" Fact is, the current administration is doing great -- and that makes those abroad that don't like a unipolar world upset"
You are in a distinct minority in thinking so. The world by a wide margin thinks the Bush administration is a global disaster of epic proportions. Most American's have even woken up to the incompetence, cronyism, and corruption, something I didn't expect. The Republicans had the American people completely snowed in to 2005, but their incompetence achieved such epic proprotions that even the sedatives that are fear mongering and gay bashing wore off.
"Iraq has been expensive -- more than 2,000 American soldiers -- but that chaos and killing is over there -- not here"
That is pretty naive. All of the hundred's of thousands of Americans who are going to be run through the meat grinder in Iraq came from the U.S. and they are going to come back to it, many with stress disorders, many maimed for life, many disillusioned with American government for sending them in to such an ugly, misguided war based on deception and exaggeration. World War II vets coped a lot better with it because everyone understood the reason for the war and supported it. At this point NO ONE can tell you what the real reason is for the war in Iraq or what will qualify as victory.
A key component in toppling the Soviet Union was veterans coming back from the war in Afghanistan who dedicated themselves to overthrowing the government that stole their lives from them. The Bush administration is training hundreds of thousands of soldiers and their families to despise them.
"If they ever result in a true infringement of rights, they'll get repealed."
Uh, what basis do you have for the rosy assertion. If they had sunset clauses on them maybe their would be a chance for them to get repealed, but the Republican's are working hard to renew the Patriot act laws without any sunset clause. Fact is most politicians are going to expend them, not repeal them out of fear for being accused of being soft on terrorism, or of being blamed if another 9/11 were to occur.
"forgeting WWII and your debt to america from real tyranny."
If you want to play that game then the U.S. is permanently indebted to France. If it were not for France the rebels in the U.S. might well have lost the revolution and America would still be a British colony. The revolution was for the most part not going all that well until Yorktown. The victory at Yorktown was due in large part to French intelligence on the movements of British army, half the army that laid siege to Yorktown was French and most importantly the fleet that bottled up the British from the sea and prevented its escape or relief was French.
There is another angle on the "debt" the world owes the U.S. for World War II. In defeating Nazi Germany the lion's share of the work was done by the Soviet Union. Certainly the U.S. helped a lot in providing war material, strategic bombing, and opening a second front, but the outcome of the war was really decided on the Eastern front in 1940-1941 when the U.S. wasn't even in the war. The Soviet Union would most probably have won World War II on its own though it certainly would have taken longer.
You will no doubt also want to take credit for precipitating the fall of the iron curtain and the Soviet Union, but in reality most of that change came from within, from the Polish and Solidarity, and Gorbachev. Much of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be attributed to its misguided war in Afghanistan where it impaled itself on an unbeatable insurgency, a lesson America should study closely in Iraq.
"You probably watch american TV and listen to american music too while eating a mcdonalds cheeseburger and a drinking a budwiser."
Dude that is some serious cultural ignorance. American TV is bad, most American movies are bad, McDonald's is some of the world's worst imaginable unhealthy food, and Bud is exceptionally poor beer by the standards of the rest of the world. Not sure many American's, with a clue, would even agree with you on the worth of American TV, fast food or beer. All you are doing is showing the extent to which Americans, and to some extent the rest of the world, is falling prey to American cultural hegemony, due to things like saturation advertising, mass marketing, brain washing and use of military force to project its misguided culture on the world.
All in all you are just further reinforcing the negative opinion most people outside the U.S. and many in the U.S. have of the classic ignorant, arrogant American.
All I can say is you have talent for putting lipstick on a pig. You can try to make it look pretty but its still a pig.
The rationale you are using is to say we can pour buckets of money in to a hole in space and its ALWAYS JUSTIFIED just because we learned that pouring a hundred billion dollars in to a hole in space is a bad idea.
The fatal flaw of ISS and Shuttle was simply that the costs were to high, the results to low and the bottomline is the return on investment was TERRIBLE. It would have been REALLY HARD to waste more money for less return. That is just the most basic definition of failure, no ROI. Bad, bad management no matter how much lipstick you put on it.
"and we have inspired other nations to get into space."
That is completely silly. Sure astronauts from other countries made it to space, well again the Russian's were flying astronauts to Mir for years at a fraction the cost, and even better they fly wealthy tourists now which is totally cool.
If anything ISS has completely soured Europe and Japan on partnering with NASA because most of their multibillion components are sitting on the ground and if they ever do manage to fly they will probably fall far short of their goals because the ISS can't manage a full crew compliment.... and NASA will start abandoning ISS as soon as its sort of done under many proposed road maps.
ISS did succeed in that it probably will create international partnerships between Europe, Russia, India and China, and in fact Europe is already looking to partner with Russia on Klipper, and end up with NASA and the U.S. being ostracized from international space exploration.
I wouldn't be surprised if its also motivated China to build its own space program because its seen how completely botched the U.S. program is and they deduced they could with enough time, smart people and money, all of which they have, they could match or surpass the U.S. manned space program. How the mighty have fallen.
"Finally, during the 90's, it was the Russians that looked bad. They were constantly out of money."
Well gee considering than their country had just ridden out a revolution and a complete restructuring of their economy, they did pretty good. Simple fact is NASA had to rely on Russia to build all the core components of the ISS because Russia had the expertise and experience. NASA hadn't built a space station since Skylab and it showed in their inability to bend metal and get something in to space so Russia did it for them.
"We need to know what will happen and how to countermand the effect. The station has been hard at work at it."
The Russians did 12 months long before the ISS came along and at a tiny fraction of the price on Mir. About all thats really come out of all the zero G physiology research is aggressive exercise is important, we didn't need to spend $100 billion to learn that. Build a craft big enough to use a centrifuge for artificial G is the only other option so far. It should be noted if you are going to Mars you are going to 1/3 G which is way less trauma than going back to 1G on earth. If you go to Mars to colonize and stay you never go back to 1G so the gravit issues is a lot less of an issue.
"ISS has shown us where things will go well, and things will go bad."
Yes it mostly showed NASA bad, Russians good. NASA has been an obnoxious partner throughout who has failed to deliver on every front. The Russians are the only ones who kept the ISS alive in the face of the disaster that is the Shuttle. If it were not for the Russians the ISS would have been abandoned already and probably burned, though that might have been a blessing in a lot of ways.
"The stations recently had O2 problems. The generator for it failed in a big way. Most likely a new design will be sought out."
You really don't need a $100 billion space station to perfect oxygen generators.
Bottomline, as someone else said, the ONLY area in which the ISS and Shuttle can be considered a success is as a lucrative multidecade jobs program for aerospace workers and contractors.
"Do you really think no one had ever transmitted RF energy in the 2 GHz frequency range before cellphones and wifi?"
We DON'T have long running experience putting RF transmitters RIGHT NEXT TO YOUR BRAIN for LONG duration exposures. There is some with UHF radio but they only transmit when you key mikes. Cell phones transmit all the time. There have been a lot of experience in cars but then the antennas are outside a metal box.
I'm not saying RF transmitters ARE dangerous, I am saying you are out in unsupported land claiming you know for a fact they are COMPLETELY SAFE. We will probably never know that with certainty. About all you can do is manage risk. Many smart people are putting shields on their cell phones to minimize the radiation shooting straight in to the side of their head from a transmitter millimeters from their tissue for long durtions.
"You should not be comparing legitmate science to corporate press releases."
Those press releases were backed by "scientific studies" and experimental data. Unfortunately you can get the results from those studies you want as long as you throw the right amount of money at the right people. The cigarette companies bent them, the cell phone companies are bending them to protect their business as do the drug companies. The FDA's credibility in safety studies for drugs has been completely compromised by corporate money and political influence.
Re:It's Just Business
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Pixar For Sale?
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· Score: 4, Informative
Pixar doesn't make ball bearings. They are a creative enterprise. They have some software assets but their movies are box office winners because of their creative talent. In particular John Lasseter is one of their single greatest assets. Pixar's movies are successful because they are based on great stories and compelling characters, not really because of their prowess doing 3D graphics(though their rich animation is priceless in its own way). Lasseter's "Luxo Jr" was done back in an era when the CGI was extremely simplistic but its still entertaining to watch because the story is good.
In an era when most movies have horrible scripts, and special effects laden comic book movies especially so, a movie studio with good story tellers is priceless. Most CG laden movies fail because the effects try to carry movies with no script.
If someone buys Pixar and Lasseter and all his many proteges leave you end up with an empty shell worth nothing. Disney's problem stems from a time when their talent, Katzenberg in particular, left for places like Dreamworks, and their story telling crater. This is why all their movies have sucked since, they are formulaic stories with cardboard characters. Eisner treated his animation studio as a business and its precisely because he didn't look out for the happiness of its key people, management and employees. Disney has a reputation for having a sweat shot work environment for its animators and that is a really bad environment to cultivate creative talent.
You are completely missing the point. The point is we know radio waves at certainly energy levels and frequencies are dangerous to living organisms. We don't know precisely what power levels at each frequency are certain to be harmless especially with long exposure. All we have are guesses.
It is a certainty the lower the power, the lower the frequency and the further you are away from a transmitter the less the risk, but you simply don't know what the consequences would be to sitting a WIMAX, 802.11 or cell phone transmitter right next to your tissue and running it for 20 years is, so don't pretend like you do know, it is naive. If an energetic radio wave enters a cell, even on the skin and disrupts DNA or RNA there is a risk. Maybe its an incredibly low risk, maybe its not.
In closing all I have to say is it was not so long ago that the power that be were assuring us nicotine wasn't addictive and smoking didn't cause lung cancer.
Uh dude, I think you might want to retract your absurd blanket statement. I assure large bands of the electromagnetic spectrum are extremely dangerous to your health, in particular ionizing radio frequency. Try standing next to a high powered radar for a while and then I'd be impressed with your hubris, or maybe stick your head in a satellite transmitter dish. They slap warning stickers on them for a reason. The jury is still out on whether prolonged exposure to cell phones causes cancer. The only issue is where the danger line is in terms of frequencies and intensity. There are FCC standards for cell phone radiation for a reason too, because higher energy levels are still considered dangerous especially with prolonged exposure.
Its just hard to definitely prove that cell phones are a risk, check back in 20 years when we see how many people are dying from brain tumors after spending 20 years with a cell phone stuck to their ear.
Where I live the power company tried running fiber during the bubble, ran a lot of it, then their partner went bankrupt, most of the fiber was run but it was never hooked up. We get the best of both worlds, dark fiber and paying surcharges for electricity as the power company tries to dig out of the bad debt. I wager some Wall Street types probably made out like bandits on the deal, they were big on going around the country during the telecom bubble telling power companies, that electricity was old school and that telecom was the future, Bernie Ebbers said so. They nearly destroyed Montana by taking a stable power company providing affordable but not very profitable electricity and turning it in to a financial and business disaster.
I hope the South Dakota power company makes out on it, having fiber is a lot nicer than a lot of obsolete copper but it is expensive providing this service in rural areas, especially if phone and cable start encroaching on all the more lucrative higher density areas. The only reason rural America got electricity and presumably phone in the first place is because of subsidies.
"If you actually know where these places are"
The front and back doors to Edwards Air Force Base or more noteworthy Mojave is home to Burt Rutan and Scaled Composites.
"They still can't compete since he can provide service to those beyond the very center of town."
I hope he succeeds, but I wager the phone/cable companies will take all the parts of his business they want and lets him keep the parts that aren't worth having. The downside of building a business on unlicensed wireless is the ease with which another competitor can enter the same business and you both end up losing money in the face of competition. Competition is a double edged sword.
Nice empty threat but I think if you actually had to do it you would be in for a rude awakening. Satellite internet is expensive(like $60/month), downloads are capped(like 200 MB/day), uplink is very slow and ping times are horrible. Ping times of 1 1/2 to 2 second kill online gaming and is somewhat annoying for things like VoIP and video conferencing. You are behind a firewalled server so you wont be serving any web pages over it, the uplink speeds preclude that anyway. VPN is difficult at best, requires additional charges and special accelerator gear to not be unusably slow and it is still annoying slow for OpenSSH. I don't think the satellite providers are investing much in new capacity, because no one will buy their product unless they have no choice so its not a growth business, which leads to deteriorating performance as they cram more users on the same satellites.
Satellite is only desirable, or maybe tolerable, if you live in rural areas with no other option.
You're only real options are likely to be:
- a cable monopoly - a phone company monopoly - maybe a power company monopoly someday - wireless
It remains to be seen if wireless avoids being monopolized, because for example the above monopolies sue if a city tries to provide it as a free service. If Wimax becomes the dominant wireless medium I believe it also has licensing structure that can create monopolies depending on who snaps up the license in a give area.
Luckily you do have several monopolies competing with each other which is better than have no competition, but as you see with oil companies if you have several big players who decide to collude they can maintain artificially high prices so they all still profit at the expense of consumers.
P.S.
Probably wont win any points saying it but it is true that cable and phone companies have invested vast sums in copper and now fiber infrastructure. You do need to insure they make a profit, and are able to service their debt as long you want that infrastructure in your home. Now if wireless could be made to work and provide similar service it obviously eliminates a lot of that infrastructure cost but I'm not sure you can get anything close to the same performance on wireless anytime soon. The other downside is wireless means we get bathed in some more potentially carcinogenic radiation.
Re:Testament to Open Source Software Developers
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OpenOffice Bloated?
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· Score: 1
Uhhh, I'm not comparing the two, I seldom ever run Office. I just notice it take FOREVER to launch OpenOffice on a beefy Athlon with a gig of RAM. I pity anyone using it on a slow machine without a lot of RAM. It doesn't help I'm loading it on KDE so there is massive GUI toolkit duplication.
Sounds like you are just being defensive and an apologist. Fact is OpenOffice COULD use a lot of bloat reduction and startup speed improvement. I was thinking about taking a turn at it but it is a complete pain to build especially native under x86_64 on AMD. Someone needs to standardize that bloody build on configure and make, so more developers will pick up working on it.
You must have an addictive personality because Civ III was crap:) In particular the technology trees are awful.
I'll take Alpha Centauri any day. Unfortunately the people that are still at Firaxis didn't develop Alpha Centauri so they have a not invented here syndrome so they don't try to develop new versions of the undisputed best game of the civ genre and probably couldn't top it if they tried since the talented people who developed Alpha Centauri left Firaxis.
Re:Testament to Open Source Software Developers
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OpenOffice Bloated?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
It would be interesting to know if someone has investigated using the symbol hiding capabilities in the newer versions of gcc to eliminate some of the shared object related bloat that most probably afflicts OpenOffice. When you use shared objects for everything every function name gets put in the dynamic symbol table by default. The only ones that actually need to be there are the ones called from the main program and other shared objects. All of the functions and global data that are only referenced by other code in the same shared object don't need to be in the dynamic symbol table or linked at run-time. Windows has used explicit exporting of symbols from the dawn of time, you can explicitly hide or export symbols in newer version of gcc, 3.4 in particular. I think KDE takes advantage of it on gcc 3.4 compiles.
You can look at the dynamic symbols that ARE loaded when the shared object loads with something like:
objdump -T/opt/OpenOffice.org/program/*.so
The bloat is especially accute in C++ code because the mangled function names can be quite long.
All those symbol names are loaded and scanned to do run-time link the shared objects, it causes slowness at startup which OpenOffice certainly has and you take a big memory hit for stuff that is not useful code.
Manually keeping track of which symbols need to be exported and which are not is a pain, and is a pain in Windows DLL's. You would almost be better off on something as big as OpenOffice to write scripts to process objdump output and figure out which symbols are actually be called outside the shared object and need to be in the dynamic symbol table.
On the other hand its kind of good discipline to create an a clean and disciplined API for each shared object which defines the public interface to the shared object. It helps improve modularity, reusability, testability and discipline in general and eliminate bloat when you realize that in fact nothing is actually calling dead code.
"and I dont see what the advantage would be for most customers"
The answer is there is almost no advantage for customers. The only thee advantages I can see in hosting things like office on the web:
- if you move around a lot, and you are not taking an office suite enabled computer, laptop, PDA or cellphone, with you, then you would have access to your documents and office suite as you move.
- you get regular updates though its open to debate if you actually want regular updates since most people want office tools that they know work, know how they work and most people really don't want continuous updates, especially ones under someone else's control.
- you get security patches and someone else maintains it. security patches are easy enough to automate without taking the host app plunge.
The many down sides:
- you completely shred the privacy and security of your documents. Maybe this is OK if you write nothing but fluffy personal docs but if you produce confidential business documents and spreadsheets the LAST thing you want to do is keep them on a server operated by strangers. Maybe, maybe you could count on Microsoft to write and honor a privacy policy but you will never know if a rogue employee at MSN is dancing through your docs looking for stuff they can exploit for insider stock tips or identity theft.
- It is dramatically easier for a rogue police state like the U.S. increasingly is to go knocking at Microsoft's door and go dancing through your documents looking for trumped up terrorism charges because they need a show trail, or shopping for fishy financial dealings. Its somewhat less bad hosting email on the web since, unless you are encrypting it, it is already bouncing around for all to see, but that is not so for your internal company email, personal and business documents.
- You have a copy of OpenOffice or Office 97. It works wonderfully, always has, always will as long as the computer hangs together which could be 10 years since hardware is plenty fast and rich with storage so we really don't need to upgrade hardware or office softare very often anymore. Oh and as long as Microsoft doesn't intentionally obsolete it by dropping support or changing file formats to force you to pay them for upgrades. Having golden oldie software that does the job is great for consumers, totally sucks for Microsoft because their revenue is going to plateau. Solution, they have to sucker consumers in to paying them every year to rent software, so instead of buying once and owning forever you pay Microsoft as much as they care to charge for their service each year.
If you are so foolish to fall for hosting all your docs on the web, make damn sure that you can easily get them all out if and when you realize its a bad idea.
Just guessing but I wager there is a GM at Blizzard who also happens to be a Slashdot reader and saw CmdrTaco running around the server he was on and.... light bulb flashes..... that name technically violates Blizzard naming rules. He stops and thinks about all the dup articles on slashdot, and the articles that the editors don't fact check or... you know.... edit. And then there is the articles that are really badly disguised infomercials like the ones for Roland Piqapille. And Then their is the IP address banning and the suspicious instant mods by editors on posts that the editors don't like, and the FAQS that basically tell you if you don't like something about Slashdot that you can pretty much go to hell because thats just the way it is, and that if you ever try to complain to the editors they probably aren't going to answer, and if bitch in posts about you get banned.
The GM slowly gets this warm fuzzy feeling inside, an opportunity for sweet revenge. A chance to hit CmdrTaco where he lives, by stripping him of his name, and he can do it arbitrarily and anonymously and CmdrTaco can't do anything about it and Rob will beat his head against an anonymous wall just like Slashdot users do. How sweet it is.
This anonymous GM just read Slashdot this morning and saw Rob's rambling screed and he laughed all the way the way through. He obviously nailed Rob where it hurts and its totally eating him up inside. There is just some total karmic justice here.
Exactly. Its been this way for a decade or two. Not only can you underpay foreign workers, but you can COUNT on obedience and servility from them. Their entire existence is completely dependent on their boss and the company they are working for. If they get laid off or fired, unless they can find a new employer immediately they lose their visa and are out of the country or turn illegal, their homes and families shredded in the process. This leads to them working large quantities of uncompensated overtime, never complaining, never questioning their superiors no matter how wrong their superior is. Their is a con job that its just because Indian workers are better, harder workers, well its also because their employers have them by the short hairs and everyone knows it.
Being a wage slave at this point just completely sucks. You are screwed coming and going because the world has completely turned in to an employer's market. Employer's can outsource, they can import H1-B's, they can hire illegal aliens whom are intentionally being let in to the country in the millions to insure cheap subservient low end labor. The political party in power in the U.S. now is completely pro business and the Democrats are close behind. The Republican's once again just voted down an increase in the minimum wage. The minimum wage hasn't gone up since 1996-97, how much inflation has there been in that time. How much more are you paying for gasoline and home heating this year. Try to live in the U.S. on $5.15/hr much of which goes in to payroll taxes.
Bottomline is if you have a clue you are going to jump to self employment because if you are working for a boss you are pretty much already screwed and its gonna get worse with every passing year. When politicians, Democrat and Republican, bought and paid for by big business, dismantled trade barriers workers in the U.S. were doomed. H-1B and illegal immigration likewise are anti worker perks big business is paying politicians to do for them.
Amazingly workers completely outnumber employers in this country but workers are consistently suckered by issues like abortion, gay bashing, "The War on Terror" in to voting people in to office who are going to completely screw them where it counts, in the work place and in the pocket book.
I think a key conclusion is that ExtremeTech is trying to drive page hits and ad revenue. Strategy, run a bunch of benchmarks, draw no particularly insightful conclusion, get it posted on Slashdot. A horde of page clicks ensue. Oh and a key point put an incredibly small amount of actual information on each page so that your army of unpaid clickers have to page through a dozen Next links to get to the conclusion, all the while probably generating tons of hits on their ads on each new page.
You answered your own question, the news was suppressed when it happened and people have shortl memories.
Some of the worst things about Three Mile Island was the powers that be that were responsible for it tried to lie their way through it at every opportunity. They nuclear power industry shredded there credibility there. If they'd been truthful from the get go they industry as a while might have weathered it better. After it was over no one trusted them about anything.
"With the primary political base of environmentalism shrinking due to the aging of its main supporters"
Where did you develop the illusion or delusion that a political base shrinks in power as it ages? Young people don't vote, old people do. How do you think Social Security and Medicare became third rails in politics, because older people vote in large numbers, the form cohesive and powerful blocks and they punish any politician that votes against their interests.
If nuclear power is in a resurgence its not because of your bizarre explanation its more likely:
A. People have forgotten Three Mile Island, especially everyone under 40 because they didn't live through it, and amazingly people have even forgotten Chernoybl with time.
B. People are realizing that coal fired power plants are as bad or worse. Coal fired power plants are slow death, nuclear has some nasty waste and potential for catastrophic failure but when they work they are relatively clean. When given a choice between coal or nuclear, nuclear is in relative terms the environmental choice. We can wish for wind or solar as clean and green power but we are a long way from actually making them viable and using them on the scale needed to satiate our appetite for energy would lead to environmental impact of their own.
Well dude that kind of proves how stuck on yourself you are because you have no clue how old I am but you are sitting there patting yourself on the back that you are so smart you can tell based on a few paragraphs of writing.
I think the key difference between us is I want to live only as long as the quality of life is good, I don't want to live off others which many seniors do today. Most paid almost nothing in to Medicare or Social Security but they reap huge windfalls from it today at the expense of younger workers.
I don't think I would want immortality, especially if it leads to a society dominated by a bunch of know it all old farts like yourselves who think you are the only ones with wisdom.
Knowing life is short is a main motivator for people to make the most of what they have. If you have immortality I suspect people would become lazy, bored, boring, and unmotivated.
"They've lived, they've learned, they have no desire to repeat the foolish, idiotic antics of youth."
It also means you wont take risks or try anything that isn't safe. There is just as much bad about the experience and wisdom of old age as there is good. Thats why I'm inclined to say a healthy mix of age groups is best. A society with a majority of people a hundred years old or older would most probably be a stagnant one, resistant to change, and intensely boring.
To each his own, but choosing to believe something just because it makes you feel better isn't particularly useful or rationale. It is a key reason many knowledgable people abhor the extent to which religion is dominating the thinking of so many in the U.S. in particular. You no longer need to look for rationale explanation for anything, you just take a leap of faith and you can believe and explain away anything. Just because a crackpot used religion as a basis for explaining somethine you just accept it, no proof required, no difficult thinking as to whether it make sense or is right. The crackpot has the perfect defense, there is an omnipotent being at work, you can't see him, you can't question him, the crackpot can't prove it, just accept it as a matter of faith. It is a mindset that as its logical conclusion will push humankind back in to an intellectual dark age.
The key weakness in the religious mindset is you probably, like most people, fear death and mortality. Religion gives you an easy out, when you die you won't die you will go to heaven and everything will be wonderful. It is one of the more insidious aspects of religion. It prays on one of mankind's greater fears to recruit converts. The converts in turn pour money in to the the religion's coffers and give its leader's power and affluence. You in turn get the comfort that if you lead a virtuous life you will have immortality. It is a suckers game.
"It would be even worse if the self-appointed morally superior among us decided that we'd all be condemned to die via old age simply because they thought immortality wasn't something anyone deserved. If practical immortality were developed and certain power groups tried to keep it from the general population you'd have bloody revolution overnight."
Dude this is already a standard part of the status quo. The wealthy developed nations already do it to all the poor underdeveloped nations, and the wealthy classes in many nations do it to their poor underclasses. Its done by hording wealth, and controling access to food, energy and medical care based on that wealth. Its done by providing the best health care to those who can afford it and inferior health care to those who can't.
Enforcing this division is why countries like the U.S. have a huge military. The U.S. has little to fear from underdeveloped countries revolting against the fact the U.S. has better health care, more energy, more food and in general more wealth. Its been that way for more than a century. The only tool for the poor to counter are 9/11 style insurgent attacks which aren't all the effective in the long run.
Within the U.S. the affluent with gold plated health insurance can count on the best in health care and will live longer. The old rely on Medicare which isn't so bad but it exacts a huge price on working people for it, as I said Medicare is a case of the old cannibalizing their youth. Medicare cares for some of the poorest but the price of getting is you must be completely destitute which is bad in itself. There is a huge pool, 40 million or so who have no health insurance so they get inferior health care and often die for lack of early intervention. If they do get hospital care it results in bankruptcy and with recent bankruptcy law changes you can no longer get out of these debts easily, so a health emergency leads to either death or financial ruin.
Fact is the mechanisms are already in place to ration immortality. It goes two tracks:
A. You aren't wealthy enough to pay for it so you don't get it.
B. You are in a program like Medicare where if immortality is doled out to everyone over 65 it will devastate the younger working people who have to pay for it, unless technology advances to the point that it is cheap. Most of the things required for immortality don't sound cheap.
"Something only someone "young and fresh" could say with a straight face."
Actually I'm closer to the old end of the scale, and I know plenty of seniors. Fact is they do often have a lot of wisdom, but they also suffer from an intense rigidity in thinking and demand routine. I think you severely underestimate the consequence of creating a huge population very old people consuming much of societies resources.
"Finally, I think you drastically overlook the social good that old age offers. In a society where people become older and older, you have people building up vast reservoirs of experience and knowledge."
The unintended consequence you overlook is those old people cannibalize their youth, and its EVEN WORSE in the developed countries with declining young populations and rising old ones. In the U.S. 12.5% of working people's salaries go to support Medicare and Social Security for old people. Thats money not going to supporting themselves but supporting anonymous old people, and it gets worse every decade. We are reaching the point young, working people wont be able to support their elders, for example Social Security and Medicare will soon bankrupt without steep tax hikes or benefit cuts.
The key problem with all this wonderful fountain of youth is its staggeringly expensive. Maybe if technology advances and it becomes cheap to keep people alive, and they can work productively, that would be one thing, but so far each advance comes with with ever steeper price tags and in socialized countries those costs are born by young people. Some old people have a pretty good life, but many engage in a non stop circuit through one doctor, hospital, diagnostic test after another, its extremely expensive and its a poor quality of life. Many sit in nursing homes, unable to care for themselves, and again devouring vast sums of money. We do keep them alive but their quality of life is horrible and expensive. Many would no doubt rather pass away peacefully but society's taboos insists on keeping them alive at all costs.
Its true old people do have a font of knowledge, but why is it then that so many companies go to such great lengths to get rid of older employees:
A. Their health care costs are very high B. People demand salary growth so the older you are the higher the salary you demand. Young workers work cheap and companies like cheap workers. C. Old people do have a font of knowledge but it is often mired in the ancient past. Sometimes this knowledge is priceless, sometimes it is obsolete and useless. Most old people acquire a fairly rigid mindset and abhor change. If you are in rapidly changing fields like technology rigid mindset is often counterproductive, not productive. Young hungry people with no rigid mindset tend to be the people that drive breakthroughs.
Slashdot Mirror
" Fact is, the current administration is doing great -- and that makes those abroad that don't like a unipolar world upset"
You are in a distinct minority in thinking so. The world by a wide margin thinks the Bush administration is a global disaster of epic proportions. Most American's have even woken up to the incompetence, cronyism, and corruption, something I didn't expect. The Republicans had the American people completely snowed in to 2005, but their incompetence achieved such epic proprotions that even the sedatives that are fear mongering and gay bashing wore off.
"Iraq has been expensive -- more than 2,000 American soldiers -- but that chaos and killing is over there -- not here"
That is pretty naive. All of the hundred's of thousands of Americans who are going to be run through the meat grinder in Iraq came from the U.S. and they are going to come back to it, many with stress disorders, many maimed for life, many disillusioned with American government for sending them in to such an ugly, misguided war based on deception and exaggeration. World War II vets coped a lot better with it because everyone understood the reason for the war and supported it. At this point NO ONE can tell you what the real reason is for the war in Iraq or what will qualify as victory.
A key component in toppling the Soviet Union was veterans coming back from the war in Afghanistan who dedicated themselves to overthrowing the government that stole their lives from them. The Bush administration is training hundreds of thousands of soldiers and their families to despise them.
"If they ever result in a true infringement of rights, they'll get repealed."
Uh, what basis do you have for the rosy assertion. If they had sunset clauses on them maybe their would be a chance for them to get repealed, but the Republican's are working hard to renew the Patriot act laws without any sunset clause. Fact is most politicians are going to expend them, not repeal them out of fear for being accused of being soft on terrorism, or of being blamed if another 9/11 were to occur.
"forgeting WWII and your debt to america from real tyranny."
If you want to play that game then the U.S. is permanently indebted to France. If it were not for France the rebels in the U.S. might well have lost the revolution and America would still be a British colony. The revolution was for the most part not going all that well until Yorktown. The victory at Yorktown was due in large part to French intelligence on the movements of British army, half the army that laid siege to Yorktown was French and most importantly the fleet that bottled up the British from the sea and prevented its escape or relief was French.
There is another angle on the "debt" the world owes the U.S. for World War II. In defeating Nazi Germany the lion's share of the work was done by the Soviet Union. Certainly the U.S. helped a lot in providing war material, strategic bombing, and opening a second front, but the outcome of the war was really decided on the Eastern front in 1940-1941 when the U.S. wasn't even in the war. The Soviet Union would most probably have won World War II on its own though it certainly would have taken longer.
You will no doubt also want to take credit for precipitating the fall of the iron curtain and the Soviet Union, but in reality most of that change came from within, from the Polish and Solidarity, and Gorbachev. Much of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be attributed to its misguided war in Afghanistan where it impaled itself on an unbeatable insurgency, a lesson America should study closely in Iraq.
"You probably watch american TV and listen to american music too while eating a mcdonalds cheeseburger and a drinking a budwiser."
Dude that is some serious cultural ignorance. American TV is bad, most American movies are bad, McDonald's is some of the world's worst imaginable unhealthy food, and Bud is exceptionally poor beer by the standards of the rest of the world. Not sure many American's, with a clue, would even agree with you on the worth of American TV, fast food or beer. All you are doing is showing the extent to which Americans, and to some extent the rest of the world, is falling prey to American cultural hegemony, due to things like saturation advertising, mass marketing, brain washing and use of military force to project its misguided culture on the world.
All in all you are just further reinforcing the negative opinion most people outside the U.S. and many in the U.S. have of the classic ignorant, arrogant American.
All I can say is you have talent for putting lipstick on a pig. You can try to make it look pretty but its still a pig.
.... and NASA will start abandoning ISS as soon as its sort of done under many proposed road maps.
The rationale you are using is to say we can pour buckets of money in to a hole in space and its ALWAYS JUSTIFIED just because we learned that pouring a hundred billion dollars in to a hole in space is a bad idea.
The fatal flaw of ISS and Shuttle was simply that the costs were to high, the results to low and the bottomline is the return on investment was TERRIBLE. It would have been REALLY HARD to waste more money for less return. That is just the most basic definition of failure, no ROI. Bad, bad management no matter how much lipstick you put on it.
"and we have inspired other nations to get into space."
That is completely silly. Sure astronauts from other countries made it to space, well again the Russian's were flying astronauts to Mir for years at a fraction the cost, and even better they fly wealthy tourists now which is totally cool.
If anything ISS has completely soured Europe and Japan on partnering with NASA because most of their multibillion components are sitting on the ground and if they ever do manage to fly they will probably fall far short of their goals because the ISS can't manage a full crew compliment
ISS did succeed in that it probably will create international partnerships between Europe, Russia, India and China, and in fact Europe is already looking to partner with Russia on Klipper, and end up with NASA and the U.S. being ostracized from international space exploration.
I wouldn't be surprised if its also motivated China to build its own space program because its seen how completely botched the U.S. program is and they deduced they could with enough time, smart people and money, all of which they have, they could match or surpass the U.S. manned space program. How the mighty have fallen.
"Finally, during the 90's, it was the Russians that looked bad. They were constantly out of money."
Well gee considering than their country had just ridden out a revolution and a complete restructuring of their economy, they did pretty good. Simple fact is NASA had to rely on Russia to build all the core components of the ISS because Russia had the expertise and experience. NASA hadn't built a space station since Skylab and it showed in their inability to bend metal and get something in to space so Russia did it for them.
"We need to know what will happen and how to countermand the effect. The station has been hard at work at it."
The Russians did 12 months long before the ISS came along and at a tiny fraction of the price on Mir. About all thats really come out of all the zero G physiology research is aggressive exercise is important, we didn't need to spend $100 billion to learn that. Build a craft big enough to use a centrifuge for artificial G is the only other option so far. It should be noted if you are going to Mars you are going to 1/3 G which is way less trauma than going back to 1G on earth. If you go to Mars to colonize and stay you never go back to 1G so the gravit issues is a lot less of an issue.
"ISS has shown us where things will go well, and things will go bad."
Yes it mostly showed NASA bad, Russians good. NASA has been an obnoxious partner throughout who has failed to deliver on every front. The Russians are the only ones who kept the ISS alive in the face of the disaster that is the Shuttle. If it were not for the Russians the ISS would have been abandoned already and probably burned, though that might have been a blessing in a lot of ways.
"The stations recently had O2 problems. The generator for it failed in a big way. Most likely a new design will be sought out."
You really don't need a $100 billion space station to perfect oxygen generators.
Bottomline, as someone else said, the ONLY area in which the ISS and Shuttle can be considered a success is as a lucrative multidecade jobs program for aerospace workers and contractors.
"Do you really think no one had ever transmitted RF energy in the 2 GHz frequency range before cellphones and wifi?"
We DON'T have long running experience putting RF transmitters RIGHT NEXT TO YOUR BRAIN for LONG duration exposures. There is some with UHF radio but they only transmit when you key mikes. Cell phones transmit all the time. There have been a lot of experience in cars but then the antennas are outside a metal box.
I'm not saying RF transmitters ARE dangerous, I am saying you are out in unsupported land claiming you know for a fact they are COMPLETELY SAFE. We will probably never know that with certainty. About all you can do is manage risk. Many smart people are putting shields on their cell phones to minimize the radiation shooting straight in to the side of their head from a transmitter millimeters from their tissue for long durtions.
"You should not be comparing legitmate science to corporate press releases."
Those press releases were backed by "scientific studies" and experimental data. Unfortunately you can get the results from those studies you want as long as you throw the right amount of money at the right people. The cigarette companies bent them, the cell phone companies are bending them to protect their business as do the drug companies. The FDA's credibility in safety studies for drugs has been completely compromised by corporate money and political influence.
Pixar doesn't make ball bearings. They are a creative enterprise. They have some software assets but their movies are box office winners because of their creative talent. In particular John Lasseter is one of their single greatest assets. Pixar's movies are successful because they are based on great stories and compelling characters, not really because of their prowess doing 3D graphics(though their rich animation is priceless in its own way). Lasseter's "Luxo Jr" was done back in an era when the CGI was extremely simplistic but its still entertaining to watch because the story is good.
In an era when most movies have horrible scripts, and special effects laden comic book movies especially so, a movie studio with good story tellers is priceless. Most CG laden movies fail because the effects try to carry movies with no script.
If someone buys Pixar and Lasseter and all his many proteges leave you end up with an empty shell worth nothing. Disney's problem stems from a time when their talent, Katzenberg in particular, left for places like Dreamworks, and their story telling crater. This is why all their movies have sucked since, they are formulaic stories with cardboard characters. Eisner treated his animation studio as a business and its precisely because he didn't look out for the happiness of its key people, management and employees. Disney has a reputation for having a sweat shot work environment for its animators and that is a really bad environment to cultivate creative talent.
You are completely missing the point. The point is we know radio waves at certainly energy levels and frequencies are dangerous to living organisms. We don't know precisely what power levels at each frequency are certain to be harmless especially with long exposure. All we have are guesses.
It is a certainty the lower the power, the lower the frequency and the further you are away from a transmitter the less the risk, but you simply don't know what the consequences would be to sitting a WIMAX, 802.11 or cell phone transmitter right next to your tissue and running it for 20 years is, so don't pretend like you do know, it is naive. If an energetic radio wave enters a cell, even on the skin and disrupts DNA or RNA there is a risk. Maybe its an incredibly low risk, maybe its not.
In closing all I have to say is it was not so long ago that the power that be were assuring us nicotine wasn't addictive and smoking didn't cause lung cancer.
Uh dude, I think you might want to retract your absurd blanket statement. I assure large bands of the electromagnetic spectrum are extremely dangerous to your health, in particular ionizing radio frequency. Try standing next to a high powered radar for a while and then I'd be impressed with your hubris, or maybe stick your head in a satellite transmitter dish. They slap warning stickers on them for a reason. The jury is still out on whether prolonged exposure to cell phones causes cancer. The only issue is where the danger line is in terms of frequencies and intensity. There are FCC standards for cell phone radiation for a reason too, because higher energy levels are still considered dangerous especially with prolonged exposure.
Its just hard to definitely prove that cell phones are a risk, check back in 20 years when we see how many people are dying from brain tumors after spending 20 years with a cell phone stuck to their ear.
Where I live the power company tried running fiber during the bubble, ran a lot of it, then their partner went bankrupt, most of the fiber was run but it was never hooked up. We get the best of both worlds, dark fiber and paying surcharges for electricity as the power company tries to dig out of the bad debt. I wager some Wall Street types probably made out like bandits on the deal, they were big on going around the country during the telecom bubble telling power companies, that electricity was old school and that telecom was the future, Bernie Ebbers said so. They nearly destroyed Montana by taking a stable power company providing affordable but not very profitable electricity and turning it in to a financial and business disaster.
I hope the South Dakota power company makes out on it, having fiber is a lot nicer than a lot of obsolete copper but it is expensive providing this service in rural areas, especially if phone and cable start encroaching on all the more lucrative higher density areas. The only reason rural America got electricity and presumably phone in the first place is because of subsidies.
"If you actually know where these places are"
The front and back doors to Edwards Air Force Base or more noteworthy Mojave is home to Burt Rutan and Scaled Composites.
"They still can't compete since he can provide service to those beyond the very center of town."
I hope he succeeds, but I wager the phone/cable companies will take all the parts of his business they want and lets him keep the parts that aren't worth having. The downside of building a business on unlicensed wireless is the ease with which another competitor can enter the same business and you both end up losing money in the face of competition. Competition is a double edged sword.
"if they blow it I can go satellite"
Nice empty threat but I think if you actually had to do it you would be in for a rude awakening. Satellite internet is expensive(like $60/month), downloads are capped(like 200 MB/day), uplink is very slow and ping times are horrible. Ping times of 1 1/2 to 2 second kill online gaming and is somewhat annoying for things like VoIP and video conferencing. You are behind a firewalled server so you wont be serving any web pages over it, the uplink speeds preclude that anyway. VPN is difficult at best, requires additional charges and special accelerator gear to not be unusably slow and it is still annoying slow for OpenSSH. I don't think the satellite providers are investing much in new capacity, because no one will buy their product unless they have no choice so its not a growth business, which leads to deteriorating performance as they cram more users on the same satellites.
Satellite is only desirable, or maybe tolerable, if you live in rural areas with no other option.
You're only real options are likely to be:
- a cable monopoly
- a phone company monopoly
- maybe a power company monopoly someday
- wireless
It remains to be seen if wireless avoids being monopolized, because for example the above monopolies sue if a city tries to provide it as a free service. If Wimax becomes the dominant wireless medium I believe it also has licensing structure that can create monopolies depending on who snaps up the license in a give area.
Luckily you do have several monopolies competing with each other which is better than have no competition, but as you see with oil companies if you have several big players who decide to collude they can maintain artificially high prices so they all still profit at the expense of consumers.
P.S.
Probably wont win any points saying it but it is true that cable and phone companies have invested vast sums in copper and now fiber infrastructure. You do need to insure they make a profit, and are able to service their debt as long you want that infrastructure in your home. Now if wireless could be made to work and provide similar service it obviously eliminates a lot of that infrastructure cost but I'm not sure you can get anything close to the same performance on wireless anytime soon. The other downside is wireless means we get bathed in some more potentially carcinogenic radiation.
Uhhh, I'm not comparing the two, I seldom ever run Office. I just notice it take FOREVER to launch OpenOffice on a beefy Athlon with a gig of RAM. I pity anyone using it on a slow machine without a lot of RAM. It doesn't help I'm loading it on KDE so there is massive GUI toolkit duplication.
Sounds like you are just being defensive and an apologist. Fact is OpenOffice COULD use a lot of bloat reduction and startup speed improvement. I was thinking about taking a turn at it but it is a complete pain to build especially native under x86_64 on AMD. Someone needs to standardize that bloody build on configure and make, so more developers will pick up working on it.
You must have an addictive personality because Civ III was crap :) In particular the technology trees are awful.
I'll take Alpha Centauri any day. Unfortunately the people that are still at Firaxis didn't develop Alpha Centauri so they have a not invented here syndrome so they don't try to develop new versions of the undisputed best game of the civ genre and probably couldn't top it if they tried since the talented people who developed Alpha Centauri left Firaxis.
It would be interesting to know if someone has investigated using the symbol hiding capabilities in the newer versions of gcc to eliminate some of the shared object related bloat that most probably afflicts OpenOffice. When you use shared objects for everything every function name gets put in the dynamic symbol table by default. The only ones that actually need to be there are the ones called from the main program and other shared objects. All of the functions and global data that are only referenced by other code in the same shared object don't need to be in the dynamic symbol table or linked at run-time. Windows has used explicit exporting of symbols from the dawn of time, you can explicitly hide or export symbols in newer version of gcc, 3.4 in particular. I think KDE takes advantage of it on gcc 3.4 compiles.
/opt/OpenOffice.org/program/*.so
You can look at the dynamic symbols that ARE loaded when the shared object loads with something like:
objdump -T
The bloat is especially accute in C++ code because the mangled function names can be quite long.
All those symbol names are loaded and scanned to do run-time link the shared objects, it causes slowness at startup which OpenOffice certainly has and you take a big memory hit for stuff that is not useful code.
Manually keeping track of which symbols need to be exported and which are not is a pain, and is a pain in Windows DLL's. You would almost be better off on something as big as OpenOffice to write scripts to process objdump output and figure out which symbols are actually be called outside the shared object and need to be in the dynamic symbol table.
On the other hand its kind of good discipline to create an a clean and disciplined API for each shared object which defines the public interface to the shared object. It helps improve modularity, reusability, testability and discipline in general and eliminate bloat when you realize that in fact nothing is actually calling dead code.
"and I dont see what the advantage would be for most customers"
The answer is there is almost no advantage for customers. The only thee advantages I can see in hosting things like office on the web:
- if you move around a lot, and you are not taking an office suite enabled computer, laptop, PDA or cellphone, with you, then you would have access to your documents and office suite as you move.
- you get regular updates though its open to debate if you actually want regular updates since most people want office tools that they know work, know how they work and most people really don't want continuous updates, especially ones under someone else's control.
- you get security patches and someone else maintains it. security patches are easy enough to automate without taking the host app plunge.
The many down sides:
- you completely shred the privacy and security of your documents. Maybe this is OK if you write nothing but fluffy personal docs but if you produce confidential business documents and spreadsheets the LAST thing you want to do is keep them on a server operated by strangers. Maybe, maybe you could count on Microsoft to write and honor a privacy policy but you will never know if a rogue employee at MSN is dancing through your docs looking for stuff they can exploit for insider stock tips or identity theft.
- It is dramatically easier for a rogue police state like the U.S. increasingly is to go knocking at Microsoft's door and go dancing through your documents looking for trumped up terrorism charges because they need a show trail, or shopping for fishy financial dealings. Its somewhat less bad hosting email on the web since, unless you are encrypting it, it is already bouncing around for all to see, but that is not so for your internal company email, personal and business documents.
- You have a copy of OpenOffice or Office 97. It works wonderfully, always has, always will as long as the computer hangs together which could be 10 years since hardware is plenty fast and rich with storage so we really don't need to upgrade hardware or office softare very often anymore. Oh and as long as Microsoft doesn't intentionally obsolete it by dropping support or changing file formats to force you to pay them for upgrades. Having golden oldie software that does the job is great for consumers, totally sucks for Microsoft because their revenue is going to plateau. Solution, they have to sucker consumers in to paying them every year to rent software, so instead of buying once and owning forever you pay Microsoft as much as they care to charge for their service each year.
If you are so foolish to fall for hosting all your docs on the web, make damn sure that you can easily get them all out if and when you realize its a bad idea.
Uh, yea and I think its you. This thread is engaging in things called irony and satire.
You actually REPORT people over their names "all the time"? Dude you are the one that needs to get the life.
LOL ... the thought did cross my mind but I just couldn't pass up the opening!!
Just guessing but I wager there is a GM at Blizzard who also happens to be a Slashdot reader and saw CmdrTaco running around the server he was on and .... ..... that name technically violates Blizzard naming rules. He stops and thinks about all the dup articles on slashdot, and the articles that the editors don't fact check or ... you know .... edit. And then there is the articles that are really badly disguised infomercials like the ones for Roland Piqapille. And Then their is the IP address banning and the suspicious instant mods by editors on posts that the editors don't like, and the FAQS that basically tell you if you don't like something about Slashdot that you can pretty much go to hell because thats just the way it is, and that if you ever try to complain to the editors they probably aren't going to answer, and if bitch in posts about you get banned.
light bulb flashes
The GM slowly gets this warm fuzzy feeling inside, an opportunity for sweet revenge. A chance to hit CmdrTaco where he lives, by stripping him of his name, and he can do it arbitrarily and anonymously and CmdrTaco can't do anything about it and Rob will beat his head against an anonymous wall just like Slashdot users do. How sweet it is.
This anonymous GM just read Slashdot this morning and saw Rob's rambling screed and he laughed all the way the way through. He obviously nailed Rob where it hurts and its totally eating him up inside. There is just some total karmic justice here.
Revenge, a dish best served cold.
Exactly. Its been this way for a decade or two. Not only can you underpay foreign workers, but you can COUNT on obedience and servility from them. Their entire existence is completely dependent on their boss and the company they are working for. If they get laid off or fired, unless they can find a new employer immediately they lose their visa and are out of the country or turn illegal, their homes and families shredded in the process. This leads to them working large quantities of uncompensated overtime, never complaining, never questioning their superiors no matter how wrong their superior is. Their is a con job that its just because Indian workers are better, harder workers, well its also because their employers have them by the short hairs and everyone knows it.
Being a wage slave at this point just completely sucks. You are screwed coming and going because the world has completely turned in to an employer's market. Employer's can outsource, they can import H1-B's, they can hire illegal aliens whom are intentionally being let in to the country in the millions to insure cheap subservient low end labor. The political party in power in the U.S. now is completely pro business and the Democrats are close behind. The Republican's once again just voted down an increase in the minimum wage. The minimum wage hasn't gone up since 1996-97, how much inflation has there been in that time. How much more are you paying for gasoline and home heating this year. Try to live in the U.S. on $5.15/hr much of which goes in to payroll taxes.
Bottomline is if you have a clue you are going to jump to self employment because if you are working for a boss you are pretty much already screwed and its gonna get worse with every passing year. When politicians, Democrat and Republican, bought and paid for by big business, dismantled trade barriers workers in the U.S. were doomed. H-1B and illegal immigration likewise are anti worker perks big business is paying politicians to do for them.
Amazingly workers completely outnumber employers in this country but workers are consistently suckered by issues like abortion, gay bashing, "The War on Terror" in to voting people in to office who are going to completely screw them where it counts, in the work place and in the pocket book.
I think a key conclusion is that ExtremeTech is trying to drive page hits and ad revenue. Strategy, run a bunch of benchmarks, draw no particularly insightful conclusion, get it posted on Slashdot. A horde of page clicks ensue. Oh and a key point put an incredibly small amount of actual information on each page so that your army of unpaid clickers have to page through a dozen Next links to get to the conclusion, all the while probably generating tons of hits on their ads on each new page.
I pass.
You answered your own question, the news was suppressed when it happened and people have shortl memories.
Some of the worst things about Three Mile Island was the powers that be that were responsible for it tried to lie their way through it at every opportunity. They nuclear power industry shredded there credibility there. If they'd been truthful from the get go they industry as a while might have weathered it better. After it was over no one trusted them about anything.
"With the primary political base of environmentalism shrinking due to the aging of its main supporters"
Where did you develop the illusion or delusion that a political base shrinks in power as it ages? Young people don't vote, old people do. How do you think Social Security and Medicare became third rails in politics, because older people vote in large numbers, the form cohesive and powerful blocks and they punish any politician that votes against their interests.
If nuclear power is in a resurgence its not because of your bizarre explanation its more likely:
A. People have forgotten Three Mile Island, especially everyone under 40 because they didn't live through it, and amazingly people have even forgotten Chernoybl with time.
B. People are realizing that coal fired power plants are as bad or worse. Coal fired power plants are slow death, nuclear has some nasty waste and potential for catastrophic failure but when they work they are relatively clean. When given a choice between coal or nuclear, nuclear is in relative terms the environmental choice. We can wish for wind or solar as clean and green power but we are a long way from actually making them viable and using them on the scale needed to satiate our appetite for energy would lead to environmental impact of their own.
"Somehow I doubt that, "dude"."
Well dude that kind of proves how stuck on yourself you are because you have no clue how old I am but you are sitting there patting yourself on the back that you are so smart you can tell based on a few paragraphs of writing.
I think the key difference between us is I want to live only as long as the quality of life is good, I don't want to live off others which many seniors do today. Most paid almost nothing in to Medicare or Social Security but they reap huge windfalls from it today at the expense of younger workers.
I don't think I would want immortality, especially if it leads to a society dominated by a bunch of know it all old farts like yourselves who think you are the only ones with wisdom.
Knowing life is short is a main motivator for people to make the most of what they have. If you have immortality I suspect people would become lazy, bored, boring, and unmotivated.
"They've lived, they've learned, they have no desire to repeat the foolish, idiotic antics of youth."
It also means you wont take risks or try anything that isn't safe. There is just as much bad about the experience and wisdom of old age as there is good. Thats why I'm inclined to say a healthy mix of age groups is best. A society with a majority of people a hundred years old or older would most probably be a stagnant one, resistant to change, and intensely boring.
To each his own, but choosing to believe something just because it makes you feel better isn't particularly useful or rationale. It is a key reason many knowledgable people abhor the extent to which religion is dominating the thinking of so many in the U.S. in particular. You no longer need to look for rationale explanation for anything, you just take a leap of faith and you can believe and explain away anything. Just because a crackpot used religion as a basis for explaining somethine you just accept it, no proof required, no difficult thinking as to whether it make sense or is right. The crackpot has the perfect defense, there is an omnipotent being at work, you can't see him, you can't question him, the crackpot can't prove it, just accept it as a matter of faith. It is a mindset that as its logical conclusion will push humankind back in to an intellectual dark age.
The key weakness in the religious mindset is you probably, like most people, fear death and mortality. Religion gives you an easy out, when you die you won't die you will go to heaven and everything will be wonderful. It is one of the more insidious aspects of religion. It prays on one of mankind's greater fears to recruit converts. The converts in turn pour money in to the the religion's coffers and give its leader's power and affluence. You in turn get the comfort that if you lead a virtuous life you will have immortality. It is a suckers game.
"It would be even worse if the self-appointed morally superior among us decided that we'd all be condemned to die via old age simply because they thought immortality wasn't something anyone deserved. If practical immortality were developed and certain power groups tried to keep it from the general population you'd have bloody revolution overnight."
Dude this is already a standard part of the status quo. The wealthy developed nations already do it to all the poor underdeveloped nations, and the wealthy classes in many nations do it to their poor underclasses. Its done by hording wealth, and controling access to food, energy and medical care based on that wealth. Its done by providing the best health care to those who can afford it and inferior health care to those who can't.
Enforcing this division is why countries like the U.S. have a huge military. The U.S. has little to fear from underdeveloped countries revolting against the fact the U.S. has better health care, more energy, more food and in general more wealth. Its been that way for more than a century. The only tool for the poor to counter are 9/11 style insurgent attacks which aren't all the effective in the long run.
Within the U.S. the affluent with gold plated health insurance can count on the best in health care and will live longer. The old rely on Medicare which isn't so bad but it exacts a huge price on working people for it, as I said Medicare is a case of the old cannibalizing their youth. Medicare cares for some of the poorest but the price of getting is you must be completely destitute which is bad in itself. There is a huge pool, 40 million or so who have no health insurance so they get inferior health care and often die for lack of early intervention. If they do get hospital care it results in bankruptcy and with recent bankruptcy law changes you can no longer get out of these debts easily, so a health emergency leads to either death or financial ruin.
Fact is the mechanisms are already in place to ration immortality. It goes two tracks:
A. You aren't wealthy enough to pay for it so you don't get it.
B. You are in a program like Medicare where if immortality is doled out to everyone over 65 it will devastate the younger working people who have to pay for it, unless technology advances to the point that it is cheap. Most of the things required for immortality don't sound cheap.
"Something only someone "young and fresh" could say with a straight face."
Actually I'm closer to the old end of the scale, and I know plenty of seniors. Fact is they do often have a lot of wisdom, but they also suffer from an intense rigidity in thinking and demand routine. I think you severely underestimate the consequence of creating a huge population very old people consuming much of societies resources.
"Finally, I think you drastically overlook the social good that old age offers. In a society where people become older and older, you have people building up vast reservoirs of experience and knowledge."
The unintended consequence you overlook is those old people cannibalize their youth, and its EVEN WORSE in the developed countries with declining young populations and rising old ones. In the U.S. 12.5% of working people's salaries go to support Medicare and Social Security for old people. Thats money not going to supporting themselves but supporting anonymous old people, and it gets worse every decade. We are reaching the point young, working people wont be able to support their elders, for example Social Security and Medicare will soon bankrupt without steep tax hikes or benefit cuts.
The key problem with all this wonderful fountain of youth is its staggeringly expensive. Maybe if technology advances and it becomes cheap to keep people alive, and they can work productively, that would be one thing, but so far each advance comes with with ever steeper price tags and in socialized countries those costs are born by young people. Some old people have a pretty good life, but many engage in a non stop circuit through one doctor, hospital, diagnostic test after another, its extremely expensive and its a poor quality of life. Many sit in nursing homes, unable to care for themselves, and again devouring vast sums of money. We do keep them alive but their quality of life is horrible and expensive. Many would no doubt rather pass away peacefully but society's taboos insists on keeping them alive at all costs.
Its true old people do have a font of knowledge, but why is it then that so many companies go to such great lengths to get rid of older employees:
A. Their health care costs are very high
B. People demand salary growth so the older you are the higher the salary you demand. Young workers work cheap and companies like cheap workers.
C. Old people do have a font of knowledge but it is often mired in the ancient past. Sometimes this knowledge is priceless, sometimes it is obsolete and useless. Most old people acquire a fairly rigid mindset and abhor change. If you are in rapidly changing fields like technology rigid mindset is often counterproductive, not productive. Young hungry people with no rigid mindset tend to be the people that drive breakthroughs.