... they find other similarly frustrated people and share their scapegoat idea. If enough of them find each other, it becomes self-perpetuating and they also have the numbers to isolate and indoctrinate their children.
Boom: A racist sub-culture is born.
It's NOT as simple as 'ignore them and they fade away'. In fact, that's probably the worst thing you can do. It makes them feel even more slighted by their chosen scapegoat, and it allows them to multiply unchecked.
>NDP (in Canada)... as being neo-Marxist types is just absurd,
The NDP, while usually the most moral of the parties, is staggeringly incompetent at reconciling their policies with reality. I like them as a significant minority opposition party.
And yet, a good portion of the USA will continue to support him because he's supposedly on their 'team'. And they think he'll deliver on the promises he made them that were never possible to deliver on in the first place. His ongoing supporters will include a surprising percentage of women, Muslims, and Hispanics, and people who think they can get a fair deal from him. Perhaps those numbers are dropping over time as reality sets in.
He's unfit by temperament and education at a minimum... but everyone around him keeps making excuses and blaming left-wing conspiracies. And he's the leader of the most powerful nation in the world, which makes it all that much more amazing (and horrifying) that he hasn't been run out of town yet.
3D is a sucky gimmick that is pretty much always unnecessary and pretty much always not done well - in fact, stereo imaging done well requires abandoning a century a movie making techniques that aren't compatible with it.
And then there's the price hike, and the stupid glasses. No thanks! If you're lucky, theatres near me will have one screen with a 2D showing per movie per day. I simply don't go to the movies as much anymore.
>Industrial production of food will mean not local and not small business and not family farms.
One of the ideas being bandied about is extremely local meat production. Imagine a never-ending sausage... it's alive, so it doesn't go bad. You cut off a bit to eat, and more grows forward.
Now, I have zero idea how pie-in-the-sky that is, but it's on the spectrum of possibilities. No big factory, but something in your own home you have to supply with raw materials. (Raw materials are to be packaged and distributed by big evil corporations, though, and DMCA-protected so you can't just use your own)
Are you looking for a medal? Because you won't like the one you've earned.
You're coming off like a climate change denier (and you should know what I mean by that without me adding a 'wall of text' qualifier).
The choices appear to be that you're trolling, you're ignorant, or you are fundamentally incapable of understanding how to communicate with your audience. So you can think yourself oh-so-clever for being technically correct while everyone misunderstands you, or you can improve the clarity of your communication by adjusting to the forum you're posting in.
>Ruth Bader Ginsburg us going to fuck Trump over, wait and see.
That's right. Let some else do it!
Or you could take responsibility (assuming you are American). It doesn't matter how you voted - your society and your system put Trump into the presidency. That requires a lot of tedious grass roots politics to address. And not the "kill those filthy Republicans" kind of adversarial actions that ultimately make things worse.
You need better education. You need to crush your religious right fanatics, and stomp on the resurgence of your 'alt-right'. Then you need to figure out how they felt so threatened they turned rabid in the first place, and fix that.
And don't ever, ever ally yourself with their kind again to give your political party an edge in an election. That means Republicans need to ditch the religious nuts who haven't discovered fire yet, and the Democrats have to disavow the right-think lefty fanatics who will try to ruin you for not agreeing with their latest lies.
Elections aren't a game where you celebrate a win, they're supposed to be a process to help you select legislative representatives to lead your nation.
I think it is very legitimately arguable that Trump's Twitter account is more official than a White House press briefing. As such, blocking Americans from it is probably not allowed.
Trump's account should be using the mute feature rather than the block feature (though the Twitter mute function seems pretty weak nearly to the point of ineffectiveness), or Trump should stop using Twitter as a presidential communications platform.
Crap. "It's a completely different rich guy who failed to convince him to NOT be a racist, bigoted asshole."
There are days where I really wish Slashdot allowed post editing, if only for a few minutes or so. And didn't stop me from posting a corrective child comment for a while.
Actually, Elon failed to convince him not to be a fossil-fuel boosting climate change denier.
It's a completely different rich guy who failed to convince him to be a racist, bigoted asshole.
On that last note, I find it really sad that only the black guy felt the need to cut ties; in my opinion, it shows you that none of them have any principles unless it hits close to home.
Yeah, plate tectonics pushed the continent over the south pole. It used to be much closer to the equator.
"Some 200 million years ago, Antarctic continental crust was joined with South American, African, Indian, and Australian continental crust making up a large southern land mass known as Gondwana (the southern part of the supercontinent called Pangea). After this time, Gondwana slowly split apart to create Antarctica as a separate continent, and Antarctica has gradually moved away from the other southern continents towards its present polar position."
It took a long time to get from the first cell to Aristotle. It took a lot of the planet's readily available resources to get from hunter-gatherers to the Information Age.
There likely isn't enough time left, and certainly not enough resources left, to allow for an equivalent technologically advanced intelligence to arise on this planet if we wipe ourselves out.
Yes, it's annoying when your kids question you all the time, and I feel for teachers who have to deal with everyone else's kids... but maybe we ought to stop with the Santa and Tooth Fairy and all the other 'cute and harmless' lies we tell kids.
Instead, we ought to be asking them what they think, and why, and then show them where they've made errors... so when they come up against something new, they have a fighting chance of figuring it out without someone holding their hand the whole time.
The best experience I ever had in school was a teacher mocking me for being afraid to be wrong, which is really the fork in the road where you either try to figure something out or just shut down and stick with your initial belief. We need more of that for our kids.
PTT, don't expect synchronous communications. Apollo managed just fine.
Even so, this is kind of silly even as a publicity stunt. There's little need for complicated infrastructure when you can easily get away with a relay station on your lander and a suit radio. You're not going to leave radio range of your lander as it will also have all your precious oxygen, and you're not taking your suit off either.
And there's currently no real need for encryption, though I suppose it might be nice for the people in question not to have the planet listening in on every noise an astronaut makes.
I love the concept, but given the difficulty (beyond current tech by at least 1 order of magnitude), expense, and the fact that it could only practically be pointed at a single target for a very brief period of time, you're going to want to be really, really confident there will be something to see with it.
It seems to be that more mundane imaging systems would have to do all the preparatory surveying. It also seems that as technology improves to approach the point at which the Solar gravitational lens method would be practical, those mundane imaging systems would likewise be improving, always making the lens financially ill-advised.
> a good IT guy will spend 99.9% of their time sitting on their ass playing videogames because they've automated everything and only have to respond when it fails.
The problem is that's not a job, its jobS.
The first job is automating the system, the second is maintaining it, and the third is being ready for disaster recovery.
You probably need vastly fewer bodies for the second job, and while you need more bodies, you don't need them for very long for the third.
So it makes more sense to hire contract for the first, have an employee for the second, and a support contract for the third than to have one group of people for all three but idle most of the time.
>Surely nobody honestly thinks that the Cuban government isnt paranoid as fuck about American ambassadors
I can see being paranoid about American intentions (Americans have traditionally seen Cuba as a resource to exploit which is why the revolution had so much backing to start with...), but I can see no benefit to deafening the ambassadors.
It almost certainly has to be some kind of surveillance or counter-surveillance accident of technology, though I suppose there could be an audio engineer out there with a chip on their shoulder doing it out of pure spite.
>I've been working in IT for over 20 years, and the thing I've seen over and over again is
Let's generalize a bit. You've seen that corporations collect knowledge but not wisdom, so they keep repeating the fundamental mistakes while avoiding repeating the exact circumstances of them.
Outsourcing vs. in-house. Cubical farms vs. offices. Part time vs. full time. Exploiting vs. 'partnering' with employees. It all goes in cycles of about half a career-span, as new people take over and experience is lost.
Unfortunately, you do need to import new knowledge and youthful enthusiasm from time to time, and people do tend to calcify as they age and eventually they go and die on you.
I simply find it very frustrating that I can see these loops and I'm not a genius, I'm simply in my 40s. Which leaves me wondering what kind of idiots are running the show, given that most of the people above me in the org structure are older.
>If Earth humans had the kind've technologies required to travel to another star system, I would hope that we would,ve also started to use those technologies to clean up and repair damage done to our existing planet.
If humans had the kind of technologies required to travel to another star system, we'd never need to set foot on another planet ever again.
We'd have the ability to build habitable ships that last centuries without resupply or refits. When you can do that... you might want to 'raid' an Oort cloud for raw material once in a while, but you'd probably avoid going deep into a stellar gravity well unless you wanted to run off solar power for a while instead of fission or fusion. Or maybe visit a rocky world inside the frost line just for fun, I suppose.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot doesn't have the capacity to carry the conversation required to educate you; you are necessarily profoundly ignorant on the subject given your previous post.
"You really need to know why" is shorthand for "Go take a series of courses in economics before you want to argue about economics". Understanding the current working theories is important before you want to credibly claim the theories are wrong.
If your position is that in your ignorance you know more than people who have dedicated years to studying economies and examining the findings of those who have gone before them... there's no hope for you.
Likely far better than you since you're obviously a proponent of them, which indicates you're a fool or idiot or some combination thereof.
Modest inflation is part of a healthy economy. You really need to understand why before you start calling for the implementation of methods to eliminate it (or even, at a minimum, government control of it via diluting of currency in circulation).
There's no social benefit to blockchain-based 'coins', and they encourage ransomware and fraud.
Just outlaw the exchange of currency for blockchain-based mediums of exchange and it will no longer have any value as a ransomware tool.
Anyone who still wants to play with the technology can do so, anybody who wants to mine or barter on the black market can do so (with a legal risk if caught, of course... it's still the 'black market'). But if people with deep pockets aren't permitted to acquire the stuff legally, attempting to extort it from them will quickly become pointless.
And honestly, society loses nothing of value except the time it takes our legislators to draft and pass the required law.
I agree in theory, but until we drastically reduce the human population it's an excellent way to distribute more protein with less negative impact on the environment, with a bonus of not having to kill animals for food (not that nature isn't already nasty in the wild, but at least we don't need to have blood on OUR hands).
Unless we all want to turn vegan. Personally, I like eating animal flesh (especially certain cuts of cow wrapped in certain bits of pig), and I'm pretty sure I'm evolved to be an omnivore and not a herbivore.
> Hate groups exists because we give them an audience.
Hate groups exist because people like simple cause-and-effect relationships, and our primate brains are also wired for 'us vs. them'. In other words, we loves us some scapegoats. Didn't you guys coin that term a few thousand years ago? :)
Anyway, when someone's frustrated for whatever reason (and this is true rich or poor, weak or powerful), they almost always look for someone other than themselves to blame. If there's a 'them' around, sometimes they pick that person or group. And then, because we're also social creatures that like to form groups... they find other similarly frustrated people and share their scapegoat idea. If enough of them find each other, it becomes self-perpetuating and they also have the numbers to isolate and indoctrinate their children.
Boom: A racist sub-culture is born.
It's NOT as simple as 'ignore them and they fade away'. In fact, that's probably the worst thing you can do. It makes them feel even more slighted by their chosen scapegoat, and it allows them to multiply unchecked.
>NDP (in Canada) ... as being neo-Marxist types is just absurd,
The NDP, while usually the most moral of the parties, is staggeringly incompetent at reconciling their policies with reality. I like them as a significant minority opposition party.
And yet, a good portion of the USA will continue to support him because he's supposedly on their 'team'. And they think he'll deliver on the promises he made them that were never possible to deliver on in the first place. His ongoing supporters will include a surprising percentage of women, Muslims, and Hispanics, and people who think they can get a fair deal from him. Perhaps those numbers are dropping over time as reality sets in.
He's unfit by temperament and education at a minimum... but everyone around him keeps making excuses and blaming left-wing conspiracies. And he's the leader of the most powerful nation in the world, which makes it all that much more amazing (and horrifying) that he hasn't been run out of town yet.
3D is a sucky gimmick that is pretty much always unnecessary and pretty much always not done well - in fact, stereo imaging done well requires abandoning a century a movie making techniques that aren't compatible with it.
And then there's the price hike, and the stupid glasses. No thanks! If you're lucky, theatres near me will have one screen with a 2D showing per movie per day. I simply don't go to the movies as much anymore.
>Industrial production of food will mean not local and not small business and not family farms.
One of the ideas being bandied about is extremely local meat production. Imagine a never-ending sausage... it's alive, so it doesn't go bad. You cut off a bit to eat, and more grows forward.
Now, I have zero idea how pie-in-the-sky that is, but it's on the spectrum of possibilities. No big factory, but something in your own home you have to supply with raw materials. (Raw materials are to be packaged and distributed by big evil corporations, though, and DMCA-protected so you can't just use your own)
Are you looking for a medal? Because you won't like the one you've earned.
You're coming off like a climate change denier (and you should know what I mean by that without me adding a 'wall of text' qualifier).
The choices appear to be that you're trolling, you're ignorant, or you are fundamentally incapable of understanding how to communicate with your audience. So you can think yourself oh-so-clever for being technically correct while everyone misunderstands you, or you can improve the clarity of your communication by adjusting to the forum you're posting in.
>Ruth Bader Ginsburg us going to fuck Trump over, wait and see.
That's right. Let some else do it!
Or you could take responsibility (assuming you are American). It doesn't matter how you voted - your society and your system put Trump into the presidency. That requires a lot of tedious grass roots politics to address. And not the "kill those filthy Republicans" kind of adversarial actions that ultimately make things worse.
You need better education. You need to crush your religious right fanatics, and stomp on the resurgence of your 'alt-right'. Then you need to figure out how they felt so threatened they turned rabid in the first place, and fix that.
And don't ever, ever ally yourself with their kind again to give your political party an edge in an election. That means Republicans need to ditch the religious nuts who haven't discovered fire yet, and the Democrats have to disavow the right-think lefty fanatics who will try to ruin you for not agreeing with their latest lies.
Elections aren't a game where you celebrate a win, they're supposed to be a process to help you select legislative representatives to lead your nation.
I think it is very legitimately arguable that Trump's Twitter account is more official than a White House press briefing. As such, blocking Americans from it is probably not allowed.
Trump's account should be using the mute feature rather than the block feature (though the Twitter mute function seems pretty weak nearly to the point of ineffectiveness), or Trump should stop using Twitter as a presidential communications platform.
Crap. "It's a completely different rich guy who failed to convince him to NOT be a racist, bigoted asshole."
There are days where I really wish Slashdot allowed post editing, if only for a few minutes or so. And didn't stop me from posting a corrective child comment for a while.
Actually, Elon failed to convince him not to be a fossil-fuel boosting climate change denier.
It's a completely different rich guy who failed to convince him to be a racist, bigoted asshole.
On that last note, I find it really sad that only the black guy felt the need to cut ties; in my opinion, it shows you that none of them have any principles unless it hits close to home.
>. Some type of climate change occurred
Yeah, plate tectonics pushed the continent over the south pole. It used to be much closer to the equator.
"Some 200 million years ago, Antarctic continental crust was joined with South American, African, Indian, and Australian continental crust making up a large southern land mass known as Gondwana (the southern part of the supercontinent called Pangea). After this time, Gondwana slowly split apart to create Antarctica as a separate continent, and Antarctica has gradually moved away from the other southern continents towards its present polar position."
http://discoveringantarctica.o...
It took a long time to get from the first cell to Aristotle. It took a lot of the planet's readily available resources to get from hunter-gatherers to the Information Age.
There likely isn't enough time left, and certainly not enough resources left, to allow for an equivalent technologically advanced intelligence to arise on this planet if we wipe ourselves out.
I'm OK with fairy tales... so long as their adult authority figures present them as stories and not fact.
As I told my kids, "Santa's a fun story, enjoy it. Play along and you also get extra presents under the tree".
Yes, it's annoying when your kids question you all the time, and I feel for teachers who have to deal with everyone else's kids... but maybe we ought to stop with the Santa and Tooth Fairy and all the other 'cute and harmless' lies we tell kids.
Instead, we ought to be asking them what they think, and why, and then show them where they've made errors... so when they come up against something new, they have a fighting chance of figuring it out without someone holding their hand the whole time.
The best experience I ever had in school was a teacher mocking me for being afraid to be wrong, which is really the fork in the road where you either try to figure something out or just shut down and stick with your initial belief. We need more of that for our kids.
>The round trip latency is about 2.5 seconds
PTT, don't expect synchronous communications. Apollo managed just fine.
Even so, this is kind of silly even as a publicity stunt. There's little need for complicated infrastructure when you can easily get away with a relay station on your lander and a suit radio. You're not going to leave radio range of your lander as it will also have all your precious oxygen, and you're not taking your suit off either.
And there's currently no real need for encryption, though I suppose it might be nice for the people in question not to have the planet listening in on every noise an astronaut makes.
I love the concept, but given the difficulty (beyond current tech by at least 1 order of magnitude), expense, and the fact that it could only practically be pointed at a single target for a very brief period of time, you're going to want to be really, really confident there will be something to see with it.
It seems to be that more mundane imaging systems would have to do all the preparatory surveying. It also seems that as technology improves to approach the point at which the Solar gravitational lens method would be practical, those mundane imaging systems would likewise be improving, always making the lens financially ill-advised.
> a good IT guy will spend 99.9% of their time sitting on their ass playing videogames because they've automated everything and only have to respond when it fails.
The problem is that's not a job, its jobS.
The first job is automating the system, the second is maintaining it, and the third is being ready for disaster recovery.
You probably need vastly fewer bodies for the second job, and while you need more bodies, you don't need them for very long for the third.
So it makes more sense to hire contract for the first, have an employee for the second, and a support contract for the third than to have one group of people for all three but idle most of the time.
>Surely nobody honestly thinks that the Cuban government isnt paranoid as fuck about American ambassadors
I can see being paranoid about American intentions (Americans have traditionally seen Cuba as a resource to exploit which is why the revolution had so much backing to start with...), but I can see no benefit to deafening the ambassadors.
It almost certainly has to be some kind of surveillance or counter-surveillance accident of technology, though I suppose there could be an audio engineer out there with a chip on their shoulder doing it out of pure spite.
>I've been working in IT for over 20 years, and the thing I've seen over and over again is
Let's generalize a bit. You've seen that corporations collect knowledge but not wisdom, so they keep repeating the fundamental mistakes while avoiding repeating the exact circumstances of them.
Outsourcing vs. in-house. Cubical farms vs. offices. Part time vs. full time. Exploiting vs. 'partnering' with employees. It all goes in cycles of about half a career-span, as new people take over and experience is lost.
Unfortunately, you do need to import new knowledge and youthful enthusiasm from time to time, and people do tend to calcify as they age and eventually they go and die on you.
I simply find it very frustrating that I can see these loops and I'm not a genius, I'm simply in my 40s. Which leaves me wondering what kind of idiots are running the show, given that most of the people above me in the org structure are older.
>If Earth humans had the kind've technologies required to travel to another star system, I would hope that we would,ve also started to use those technologies to clean up and repair damage done to our existing planet.
If humans had the kind of technologies required to travel to another star system, we'd never need to set foot on another planet ever again.
We'd have the ability to build habitable ships that last centuries without resupply or refits. When you can do that... you might want to 'raid' an Oort cloud for raw material once in a while, but you'd probably avoid going deep into a stellar gravity well unless you wanted to run off solar power for a while instead of fission or fusion. Or maybe visit a rocky world inside the frost line just for fun, I suppose.