is the minds of the Slashdot nuke fanbois blowing a gasket.
Not at all. Of course you can produce energy cheaper by burning fossil fuels than with nuclear, because fossil fuel plants are allowed to externalize most of the costs of energy production, such as pollution. Once these externalities - such as turning every coastal city into a New Orleans - is taken into account, nuclear power is cheapest and safest.
There is by the way a lot of theory that argues that monetary systems are superior to other economic systems.
I very much doubt that seeing how "money" is just a convenient one-number summary of the concept of "resource usage" which all economic systems by definition have, because economy is all about managing resources. So the statement doesn't really make sense.
Perhaps you meant capitalist systems? In which case, yes, there's a lot of theories arguing their superiority. And plenty of theories arguing the opposite. Both of which tend to cause spectacular failures when someone tries to actually implement them.
End-to-end cryptography won't stop "them" from seeing with whom you communicate, how often, where, and when.
Use Tor or Freenet and make them transmit everything in fixed-size (padded if necessary) fixed-frequency bursts, encrypted of course. Keep every communication channel constantly saturated and if becomes impossible for an attacker to know when they're actually in use.
In the long run, though, we have to build mesh networks. The current semi-centralized model with its ISPs makes it too easy to tap or cut people off.
Things are all automated and depersonalized now. You have machines making the decisions and people trusting the machines. We are turning into a dystopian "future" that'd make a Nebula Award jealous.
No. All it means is that your personality - your ability to charm people - is taken out of equation. Which is bad for those who have charisma and good for those who don't. There's nothing "dystopian" in evaluating potential employees solely based on their education and work history, and ignoring how smooth talkers they might be in person. If anything, it could be argued to be fairer than letting the recruiters personal biases affect the process.
That guy should join a debate club because he would win after his opponents all fell over laughing.
Just out of curiosity, can you come up with an argument for why he's wrong - why endangering your life or health for a thrill is okay when doing so with extreme sports but not with drugs - without resorting to begging the question? Because an appeal to ridicule doesn't actually prove anything, and in any case classes of drugs such as psychedelics are often used for the supposed spiritual experience rather than mere thrill.
I think the availability of this substance should be encouraged. If anyone is supremely dumb enough to inject this into themselves, our overall gene pool can only benefit as a result.
Stupidity is not really a threat for the human race, but sociopathy - lack of empathy - is. Stupid people are unlikely to harm anyone besides themselves, and frankly, it doesn't take an Einstein to survive and even be productive in modern society. Someone needs to flip the burgers and haul garbage, after all. On the other hand, socipathy got us slavery, eugenics, Civil War, Word War 2, Stalin's Russia, Mao's China, Vietnam, 9/11, the War on Terror and the associated side wars, and various assorted genocides and conflicts around the globe.
tl;dr a guy who kills himself is less of a burden on humanity than the guy who's cheering him on.
This is why: In all honestly, it is not murder when someone willfully engages in the practice, knowing full well there are potentially fatal hazards involved (given the plethora of education on the subject, it's not like you can credibly claim a general ignorance here.)
No one needs to walk in a forest. Therefore, it's okay if a hunter blindly shoots at any noise without bothering to check his target, as long as he's made a public announcement of said habit beforehand.
Of course this analogy fails in that the hunter is merely selfish and causes harm as a foreseeable but uninteded side effect, whereas drug prohibition specifically exists to cause harm to drug users.
But the views of people who believe that other people are in the wrong simply for living their lives as they see fit deserve not tolerance and respect, but scorn and condemnation. It's pretty much the verbal equivalent of another fine saying, "your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins."
Swinging my fist at your nose and simply not liking your nose are not the same thing. Once you refuse tolerance and respect from and heap scorn and condemnation on people just for their beliefs you've gone from freedom fighter to thought police. It is unreasonable to demand that everyone agrees with how you live your life, just that they acknowledge it's your life to live as you see fit - which is pretty much the definition of tolerance.
so why don't we just look at what organizations like the US military use to secure and sign their data, and use that?
Because you can't trust that either. The US military is not fighting enemies at its own level, thus it can afford to risk operational data leaking, especially if it still takes a while to decode. And even if it doesn't want to risk it, who's to say the NSA wouldn't? It's not like they are the ones at risk of lead poisoning, and it'll make their job easier.
That's the problem with corruption: once it sets in, you can't trust an organization as a whole to act rationally, since the various departments are all too happy to screw each other over to make themselves look good.
I would posit that this case does NOT reflect a "philosophy of selfishness", but instead a "philosophy of greed". Often the two, selfishness and greed, are conflated. I often read treatises dedicated to trashing Ayn Rand for her promotion of "selfishness", with the writers either cluelessly or maliciously misrepresenting her position.
Selfishness and greed are conflated because, in common usage, selfishness means you're willing to screw others over to get (often short term) benefit for yourself, and greed is one of the most common causes of it. It is Rand who misrepresented the concept of selfishness by pretending it entails morality it does not. Which, of course, made her very popular amongst selfish people who want to pretend they're not the scum of the Earth yet don't want to give up the benefits.
It's exactly like some religious people like to pretend words like "good" and "evil" mean something entirely else when talking about their god, for the purposes of painting absurdly gory scenes of Hell and then pretending the god they attribute their execution to is nonetheless "good". And of course it lets them pretend they're saints, despite eagerly anticipating getting to laugh at burning people for all eternity.
The "philosophy of selfishness" does not entail stealing others' ideas, failing to credit and compensate them; in fact, that is theft, a hallmark of greed, and the very kind of behavior that Rand attributed to the "takers".
The concept of selfishness entails stealing other people's ideas, work and every thing else if, for example, such behaviour nets you 1 million dollars. That's what selfishness means, not whatever daydreams Rand had about the subject. Trying to pretend otherwise is dishonest, which is why Objectivism has the reputation it does outside of its fanboys.
So the GNOME people have finally done something about it and name the app that helps you install software "Software", and call the web browser "web" instead of "Epihpany"...makes sense considering the feedback right?
Ubuntu has a video editor called "lives". It's completely useless, because it crashes constantly. Why? I have no idea; googling either "lives crashes" or "lives problem" gets nothing useful, since "lives" is such a common word.
So no, renaming Epiphany into Web doesn't make sense. Renaming it to "Epiphany Web Browser" would. That way the name both makes it clear what the thing does and contains enough entropy in the form of a non-common word to allow searching for help in case of problems.
You have to consider the consequences too, not just feedback.
In this case it isn't make it slow enough so that it doesn't bother me, it's make it slow enough so that natural systems aren't pushed into another mass extinction event, because that won't be good for any of us.
That's the problem so many whiners miss in this thread. It requires collusion to "raise rates and make more profit, muahaha."
Yes, but if you choose "climate change doesn't exist" as a fixed point in your belief system, such collusion and conspiracies become the most logical option: the simplest one compatible with their fixed point. It works the same as the useful idiots of yesteryear who had "Soviet Union is awesome" as their fixed point, and looked at all evidence through that lens - sometimes to the point of concluding "Stalin doesn't know this gulag I'm in right now exists".
There is a theory that human abstract reasoning got its development boost when it became a tool of winning arguments to determine the pack pecking order, and the ability to think logically is just an accidental side effect of the ability to do insane troll logic. That would explain a lot, actually. And it definitely explains why climate change, Intelligent Design, economic policy, gay marriage, and other such "culturally charged" subjects seem to make people go crazy: they aren't arguing about the topic, they're fighting over prestige. And it also explains why the set of monkey-fit inducing topics varies by culture: it's not about the issues themselves, so why wouldn't they?
So, if photons have no mass, how do black holes keep the photons from escaping?
Because black holes are undead stars reaching from their graves with claws of gravity, and we all know that if you try to run from the monster you end up running right at it, which is what happens to photons. Then they get eaten and are never seen again.
The goal should be that artists get paid, not to have zero piracy.
In that case, why have DRM at all? Simply ask for donations. Since DRM is not effective, people are not going to pay anyway unless they feel like it, so why annoy them and lower your chances? Instead, focus on making as many payment methods available as possible, from credit cards to Paypall to Bitcoin.
If a company wishes to sell you something with some restrictions, well, that's their right.
A company has a right to make an offer. But I have no obligation to accept. Nor do I have an obligation to care about corporate wishes. Why on Earth should I?
And no, just because they paid good money to get laws passed does not oblige me to do anything besides laugh as they fail to have any effect.
It does not mean people have the right to steal it just to spite them.
We're talking about copyright law, not property law. Copyright violation is not theft, nor is it morally wrong, and that's why copyright law is ignored by pretty much everyone. It does, however, serve as a fine case study just where the limits of coercive authority are.
It'll also be interesting to see how the society is affected as generations who're used to simply ignoring unjust laws make up larger and larger proportion of people.
I'm not. U.S. Corporations laid the cables and built the infrastructure. The Brazilian government leases them.
You said: "My feeling is that if I pay for it, I can do what I damned well please with it." You also said: "If they want international connections that don't go via the U.S.... BUT they want the U.S. to keep picking up the tab, they can suck eggs." Now you're saying you're not paying after all.
BUT... "[citation needed]" IMPLIES that the person thinks I'm lying. No accusation, but the implication is real, and rude.
So basically, accusing other people of lying is fine, but having people demand evidence for said accusations is rude, since it implies they don't simply take your word for it?
Now the question is: Can they be prosecuted for insider trading?
Probably not. According to the summary, they made "billions of dollars" worth of trades, so they'd be part of the aristocracy. The only way the law would apply was if they stepped on some other peers toes with this - and that's unlikely, because of course the other nobles would also know about this ahead of time.
Your equation of an amalgamated unit and a solitary one is slightly disingenuous in that it conflates two separate measurements -- that is to say you are equating amounts-of-energy-used-over-a-period-of-time with a fixed-amount-of-energy. While calculations can bear out that they're effectively equivalent, what you're doing is like looking at a pump and equating it's flow-rate to a fixed volume of stuff that it can pump: i.e. 5 gallons-per-minute versus 300gallons (the number of gallons that said pump could move in an hour). -- You would never look at a 5 gal/min pump and call it a "300 gallon pump" and doing so would be just as technically incorrect as saying "1kWh is the same as 3.6MJ"
A joule is "kilogram-meter per second per second". In other words, a joule is the minimum energy needed to accelerate a one-kilogram weight from standstill to the speed of one meter per second. A more powerful engine can deliver this energy in a shorter time than a less powerfull one, which then gives rise to watt, which is joules per second. And that, in turn, leads us to why watt-hour is just another way of saying "3.6 MJ" : a watt is joules per second; an hour has 3600 seconds; 1000 joules per second times 3600 seconds is 3,600,000 joules; 3,600,000 joules is 3.6 megajoules.
They aren't "effectively equivalent" (what would that even mean?), they're the same thing. In exactly the same way as the volume of stuff a pump with a fixed flow rate can pump over a fixed time is not "effectively equivalent" to a volume, it is a volume.
(As it is, why don't we cut the criminal distribution networks off at the knees by referring addicts straight to the higher-quality product, and accompanying opportunity for medical care and cessation assistance, provided by medical-grade drugs?)
Why do televengalists preach brimstone and hellfire rather than love and forgiveness? Why do politicians compete on being "though on crime" and declare wars on whatever? Why do witch hunts - from Comics Code to Satanic Ritual Abuse - persist to this day, despite the usually absurd premise? Why did the Romans feed people to lions in crowded stadiums?
Once you get addicted to hatred, it's just as hard to stop as any other drug. Or perhaps even harder, since the next hit is always just a thought away. And US public is a junkie, always howling for the blood of the next victim to feed their addiction. So better pick one that can't fight back, such as someone who needs medical assistance.
Every country has the government it deserves. Including the US.
Slashdot Mirror
Not at all. Of course you can produce energy cheaper by burning fossil fuels than with nuclear, because fossil fuel plants are allowed to externalize most of the costs of energy production, such as pollution. Once these externalities - such as turning every coastal city into a New Orleans - is taken into account, nuclear power is cheapest and safest.
I dunno, I kinda liked raw ammonium chloride. That chemistry class probably wouldn't fly today :(...
I very much doubt that seeing how "money" is just a convenient one-number summary of the concept of "resource usage" which all economic systems by definition have, because economy is all about managing resources. So the statement doesn't really make sense.
Perhaps you meant capitalist systems? In which case, yes, there's a lot of theories arguing their superiority. And plenty of theories arguing the opposite. Both of which tend to cause spectacular failures when someone tries to actually implement them.
Use Tor or Freenet and make them transmit everything in fixed-size (padded if necessary) fixed-frequency bursts, encrypted of course. Keep every communication channel constantly saturated and if becomes impossible for an attacker to know when they're actually in use.
In the long run, though, we have to build mesh networks. The current semi-centralized model with its ISPs makes it too easy to tap or cut people off.
No. All it means is that your personality - your ability to charm people - is taken out of equation. Which is bad for those who have charisma and good for those who don't. There's nothing "dystopian" in evaluating potential employees solely based on their education and work history, and ignoring how smooth talkers they might be in person. If anything, it could be argued to be fairer than letting the recruiters personal biases affect the process.
You are.
Stupidity is not really a threat for the human race, but sociopathy - lack of empathy - is. Stupid people are unlikely to harm anyone besides themselves, and frankly, it doesn't take an Einstein to survive and even be productive in modern society. Someone needs to flip the burgers and haul garbage, after all. On the other hand, socipathy got us slavery, eugenics, Civil War, Word War 2, Stalin's Russia, Mao's China, Vietnam, 9/11, the War on Terror and the associated side wars, and various assorted genocides and conflicts around the globe.
tl;dr a guy who kills himself is less of a burden on humanity than the guy who's cheering him on.
No one needs to walk in a forest. Therefore, it's okay if a hunter blindly shoots at any noise without bothering to check his target, as long as he's made a public announcement of said habit beforehand.
Of course this analogy fails in that the hunter is merely selfish and causes harm as a foreseeable but uninteded side effect, whereas drug prohibition specifically exists to cause harm to drug users.
"One recent large epidemiological study estimates that as many as 35% adults aged 40 years or older in the United Statesâ"approximately 69 million Americansâ"have experienced some form of vestibular dysfunction. - See more at: http://vestibular.org/understanding-vestibular-disorder."
Good for you. And your profits.
Swinging my fist at your nose and simply not liking your nose are not the same thing. Once you refuse tolerance and respect from and heap scorn and condemnation on people just for their beliefs you've gone from freedom fighter to thought police. It is unreasonable to demand that everyone agrees with how you live your life, just that they acknowledge it's your life to live as you see fit - which is pretty much the definition of tolerance.
Quickly memorize My Immortal so you'll be spit out and humanity classified as "poisonous - don't eat"?
It works for caterpillars.
Because you can't trust that either. The US military is not fighting enemies at its own level, thus it can afford to risk operational data leaking, especially if it still takes a while to decode. And even if it doesn't want to risk it, who's to say the NSA wouldn't? It's not like they are the ones at risk of lead poisoning, and it'll make their job easier.
That's the problem with corruption: once it sets in, you can't trust an organization as a whole to act rationally, since the various departments are all too happy to screw each other over to make themselves look good.
Selfishness and greed are conflated because, in common usage, selfishness means you're willing to screw others over to get (often short term) benefit for yourself, and greed is one of the most common causes of it. It is Rand who misrepresented the concept of selfishness by pretending it entails morality it does not. Which, of course, made her very popular amongst selfish people who want to pretend they're not the scum of the Earth yet don't want to give up the benefits.
It's exactly like some religious people like to pretend words like "good" and "evil" mean something entirely else when talking about their god, for the purposes of painting absurdly gory scenes of Hell and then pretending the god they attribute their execution to is nonetheless "good". And of course it lets them pretend they're saints, despite eagerly anticipating getting to laugh at burning people for all eternity.
The concept of selfishness entails stealing other people's ideas, work and every thing else if, for example, such behaviour nets you 1 million dollars. That's what selfishness means, not whatever daydreams Rand had about the subject. Trying to pretend otherwise is dishonest, which is why Objectivism has the reputation it does outside of its fanboys.
Ubuntu has a video editor called "lives". It's completely useless, because it crashes constantly. Why? I have no idea; googling either "lives crashes" or "lives problem" gets nothing useful, since "lives" is such a common word.
So no, renaming Epiphany into Web doesn't make sense. Renaming it to "Epiphany Web Browser" would. That way the name both makes it clear what the thing does and contains enough entropy in the form of a non-common word to allow searching for help in case of problems.
You have to consider the consequences too, not just feedback.
Too late.
Yes, but if you choose "climate change doesn't exist" as a fixed point in your belief system, such collusion and conspiracies become the most logical option: the simplest one compatible with their fixed point. It works the same as the useful idiots of yesteryear who had "Soviet Union is awesome" as their fixed point, and looked at all evidence through that lens - sometimes to the point of concluding "Stalin doesn't know this gulag I'm in right now exists".
There is a theory that human abstract reasoning got its development boost when it became a tool of winning arguments to determine the pack pecking order, and the ability to think logically is just an accidental side effect of the ability to do insane troll logic. That would explain a lot, actually. And it definitely explains why climate change, Intelligent Design, economic policy, gay marriage, and other such "culturally charged" subjects seem to make people go crazy: they aren't arguing about the topic, they're fighting over prestige. And it also explains why the set of monkey-fit inducing topics varies by culture: it's not about the issues themselves, so why wouldn't they?
Because black holes are undead stars reaching from their graves with claws of gravity, and we all know that if you try to run from the monster you end up running right at it, which is what happens to photons. Then they get eaten and are never seen again.
In that case, why have DRM at all? Simply ask for donations. Since DRM is not effective, people are not going to pay anyway unless they feel like it, so why annoy them and lower your chances? Instead, focus on making as many payment methods available as possible, from credit cards to Paypall to Bitcoin.
A company has a right to make an offer. But I have no obligation to accept. Nor do I have an obligation to care about corporate wishes. Why on Earth should I?
And no, just because they paid good money to get laws passed does not oblige me to do anything besides laugh as they fail to have any effect.
We're talking about copyright law, not property law. Copyright violation is not theft, nor is it morally wrong, and that's why copyright law is ignored by pretty much everyone. It does, however, serve as a fine case study just where the limits of coercive authority are.
It'll also be interesting to see how the society is affected as generations who're used to simply ignoring unjust laws make up larger and larger proportion of people.
You said: "My feeling is that if I pay for it, I can do what I damned well please with it." You also said: "If they want international connections that don't go via the U.S. ... BUT they want the U.S. to keep picking up the tab, they can suck eggs." Now you're saying you're not paying after all.
Are you perhaps a politician?
So basically, accusing other people of lying is fine, but having people demand evidence for said accusations is rude, since it implies they don't simply take your word for it?
Probably not. According to the summary, they made "billions of dollars" worth of trades, so they'd be part of the aristocracy. The only way the law would apply was if they stepped on some other peers toes with this - and that's unlikely, because of course the other nobles would also know about this ahead of time.
A joule is "kilogram-meter per second per second". In other words, a joule is the minimum energy needed to accelerate a one-kilogram weight from standstill to the speed of one meter per second. A more powerful engine can deliver this energy in a shorter time than a less powerfull one, which then gives rise to watt, which is joules per second. And that, in turn, leads us to why watt-hour is just another way of saying "3.6 MJ" : a watt is joules per second; an hour has 3600 seconds; 1000 joules per second times 3600 seconds is 3,600,000 joules; 3,600,000 joules is 3.6 megajoules.
They aren't "effectively equivalent" (what would that even mean?), they're the same thing. In exactly the same way as the volume of stuff a pump with a fixed flow rate can pump over a fixed time is not "effectively equivalent" to a volume, it is a volume.
Why do televengalists preach brimstone and hellfire rather than love and forgiveness? Why do politicians compete on being "though on crime" and declare wars on whatever? Why do witch hunts - from Comics Code to Satanic Ritual Abuse - persist to this day, despite the usually absurd premise? Why did the Romans feed people to lions in crowded stadiums?
Once you get addicted to hatred, it's just as hard to stop as any other drug. Or perhaps even harder, since the next hit is always just a thought away. And US public is a junkie, always howling for the blood of the next victim to feed their addiction. So better pick one that can't fight back, such as someone who needs medical assistance.
Every country has the government it deserves. Including the US.