Security issues are traditionally a Republican issue; the more people are worried about security, the more likely they are to vote Republican. (EG, analysis about "security moms" [PDF].) Thus, increase worry, and shift the vote Republican.
The long-term (and now perhaps short-term) risk of this strategy is that while the Republicans are seen as concerned with security, this sort of thing happening regularly makes them start to look incompetent as time passes. The bad news is, the Democrats are more likely to get to power using an isolationist style platform to oppose them. No-one's going to run on a moderate, subtle, nuanced approach to the international theatre; it doesn't make good soundbytes.
On foreign policy, the Republican party has no brains, and the Democratic Party has no balls.
You're correct, it was supposed to be per square meter, as the units of the Google calculation I linked in show. This is what I get for posting to Slashdot right before bed.
However, another minor point: IIR, fission produces antineutrinos, not neutrinos. Fusion (such as the sun or a nova) releases neutrinos. (Not that anyone besides daft particle physicists care which way a tiny chunk of nothing is spinning....)
If the North Koreans detonated a 10-30 kiloton device, several times 1013 neutrinos from it should have passed through Kamiokande.
Assuming it was a nuke, the chemical explosive component should be neglectable. According to Wikipedia, 1 kiloton-TNT is 4.184 TJ. According to a quick search (matching what I recall from NE301 a decade back), average fission energy yield is around 200 MeV per. This gives about 4E24 fissions. Assuming you get on the order of 1 antineutrino per, at a radius of 1000 km and assuming even sterradial distribution, gives on the order of 300 billion antineutrinos per fission.
Anyone who wants to find the detector capture efficiency and make a guess at its cross-sectional area is welcome to refine the numbers further. I have some sleep to not-get.
I think you meant that headline to say "Bush administration secretly tells N. Korea to announce that they have conducted their first nuclear test before the November election".
Try again. If you want to do conspiracy theories, you ought to do them right.
On Sept. 19, 2005, North Korea signed a widely heralded denuclearization agreement with the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea. Pyongyang pledged to "abandon all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs." [...] Four days later, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sweeping financial sanctions against North Korea designed to cut off the country's access to the international banking system, branding it a "criminal state" guilty of counterfeiting, money laundering and trafficking in weapons of mass destruction.
And, of course, there's Hawking's remark about the Warp Core when touring the set of TNG's Engineering: "I'm working on that." And the resemblance between TOS communicators and modern cell phones.
Aren't you glad Star Trek had a generally utopian view of the future, instead of the common dystopian views? =)
[N]erds will stop at NOTHING to prove Star Trek is real.
While I'll agree it's daft, are you willing to conceed that it constitues a less detrimental and more sustainable impetus for technological advancement than wars between nation-states?
Yet another way in which Star Trek contributes to the improvement of our society.
We were attacked because of things like unquestionable support for Israel in EVERYTHING they do including the bad stuff, cozying up with dictators when it's convenient for our interests, and so on.
While I agree that US support for Israel has been unquestionable, it hasn't been unquestioning. They're far from perfect; however, nearly every government around them either would love to see them wiped off the map, or are unable to restrain the portion of their own populace that feels that way. Most of their worst behavior (such as the facist-style checkpoints and abrupt military incursions into others' territory) results directly from guerilla provocation. The US has on occasion quietly criticized Israeli tactics, and has encouraged Israel in peace negotiations.
The "cozying up with dictators" I have no quibbles about.
Fundamental Islam = Fundamental Christianity in terms of disgusting behavior. If you want to play the immature game of name calling then I suggest that you start referring to this administration as ChristianFascist.
Unfortunately, you're wrong; while there are strong parallels between them, they're not equivalent. First off, I've read both the Q'uran, the Old Testament, and the New Testament. I haven't read the Talmud; however, based on comments from my neighbors when growing up, I understand it moderates some of the more extreme tendancies of the Old Testament. The New Testament, while almost as large of a mass of contradictions as the Old, has more of a base message of tolerance than either the OT or the Q'uran. In many places, the Q'uran is downright Xenophobic. Furthermore, in Europe Christianity spent almost a thousand years fighting over what was Really The True Faith. It was this history that led to the Non-Establishment clause in the First Amendment. While Islam has had extensive conflicts as to the True Faith (between Sunni, Shia, Sufi, and other factions), they have been smaller in scope, with fewer factions, and overshadowed by the conflicts with outside faiths (particularly Christianity).
So, Christianity starts with a baseline more tolerant message, and furthermore, has had the practical importance of tolerance beaten into it by the few centuries of extensive infighting. (That they generally lost the crusades may also be a factor.) So, while the tolerance still follows a bell-type distribution, the median Christian is more tolerant than the median Moslem. Both faiths have their hair-shirt ranting whack-jobs... but Islam has a larger fraction who are further out on any given absolute value of whacko.
While I'll agree the US has not made substantial efforts to understand the neo-Caliphate very well, I'm not sure it would be of any great benefit. There is an overlarge faction within Islam that is primed with the idea of world conquest as an article of faith, and there doesn't appear to be any internal faction capable of effectively countering that. (In part, because one of Islam's main tenets is unity against outside threats.) I see relatively few courses that might change this. First, the emergence of a new religious leader within Islam; of a caliber comparable to Mohommet, Jesus, or Sidhartha; and oriented towards increased tolerance. I consider direct divine intervention only slightly less plausible. Second, some series of events triggers a large-scale conflict within Islam, devolving most of the Islamic lands into religious civil war for the next couple hundred years until they collectively realize the advantages of general tolerance and the separation between religion and politics. While a properly Machievellian management of Iraq might pull this off, I don't think anyone in the Bush team is this long-sighted, nor are they subtle enough to do it without leaving massive fingerprints on their efforts. Neither is any other prospective US candidate for 2008. Third, other global powers deciding that Islam constitutes a sufficient threat to world peace that they render large parts of the mideast glow-in-the-dark for the next mill
In addition to objections noteed by others, it also does not seem to allow for write-in candidates — a critical safety valve when more than one party is corrupt.
Honest elections should NOT be a political issue. It should be a PATRIOTIC issue.
Screw both politics and patriotism. There's a PRACTICAL reason why elections should be clearly seen as honest.
Elections are, at essence, a mock civil war. While expensive, tedious, annoying, disruptive, and a daft way to run a government, they have the advantage of being better in each of those respects than real wars, and less destructive of resources to boot. (This is why it's ultima ratio regnum — war is worse than any other means of settling differences... except sometimes for finality) Thus, one prospective partisan, one vote, and God picks the side of the biggest battalions. Simple, and if you don't like the result, you can wait a bit until the next round.
Vote tampering alters the results of the mock war, but unlike speechmaking (propoganda) or even outright vote buying (hiring mercenaries), it would have not effect on an actual war.
If enough of the population rejects the results of the election's mock civil war, either as anathema or as bogus, they'll try a REAL civil war to see if that works any better.
Vote tampering ought to be a capital offense on par with War Crimes.
I guess there is a very simple solution to this laser problem: Just mount a mirror in front of the satellite and send the laser right back where it came from.
Nah; there's no serious power behind the laser, especially after it passes through the atmosphere a second time. It sounds like the Chinese are trying for temporary disabling (too much light to take pictures), rather than something more permanent (too much energy fries the electronics).
Alternatively, start sending up satellites with supplementary code, so that "high intensity laser beam" means "deorbit to impact with maximum velocity at this laser's point of origin." Publicly and prominently announce it as a means of insuring the "safe and controlled" deorbit of satellites at the end of useful life. At that point, the Chinese use of their overpowered laser pointers becomes a self-correcting problem. =)
So, to answer the question, Blu-Ray came first, and Sony is trying to justify their huge price by claiming that it was needed by game designers. It's not.
It is now. Bear in mind Murphy's Law of Storage: storage requirements rise to meet storage capacity... plus. The storage capacity became available; thus, now it's "needed". Now pardon me, I have a 1 TB RAID to check up on....
I think it is talked about far more than it should be considering it is little more than science fiction.
So was spaceflight, once. I even have some of the pulp magazines from back then. And that "little" is "potential for multiple order of magnitude decrease in marginal cost per kilo lifted to geosynchronous orbit". When Clarke and Sheffield were writing, that might have been fair; with the discovery of fullerene tubes that are may allow for the required strength-to-weight ratio, there's a lot less bolognium amd a lot more real engineering involved.
Prove to me it is the focus of substantial research and I will reconsider.
Will you settle for a quick couple hundred citations? I can't list all the indirect research from materials science and engineering, I've other work to get to.
Sure, nobody can know for certain what the future will bring specifically, but one incontrovertable observation is that since the beginning of time overall progress has been accelerating exponentially.
You're forgetting various local dark ages. EG, the decline of the Egyptian empire from Saharan desertification, for an easy example. Progress was on a downturn for a while.
Genetics, Nanotechnology, and Robotics/AI (GNR) will play a huge part in the coming decades; the only question is how well we'll be able to guide how it all unfolds.
More importantly, you're presuming we can find economical replacement(s) for geo-petroleum in the requisite timeframe. Our current infrastructure is highly dependent on it, and the time frame left before the anticipated global Hubbert curve's decline in production rates is small. Solve that problem, and the future looks bright. If we fail to solve it, then "Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
No, Bush's policies are closer to fascist-style state corporatism than the soviet flavor of communist-style state corporatism. The main difference is that fascist ideology glorifies industry rather than the workers themselves. Depressingly similar, in many ways.
I took a couple random anthropology classes back in college. One concept that was passingly mentioned was the common classification of cultures as shame-cultures versus guilt-cultures. To suit my argument, I will grossly oversimplify to say members of a guilt society feel bad if they do something wrong, but those in a shame society only feel bad if anyone finds out what they did. It seems to me that the dangers of corporate liability is begining to develop something even nastier (IMHO) than a shame culture. Corporate executives feel bad not if they do something bad, or even everyone believes they did something bad, but if they have to admit that what they did was wrong.
An actual anthropologist might have better insights, but this doesn't look much like "progress" from where I sit.
Communism as its been practiced (outside religious enclaves) is similar to monopolistic corporatism... where the State is the only corporation, holds all the monopolies, and all the citizens are the employees. Gives new meaning to the idea of being "terminated," huh?
But if you want to vote communist, move to the US; our communist party hasn't been noticably inconvenienced by the fall of the Soviet Union, and they often manage to field local-level candidates in some of the more liberal-leaning areas of the country.
The fact that the Department of Homeland Security was advising people to buy plastic sheeting to protect themselves against chemical attack is completely ludicrous...
No, not completely ludicrous. Those like you, me, and most of Slashdot assess the risks rationally, and decide that such an attack is unlikely to be attempted, if attempted is unlikely to be done with any degree of success, and if it does get pulled off successfully then there is essentially no prior preparation we can do that will materially impact our overall chances.
However, not all of the monkeys wandering about on two legs turning food into shit are quite so reasonable. Furthermore, if the wackier ones start to panic, the panic may spread to the only marginally wacky ones... and sane and reasonable people like me and thee (although I'm none too sure about thee) might get hurt.
Therefore, The Authorities(TM) direct the monkeys to do something that at least won't do any serious harm, and (if in monkey fashion one doesn't consider the idea too hard) looks like it might do some good. This keeps them calm enough to begin going about their day without too much disruption for the rest of us... unless you needed a plastic drop sheet for painting that week.
So, it's as dumb as "duck and cover". Big Fat Hairy Deal. It tricked people into going about their daily lives, rather than wasting all their time and effort into worrying about a possibility that they couldn't do much about. If it's more likely to help keep society running than to cause it to fall apart, it might be a good thing overall. Admittedly, educating all of the monkeys to think might be more productive in the long haul. On the other hand, I'm living in a country where more than half don't even believe in evolution... so let me know how your education project turns out.
...with both diagnoses, he seems more of a case of ADHD. He's fully functional in modern (American) society, which is why I disapprove of parents who automatically want to medicate their kids at the first sign. I suspect he'd be deemed "stupid, expendable, and going" in an earlier age.
Eh, what do I care, as long as I'm not living within blast range of him?
Are you in an understatement competition? Yes, there is. You could probably make a dozen miniseries out of it.
Something like the tale of Turin, or Beren and Luthien, or the Tuor and the fall of Gondolin, would work quite successfully as individual films.
Scanning my hardback copy: From the music of the Ainur to the Burning of the Ships (first 9 chapters); from the Building of Menegroth through the Ruin of Beleriand (10 chapters); Beren and Luthien (1 chapter, expanded with pieces from the Lays — the hardest to do justice to); the house of Hurin and the Ruin of Doriath; of the Fall of Gondolin and the Fate of the Silmarils; and the Akallabeth. Six movies; possibly a seventh, covering the first Ringwar after the fall of Numenor.
The problem is, you'd need someone able to make worthy scripts for them. GRRM might be able to do it, but first he has to finish the dratted Song of Ice and Fire. Anything less than a Martin/Jackson partnership seems unlikely to equal the task, and I don't think they'll live long enough to make it through the end.
That film would have sucked a whole lot less if those involved had given a pair of fetid dingo's kidneys about Douglas' original writings.
Including, perhaps, Douglas Adams himself? He was quite pleased with how no two versions of his work were ever consistent; with the radio programs, books, and TV series all having unique quirks, making the movie match any of them just wouldn't quite ring true. He was fairly heavily involved in production, up until his untimely death. I'll agree it wasn't his best work, but I think his attitude on deadlines was a liability to the end result.
But yes, Jackson will be the best choice for the Hobbit. The fun question is, will the studios ever get daft enough to want to take the Silmarillion to the silver screen?
1. They stop beating crap like HD-DVD vs. BluRay to death while everything else gets ignored.
Lessee, those tie to issues of the power of corporations, DRM, and how the tech we work with actually gets developed. This fails to qualify as "news for nerds", how? If you don't like the submissions, start looking for more interesting stuff. Or just ignore a lot of threads. (I tend to skip most of the hardware-mod stuff, myself.
2. Drop the politics section. While I'm sure it will go away as soon as a Democrat is elected president, regardless of his wrong doings, it's become nothing but a bashfest that has added no substance
You're evidently not old enough to remember Usenet. Often seperate newsgroups were created to give overly popular bashfests their own place to go, so they would be less likely to interfere with vaguely productive discussions elsewhere. It worked well then (until a couple of lawyers introduced intrusive advertising), and it's worked moderately well now on Slashdot.
I admit that it's likely that section will tone down; however, this is because I fear Bush is probably one of the four or five worst presidents in US history, and the Democrats will have to work hard to come up with someone as bad. (Hillary has possibilities.)
The overall "lean" of Slashdot isn't so much Democratic as Libertarian: socially liberal, fiscally conservative. Under Bush, the republicans has demonstrated neither characteristic. While I've stopped classing myself as a hard libertarian due to doubts about the checks and balances of corporate power, it took George W. Bush's first term to convince me to vote anything but a straight libertarian ticket. Energy issues and the national debt are problems neither party is willing to seriously address at this point, so it's not a question of whether I'll complain, but what other issues I'll complain about.
3. I get mod points back. It's sad that I lost mod points because I don't do the slashdot goosestep. Hence, I'm a troll today.
Actually, it looks like your post got an asbestos cork mod instead this time.
Good karma helps gain mod points. Interesting non-AC posts build karma. It's possible to be interesting while disagreeing with someone's position. Just keep the ad hominem attacks to a minimum, and focus on a well organized, reasoned logical argument, backed by solid facts. Build karma for a while by posting, then worry about modding.
4. Get rid of the overrated/underrated mods.
I might lean with you on this one. However, I'd be more inclined to make them zero-point mods, requiring one mod-point to use. It might also be nice to have a mod for "factually wrong" stuff, for cases when someone posts items as bad as "Ronald Reagan was the Thirty-Second US President". Currently, "Troll" is the closest, and that really doesn't fit well when an otherwise solid post has one glaring error.
We're your customer, Taco, we're always right.
No, you're just always the customer. And, since you aren't a subscriber, you're not a paying customer, just a potential customer — meaning it's not as important to listen to you unless Taco feels the need for more money. Add in that you come across as an asshat, and dealing with you gets hit with a renice to something behind "sort dryer lint".
Slashdot Mirror
May I ask: how does this help Bush?
Security issues are traditionally a Republican issue; the more people are worried about security, the more likely they are to vote Republican. (EG, analysis about "security moms" [PDF].) Thus, increase worry, and shift the vote Republican.
The long-term (and now perhaps short-term) risk of this strategy is that while the Republicans are seen as concerned with security, this sort of thing happening regularly makes them start to look incompetent as time passes. The bad news is, the Democrats are more likely to get to power using an isolationist style platform to oppose them. No-one's going to run on a moderate, subtle, nuanced approach to the international theatre; it doesn't make good soundbytes.
On foreign policy, the Republican party has no brains, and the Democratic Party has no balls.
It would be nice if something like this would at least show up on PBS....
You're correct, it was supposed to be per square meter, as the units of the Google calculation I linked in show. This is what I get for posting to Slashdot right before bed.
However, another minor point: IIR, fission produces antineutrinos, not neutrinos. Fusion (such as the sun or a nova) releases neutrinos. (Not that anyone besides daft particle physicists care which way a tiny chunk of nothing is spinning....)
If the North Koreans detonated a 10-30 kiloton device, several times 1013 neutrinos from it should have passed through Kamiokande.
Assuming it was a nuke, the chemical explosive component should be neglectable. According to Wikipedia, 1 kiloton-TNT is 4.184 TJ. According to a quick search (matching what I recall from NE301 a decade back), average fission energy yield is around 200 MeV per. This gives about 4E24 fissions. Assuming you get on the order of 1 antineutrino per, at a radius of 1000 km and assuming even sterradial distribution, gives on the order of 300 billion antineutrinos per fission.
Anyone who wants to find the detector capture efficiency and make a guess at its cross-sectional area is welcome to refine the numbers further. I have some sleep to not-get.
I think you meant that headline to say "Bush administration secretly tells N. Korea to announce that they have conducted their first nuclear test before the November election".
Try again. If you want to do conspiracy theories, you ought to do them right.
MSNBC, via Daily Kos:
Now, add in this report dated September 20th: It's October. "SURPRISE!!!"Silicon based life forms?
Not yet. Non-aqueous solvent life looks more promising in the Xenochemistry field, FWIW.
Tricorders?
Check.
Holidecks?
Check.
Deanna Troi android?
More or less, although it looks more like Keiko Ishikawa O'Brein.
And, of course, there's Hawking's remark about the Warp Core when touring the set of TNG's Engineering: "I'm working on that." And the resemblance between TOS communicators and modern cell phones.
Aren't you glad Star Trek had a generally utopian view of the future, instead of the common dystopian views? =)
[N]erds will stop at NOTHING to prove Star Trek is real.
While I'll agree it's daft, are you willing to conceed that it constitues a less detrimental and more sustainable impetus for technological advancement than wars between nation-states?
Yet another way in which Star Trek contributes to the improvement of our society.
We were attacked because of things like unquestionable support for Israel in EVERYTHING they do including the bad stuff, cozying up with dictators when it's convenient for our interests, and so on.
While I agree that US support for Israel has been unquestionable, it hasn't been unquestioning. They're far from perfect; however, nearly every government around them either would love to see them wiped off the map, or are unable to restrain the portion of their own populace that feels that way. Most of their worst behavior (such as the facist-style checkpoints and abrupt military incursions into others' territory) results directly from guerilla provocation. The US has on occasion quietly criticized Israeli tactics, and has encouraged Israel in peace negotiations.
The "cozying up with dictators" I have no quibbles about.
Fundamental Islam = Fundamental Christianity in terms of disgusting behavior. If you want to play the immature game of name calling then I suggest that you start referring to this administration as ChristianFascist.
Unfortunately, you're wrong; while there are strong parallels between them, they're not equivalent. First off, I've read both the Q'uran, the Old Testament, and the New Testament. I haven't read the Talmud; however, based on comments from my neighbors when growing up, I understand it moderates some of the more extreme tendancies of the Old Testament. The New Testament, while almost as large of a mass of contradictions as the Old, has more of a base message of tolerance than either the OT or the Q'uran. In many places, the Q'uran is downright Xenophobic. Furthermore, in Europe Christianity spent almost a thousand years fighting over what was Really The True Faith. It was this history that led to the Non-Establishment clause in the First Amendment. While Islam has had extensive conflicts as to the True Faith (between Sunni, Shia, Sufi, and other factions), they have been smaller in scope, with fewer factions, and overshadowed by the conflicts with outside faiths (particularly Christianity).
So, Christianity starts with a baseline more tolerant message, and furthermore, has had the practical importance of tolerance beaten into it by the few centuries of extensive infighting. (That they generally lost the crusades may also be a factor.) So, while the tolerance still follows a bell-type distribution, the median Christian is more tolerant than the median Moslem. Both faiths have their hair-shirt ranting whack-jobs... but Islam has a larger fraction who are further out on any given absolute value of whacko.
While I'll agree the US has not made substantial efforts to understand the neo-Caliphate very well, I'm not sure it would be of any great benefit. There is an overlarge faction within Islam that is primed with the idea of world conquest as an article of faith, and there doesn't appear to be any internal faction capable of effectively countering that. (In part, because one of Islam's main tenets is unity against outside threats.) I see relatively few courses that might change this. First, the emergence of a new religious leader within Islam; of a caliber comparable to Mohommet, Jesus, or Sidhartha; and oriented towards increased tolerance. I consider direct divine intervention only slightly less plausible. Second, some series of events triggers a large-scale conflict within Islam, devolving most of the Islamic lands into religious civil war for the next couple hundred years until they collectively realize the advantages of general tolerance and the separation between religion and politics. While a properly Machievellian management of Iraq might pull this off, I don't think anyone in the Bush team is this long-sighted, nor are they subtle enough to do it without leaving massive fingerprints on their efforts. Neither is any other prospective US candidate for 2008. Third, other global powers deciding that Islam constitutes a sufficient threat to world peace that they render large parts of the mideast glow-in-the-dark for the next mill
In addition to objections noteed by others, it also does not seem to allow for write-in candidates — a critical safety valve when more than one party is corrupt.
Honest elections should NOT be a political issue. It should be a PATRIOTIC issue.
Screw both politics and patriotism. There's a PRACTICAL reason why elections should be clearly seen as honest.
Elections are, at essence, a mock civil war. While expensive, tedious, annoying, disruptive, and a daft way to run a government, they have the advantage of being better in each of those respects than real wars, and less destructive of resources to boot. (This is why it's ultima ratio regnum — war is worse than any other means of settling differences... except sometimes for finality) Thus, one prospective partisan, one vote, and God picks the side of the biggest battalions. Simple, and if you don't like the result, you can wait a bit until the next round.
Vote tampering alters the results of the mock war, but unlike speechmaking (propoganda) or even outright vote buying (hiring mercenaries), it would have not effect on an actual war.
If enough of the population rejects the results of the election's mock civil war, either as anathema or as bogus, they'll try a REAL civil war to see if that works any better.
Vote tampering ought to be a capital offense on par with War Crimes.
Dear ghod, it's The Cockroach That Ate Cincinnati!
I guess there is a very simple solution to this laser problem: Just mount a mirror in front of the satellite and send the laser right back where it came from.
Nah; there's no serious power behind the laser, especially after it passes through the atmosphere a second time. It sounds like the Chinese are trying for temporary disabling (too much light to take pictures), rather than something more permanent (too much energy fries the electronics).
Alternatively, start sending up satellites with supplementary code, so that "high intensity laser beam" means "deorbit to impact with maximum velocity at this laser's point of origin." Publicly and prominently announce it as a means of insuring the "safe and controlled" deorbit of satellites at the end of useful life. At that point, the Chinese use of their overpowered laser pointers becomes a self-correcting problem. =)
So, to answer the question, Blu-Ray came first, and Sony is trying to justify their huge price by claiming that it was needed by game designers. It's not.
It is now. Bear in mind Murphy's Law of Storage: storage requirements rise to meet storage capacity... plus. The storage capacity became available; thus, now it's "needed". Now pardon me, I have a 1 TB RAID to check up on....
I think it is talked about far more than it should be considering it is little more than science fiction.
So was spaceflight, once. I even have some of the pulp magazines from back then. And that "little" is "potential for multiple order of magnitude decrease in marginal cost per kilo lifted to geosynchronous orbit". When Clarke and Sheffield were writing, that might have been fair; with the discovery of fullerene tubes that are may allow for the required strength-to-weight ratio, there's a lot less bolognium amd a lot more real engineering involved.
Prove to me it is the focus of substantial research and I will reconsider.
Will you settle for a quick couple hundred citations? I can't list all the indirect research from materials science and engineering, I've other work to get to.
Sure, nobody can know for certain what the future will bring specifically, but one incontrovertable observation is that since the beginning of time overall progress has been accelerating exponentially.
You're forgetting various local dark ages. EG, the decline of the Egyptian empire from Saharan desertification, for an easy example. Progress was on a downturn for a while.
Genetics, Nanotechnology, and Robotics/AI (GNR) will play a huge part in the coming decades; the only question is how well we'll be able to guide how it all unfolds.
More importantly, you're presuming we can find economical replacement(s) for geo-petroleum in the requisite timeframe. Our current infrastructure is highly dependent on it, and the time frame left before the anticipated global Hubbert curve's decline in production rates is small. Solve that problem, and the future looks bright. If we fail to solve it, then "Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
The jury is still out.
No, Bush's policies are closer to fascist-style state corporatism than the soviet flavor of communist-style state corporatism. The main difference is that fascist ideology glorifies industry rather than the workers themselves. Depressingly similar, in many ways.
I took a couple random anthropology classes back in college. One concept that was passingly mentioned was the common classification of cultures as shame-cultures versus guilt-cultures. To suit my argument, I will grossly oversimplify to say members of a guilt society feel bad if they do something wrong, but those in a shame society only feel bad if anyone finds out what they did. It seems to me that the dangers of corporate liability is begining to develop something even nastier (IMHO) than a shame culture. Corporate executives feel bad not if they do something bad, or even everyone believes they did something bad, but if they have to admit that what they did was wrong.
An actual anthropologist might have better insights, but this doesn't look much like "progress" from where I sit.
This! This! is why I want to vote communist!
Communism as its been practiced (outside religious enclaves) is similar to monopolistic corporatism... where the State is the only corporation, holds all the monopolies, and all the citizens are the employees. Gives new meaning to the idea of being "terminated," huh?
But if you want to vote communist, move to the US; our communist party hasn't been noticably inconvenienced by the fall of the Soviet Union, and they often manage to field local-level candidates in some of the more liberal-leaning areas of the country.
The fact that the Department of Homeland Security was advising people to buy plastic sheeting to protect themselves against chemical attack is completely ludicrous...
No, not completely ludicrous. Those like you, me, and most of Slashdot assess the risks rationally, and decide that such an attack is unlikely to be attempted, if attempted is unlikely to be done with any degree of success, and if it does get pulled off successfully then there is essentially no prior preparation we can do that will materially impact our overall chances.
However, not all of the monkeys wandering about on two legs turning food into shit are quite so reasonable. Furthermore, if the wackier ones start to panic, the panic may spread to the only marginally wacky ones... and sane and reasonable people like me and thee (although I'm none too sure about thee) might get hurt.
Therefore, The Authorities(TM) direct the monkeys to do something that at least won't do any serious harm, and (if in monkey fashion one doesn't consider the idea too hard) looks like it might do some good. This keeps them calm enough to begin going about their day without too much disruption for the rest of us... unless you needed a plastic drop sheet for painting that week.
So, it's as dumb as "duck and cover". Big Fat Hairy Deal. It tricked people into going about their daily lives, rather than wasting all their time and effort into worrying about a possibility that they couldn't do much about. If it's more likely to help keep society running than to cause it to fall apart, it might be a good thing overall. Admittedly, educating all of the monkeys to think might be more productive in the long haul. On the other hand, I'm living in a country where more than half don't even believe in evolution... so let me know how your education project turns out.
Hmmm. Go read a book?
Yeah, I still have a few of the 1960's/1970's paperbacks with those annoying ad inserts in the middle....
...with both diagnoses, he seems more of a case of ADHD. He's fully functional in modern (American) society, which is why I disapprove of parents who automatically want to medicate their kids at the first sign. I suspect he'd be deemed "stupid, expendable, and going" in an earlier age.
Eh, what do I care, as long as I'm not living within blast range of him?
It will take a bit more before the voters do the the necessary open rioting, however.
There is plenty of scope there
Are you in an understatement competition? Yes, there is. You could probably make a dozen miniseries out of it.
Something like the tale of Turin, or Beren and Luthien, or the Tuor and the fall of Gondolin, would work quite successfully as individual films.
Scanning my hardback copy: From the music of the Ainur to the Burning of the Ships (first 9 chapters); from the Building of Menegroth through the Ruin of Beleriand (10 chapters); Beren and Luthien (1 chapter, expanded with pieces from the Lays — the hardest to do justice to); the house of Hurin and the Ruin of Doriath; of the Fall of Gondolin and the Fate of the Silmarils; and the Akallabeth. Six movies; possibly a seventh, covering the first Ringwar after the fall of Numenor.
The problem is, you'd need someone able to make worthy scripts for them. GRRM might be able to do it, but first he has to finish the dratted Song of Ice and Fire. Anything less than a Martin/Jackson partnership seems unlikely to equal the task, and I don't think they'll live long enough to make it through the end.
That film would have sucked a whole lot less if those involved had given a pair of fetid dingo's kidneys about Douglas' original writings.
Including, perhaps, Douglas Adams himself? He was quite pleased with how no two versions of his work were ever consistent; with the radio programs, books, and TV series all having unique quirks, making the movie match any of them just wouldn't quite ring true. He was fairly heavily involved in production, up until his untimely death. I'll agree it wasn't his best work, but I think his attitude on deadlines was a liability to the end result.
But yes, Jackson will be the best choice for the Hobbit. The fun question is, will the studios ever get daft enough to want to take the Silmarillion to the silver screen?
Lessee, those tie to issues of the power of corporations, DRM, and how the tech we work with actually gets developed. This fails to qualify as "news for nerds", how? If you don't like the submissions, start looking for more interesting stuff. Or just ignore a lot of threads. (I tend to skip most of the hardware-mod stuff, myself.
2. Drop the politics section. While I'm sure it will go away as soon as a Democrat is elected president, regardless of his wrong doings, it's become nothing but a bashfest that has added no substance
You're evidently not old enough to remember Usenet. Often seperate newsgroups were created to give overly popular bashfests their own place to go, so they would be less likely to interfere with vaguely productive discussions elsewhere. It worked well then (until a couple of lawyers introduced intrusive advertising), and it's worked moderately well now on Slashdot.
I admit that it's likely that section will tone down; however, this is because I fear Bush is probably one of the four or five worst presidents in US history, and the Democrats will have to work hard to come up with someone as bad. (Hillary has possibilities.)
The overall "lean" of Slashdot isn't so much Democratic as Libertarian: socially liberal, fiscally conservative. Under Bush, the republicans has demonstrated neither characteristic. While I've stopped classing myself as a hard libertarian due to doubts about the checks and balances of corporate power, it took George W. Bush's first term to convince me to vote anything but a straight libertarian ticket. Energy issues and the national debt are problems neither party is willing to seriously address at this point, so it's not a question of whether I'll complain, but what other issues I'll complain about.
3. I get mod points back. It's sad that I lost mod points because I don't do the slashdot goosestep. Hence, I'm a troll today.
Actually, it looks like your post got an asbestos cork mod instead this time.
Good karma helps gain mod points. Interesting non-AC posts build karma. It's possible to be interesting while disagreeing with someone's position. Just keep the ad hominem attacks to a minimum, and focus on a well organized, reasoned logical argument, backed by solid facts. Build karma for a while by posting, then worry about modding.
4. Get rid of the overrated/underrated mods.
I might lean with you on this one. However, I'd be more inclined to make them zero-point mods, requiring one mod-point to use. It might also be nice to have a mod for "factually wrong" stuff, for cases when someone posts items as bad as "Ronald Reagan was the Thirty-Second US President". Currently, "Troll" is the closest, and that really doesn't fit well when an otherwise solid post has one glaring error.
We're your customer, Taco, we're always right.
No, you're just always the customer. And, since you aren't a subscriber, you're not a paying customer, just a potential customer — meaning it's not as important to listen to you unless Taco feels the need for more money. Add in that you come across as an asshat, and dealing with you gets hit with a renice to something behind "sort dryer lint".