Some of the necessary wetware already exists in the mechanism that manufactures fake sensory input and intercepts motor nerve outputs while dreaming.
Or while you're awake, for that matter. Also, tapping into these systems should allowing fabrication of whole new senses and operational controls - there's no particular reason why using Slashdot should involve either optical or motor centers, when the actual content is communications.
You assume that there is a "market" that decides that the "cheapest energy" will win in the long run.
There is no electric market in the US? Or do the people simply prefer nuclear over wind there, to the point of actually being willing to pay more (and wait 15 years)?
First of all there is no market.
Well then, maybe you should fix that first? Separate the wires and power generation and mandate "wire neutrality" or something?
Everything right now was casked in concrete over the previous 50 or more years mainly by government interests.
Please explain - is the building of wind farms not permitted? Do black helicopters block the sunlight? What?
A new build nuclear plant, if we start today with the planning, will be ready in 15 years, at the soonest, if no court or other interference kills it mid term. That means we have a delay of 15 years to scale up in energy production by 4 - 6 GW. Or a similar delay in replacing a similar amount of coal power.
Wind and solar on the other hand makes it easy to connect power generation in small chunks to the grid continiously.
I can plan for a 4GW wind farm and comnect it while I build it in 100MW chunks to the grid. So instead of waiting 15 years for a new nuclear plant TO HAVE ANY EFFECT I have an imediate effect if I build wind and solar plants.
And obviously: a new build wind/solar plant generates energy cheaper than a new build nuclear plant.
And this gets back to my original question: why are the plural you not building wind and solar, then? Surely their cheap power would make the nuke-builders cut their losses long before the 15 years are up, thus making it unnecessary to argue against nuclear power on Slashdot.
All reactors can suffer catastrophic failure that releases radioactive material into the surrounding environment.
Unless, of course, radiactive material was never there to begin with. I wonder if you could do some interesting things by irradiating non-radioactive material with a fusor? Activate the material by irradiating it with neutrons and turn it into very short-lived isotopes which then decay into stable ones and release heat. Even if you blew the whole thing up with a bomb, there simply isn't anything to release. For the same reason you could export reactors to anyone who wants them with no fear of nuclear profiliation, and also remove the excuse of a peaceful nuclear program from anyone caught enriching uranium.
The payback time is too long for most folks if energy stays cheap.
"Payback time is too long" is another way of saying "cost is so high the quality of life is significantly lowered for a long time". More expensive energy will make the problem worse, since now you still lose the money required to buy and install the insulation, but don't actually get a lower power bill in return. And of course the sudden demand for insulation, combined with the increased cost of energy for the manufacturer, rises prices even higher.
So yes, trying to extort people to conserve energy by increasing its cost very definitely is "shiver in the dark" -enviromentalism. Which it all seems to tend towards nowadays...
But nuclear power is neither cheap nor reliable.
It is extremely reliable, both in the sense that it generates a predictable amount of constant output and in the deaths or property damage per megawatt-hour produced.
As for cheap... compared to what? Fossil fuels, which you yourself said are allowed to externalize any enviromental or other damage? Or renewables, which are outright subsidized, allowed to externalize enviromental damage and are allowed to externalize reliability - the power production of a windmill or solar panel is essentially random, yet power is needed every hour of every day, so there needs to be some other source on standby ready to replace them?
As to the "fast enough" part of that, solar and wind can be ramped up much faster than nuclear.
So why are you even bothering with this discussion? Surely the rising cost of energy is going to incentivize solar plant after wind farm, if they are truly so superior to nuclear power?
It's their money, period. Assuming they earned it fairly, in a free and just society you should have no say in how/where/if any person should spend their money, or any of their property for that matter.
And France was Louis XVI's kingdom, but that didn't stop the peasants from revolting, now did it?
They sure did have a whole lot to do with it, and they should be the ones to blame most of all. They voted for, and continued to vote for the governments/politicians that caused the mess in the first place.
Except, of course, most people hurt were not eligible to vote in US elections. I'd also question why you blame the actions of businessmen on politicians, but I figure it's a matter of ideology to you, the same as Soviet Union being a paradise on Earth was a matter of faith for the useful idiots of old. Time will tell whether you of the new era can let go of it before this house of cards collapses.
We'd all be way better off if there was no government meddling going on, period.
Sure thing. Let's repeal all meddlesome laws and see how long your property stays yours without them. Because surely you don't mean it's only meddling if you don't approve of it?
Look, I'm not going to debate government vs liberty with you, as you obviously don't believe people should have liberty judging by your views on currency, regulations and the use of "guillotines" to solve societal problems.
What views? Guillotine - without the quotation marks - is what people resort to as means of curbing abuses when the law fails. It's not "my view", it's what history has shown over and over again.
If you don't leave people alone to do their own peaceful thing, then you're a tyrant and have no moral standing when it comes to "social responsibility" and "civil society".
Indeed. So why do you assert it's okay when tyranny is enabled by economic power?
We may all live w/o famine and disease, but some cultures may not survive the translation to English and Chinese.
Even if this was true, I very much doubt anyone would choose famine and disease over keeping their traditions pure - I'm assuming you weren't implying we should make the choice for them to provide ourselves with more cultural diversity. But of course it's not true. Archeology would not be possible if it was. None of the world religions could exist if it was. Iliad and Odyssey would be incomprehensible to modern audiences if it was; for that matter, so would be Arthurian legends or the works of Shakespear.
In any case, cultures come and go, they aren't any more eternal than people. If anything, the Internet has greater chance of preserving the traditions of small cultures since they are no longer limited to just one geographic location, and members can keep in touch even if they move abroad. And of course whole new subcultures are being born in the Net all the time.
- I wish that people with money simply tried to make more money by growing their marketshare as much as they possibly can in any business they attempt, thus lowering costs and prices for everybody
"Stop giving to the poor and give to me instead!"
and I wish people would stop believing in nonsense, such as: giving away savings for simple consumer spending is a good thing for any economy.
Finding a vaccination for malaria is unlikely to be a bad thing for the economy, but even if it was it would definitely help the people and thus be a good thing.
You do understand that economy exists for the sake of people and not the other way around, right?
I have no idea what people struggling to find food would do with the internet. Would it enrich their lives? I don't see how. Would it save them from disease? Would it allow their children greater likelyhood to see their fifth birthday?
It links them up as part of the greater worldwide community, which in turn gives access to information, provides opportunities to earn cash, and makes it easier to pool resources with nearby communities to build infrastructure. Or, for that matter, ask for help - the world actually has a lot of bleeding-heart whatevers willing to chip in a few bucks if you ask them nicely, and that's often all it takes to get started.
You can't solve the problem (of hunger/disease/general misery) without ending poverty, you can't end poverty without having a functional economy, and you can't have an economy without communications. Thus, hooking everyone up with an Internet connection is a good first step.
Or we could simply accept that bodies adapted to Earth are a liability anywhere else. We could fortify them to solve such problems. Or, if it turns out human mind is indeed a Turing machine, upload them. A far-future humanity could well live in spaceborn datacenters and central computers of robots and spaceships.
If you drive a vehicle for a living, start training for another job ASAP. This is the tip of the iceberg. I honestly think that in 25 years zero humans will be paid to drive a vehicle.
The problem is, the same goes for every other job. If you can't break into the owner class, and if we don't have some rather extensive economic restructuring, you're screwed.
Those coins still belong to someone. If that person/group chose to not use those coins and have them sit idly and uselessly by, then that's their choice and their loss.
The problem is that if someone controls, say, 1/10th of the buying power in the entire economy, any move they make will have an effect on me and thus becomes my problem. The current worldwide economic crisis is an excellent example: most of the people getting hurt had nothing to do with the whole affair but got to suffer the results all the same. And of course that makes them angry, which in turn is causing social instability.
Money is power, and with great power comes great responsibility. That's why financial regulations exist, and that's why removing them results in the rich behaving like cartoon supervillains. You get to choose whether you buy bread from supermarket; you don't get to choose whether you buy all the bread from a country and tell the residents to eat cake. The only question is whether you're stopped by regulation or by a guillotine.
tl;dr civil society stops being civil when you start throwing enough weight around.
Secondly, economies are not a fixed size and (in general) tend to grow - in the case of bitcoins, at some point the economy will likely be growing faster than the total number of bitcoins in circulation, and when that happens we get deflation. Very few people would argue that deflation wasn't a very bad thing.
Bitcoin economy has grown faster than the amount of coins in circulation for most of its existence, as shown by the price going up, yet the bad things don't seem to be manifesting. So I guess the very few people are right on this one.
It just means that the bitcoins that are still there increase in value - possibly rapidly - making it more interesting for people to hold them instead of spending them, amplifying the problem.
Actually, I think Bitcoin has conclusively disproven this myth about deflation: even when Bitcoins were gaining hundreds of percents the economy get going as usual.
The concept of a deflationary spiral is based on a false assumption: specifically, that people prefer long-term gain over short-term one. That's simply not true. And it's pretty obviously untrue, since otherwise no one would buy a computer, pad or smartphone today since you can get a better one tomorrow - technology has a constant deflation, yet that doesn't seem to result in a halt to sales.
Mind you, this has a lot of implications outside of Bitcoin economy, too.
So was Claus von Stauffenberg. Yet he was still a hero not despite, but because of that betrayal. Loyalty to evil is not a virtue, nor is betraying it a sin.
There was a right way to do this, he didn't even try a little bit to go that route.
Was there? The problems in US go way beyond individual abuses to systemic rot. You can't get rid of the mold of corruption by scrubbing away some of the more visible patches, you need to open up the structure and dry it all out. Fail to do so, and things might look pretty but the air will still be a poisonous fume that sickens all who live there.
Just compare present events to Watergate to see how bad it's gotten. Or does anyone seriously think Obama will resign over this much bigger spying scandal than the one which destroyed Nixon?
Airports are full of armed guards and police... At least UK ones are. Men and women, with guns, loaded, maintained, trained in their use and ready to act. Didn't seem to help here.
According to the (ABC News) article, airport police stopped the gunman by shooting him, so your assertion is incorrect.
or we could have a rational discussion about gun control...Nah
When did the US last have a rational discussion about anything? Does anyone seriously believe the country is capable of it? How could it, when its political leadership is made of mutually hostile tribes that treat compromise as a defeat to be avoided at any cost?
Or both, since both sides call anything they don't like a socialist or teabagger, if you propose something that neither side likes, you're a Socialist Teabagger.
Don't forget Terrorist.
But at least it goes to show that America truly has the government it deserves.
It would be very simple and fair. Lastly it would encourage savings rather than consumption which is something we need desperately right now.
Because a recession is not bad enough already, let's discourage economic activity and turn it into Greater Depression!
Then again, much of the country can't save up because they're already living paycheck to paycheck, so I guess they'd end up paying more taxes and going into deeper debt. But I guess kicking people who are already down is some people's idea of "fair". What I don't get is why they think this won't lead to an outright rebellion.
Light aircraft don't use fly-by-wire, why do cars need it?
Because you can keep incompetent people from getting a pilot license, but you can't keep them from getting a driver's license, at least not without grinding the whole society to a standstill. So letting a computer handle as much of the driving as possible makes everyone safer.
I mean... I get that mature software doesn't necessarily deliver awe-inspiring features all the time, but
But we're talking about Firefox. It's not mature by any stretch of imagination.
why is it news?
Hype. The whole purpose of ditching major.minor.build versioning was to get the hype of a major release for every single new build. Well, that and it makes it less convenient to maintain old branches in bugfix state, thus forcing everyone to buy into every new feature and feature removal unless they want to be pwned. The developers have a vision and you will share it, dammit!
You know, I've had very little good to say about Snowden, considering him little more than some kid who punked the NSA, then mooned us on his way out the door.
/blockquote>
Who's us? The NSA? The people who'd rather keep their heads in bushes and pretend their governments are not their enemies? The people who benefit from all that illegal digital stalking?
Or are you simply an authoritarian who gets angry at the thought of the rule of law?
If one vendor is selling "Atlas Shrugged" for $1 (plus $4) shipping, and the other vendor is selling it for $2 including shipping, which one is cheaper?
Well, since dollar isn't backed by gold and is therefore worthless to the target audience, they're the same price: 5*0 = 2*0 = 0;).
Nazism is short for National Socialism. They aren't *like* socialists, they *are* socialists.
Or so they claimed, anyway. Do you also trust the rest of Nazi propaganda, or did you pick this particular item because it happened to make for a nice propaganda piece for you?
Anyway, you answered the summary's question by demonstration: USA can't get anything done right because Americans treat politics like a weird role-playing game where you are the hero and anyone who doesn't agree with you is a nazi communist zombie terrorist. Why would you expect fighting against figments of your own imagination to solve any actual problems, rather than making them worse?
Slashdot Mirror
Or while you're awake, for that matter. Also, tapping into these systems should allowing fabrication of whole new senses and operational controls - there's no particular reason why using Slashdot should involve either optical or motor centers, when the actual content is communications.
There is no electric market in the US? Or do the people simply prefer nuclear over wind there, to the point of actually being willing to pay more (and wait 15 years)?
Well then, maybe you should fix that first? Separate the wires and power generation and mandate "wire neutrality" or something?
Please explain - is the building of wind farms not permitted? Do black helicopters block the sunlight? What?
And this gets back to my original question: why are the plural you not building wind and solar, then? Surely their cheap power would make the nuke-builders cut their losses long before the 15 years are up, thus making it unnecessary to argue against nuclear power on Slashdot.
Unless, of course, radiactive material was never there to begin with. I wonder if you could do some interesting things by irradiating non-radioactive material with a fusor? Activate the material by irradiating it with neutrons and turn it into very short-lived isotopes which then decay into stable ones and release heat. Even if you blew the whole thing up with a bomb, there simply isn't anything to release. For the same reason you could export reactors to anyone who wants them with no fear of nuclear profiliation, and also remove the excuse of a peaceful nuclear program from anyone caught enriching uranium.
Sure they are: they're smaller. Also, they might become unnecessary, since you can extract uranium from seawater.
But would you really want a device that can store 180MJ and release it pretty much instantaneously in case of a malfunction in your house?
"Payback time is too long" is another way of saying "cost is so high the quality of life is significantly lowered for a long time". More expensive energy will make the problem worse, since now you still lose the money required to buy and install the insulation, but don't actually get a lower power bill in return. And of course the sudden demand for insulation, combined with the increased cost of energy for the manufacturer, rises prices even higher.
So yes, trying to extort people to conserve energy by increasing its cost very definitely is "shiver in the dark" -enviromentalism. Which it all seems to tend towards nowadays...
It is extremely reliable, both in the sense that it generates a predictable amount of constant output and in the deaths or property damage per megawatt-hour produced.
As for cheap... compared to what? Fossil fuels, which you yourself said are allowed to externalize any enviromental or other damage? Or renewables, which are outright subsidized, allowed to externalize enviromental damage and are allowed to externalize reliability - the power production of a windmill or solar panel is essentially random, yet power is needed every hour of every day, so there needs to be some other source on standby ready to replace them?
So why are you even bothering with this discussion? Surely the rising cost of energy is going to incentivize solar plant after wind farm, if they are truly so superior to nuclear power?
And France was Louis XVI's kingdom, but that didn't stop the peasants from revolting, now did it?
Except, of course, most people hurt were not eligible to vote in US elections. I'd also question why you blame the actions of businessmen on politicians, but I figure it's a matter of ideology to you, the same as Soviet Union being a paradise on Earth was a matter of faith for the useful idiots of old. Time will tell whether you of the new era can let go of it before this house of cards collapses.
Sure thing. Let's repeal all meddlesome laws and see how long your property stays yours without them. Because surely you don't mean it's only meddling if you don't approve of it?
What views? Guillotine - without the quotation marks - is what people resort to as means of curbing abuses when the law fails. It's not "my view", it's what history has shown over and over again.
Indeed. So why do you assert it's okay when tyranny is enabled by economic power?
Even if this was true, I very much doubt anyone would choose famine and disease over keeping their traditions pure - I'm assuming you weren't implying we should make the choice for them to provide ourselves with more cultural diversity. But of course it's not true. Archeology would not be possible if it was. None of the world religions could exist if it was. Iliad and Odyssey would be incomprehensible to modern audiences if it was; for that matter, so would be Arthurian legends or the works of Shakespear.
In any case, cultures come and go, they aren't any more eternal than people. If anything, the Internet has greater chance of preserving the traditions of small cultures since they are no longer limited to just one geographic location, and members can keep in touch even if they move abroad. And of course whole new subcultures are being born in the Net all the time.
"Stop giving to the poor and give to me instead!"
Finding a vaccination for malaria is unlikely to be a bad thing for the economy, but even if it was it would definitely help the people and thus be a good thing.
You do understand that economy exists for the sake of people and not the other way around, right?
It links them up as part of the greater worldwide community, which in turn gives access to information, provides opportunities to earn cash, and makes it easier to pool resources with nearby communities to build infrastructure. Or, for that matter, ask for help - the world actually has a lot of bleeding-heart whatevers willing to chip in a few bucks if you ask them nicely, and that's often all it takes to get started.
You can't solve the problem (of hunger/disease/general misery) without ending poverty, you can't end poverty without having a functional economy, and you can't have an economy without communications. Thus, hooking everyone up with an Internet connection is a good first step.
Or we could simply accept that bodies adapted to Earth are a liability anywhere else. We could fortify them to solve such problems. Or, if it turns out human mind is indeed a Turing machine, upload them. A far-future humanity could well live in spaceborn datacenters and central computers of robots and spaceships.
The problem is, the same goes for every other job. If you can't break into the owner class, and if we don't have some rather extensive economic restructuring, you're screwed.
The problem is that if someone controls, say, 1/10th of the buying power in the entire economy, any move they make will have an effect on me and thus becomes my problem. The current worldwide economic crisis is an excellent example: most of the people getting hurt had nothing to do with the whole affair but got to suffer the results all the same. And of course that makes them angry, which in turn is causing social instability.
Money is power, and with great power comes great responsibility. That's why financial regulations exist, and that's why removing them results in the rich behaving like cartoon supervillains. You get to choose whether you buy bread from supermarket; you don't get to choose whether you buy all the bread from a country and tell the residents to eat cake. The only question is whether you're stopped by regulation or by a guillotine.
tl;dr civil society stops being civil when you start throwing enough weight around.
Bitcoin economy has grown faster than the amount of coins in circulation for most of its existence, as shown by the price going up, yet the bad things don't seem to be manifesting. So I guess the very few people are right on this one.
Actually, I think Bitcoin has conclusively disproven this myth about deflation: even when Bitcoins were gaining hundreds of percents the economy get going as usual.
The concept of a deflationary spiral is based on a false assumption: specifically, that people prefer long-term gain over short-term one. That's simply not true. And it's pretty obviously untrue, since otherwise no one would buy a computer, pad or smartphone today since you can get a better one tomorrow - technology has a constant deflation, yet that doesn't seem to result in a halt to sales.
Mind you, this has a lot of implications outside of Bitcoin economy, too.
So was Claus von Stauffenberg. Yet he was still a hero not despite, but because of that betrayal. Loyalty to evil is not a virtue, nor is betraying it a sin.
Was there? The problems in US go way beyond individual abuses to systemic rot. You can't get rid of the mold of corruption by scrubbing away some of the more visible patches, you need to open up the structure and dry it all out. Fail to do so, and things might look pretty but the air will still be a poisonous fume that sickens all who live there.
Just compare present events to Watergate to see how bad it's gotten. Or does anyone seriously think Obama will resign over this much bigger spying scandal than the one which destroyed Nixon?
According to the (ABC News) article, airport police stopped the gunman by shooting him, so your assertion is incorrect.
When did the US last have a rational discussion about anything? Does anyone seriously believe the country is capable of it? How could it, when its political leadership is made of mutually hostile tribes that treat compromise as a defeat to be avoided at any cost?
Don't forget Terrorist.
But at least it goes to show that America truly has the government it deserves.
Because a recession is not bad enough already, let's discourage economic activity and turn it into Greater Depression!
Then again, much of the country can't save up because they're already living paycheck to paycheck, so I guess they'd end up paying more taxes and going into deeper debt. But I guess kicking people who are already down is some people's idea of "fair". What I don't get is why they think this won't lead to an outright rebellion.
Because you can keep incompetent people from getting a pilot license, but you can't keep them from getting a driver's license, at least not without grinding the whole society to a standstill. So letting a computer handle as much of the driving as possible makes everyone safer.
But we're talking about Firefox. It's not mature by any stretch of imagination.
Hype. The whole purpose of ditching major.minor.build versioning was to get the hype of a major release for every single new build. Well, that and it makes it less convenient to maintain old branches in bugfix state, thus forcing everyone to buy into every new feature and feature removal unless they want to be pwned. The developers have a vision and you will share it, dammit!
Well, since dollar isn't backed by gold and is therefore worthless to the target audience, they're the same price: 5*0 = 2*0 = 0 ;).
Or so they claimed, anyway. Do you also trust the rest of Nazi propaganda, or did you pick this particular item because it happened to make for a nice propaganda piece for you?
Anyway, you answered the summary's question by demonstration: USA can't get anything done right because Americans treat politics like a weird role-playing game where you are the hero and anyone who doesn't agree with you is a nazi communist zombie terrorist. Why would you expect fighting against figments of your own imagination to solve any actual problems, rather than making them worse?