But you didn't even go to the trouble of linking the term online poker to Wikipedia in your submission? Slashdot has some healthy pagerank, too, ya know.
The result is the PR effect of being slashdotted is next to nil after just a couple of days. It's also harder to use Google's site search for specific stories.
EQ addict is already more precise than Internet addict...
Anyhow, sounds like your old roomie had some serious personality disorders- depression, psychosis, I don't know. The addiction may not have even been the central problem. Compare:
"EQ addict"
with "Depressed with a borderline personality disorder and an EQ addiction"
You've made a diagnosis. Unfortunately some of the other information you gave us doesn't quite square with such a simplistic interpretation- this guy needed a more thorough and sorry to say, *professional* evaluation. Blaming it all on EQ just feeds a moral panic about MMORPGs.
TV addiction is a good comparison. I can stop playing World of Warcraft whenever I want. I'll miss it, probably think about it... but I'm not going to be a basket case like some who miss Days of Our Lives, Jerry Springer, or whatever other dumb-ass program they have on these days.
Why is every bad habit these days assigned a diagnosis of "addiction"?
I'll tell you why. Because if we can blame our bad habits on a disease, something out of our control, then we can absolve ourselves of any responsibility for it.
It's not the addicts that defined the addictions- it's those that would treat it. And they're the people that want to take responsibility from you by medicating you into normalcy. Because we gamers obviously require professional help... to be normal people that watch TV.
Let's not blame everything on the individual, especially when there's already an obvious systemic drive to define each of us as sick whenever we deviate from the "norm".
So he has all those personality issues, and they all get lumped into internet addiction?
The guy could just as easily become a gang/frat member, an alcoholic, a workaholic, a born-again Xian, whatever... (note in the last two cases, society doesn't always consider this pathological- though it certainly is a reflection of an underlying pathology in many cases I've witnessed).
Calling this an internet addiction is far too reductionnist.
I had been checking every couple weeks on wind and solar energy stories... so now I just added a "Renewables" custom section with the following search:
"solar energy" OR "solar power" OR "wind energy" OR "wind power"
There's probably a more elegant way to state the search- but hey, I'm extremely lazy. I know I could have gotten alerts, but those just clutter my inbox... this format is quite a bit more convenient. Nice execution too:)
I used OO Impress to import old Powerpoint files for a co-worker last year- so she could open it up in her new version of PP.
The other tech and I just looked at each other and shook our heads: they (management) didn't want to use OO because it wasn't fully compatible with MS. Turns out MS is not compatible with MS.
You assume the impact is only felt in absolute numbers. The trends in this case may be far more important.
Take wind energy: in absolute numbers, it's still small compared to overall energy production. The fact that it's growing at double digits however is hugely significant. If we go from 30% annual growth rates to 50%, you can understand the impact- but that extra 20 points could be seen as a rounding error in global energy market statistics.
The growth rates for solar are similar to those of wind, and with every doubling in production costs go down significantly. Depending on the analysts, inflation adjustments, etc... that figure can be anywhere from 18 to 25%. This pattern is found with most new technologies, and is well documented.
With growth rates over 30%, production doubles about twice in 5 years.
Japan implemented subsidies for solar installations years ago. As the market matured, subsidies were slowly reduced, and now Japan is the leader in solar after displacing the US.
Waiting is an option, and the technology WILL be cheaper. It also won't be your own.
Kyoto is not perfect. It does however get some governments to go in the right direction, and the results will be felt as sustainable alternatives grow faster with all the consequences for the US that I outlined above.
I don't argue the uselessness of the GDP, but its counter-productiveness. Any discussion that uses it - even only to say the impact is negligible misses the point. We should be discussing the things we can reach a deedper agreeement on, like what type of world we want to leave our children and their descendants.
The GDP measures no such thing: it only measures exchange, not value created. I argue that the measure is irrelevant. And also that economists are useless at predicting it:)
If some greens argue for zero- growth (or negative!), they're freaking mad.
Less people being hospitalized for deadly lung disease caused by smog is going to be a negative for the GDP. More people would be a boost for the "economy." We can't seriously adress the important questions if we agree to using this measure of progress. So the 2053/2056 thing has to be qualified... it may in this case be a very, very good thing.
Last night on CBC's The Hour, I believe David Suzuki came out and called the US a rogue nation.
This is a fair reflection of the developing consensus around the world. This has been especially notable after the US failed to support a world court.
What's most bizarre is that the US will end up losing out because of this. Japan is becoming a leader in solar, Germany and Denmark for wind. As prices become competitive against even natural gas, they will gain a tremendous advantage.
There are other examples, but those are just the most obvious. So much for another American century...
Seeing as how economists are less accurate than meteorologists, how in hell do they expect us to seriously believe a prediction of 40 years? 90% of them can't tell you what the growth rate will be in the next YEAR.
Plus, if they measure prosperity by GDP, they ought to be checked in for an examination. The Exxon Valdez spill was a net boost for the GDP, so it's not exactly the type of measure we want for whether we're better off after implementing such policies as Kyoto will require.
Besides, GDP is much higher than it was in 1970, but most people aren't much happier- and many believe that their children have less to look forward to than they did then. So, wtf, mate?
As far as they go, predictions of energy use have been completely, utterly atrocious when they have been done for periods of 30 years. I think if the US DOE (and all the industrialized nations' counterparts) were right, we'd be using twice as much energy today.
Most third world countries didn't finish building old-fashioned telephony systems before cell phones took over. Their infrastructure costs are much lower- without an entrenched bureaucracy that wants to have its old investment pay off, there's little incentive to put down copper lines now.
The reason I mention cell phones is that not only did it surprise most analysts, it perfectly illustrates what we could expect to happen as they "leap-frog" our filthy, polluting fossil-fuel addictions. A leap we can't take for the same reasons most of us (well, maybe not here) still use old-fashioned telephone lines.
As far as reducing emissions, technology has more of the solution than politics. Something the/. crowd should take to mean that we have potentially more power than politicians. After all, we know politicians aren't usually clued in about tech:)
As people talk about fusion, it's hard not to notice all the rhetoric seems to forget the lessons learned in the 50's. Fusion won't save the world anymore than old-hat nuclear. But people believe it, just as they believed in the too-cheap-to-meter nonsense.
Cheaper in France? I checked (the first plan I clicked to, you may find cheaper). That's cheaper than in most parts of the US, but considerably more than I pay now in Nova Scotia, which isn't even the cheapest in Canada and is delivered by a for-profit corporation.
The real question however is whether nuclear is cheaper for producers. The markets seem to have settled that one long ago- not many nuclear plants have been started since 1980, while natural gas plants had their boom. Best figures I got were 10c per kWh for nuclear against 5-6 for natural gas.
If you check out the data on page 23 of TFA, you'll see price trends for wind- and we expect several more doublings before that market matures. It's almost inevitable that wind and solar will be cheaper than even natural gas within 20 years. We already have a winner- so spending billions on an industry that has had too many excuses for it poor performance should be a non-starter.
I'll believe it when I see it. You can perhaps prove that it is "walk away" safe through technical means, but that still doesn't account for the waste problem.
It also doesn't prove that it will be cheap to build. That is something the nuclear industry has a terrible track record on, and absolutely no credibility when it comes to estimates. Consistent cost overruns and time delays in both building and maintaining plants (e.g. in Ontario) show a deep problem in their ability make predictions.
As for capacity for renewables... what is the problem exactly?
I disagree. Nuclear was supposed to be "too cheap to meter" and it's more expensive than coal or natural gas.
So after spending billions on old nuclear, we spend billions more on fusion- the same people make the same promises and we're just supposed to believe it?
Solar and wind have been going down in price in predictable ways. Every new tech- cars, tvs, computers ends up offering better value for consumers as competition and economies of scale work their magic. Spending billions on those technologies guarantees results.
Excuse me, but given the BILLIONS of dollars that have been invested in nuclear power, we should be able to do better than merely avoiding meltdowns. This was energy that was going to be "too cheap to meter" and we still can't deal with the waste? How is that cleaner than wind???
Solar and wind have been steadily going down in price, and they will soon be cost-effective even compared to coal. Nuclear is still more expensive! It's not the activists, it's the cost overruns on plant constructions that killed it. The cost of running the plant is low, assuming no breakdowns- but the cost of building it has to be included in the final cost per kWh.
Well, first off I love the idea. I thought of it myself, and contacted my city's transit system admins to get the schedules and long/lat coordinates for the stops (I live in Halifax, NS).
It turns out they won't even let the bus drivers get the information in electronic format (except for a limited set of stops in PDF). Compare to cities like San Francisco, Paris... you'd scarcely believe we had bleeding edge technology just 15 years ago.
This is simple technology. Finding the shortest route between two points is not a complicated algorithm to implement. What this requires is vision, something many transit bureaucracies lack.
The best release their version of trip planners with their crappy UIs, but I want real-time data to be free so hackers can experiment with better ways of delivering it. And neat ways to integrate it, analyze it, and whatever else hackers will do with data.
You mentionned that this could be profitable, and you are absolutely correct. Knowing where people come from, where they go and when tells you a lot about them that is of use to marketers. That can be a problem, as bureaucracies will want money for the information. Either they develop their own trip planning website/subsite, or they charge for access to the information.
Perhaps I'm bitter that I couldn't do it. Try with your city's transit, and I wish you better luck there. Perhaps after a few let their citizens develop nice applications my city's administrators will come to their collective senses. I'm not giving up hope just yet.
[yeah, feeding trolls and what not... but this attitude is prevalent enough I wanted to make this point]
Screw France, hein?
I bet a few would say "Je t'emmerde":)
Oh, and talking about complicity, remember thhose details about not letting Jews emigrate, IBM selling equipment and GWB's grand-daddy making a fortune? An anglophone saying about pots and kettles might apply here.
Ahem... there is Anti-Americanism in France. I'm French, and don't live there anymore, but I think I can still say that with some credibility.
You could even call me anti-american if you thought my opposing GWB's asinine policies qualified. Now, I don't have all americans, just the minority of assholes that "lead" the country.
Anyhow, that ruling should not be seen as a sign of anti-Americanism. Perhaps more a sign of a different understanding of trademarks in France (try calling a California wine a Champagne, and see what happens to you), as well as their courts having missed the internet clue-train.
Slashdot Mirror
Placebo, plus IIRC alcohol also makes you more suggestible.
:)
It would be amusing if someone decided to use alcohol with placebos to see if they worked better
The result is the PR effect of being slashdotted is next to nil after just a couple of days. It's also harder to use Google's site search for specific stories.
EQ addict is already more precise than Internet addict...
Anyhow, sounds like your old roomie had some serious personality disorders- depression, psychosis, I don't know. The addiction may not have even been the central problem. Compare:
"EQ addict"
with "Depressed with a borderline personality disorder and an EQ addiction"
You've made a diagnosis. Unfortunately some of the other information you gave us doesn't quite square with such a simplistic interpretation- this guy needed a more thorough and sorry to say, *professional* evaluation. Blaming it all on EQ just feeds a moral panic about MMORPGs.
TV addiction is a good comparison. I can stop playing World of Warcraft whenever I want. I'll miss it, probably think about it... but I'm not going to be a basket case like some who miss Days of Our Lives, Jerry Springer, or whatever other dumb-ass program they have on these days.
But MMORPGs are new and scary.
Let's not blame everything on the individual, especially when there's already an obvious systemic drive to define each of us as sick whenever we deviate from the "norm".
So he has all those personality issues, and they all get lumped into internet addiction?
The guy could just as easily become a gang/frat member, an alcoholic, a workaholic, a born-again Xian, whatever... (note in the last two cases, society doesn't always consider this pathological- though it certainly is a reflection of an underlying pathology in many cases I've witnessed).
Calling this an internet addiction is far too reductionnist.
I had been checking every couple weeks on wind and solar energy stories... so now I just added a "Renewables" custom section with the following search:
:)
"solar energy" OR "solar power" OR "wind energy" OR "wind power"
There's probably a more elegant way to state the search- but hey, I'm extremely lazy. I know I could have gotten alerts, but those just clutter my inbox... this format is quite a bit more convenient. Nice execution too
I used OO Impress to import old Powerpoint files for a co-worker last year- so she could open it up in her new version of PP.
The other tech and I just looked at each other and shook our heads: they (management) didn't want to use OO because it wasn't fully compatible with MS. Turns out MS is not compatible with MS.
If Netflix has smart leadership, they'll be trying to kill their own business by being the first ones selling/renting movies online legally.
If that's the case, the real threat is the MPAA waiting until the practice is common before allowing legal purchases.
You assume the impact is only felt in absolute numbers. The trends in this case may be far more important.
Take wind energy: in absolute numbers, it's still small compared to overall energy production. The fact that it's growing at double digits however is hugely significant. If we go from 30% annual growth rates to 50%, you can understand the impact- but that extra 20 points could be seen as a rounding error in global energy market statistics.
The growth rates for solar are similar to those of wind, and with every doubling in production costs go down significantly. Depending on the analysts, inflation adjustments, etc... that figure can be anywhere from 18 to 25%. This pattern is found with most new technologies, and is well documented.
With growth rates over 30%, production doubles about twice in 5 years.
Japan implemented subsidies for solar installations years ago. As the market matured, subsidies were slowly reduced, and now Japan is the leader in solar after displacing the US.
Waiting is an option, and the technology WILL be cheaper. It also won't be your own.
Kyoto is not perfect. It does however get some governments to go in the right direction, and the results will be felt as sustainable alternatives grow faster with all the consequences for the US that I outlined above.
I don't argue the uselessness of the GDP, but its counter-productiveness. Any discussion that uses it - even only to say the impact is negligible misses the point. We should be discussing the things we can reach a deedper agreeement on, like what type of world we want to leave our children and their descendants.
:)
The GDP measures no such thing: it only measures exchange, not value created. I argue that the measure is irrelevant. And also that economists are useless at predicting it
If some greens argue for zero- growth (or negative!), they're freaking mad.
Less people being hospitalized for deadly lung disease caused by smog is going to be a negative for the GDP. More people would be a boost for the "economy." We can't seriously adress the important questions if we agree to using this measure of progress. So the 2053/2056 thing has to be qualified... it may in this case be a very, very good thing.
Last night on CBC's The Hour, I believe David Suzuki came out and called the US a rogue nation.
This is a fair reflection of the developing consensus around the world. This has been especially notable after the US failed to support a world court.
What's most bizarre is that the US will end up losing out because of this. Japan is becoming a leader in solar, Germany and Denmark for wind. As prices become competitive against even natural gas, they will gain a tremendous advantage.
There are other examples, but those are just the most obvious. So much for another American century...
Seeing as how economists are less accurate than meteorologists, how in hell do they expect us to seriously believe a prediction of 40 years? 90% of them can't tell you what the growth rate will be in the next YEAR.
Plus, if they measure prosperity by GDP, they ought to be checked in for an examination. The Exxon Valdez spill was a net boost for the GDP, so it's not exactly the type of measure we want for whether we're better off after implementing such policies as Kyoto will require.
Besides, GDP is much higher than it was in 1970, but most people aren't much happier- and many believe that their children have less to look forward to than they did then. So, wtf, mate?
Great submissions, btw
There's one huge problem with that prediction.
/. crowd should take to mean that we have potentially more power than politicians. After all, we know politicians aren't usually clued in about tech :)
As far as they go, predictions of energy use have been completely, utterly atrocious when they have been done for periods of 30 years. I think if the US DOE (and all the industrialized nations' counterparts) were right, we'd be using twice as much energy today.
Most third world countries didn't finish building old-fashioned telephony systems before cell phones took over. Their infrastructure costs are much lower- without an entrenched bureaucracy that wants to have its old investment pay off, there's little incentive to put down copper lines now.
The reason I mention cell phones is that not only did it surprise most analysts, it perfectly illustrates what we could expect to happen as they "leap-frog" our filthy, polluting fossil-fuel addictions. A leap we can't take for the same reasons most of us (well, maybe not here) still use old-fashioned telephone lines.
As far as reducing emissions, technology has more of the solution than politics. Something the
As people talk about fusion, it's hard not to notice all the rhetoric seems to forget the lessons learned in the 50's. Fusion won't save the world anymore than old-hat nuclear. But people believe it, just as they believed in the too-cheap-to-meter nonsense. Cheaper in France? I checked (the first plan I clicked to, you may find cheaper). That's cheaper than in most parts of the US, but considerably more than I pay now in Nova Scotia, which isn't even the cheapest in Canada and is delivered by a for-profit corporation. The real question however is whether nuclear is cheaper for producers. The markets seem to have settled that one long ago- not many nuclear plants have been started since 1980, while natural gas plants had their boom. Best figures I got were 10c per kWh for nuclear against 5-6 for natural gas. If you check out the data on page 23 of TFA, you'll see price trends for wind- and we expect several more doublings before that market matures. It's almost inevitable that wind and solar will be cheaper than even natural gas within 20 years. We already have a winner- so spending billions on an industry that has had too many excuses for it poor performance should be a non-starter.
I'll believe it when I see it. You can perhaps prove that it is "walk away" safe through technical means, but that still doesn't account for the waste problem. It also doesn't prove that it will be cheap to build. That is something the nuclear industry has a terrible track record on, and absolutely no credibility when it comes to estimates. Consistent cost overruns and time delays in both building and maintaining plants (e.g. in Ontario) show a deep problem in their ability make predictions. As for capacity for renewables... what is the problem exactly?
I disagree. Nuclear was supposed to be "too cheap to meter" and it's more expensive than coal or natural gas.
So after spending billions on old nuclear, we spend billions more on fusion- the same people make the same promises and we're just supposed to believe it?
Solar and wind have been going down in price in predictable ways. Every new tech- cars, tvs, computers ends up offering better value for consumers as competition and economies of scale work their magic. Spending billions on those technologies guarantees results.
Excuse me, but given the BILLIONS of dollars that have been invested in nuclear power, we should be able to do better than merely avoiding meltdowns. This was energy that was going to be "too cheap to meter" and we still can't deal with the waste? How is that cleaner than wind???
Solar and wind have been steadily going down in price, and they will soon be cost-effective even compared to coal. Nuclear is still more expensive! It's not the activists, it's the cost overruns on plant constructions that killed it. The cost of running the plant is low, assuming no breakdowns- but the cost of building it has to be included in the final cost per kWh.
Bad SE rankings probably spells doom for them.
If I had more time and money, I'd give their financial data a look to see if there's any money to be made selling them short.
Well, first off I love the idea. I thought of it myself, and contacted my city's transit system admins to get the schedules and long/lat coordinates for the stops (I live in Halifax, NS).
It turns out they won't even let the bus drivers get the information in electronic format (except for a limited set of stops in PDF). Compare to cities like San Francisco, Paris... you'd scarcely believe we had bleeding edge technology just 15 years ago.
This is simple technology. Finding the shortest route between two points is not a complicated algorithm to implement. What this requires is vision, something many transit bureaucracies lack.
The best release their version of trip planners with their crappy UIs, but I want real-time data to be free so hackers can experiment with better ways of delivering it. And neat ways to integrate it, analyze it, and whatever else hackers will do with data.
You mentionned that this could be profitable, and you are absolutely correct. Knowing where people come from, where they go and when tells you a lot about them that is of use to marketers. That can be a problem, as bureaucracies will want money for the information. Either they develop their own trip planning website/subsite, or they charge for access to the information.
Perhaps I'm bitter that I couldn't do it. Try with your city's transit, and I wish you better luck there. Perhaps after a few let their citizens develop nice applications my city's administrators will come to their collective senses. I'm not giving up hope just yet.
[yeah, feeding trolls and what not... but this attitude is prevalent enough I wanted to make this point]
:)
Screw France, hein?
I bet a few would say "Je t'emmerde"
Oh, and talking about complicity, remember thhose details about not letting Jews emigrate, IBM selling equipment and GWB's grand-daddy making a fortune? An anglophone saying about pots and kettles might apply here.
Ahem... there is Anti-Americanism in France. I'm French, and don't live there anymore, but I think I can still say that with some credibility.
You could even call me anti-american if you thought my opposing GWB's asinine policies qualified. Now, I don't have all americans, just the minority of assholes that "lead" the country.
Anyhow, that ruling should not be seen as a sign of anti-Americanism. Perhaps more a sign of a different understanding of trademarks in France (try calling a California wine a Champagne, and see what happens to you), as well as their courts having missed the internet clue-train.