A more important question is, who's in charge of that counter? Do you take anything you see at face value? Put Mr. Prankster as the website admin, and then when the counter hits 55 trillion, you wonder how it got there. When billions are spent on advertising in general, having control of such a simple device as a counter, well, the temptation is huge, for anyone pushing an agenda. You have to take everything with a grain of salt, even open source marketing spins, and instead evaluate and see for yourself. If you are happy using firefox, and you do use it, then ok, 80M is believable.
I for one prefer mozilla classic suite, with bundled email and composer, "overwhelming" amount of features that don't overwhelm me. Firefox is just way too dumbed down for my taste, last time I looked. Mozilla classic is well designed, people put their heart in it. What I fear with firefox is this "let's take firefox through the roof mission, then submarine it," and make it some massive nuisance security breach issue, because some 10 year old script kiddie was allowed to donate code to it, without some oversight committee. That's how we teach everybody a lesson. The need for firefox to have to use external plugins for basic functionality already provided by mozilla is suspectful. Yeah, I can go around downloading wallpapers from any script kiddie or joe sixpack, no big worries there, but firefox plugins, running code while on the net? I have no problem lookin at VBA macros, and using anyones macros, as long as I get to read the code and understand it, then copy and paste the sourcecode and tailor it. Is the firefox plugin interface so simple and dumbed down that joe average can read it and pick out the meaning, like he can from an msoffice vba macro? That's what needs to be dumbed down, the programming interface, not the user interface. Using mozilla with its "overwhelming" features is incredibly easier than using the easiest programming languages for anything these days.
Yeah, well shit happens. I think NASA is the perfect system to operate the Shuttle, instead of handing it over to some private industry dingbats. Maybe NASA should operate the nuke plants too, instead of handing them over to dumbass operators who fall asleep at the control terminals at 3 mile island, for they were hired into that position because they were profitable - i.e. cheap. Yeah, let's privatize everything, even the police, military and yo momma too.
And there is only so much hydroelectric power to go around. Out of the total US energy consumption, 2.6% is generated by hydroelectric. You can bet most places that are feasible, are already dammed, all around the world. We could dam the Grand Canyon for another 0.0001%. Also, damming does have its environmental drawbacks, even if it doesn't fall into the pollution category.
Even nukular energy provides the US 8% of its energy needs, but the rest, well, the remaining 90% is all fossil. Kyoto treaty anyone? Yeah, way to undermine our comfort, our American way of life, and our 8 mpg Hummers. Other nations of Earth, you don't understand, I NEEED that Hummer, otherwise what will my neighbour think of me, how would I compensate for my small penis size??
Cost is a relative term. If your energy costs are infinite, the cost of batteries is minuscule in comparison. These days we got used to the mentality that energy is dirt cheap, and the only cost is labor, human involvement, and the money spent on sales and promotion and R&D. A new reality is coming, where energy in itself will be worth something, unless we find a way to cheap energy, by, say, the guys playing at Cadarache get fusion to work somehow, and then we can go back to this idillic world where the cost of a product is the cost of the sales effort invested into it, because making it was dirt cheap, the robots worked for free. 80% retail markup? Try 99.98 to 99.99% markup. But ONLY if we find cheap energy.
Yup, like parent said it, mpg is always a tradeoff between comfort/utility and efficiency. The hard part is providing luxury while having efficiency. There is a fine balance, and the Toyota Corolla with a 40mpg, or the hybrids, strike that balance a lot better than either a 10mpg super luxury SUV or a 1986 Geo Metro. Not to say the Geo Metro isn't quite a luxury from a buggy horse, or even the Ford T-model. I think you should be proud to own such a 1986 vehicle, but still know that you could get that 1986 vehicle to either get more mpg at same comfort level, or more comfort at same mpg, these days.
A solar panel car can give you quite a lot of mpg because it uses no liquid fuel, but try flooring it and see if you win a dragrace with it. You also don't get much of a legroom in a solar car.
That's why wasting $500 million for a Shuttle launch is not money down the drain, it's a massive psychological pill for these aware people, because it brings hope, it brings hope that there will be people living on Mars, on the Moon, on Venus, and on all kinds of self-sustaining runaway devices in space, so if and when a nukular wipeout happens on Earth, well, we at least got some people on Mars to come back and recolonize Earth, or if there is an interplanetary war, there will be certainly some renegade spaceships hiding out in the asteroid belt, functioning as sorts of Noah's archs, that make it, and give a chance for at least something to survive. In order to wipe all these out in one stroke, you'd need the Sun to blow up, and engulf all the planets to Jupiter, which is coming anyway when Sun will turn into a Red Giant, but by then there might be some Noah's arcs orbiting Saturn instead. And orbiting Saturn with a nonexistent Sun around and solar panels worth nothing may not be possible without mining nukular materials from Saturn, which may not be possible without this Hiroshima-age-consciousness first.
"My position is that organized religions naturally appear as a method of control and accumulating cultural/political power."
Except some eastern religions don't have the appearance of power. Buddhist monks in Tibet go with their bowls around the village, and they only eat what they get that day. They may hold moral authority, but definitely don't excercise or abuse their power, or at least counterbalance it. Taoism or Zen and Shinto doesn't even have priests, or a religious class layer of people, most of the 'masters' are everyday people. Hinduism though gave a rise to the Brahmin class. Other major world religions all abuse their power position, but there is always two sides to that story too. Parents abuse their autority positions, and sometimes this can be good, sometimes bad.
So how did the religions that do not embody the accumulation of power arise? Perhaps the population had a general upbringing and was cultured, educated enough that they couldn't stand abusive religions?
What is mass? What is gravity? There ought to be mass because there is gravity? - when we don't even know what the terms "mean," we just have a shallow, temporary understanding of them?
That's like asking what is the temperature, if I stuck my finger in it, it's surely cold because if it were hot then it would glow? Or it's surely hot because it glows except the glowing can't escape, together with my finger, or finger-sensation-nerve-currents? Does it have no temperature if the measurement can't escape? What's the definition? As opposed to mass and gravity, at least we know that hotness and coldness comes down to something else, something more basic, the atomic/molecular motion, and then we don't have a problem describing temperature inside a black hole, which can be hot, or cold, depending how the atoms move, and what the statistical entropy states are. But still, if you can't get information out of a black hole, how do you measure anything? Science is pitted on empiricism. In fact, how come gravity escapes a black hole? Are these mystical gravitons "lighter" than photons, using the term lighter losely because the very definition of light gravitons depends on gravitons, making it a circular definition.
The GPL doesn't only give them sourcecode access, but also the freedom to change that sourcecode, and to distribute their changes. One of the gripes with the GPL coming from commercial vendors is that they'd like to make money. But the right to redistribute basically eliminates their market.
How to rectify this? Requiring that only if you actually delved into the sourcecode and made a change are you allowed to distribute wouldn't work, because, at the one end of the spectrum you change a punctuation mark somewhere, on the other end you start with a single line of their code and add 1 million lines of self written code. You obviously did nothing by changing a punctuation mark, and by using a single line of code from them obviously is minuscule compared to your self written stuff. Who's to judge the in-between code-modification stuff? They can't measure programmer performance based on line of code written, how can they allocate, slice and dice the price, measure the worth of creativity?
Basically, for now, if you have a piece of software, GPL'd, you can ask a million bux for it. If it's not your own modified version of say the linux kernel, people can either pay you a million, or go grab a copy off an ftp server for free. On the other hand if there is something in your modified copy that nobody in the world has, they may be willing to pay up that 1 million for it, but once it's out of your hands, they can give it away for free. This essentially eliminates your market, by creating a million competitors with 0 cost, your only chance of recovering invested effort is at that very first sale.
If you think of it, this way with the GPL you only get rewarded when you create, and not some 60 years after it, milking the same cow over and over, when you no longer bring value to the table in exchange for the money you extort. Intellectual property laws were invented to spur creatity and provide incentives for it, but they've been bastardized into freedom-squatting devices, where you get to pay over and over an 'existence fee,' for simply being born, to a feudal lord, without really being provided anything valuable in return. As a last resort, feudal lords will try to sell you the idea of security and global order they provide, which they can really do provide, but at just what cost? A gov't by the people can provide for the same military, police and security, and get taxed (don't laugh here) less than what a feudal lord would tax you. Creativity isn't spurred that much, in contrast to the sacrifices born in exchange with such a feudal system.
On the other hand developing something for mass consumption, such as a movie - who is going to pay that 1-time 100 million dollar to see the movie, instead of the 10 bux each at the movie theater? They made the movie with the intent to make profit, even if a lot of movies end up like crappy drugs to your mind, you could even say negative value in the overall big picture, instead of something educational that doesn't really take that much money to make. There is entertainment, and there is brainwashing - which should be reimbursed? Anyway, 100 million for a movie? Yes, sometimes, but how about Shakespeare's Theatre? Which provides greater value, how do you measure the worth of creativity? Hollywood and the current media wants to have nothing to do with awesome creativity that didn't cost 100 million to make, because that would undermined their brainwashed power position where only expensive is good. Yes, good is expensive, but there is a balance in everything. Windows for how many billion dollars? Give me a break. Linux for free? Ehh, I can't complain as an end user, but no reward to the creators is not something perfect either. Luckily, a lot of the creators find some kind of reward, at least enough to feed and have a comfy life, after which their reward is often being best at doing what they love to do.
It's hard to bring justice to a situation where the worth of something is so elusive. With artistic creation where the shock factor, se
Forgot one thing, as far as artificial demand goes. They say the really good salesman is not someone who can sell you something you want to buy, but one who can sell you something you wouldn't want to buy in the first place. Yeah, how many salespeople have a "creed," a sort of "hippocratic oath," to seek out and get to know a person, and only sell them what they truly need, to become sort of people-knowers, psychologists, instead of abusing their position of power over their target, their power to influence them.
Asking for such a creed is foolish, after all, happiness can be generated by telling you something will make you happy, and you believing in that. Placebos cure ilnesses, even though they have a lot of side effects. Any drug company will tell you that. Value and demand is something that's unfixed, fluctuates a lot, because perception fluctuates a lot. If your perception of the value of some goods is artificially increased, your happiness is increased too, even if artificially. Tell me lies, sweet little lies often beats getting the cold hard truth in your face all the time. Did you know that you're special? (Psst, so is everyone else.) Happiness, even artificial happiness, matters. Honey, do these clothes make me look fat? What is your answer? Artificial happiness? Artificial demand? Artificial piles of waste? Why can't we create artificial happiness without the artificial waste piles?
I beg to disagree but a lot of demand is artificial too. A lot of people need to be told what to want, because they can't think for themselves, and they go around like a herd of lemmings, following the latest trends.
Not to categorize people, or belittle some as dumb, as opposed to you and me, who are wise, because everyone has a that trend following side to themselves, follow the flock, do as others do, including you and me. It's part of being human, otherwise there is no society, people that don't follow any trends ever don't get to cooperate. For instance, you could call scientific experiments, faith in the scientific method a trend, together with the written word from even thousands of years ago (e.g. Euclid), a human cooperation of a massive scale. It's nothing more than a belief system, a trend, because you put your belief in repeatablity of experiments, faith into - as Wittgenstein said it, "that the sun will rise tomorrow - is only a hypothesis." Nothing assures you, and some religion will come by and say science is an illusion, reality is an illusion, and tomorrow all science will end, and you shall be judged by your adherence to these religious rules this guy is preaching you. You may say, I won't adhere, I'd rather wait and see, and he'll say just watch, you'll be sorry. Or, you can adhere, saying, what do I got to lose if the the world truly ends tomorrow and I shall be judged because I didn't follow what this guy told me? What if he's right? A lot of belief systems prey on people with such techniques. At least doubt is at the core of science - It's the religion of doubt, the faith of doubting, the faith in not having faith, the faith of minimizing or optimizing faith, leaving as few pillars you stand on based on faith as possible. Faith is a very precious commodity you shouldn't throw around too easily. Still, as far as following trends goes, the scientific method has a lot of followers, because so far so good, look at the big picture, we got the steam engine, we got computers, eyeglasses, we get to look at Jupiter's moons, and keep our asses warm by running that nukular powerplant a couple miles down that way. For those opposing science and technology, I think it beats having to set a fire inside a cave, and eating meat you killed with your untechnological stone tools, because you didn't sow crops to harvest.
Still, when marching along, following trends, most often only when you've got a taste, when you walked down a path with a flock for a while - give everything a chance - do you come to a full hault and say: I gotta stop, something's not right, look at the big picture. It takes a while to wake up, until it's too late, and those who dare not sleepwalk and wake up early, get axed by the sheperds who are the religious high priests of the current trend, the current belief system.
There is of course the other side to even the scientific "vogue." Not the doubting part, because the following is a doubting of even the method of doubting. More exactly, the method of doubting gives you success and benefits, but the problem is failing to doubt the benefit of benefits, or, in other words, the drawback of too much, too sudden success without corresponding checks and balances. (My condolances go to all people who win the lottery, and are unable to behave like, say Bill Gates did, when he first became a billionare, and took the reporters to McDonalds over it, wearing jeans and tennis shoes.) As far as the sudden advances of technology and and science go, without corresponding spiritual advances, where we came to the point of being able to extinguish all life a the push of a button, there are some people that say halt, let's think here for a minute. Ted Kaczynski, for all the sickness he is, he's got another side to him, he's got a point. Look at the amish as a much better example of how to tame technology, how to tame science, how to say halt, let's think first before we dive head first down that cliff.
The "free market religion" is no different from a trend. Regarding the fallacy of the br
A philosopher is someone who knows about very many topics, and is able to assess them all, under one hat. As he goes on to learn about more and more things, because of his limited brain capacity, he gets to know less and less about each individual thing, until he reaches his goal of knowing nothing about everything.
Old Joke (blatantly plagiarized here): Zen master to hot dog vendor: "Make me one with everything!" The Zen master pays with a twenty-dollar bill, which the vendor puts in his pocket. Zen master: "Where's my change?" Vendor: "Ahh, Change! Change cannot come from without, it must come from within!
Now everyone will know that penguins are homosexuals, therefore linux is a homosexual thing. Not that there should eb anything wrong with that, but are you biased, my friend, prejudiced in any way?
You can't blame Bush for not doing anything in his power to help the economy. As long as you are forced to buy new crap and send your old, perfectly working stuff to the dumpster, it's all good man. The only way this economy can be happy is by generating massive piles of unneeded trash and waste, because, well, we can't find any other way, any other system, to live our collective lives, conserving resources, and only consuming what's really needed, not based on artificial demand, but what demand stems naturally.
Ahh, it's google maps. Article made me go check it out. Unfortunately, it didn't work for me google is marching down that dangerous road of nonstandard crap. I remember when they at least fell back on giving you a gif, png or jpg. So pop it up, look at page source and a quick scan shows following garbage:...
xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" ...
X()) {_el('loading').style.display = 'none';document.write('<p>ActiveX is not enabled in your browser. If your browser is Internet Explorer, you must have ActiveX enabled to use Google Maps.</p>');} else if (_c) { _makePasteBox(_el('q .....
else {document.write('<p>Your browser is not officially supported by Google Maps. We currently support the following browsers:</p><ul><li><a href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/download s/default.asp">IE</a> 5.5+ (Windows)</li><li><a href="http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/">Fi refox</a> 0.8+ (Windows, Mac, Linux)</li><li><a href="http://www.apple.com/safari/download/">Safar i</a> 1.2.4+ (Mac)</li><li><a href="http://channels.netscape.com/ns/browsers/dow nload.jsp">Netscape</a> 7.1+ (Windows, Mac, Linux)</li><li><a href="http://www.mozilla.org/products/mozilla1.x/" >Mozilla</a> 1.4+ (Windows, Mac, Linux)</li><li><a href="http://www.opera.com/download/">Opera</a> 7.5+ (Windows, Mac, Linux)</li></ul><p>We recommend you download one of the browsers above, or you can try to <a href="/?fc=1">load Google Maps</a> in your current browser.</p>');}if (!_nxsl) {var nxsrc = '/maps?file=sf&' + _sf;var nxtxt = '<iframe id="nxsl" onload .....
Well obviously it didn't document write that my browser is not supported, and it's one of those in the list, but unfortunately if it doesn't use microsoft winblows, it just doesn't work. I better upgrade and bend over, touch my toes for Microsoft, ehh? I'll get fucked anyway, sooner or later, it's only a matter of time, as I'm always shown. Whatever happened to give me liberty or give me death, and the price of freedom being eternal vigilance? Freedom? Only if you're officially approved with a rubber stamp on your ass for being born with 'divine right', are you allowed to be free.
Parent was picked for me to metamod. Now, thank you for the education, I made some seemingly nonsense post on this, talking the same thing, without knowing the "falsifiable claim" terminology. After all, the metamod handpickers on slashdot care about you.
I guess the slashdot crowd is wearing out...
on
When Pigs Wifi
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You're wearing out the slashdot crowd's ability to cry foul in face of this constant harassment, over broadband and FCC DSL rulings. After all, they are all human beings, with a psychology, and any psyche can be broken. So now you have to resort to putting the cry foul slogans back into their mouths, because they've worn out coming up with it themselves? That's like injecting a horse with a mental agitator, after it's calm and lets you sit on its back. I guess, unlike with a horse, on slashdot the agitation, the counterarguments are what you seek.
Ehh, you can almost put an actual human to monitor google image searches, because I bet you 99.9999% of image searches are of images depicting human beings, most of that being porn. The rest are images of galaxies, cars, and pictures of what to put on your school report. That's why they got the offensive filter off setting, as soon as someone sets that, ehh, they're looking for porn. But you have to beware of cunning terrorists who will set that filter, and still look for the nukular plant images.
Perhaps you could tackle your idea of "undergoing acceleration." After all, based on the correspondence principle, when you're inside an elevator, you have no clue whether you are sitting in a gravity field, or you're "undergoing acceleration." I'm asking for some kind of intuitive understanding of the structure of space, why inertial reference frames don't matter - Galileo's flies don't accumulate in the back of the ship, because they get tired trying to keep up with it, you don't feel motion - but as soon as you accelerate, press the pedal down, you can physically feel it, nature tells you. What's up with nature, like that? One way was to call it D'Alembert's law, or Galileos inertia law, or Newton's. It just is. Then came relativity theory, pivoting on a single concept of having a maximum speed, the speed of light, came up with all kinds of neat space-curvature math, but it shouldn't end there. When they tackled the pardox of constancy of speed of light, that arose from Maxwell's equations - because, unlike with everything else mechanical, electrodynamics and electric induction from magnetic fields depends on simply moving magnetic fields, not just accelerating ones (F=q(v x B) - note v, velocity, not a, acceleration), so to bring velocity and acceleration under one hat, the speed of light c enters every formula to compensate. The shape of the laws didn't change, you still have Galileos relativity, but you had to twist something else to make it work. It's like you got extra insight, but you're not done. Then the elevator insight came to tackle general relativity. That's all general relativity is, the elevator box, not knowing the difference between gravity, and acceleration, therefore they must be the same thing as far as nature manifests them to you - curved spacetime. Everything else logically follows, but that's where it all ends, you get no further. You have to seek out these paradoxes, and just because a Bohr came up with some 'ether' theory that works, it doesn't mean there can't be something more. You can toss the rule at it, - no radiation in quantum states, only during jumps - and say it just is, it's a law, suck it up. Or you can pick at it, but you have to find the handle where to start.
Perhaps the electron really doesn't undergo acceleration in the physical sense - I'm not claiming I have an intutitive idea, or an answer to this, but it's some point you can start chiseling away at the issues, that seems to be ignored these days. Naive off-the-wall ideas are that, perhaps the electron doesn't feel acceleration because it has its own compensating antigravity field. Perhaps at the length scales in question, the amount of antigravity, antiacceleration generated, is compensated by the external gravity we call Newton's law, so in the end the total sum of negative plus positive gravities is 0. Another off the wall idea could be, that perhaps space has some kind of fine structure, tiled of some imaginary-number sided polygons/3d objects, and when you define motion as "something" changing space-cells, jumping to neighbours, like a dot on a computer screen, some funky math works out that under these "dx" measuring conditions, with imaginary numbers stirring in the soup, the acceleration doesn't exist in some conditions, like some "eigenvalues" misbehave with matrices. I'm not trying to make sense here, these are blow-smoke-up-your-ass-theories, but it's something to think about. What is acceleration? What is motion? What is space? These concepts are taken for granted, but that's where the key lies. We take teh basics for granted, as a foundation, we "know(consider)" spacetime is curved, consider that there are quantum states, and then off we go with these tools on head-hurting analyses and complexity that's awesome predictive - imagine a computational solution to chromiums orbital jumps - but we don't really care, as long as we know the fundamentals, the methods, it doesn't shock us if someone goes on a computational quest. Like calculating pi - when someone goes and gets 35 decimal places via Archime
I get the general feeling, from the constant subtle posts about dark matter on Slashdot, that lot of the noise around dark matter is like that around snake oil = lots of profit. Yeah, way to solve the global energy problem! Whoever needs the first law of thermodynamics, when you can make all the perpetuum mobile you want, fueled by Dark Energy? I for one welcome the rigor and limit that science/nature puts on us. Practicing science is like practicing religion, you have to bow before Nature, instead of asserting your own will. Kings and fools are equal before its eyes. You can only get anywhere if you respect its limits, its laws. It's better than being completely free. You could argue whether the laws are fair or not, but that's a moot point, dumb, these laws are not like human erected laws, and laws dealing with the inner world, they are set, independently of you, and maybe you can't even comprehend them all, just get a glimmer, a glimpse - see, sparks of religious feeling even there. In fact you cannot disobey these laws, even if you tried to, I mean, you can try to, such as build perpetuum mobiles, but trying to do so is a futile excersize. You could approach this dark energy thing with a lot less greed, and a lot more wonder and love.
Nothing can escape from Heaven either. However, listen to the following story:
St. Peter goes opens the gates of Heaven, because someone is knocking. A guy stands there, says "Aaaaa..." and puff, disappears, like magic. St. Peter doesn't understand it, he just shrugs his shoulders, closes the door back, and goes on his business. Soon, there is knocking again. Same thing all over, same guy there, about to say "Aaaa.." and puff, disappears again. This repeats a few times, until St. Peter loses his temper, and next time he opens the door, before the guy even gets a chance to open his mouth, yells at him: "What the hell are you doing man??" The guy finally able to catch his breath, and utter a full sentence says: "Aaai'm sorry, I can't help it when they are trying to use the defibrillator on me."
See? You can escape even from Heaven, with correct technology. If you can escape from there, then black holes should be a piece of cake too, IF you got the right technology. Commercials in 6549AD: Tourist trips to the depths black hole #XX9 near Polaris - guaranteed to rock your brains! Roundrip fare only $9999.999 denars.
Slashdot Mirror
A more important question is, who's in charge of that counter? Do you take anything you see at face value? Put Mr. Prankster as the website admin, and then when the counter hits 55 trillion, you wonder how it got there. When billions are spent on advertising in general, having control of such a simple device as a counter, well, the temptation is huge, for anyone pushing an agenda. You have to take everything with a grain of salt, even open source marketing spins, and instead evaluate and see for yourself. If you are happy using firefox, and you do use it, then ok, 80M is believable.
I for one prefer mozilla classic suite, with bundled email and composer, "overwhelming" amount of features that don't overwhelm me. Firefox is just way too dumbed down for my taste, last time I looked. Mozilla classic is well designed, people put their heart in it. What I fear with firefox is this "let's take firefox through the roof mission, then submarine it," and make it some massive nuisance security breach issue, because some 10 year old script kiddie was allowed to donate code to it, without some oversight committee. That's how we teach everybody a lesson. The need for firefox to have to use external plugins for basic functionality already provided by mozilla is suspectful. Yeah, I can go around downloading wallpapers from any script kiddie or joe sixpack, no big worries there, but firefox plugins, running code while on the net? I have no problem lookin at VBA macros, and using anyones macros, as long as I get to read the code and understand it, then copy and paste the sourcecode and tailor it. Is the firefox plugin interface so simple and dumbed down that joe average can read it and pick out the meaning, like he can from an msoffice vba macro? That's what needs to be dumbed down, the programming interface, not the user interface. Using mozilla with its "overwhelming" features is incredibly easier than using the easiest programming languages for anything these days.
Yeah, well shit happens. I think NASA is the perfect system to operate the Shuttle, instead of handing it over to some private industry dingbats. Maybe NASA should operate the nuke plants too, instead of handing them over to dumbass operators who fall asleep at the control terminals at 3 mile island, for they were hired into that position because they were profitable - i.e. cheap. Yeah, let's privatize everything, even the police, military and yo momma too.
And there is only so much hydroelectric power to go around. Out of the total US energy consumption, 2.6% is generated by hydroelectric. You can bet most places that are feasible, are already dammed, all around the world. We could dam the Grand Canyon for another 0.0001%. Also, damming does have its environmental drawbacks, even if it doesn't fall into the pollution category. Even nukular energy provides the US 8% of its energy needs, but the rest, well, the remaining 90% is all fossil. Kyoto treaty anyone? Yeah, way to undermine our comfort, our American way of life, and our 8 mpg Hummers. Other nations of Earth, you don't understand, I NEEED that Hummer, otherwise what will my neighbour think of me, how would I compensate for my small penis size??
Cost is a relative term. If your energy costs are infinite, the cost of batteries is minuscule in comparison. These days we got used to the mentality that energy is dirt cheap, and the only cost is labor, human involvement, and the money spent on sales and promotion and R&D. A new reality is coming, where energy in itself will be worth something, unless we find a way to cheap energy, by, say, the guys playing at Cadarache get fusion to work somehow, and then we can go back to this idillic world where the cost of a product is the cost of the sales effort invested into it, because making it was dirt cheap, the robots worked for free. 80% retail markup? Try 99.98 to 99.99% markup. But ONLY if we find cheap energy.
Yup, like parent said it, mpg is always a tradeoff between comfort/utility and efficiency. The hard part is providing luxury while having efficiency. There is a fine balance, and the Toyota Corolla with a 40mpg, or the hybrids, strike that balance a lot better than either a 10mpg super luxury SUV or a 1986 Geo Metro. Not to say the Geo Metro isn't quite a luxury from a buggy horse, or even the Ford T-model. I think you should be proud to own such a 1986 vehicle, but still know that you could get that 1986 vehicle to either get more mpg at same comfort level, or more comfort at same mpg, these days.
A solar panel car can give you quite a lot of mpg because it uses no liquid fuel, but try flooring it and see if you win a dragrace with it. You also don't get much of a legroom in a solar car.
"What the FCC, and their "sponsors" don't seem to understand is that competition really is good for everybody."
Tell that to "The Man", the Hitler in charge, running all this propaganda machine. I'm sure he'll be kind and understanding.
That's why wasting $500 million for a Shuttle launch is not money down the drain, it's a massive psychological pill for these aware people, because it brings hope, it brings hope that there will be people living on Mars, on the Moon, on Venus, and on all kinds of self-sustaining runaway devices in space, so if and when a nukular wipeout happens on Earth, well, we at least got some people on Mars to come back and recolonize Earth, or if there is an interplanetary war, there will be certainly some renegade spaceships hiding out in the asteroid belt, functioning as sorts of Noah's archs, that make it, and give a chance for at least something to survive. In order to wipe all these out in one stroke, you'd need the Sun to blow up, and engulf all the planets to Jupiter, which is coming anyway when Sun will turn into a Red Giant, but by then there might be some Noah's arcs orbiting Saturn instead. And orbiting Saturn with a nonexistent Sun around and solar panels worth nothing may not be possible without mining nukular materials from Saturn, which may not be possible without this Hiroshima-age-consciousness first.
"My position is that organized religions naturally appear as a method of control and accumulating cultural/political power."
Except some eastern religions don't have the appearance of power. Buddhist monks in Tibet go with their bowls around the village, and they only eat what they get that day. They may hold moral authority, but definitely don't excercise or abuse their power, or at least counterbalance it. Taoism or Zen and Shinto doesn't even have priests, or a religious class layer of people, most of the 'masters' are everyday people. Hinduism though gave a rise to the Brahmin class. Other major world religions all abuse their power position, but there is always two sides to that story too. Parents abuse their autority positions, and sometimes this can be good, sometimes bad.
So how did the religions that do not embody the accumulation of power arise? Perhaps the population had a general upbringing and was cultured, educated enough that they couldn't stand abusive religions?
Actually, Kain did it most, Eve only stole and Apple.
What is mass? What is gravity? There ought to be mass because there is gravity? - when we don't even know what the terms "mean," we just have a shallow, temporary understanding of them? That's like asking what is the temperature, if I stuck my finger in it, it's surely cold because if it were hot then it would glow? Or it's surely hot because it glows except the glowing can't escape, together with my finger, or finger-sensation-nerve-currents? Does it have no temperature if the measurement can't escape? What's the definition? As opposed to mass and gravity, at least we know that hotness and coldness comes down to something else, something more basic, the atomic/molecular motion, and then we don't have a problem describing temperature inside a black hole, which can be hot, or cold, depending how the atoms move, and what the statistical entropy states are. But still, if you can't get information out of a black hole, how do you measure anything? Science is pitted on empiricism. In fact, how come gravity escapes a black hole? Are these mystical gravitons "lighter" than photons, using the term lighter losely because the very definition of light gravitons depends on gravitons, making it a circular definition.
Careful there.
The GPL doesn't only give them sourcecode access, but also the freedom to change that sourcecode, and to distribute their changes.
One of the gripes with the GPL coming from commercial vendors is that they'd like to make money. But the right to redistribute basically eliminates their market.
How to rectify this? Requiring that only if you actually delved into the sourcecode and made a change are you allowed to distribute wouldn't work, because, at the one end of the spectrum you change a punctuation mark somewhere, on the other end you start with a single line of their code and add 1 million lines of self written code. You obviously did nothing by changing a punctuation mark, and by using a single line of code from them obviously is minuscule compared to your self written stuff. Who's to judge the in-between code-modification stuff? They can't measure programmer performance based on line of code written, how can they allocate, slice and dice the price, measure the worth of creativity?
Basically, for now, if you have a piece of software, GPL'd, you can ask a million bux for it. If it's not your own modified version of say the linux kernel, people can either pay you a million, or go grab a copy off an ftp server for free. On the other hand if there is something in your modified copy that nobody in the world has, they may be willing to pay up that 1 million for it, but once it's out of your hands, they can give it away for free. This essentially eliminates your market, by creating a million competitors with 0 cost, your only chance of recovering invested effort is at that very first sale.
If you think of it, this way with the GPL you only get rewarded when you create, and not some 60 years after it, milking the same cow over and over, when you no longer bring value to the table in exchange for the money you extort. Intellectual property laws were invented to spur creatity and provide incentives for it, but they've been bastardized into freedom-squatting devices, where you get to pay over and over an 'existence fee,' for simply being born, to a feudal lord, without really being provided anything valuable in return. As a last resort, feudal lords will try to sell you the idea of security and global order they provide, which they can really do provide, but at just what cost? A gov't by the people can provide for the same military, police and security, and get taxed (don't laugh here) less than what a feudal lord would tax you. Creativity isn't spurred that much, in contrast to the sacrifices born in exchange with such a feudal system.
On the other hand developing something for mass consumption, such as a movie - who is going to pay that 1-time 100 million dollar to see the movie, instead of the 10 bux each at the movie theater? They made the movie with the intent to make profit, even if a lot of movies end up like crappy drugs to your mind, you could even say negative value in the overall big picture, instead of something educational that doesn't really take that much money to make. There is entertainment, and there is brainwashing - which should be reimbursed? Anyway, 100 million for a movie? Yes, sometimes, but how about Shakespeare's Theatre? Which provides greater value, how do you measure the worth of creativity? Hollywood and the current media wants to have nothing to do with awesome creativity that didn't cost 100 million to make, because that would undermined their brainwashed power position where only expensive is good. Yes, good is expensive, but there is a balance in everything. Windows for how many billion dollars? Give me a break. Linux for free? Ehh, I can't complain as an end user, but no reward to the creators is not something perfect either. Luckily, a lot of the creators find some kind of reward, at least enough to feed and have a comfy life, after which their reward is often being best at doing what they love to do.
It's hard to bring justice to a situation where the worth of something is so elusive. With artistic creation where the shock factor, se
Perverted anime cartoons, and japanese as a whole as uncaring people. I'm not denying the side I heard, I just felt the other side needed mention too.
Forgot one thing, as far as artificial demand goes. They say the really good salesman is not someone who can sell you something you want to buy, but one who can sell you something you wouldn't want to buy in the first place. Yeah, how many salespeople have a "creed," a sort of "hippocratic oath," to seek out and get to know a person, and only sell them what they truly need, to become sort of people-knowers, psychologists, instead of abusing their position of power over their target, their power to influence them. Asking for such a creed is foolish, after all, happiness can be generated by telling you something will make you happy, and you believing in that. Placebos cure ilnesses, even though they have a lot of side effects. Any drug company will tell you that. Value and demand is something that's unfixed, fluctuates a lot, because perception fluctuates a lot. If your perception of the value of some goods is artificially increased, your happiness is increased too, even if artificially. Tell me lies, sweet little lies often beats getting the cold hard truth in your face all the time. Did you know that you're special? (Psst, so is everyone else.) Happiness, even artificial happiness, matters. Honey, do these clothes make me look fat? What is your answer? Artificial happiness? Artificial demand? Artificial piles of waste? Why can't we create artificial happiness without the artificial waste piles?
I beg to disagree but a lot of demand is artificial too. A lot of people need to be told what to want, because they can't think for themselves, and they go around like a herd of lemmings, following the latest trends.
Not to categorize people, or belittle some as dumb, as opposed to you and me, who are wise, because everyone has a that trend following side to themselves, follow the flock, do as others do, including you and me. It's part of being human, otherwise there is no society, people that don't follow any trends ever don't get to cooperate. For instance, you could call scientific experiments, faith in the scientific method a trend, together with the written word from even thousands of years ago (e.g. Euclid), a human cooperation of a massive scale. It's nothing more than a belief system, a trend, because you put your belief in repeatablity of experiments, faith into - as Wittgenstein said it, "that the sun will rise tomorrow - is only a hypothesis." Nothing assures you, and some religion will come by and say science is an illusion, reality is an illusion, and tomorrow all science will end, and you shall be judged by your adherence to these religious rules this guy is preaching you. You may say, I won't adhere, I'd rather wait and see, and he'll say just watch, you'll be sorry. Or, you can adhere, saying, what do I got to lose if the the world truly ends tomorrow and I shall be judged because I didn't follow what this guy told me? What if he's right? A lot of belief systems prey on people with such techniques. At least doubt is at the core of science - It's the religion of doubt, the faith of doubting, the faith in not having faith, the faith of minimizing or optimizing faith, leaving as few pillars you stand on based on faith as possible. Faith is a very precious commodity you shouldn't throw around too easily. Still, as far as following trends goes, the scientific method has a lot of followers, because so far so good, look at the big picture, we got the steam engine, we got computers, eyeglasses, we get to look at Jupiter's moons, and keep our asses warm by running that nukular powerplant a couple miles down that way. For those opposing science and technology, I think it beats having to set a fire inside a cave, and eating meat you killed with your untechnological stone tools, because you didn't sow crops to harvest.
Still, when marching along, following trends, most often only when you've got a taste, when you walked down a path with a flock for a while - give everything a chance - do you come to a full hault and say: I gotta stop, something's not right, look at the big picture. It takes a while to wake up, until it's too late, and those who dare not sleepwalk and wake up early, get axed by the sheperds who are the religious high priests of the current trend, the current belief system.
There is of course the other side to even the scientific "vogue." Not the doubting part, because the following is a doubting of even the method of doubting. More exactly, the method of doubting gives you success and benefits, but the problem is failing to doubt the benefit of benefits, or, in other words, the drawback of too much, too sudden success without corresponding checks and balances. (My condolances go to all people who win the lottery, and are unable to behave like, say Bill Gates did, when he first became a billionare, and took the reporters to McDonalds over it, wearing jeans and tennis shoes.) As far as the sudden advances of technology and and science go, without corresponding spiritual advances, where we came to the point of being able to extinguish all life a the push of a button, there are some people that say halt, let's think here for a minute. Ted Kaczynski, for all the sickness he is, he's got another side to him, he's got a point. Look at the amish as a much better example of how to tame technology, how to tame science, how to say halt, let's think first before we dive head first down that cliff.
The "free market religion" is no different from a trend. Regarding the fallacy of the br
A philosopher is someone who knows about very many topics, and is able to assess them all, under one hat. As he goes on to learn about more and more things, because of his limited brain capacity, he gets to know less and less about each individual thing, until he reaches his goal of knowing nothing about everything.
Old Joke (blatantly plagiarized here):
Zen master to hot dog vendor: "Make me one with everything!"
The Zen master pays with a twenty-dollar bill, which the vendor puts in his pocket.
Zen master: "Where's my change?"
Vendor: "Ahh, Change! Change cannot come from without, it must come from within!
Now everyone will know that penguins are homosexuals, therefore linux is a homosexual thing. Not that there should eb anything wrong with that, but are you biased, my friend, prejudiced in any way?
You can't blame Bush for not doing anything in his power to help the economy. As long as you are forced to buy new crap and send your old, perfectly working stuff to the dumpster, it's all good man. The only way this economy can be happy is by generating massive piles of unneeded trash and waste, because, well, we can't find any other way, any other system, to live our collective lives, conserving resources, and only consuming what's really needed, not based on artificial demand, but what demand stems naturally.
Maybe for people with 12 fingers it will be easy to learn how to count in a kindergarten...
Ahh, it's google maps. Article made me go check it out. Unfortunately, it didn't work for me google is marching down that dangerous road of nonstandard crap. I remember when they at least fell back on giving you a gif, png or jpg. So pop it up, look at page source and a quick scan shows following garbage: ...
...
.....
d s/default.asp">IE</a>i refox</a>r i</a> 1.2.4+w nload.jsp">Netscape</a>" >Mozilla</a>
.....
xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml"
X()) {_el('loading').style.display =
'none';document.write('<p>ActiveX is not enabled in your browser.
If your browser is Internet Explorer, you must have ActiveX enabled to
use Google Maps.</p>');} else if (_c) { _makePasteBox(_el('q
else {document.write('<p>Your browser is not officially
supported by Google Maps. We currently support the following
browsers:</p><ul><li><a
href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/downloa
5.5+ (Windows)</li><li><a
href="http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/">F
0.8+ (Windows, Mac, Linux)</li><li><a
href="http://www.apple.com/safari/download/">Safa
(Mac)</li><li><a
href="http://channels.netscape.com/ns/browsers/do
7.1+ (Windows, Mac, Linux)</li><li><a
href="http://www.mozilla.org/products/mozilla1.x/
1.4+ (Windows, Mac, Linux)</li><li><a
href="http://www.opera.com/download/">Opera</a> 7.5+ (Windows,
Mac, Linux)</li></ul><p>We recommend you download one
of the browsers above, or you can try to <a href="/?fc=1">load
Google Maps</a> in your current browser.</p>');}if (!_nxsl)
{var nxsrc = '/maps?file=sf&' + _sf;var nxtxt = '<iframe
id="nxsl" onload
Well obviously it didn't document write that my browser is not supported, and it's one of those in the list, but unfortunately if it doesn't use microsoft winblows, it just doesn't work. I better upgrade and bend over, touch my toes for Microsoft, ehh? I'll get fucked anyway, sooner or later, it's only a matter of time, as I'm always shown. Whatever happened to give me liberty or give me death, and the price of freedom being eternal vigilance? Freedom? Only if you're officially approved with a rubber stamp on your ass for being born with 'divine right', are you allowed to be free.
Parent was picked for me to metamod. Now, thank you for the education, I made some seemingly nonsense post on this, talking the same thing, without knowing the "falsifiable claim" terminology. After all, the metamod handpickers on slashdot care about you.
You're wearing out the slashdot crowd's ability to cry foul in face of this constant harassment, over broadband and FCC DSL rulings. After all, they are all human beings, with a psychology, and any psyche can be broken. So now you have to resort to putting the cry foul slogans back into their mouths, because they've worn out coming up with it themselves? That's like injecting a horse with a mental agitator, after it's calm and lets you sit on its back. I guess, unlike with a horse, on slashdot the agitation, the counterarguments are what you seek.
Ehh, you can almost put an actual human to monitor google image searches, because I bet you 99.9999% of image searches are of images depicting human beings, most of that being porn. The rest are images of galaxies, cars, and pictures of what to put on your school report. That's why they got the offensive filter off setting, as soon as someone sets that, ehh, they're looking for porn. But you have to beware of cunning terrorists who will set that filter, and still look for the nukular plant images.
Perhaps you could tackle your idea of "undergoing acceleration." After all, based on the correspondence principle, when you're inside an elevator, you have no clue whether you are sitting in a gravity field, or you're "undergoing acceleration." I'm asking for some kind of intuitive understanding of the structure of space, why inertial reference frames don't matter - Galileo's flies don't accumulate in the back of the ship, because they get tired trying to keep up with it, you don't feel motion - but as soon as you accelerate, press the pedal down, you can physically feel it, nature tells you. What's up with nature, like that? One way was to call it D'Alembert's law, or Galileos inertia law, or Newton's. It just is. Then came relativity theory, pivoting on a single concept of having a maximum speed, the speed of light, came up with all kinds of neat space-curvature math, but it shouldn't end there. When they tackled the pardox of constancy of speed of light, that arose from Maxwell's equations - because, unlike with everything else mechanical, electrodynamics and electric induction from magnetic fields depends on simply moving magnetic fields, not just accelerating ones (F=q(v x B) - note v, velocity, not a, acceleration), so to bring velocity and acceleration under one hat, the speed of light c enters every formula to compensate. The shape of the laws didn't change, you still have Galileos relativity, but you had to twist something else to make it work. It's like you got extra insight, but you're not done. Then the elevator insight came to tackle general relativity. That's all general relativity is, the elevator box, not knowing the difference between gravity, and acceleration, therefore they must be the same thing as far as nature manifests them to you - curved spacetime. Everything else logically follows, but that's where it all ends, you get no further. You have to seek out these paradoxes, and just because a Bohr came up with some 'ether' theory that works, it doesn't mean there can't be something more. You can toss the rule at it, - no radiation in quantum states, only during jumps - and say it just is, it's a law, suck it up. Or you can pick at it, but you have to find the handle where to start.
Perhaps the electron really doesn't undergo acceleration in the physical sense - I'm not claiming I have an intutitive idea, or an answer to this, but it's some point you can start chiseling away at the issues, that seems to be ignored these days. Naive off-the-wall ideas are that, perhaps the electron doesn't feel acceleration because it has its own compensating antigravity field. Perhaps at the length scales in question, the amount of antigravity, antiacceleration generated, is compensated by the external gravity we call Newton's law, so in the end the total sum of negative plus positive gravities is 0. Another off the wall idea could be, that perhaps space has some kind of fine structure, tiled of some imaginary-number sided polygons/3d objects, and when you define motion as "something" changing space-cells, jumping to neighbours, like a dot on a computer screen, some funky math works out that under these "dx" measuring conditions, with imaginary numbers stirring in the soup, the acceleration doesn't exist in some conditions, like some "eigenvalues" misbehave with matrices. I'm not trying to make sense here, these are blow-smoke-up-your-ass-theories, but it's something to think about. What is acceleration? What is motion? What is space? These concepts are taken for granted, but that's where the key lies. We take teh basics for granted, as a foundation, we "know(consider)" spacetime is curved, consider that there are quantum states, and then off we go with these tools on head-hurting analyses and complexity that's awesome predictive - imagine a computational solution to chromiums orbital jumps - but we don't really care, as long as we know the fundamentals, the methods, it doesn't shock us if someone goes on a computational quest. Like calculating pi - when someone goes and gets 35 decimal places via Archime
I get the general feeling, from the constant subtle posts about dark matter on Slashdot, that lot of the noise around dark matter is like that around snake oil = lots of profit. Yeah, way to solve the global energy problem! Whoever needs the first law of thermodynamics, when you can make all the perpetuum mobile you want, fueled by Dark Energy? I for one welcome the rigor and limit that science/nature puts on us. Practicing science is like practicing religion, you have to bow before Nature, instead of asserting your own will. Kings and fools are equal before its eyes. You can only get anywhere if you respect its limits, its laws. It's better than being completely free. You could argue whether the laws are fair or not, but that's a moot point, dumb, these laws are not like human erected laws, and laws dealing with the inner world, they are set, independently of you, and maybe you can't even comprehend them all, just get a glimmer, a glimpse - see, sparks of religious feeling even there. In fact you cannot disobey these laws, even if you tried to, I mean, you can try to, such as build perpetuum mobiles, but trying to do so is a futile excersize. You could approach this dark energy thing with a lot less greed, and a lot more wonder and love.
Nothing can escape from Heaven either. However, listen to the following story:
St. Peter goes opens the gates of Heaven, because someone is knocking. A guy stands there, says "Aaaaa..." and puff, disappears, like magic. St. Peter doesn't understand it, he just shrugs his shoulders, closes the door back, and goes on his business. Soon, there is knocking again. Same thing all over, same guy there, about to say "Aaaa.." and puff, disappears again. This repeats a few times, until St. Peter loses his temper, and next time he opens the door, before the guy even gets a chance to open his mouth, yells at him: "What the hell are you doing man??" The guy finally able to catch his breath, and utter a full sentence says: "Aaai'm sorry, I can't help it when they are trying to use the defibrillator on me."
See? You can escape even from Heaven, with correct technology. If you can escape from there, then black holes should be a piece of cake too, IF you got the right technology. Commercials in 6549AD: Tourist trips to the depths black hole #XX9 near Polaris - guaranteed to rock your brains! Roundrip fare only $9999.999 denars.