If you RTFA you find it is not expected to produce objectionable byproducts like regular reactors.
Right. It's entirely safe despite releasing "several million times more energy than chemical reactions". It does this through weak nuclear force interactions, which are 10 orders of magnitude weaker than the electromagnetic ones that drive chemistry. Despite energy output per event being millions of times greater than typical binding energy of chemical bonds (because one event is described as consuming one atom of fuel), no ionizing radiation is released. Oh, and it sounds like getting this thing to work even in theory requires creating a non-thermal energy distribution in the electrons of the fuel.
but you still in principle are not against taking the movie or novel that my brother put his heart, soul, and financial future into making and giving it away to anybody who wants it
Perhaps your brother shouldn't had bet his financial future on a plan that requires restricting what third parties may do with each other?
Of course, the big question, is why is America so against the notion of gambling? Is this just another morality issue, or because they're not getting taxes?
Every society where injustice exists - which is all of them - needs some sort of excuse why it's not really unjust. In the USA, that excuse is the American Dream, which says that the rich deserve to live in luxury because they earned their riches by working hard, whereas the poor deserve to live in misery because they lack ambition. In other words, success becomes evidence of great personal virtue and poverty a proof of moral failure - a classical Just World Fallacy.
Gambling directly contradicts this mythology, because correctly guessing random numbers cannot possibly be attributed to personal qualities. Someone going from poverty to riches through sheer dumb luck threatens the stability of the whole system, because if the mythology is wrong in one case, it might be so in others. And if the rich didn't earn their riches through personal virtue, if there was some element of luck involved, then what's to stop the have-nots from deciding their share of the pie is not fair, and demanding more?
In short, America despises gambling because it makes it harder to justify capitalism.
Luckily the means of production for blogs are fairly accessable.
Which is precisely why Richardson went after Askey's means of producing food on his table instead. It's the beauty of western democracy: everyone has a voice and those who are independently wealthy can actually afford to use theirs.
kernel level stuff should be kept as close to the machine hardware as possible,
Why? How much time does the CPU spend running kernel code vs. user code? 1%? If it slows to half speed, and takes 2% instead, is that actually detectable?
Sure, you don't want to be writing video or audio drivers in this thing, but for something that just needs to send a bunch of commands over USB, why not?
From what I've understood, the current bottlenecks in FOSS video drivers have to do with shader compilers, which seems exactly the kind of situation where trading some execution speed for development speed would be reasonable. And really, that's to be expected: since the whole point of a video driver is to offload work to the graphics card, it would be strange if its own execution speed on the CPU would be particularly relevant.
Just what we need: "modern" software bloat in the kernel. [sarcasm] Thanks, but no thanks.
A monolithic kernel will inevitably get bloated over time as more features and drivers are added. This is a bad thing because any malfunction in any component has the potential to mess up the entire running kernel. Using a scripting language for less performance-intensive parts is an attempt to mitigate this risk. Whether it's a good idea remains to be seen.
I have right here a program that is more than 45 times the size of the entire hard drive from one of our office computers back in 1994... and that hard drive had a full install of that year's Microsoft Office, plus WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3, with lots of room to spare for files.
How much disk space does this unnamed program take in proportion to your current disk versus the space taken by any of those programs in the disk you had back then? What does it do?
Sure... that was '94. But is there REALLY call for programs that large, and by the way slow?
You seem to believe so, since you have it installed. The rest of us couldn't possibly judge an unspecified program.
However, I for one remember well the computers and programs of that era. Maybe you should revert back to DOS/Windows 3.1 and associated programs for a week or so? That should refresh your memory on why all the "bloat" was added.
"Ponzi scheme" is not a synonym for "something to do with money I disagree with". Stop using it as such. Bitcoin isn't a Ponzi scheme because it's not an investment scheme. Furthermore, since all the details about Bitcoin are publicly known, it's hard to see how it could be called a scam at all - there are no below-table dealings there.
"Ponzi scheme" is quickly becoming the Godwin of economic discussion.
The fixed volume of potential bitcoins is a pretty massive clue that it's a scam.
While it's likely that deflation makes Bitcoin unsuitable as a currency, that doesn't make it a scam, just flawed.
Or get a job. Remember that in the mid-30s when Social Security was introduced, there were, just there is now, massive institutional disincentive to employ people.
The problem is that the need for human labour is going down due to automation, and thus its market price - also known as wage - is also going down. However, the minimum resources needed to keep a human being alive is pretty much fixed. That leaves the options of:
Enforce minimum price for labour - minimum wage - and accept that some become unemployed and need subsidy.
Don't enforce minimum wage and accept that many - perhaps most - jobs will pay less than the minimum needed to stay alive, and thus the workers need subsidy.
Both of these options have the further choise between providing the necessary subsidies or letting people starve. Also, it's highly questionable whether leaving a large proportion of populace to live at mere subsistence level just for ideological reasons is either right or wise. Sure, it might result in an efficient economy as everyone desperately fights against everyone else for table scraps, but that efficiency comes at the cost of constant fear and uncertainty about your financial future, and furthermore the economy itself is extremely fragile and prone to cascade failures (like the start of the current depression).
The laws of physics. There's no free will term in f=ma.
Which is precisely why f=ma says nothing about the existence or nonexistence of free will. Free will is a concept in philosophy, and a pretty vague one even there; trying to contrast it with the physical concept of determinism leads to absurd results because they simply have nothing to do with each other.
Besides, it's questionable whether the whole concept of determinism even makes sense. No system can ever occur truly deterministic to you, because observing its initial stage requires interaction which makes you part of the system, at which point your internal model of the system is also part of the system and must thus sacrifice detail to fit inside just a part of the system (you), which in turn leads to inaccuracies. So if it's logically impossible to observe a fully deterministic systems even in principle, doesn't that make the whole concept of determinism itself self-contradictory?
It isn't like anyone is holding a gun to any of these women to disrobe, or have sex on screen (they have to sign papers about age and all this anyway)...how could it possibly be in any way, an imposition on their civil rights??!!?
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. - C. S. Lewis
Of course this assumes that Prof. Dines actually cares about porn stars as anything besides props in a classic "think of the childreeennnn!!!" argument.
Is freedom of choice what to do with yourself not a civil right? What about that?
Only if you choose something I approve. Otherwise, you're clearly too weak/naive/pure to choose wisely, and need my guidance.
The domain is being used exclusively for activities relating to Ron Paul the congressman from Texas. This is exactly the definition of cybersquatting.
Even if it is... so what? If I buy gold because I think someone is willing to offer more from it in the future, should that someone have the right to have it confiscated from me because I'm "goldsquatting"? Why should domain names be exempt from the free market - because the rich and the powerful don't have an inherent advantage there?
Or maybe Ron Paul thinks he should get the domain because he's more deserving than the current owners. Dirty commie.
Just I feel no need to watch Desperate Housewives, Harry Potter, or study Barraiya, Maui, or Asmat, why would I even waste my time with these fairy tales?
Because, as this story demonstrates, enough people care about religion that it has a potential effect on your life. You can argue that this shouldn't be the case, but that won't stop it from being so. And that leaves you the choice of either understanding these "fairy tales" - and thus the reality the people who believe them operate in - or having your ability to influence society be crippled.
Atheism isn't a religion (I know this is obvious but it seems to be a hard point to get through to some people).
This is a perfect example of what I mean: it is impossible for a certain type of person to comprehend the meaning of the statement "atheism isn't a religion" because the concept simply doesn't exist in their perception of reality. And you keep on wasting your time explaining it anyway, since you in turn can't comprehend such inability. Neither of you is necessarily stupid, you simply don't agree about some key points about reality so every message one of you sends to the other that touches on these points gets interpreted differently than it was meant to, making the receiver think the sender is nuts. And the only way around that is for one to learn how the other sees the world.
That's why these religion-related threads always turn into pointless bickering: both sides think the other is intentionally trolling them, when in reality it's just a matter of bad translation. But of course acknowledging that would require acknowledging that there are other possible ways of interpreting reality, which might result in being less sure in one's convictions, which is uncomfortable.
There are a LOT of people that don't drive more that 25 miles 95% of the time. These people tend to live in areas where pollution from cars is a very big problem, so uptake of this kind of vehicle is supportable.
Is it also supportable once you factor in the need for extra power generation and transmission capacity needed to load these cars? Because AFAIK the electric grid is already working beyond its safe capacity, so putting in the extra load would cause more black/brownouts, which in turn would leave people relying on electric vehicles stranded.
When you're trying to free up vital disk space by deleting hügÃ_fÃlÃ.jpg, wouldn't it be handy to be able to type its filename?
Is it actually impossible to type in umlauts? Or does the console simply not show them correctly?
Besides, doesn't ext2/3 reserve some disk space for the root by default? 5% if memory serves. Enough to get userspace - even X - running, at the very least.
If I remember correctly, comparative studies have shown that a joystick is a better way to steer a car than a steering wheel.
A joystic is less accurate due to smaller range of motion, more prone to getting spurious input due to small muscle spasm or simply g-forces, and less reliable than a steering wheels due to the lack of mechanical connection to the wheels. On the other hand, it looks cooler, for some definitions of cool. So it's not better, but it is "better".
When you can't win on the merits of your argument, call your opponents fascists, Nazis, racists, elitists, rich, privileged, etc.
That's the classic ad hominem attack:
"You shouldn't listen to this guy because he's a fascist!"
Comparisons to various dictatorial ideologies are perfectly valid in a discussion about censorship. After all, controlling what is and is not allowed to be discussed is what allowed totalitarian ideologies to wield sufficient power to perform their atrocities, and the justifications to establish such censorship in the first place are similar to those used by those who want to censor pornography.
Pointing out that a politician is sounding like a fascist is not an ad hominem, it is a perfectly valid political argument.
In addition, if you're over 13, it's a pointless and recognizably played out tactic.
This, on the other hand, is an ad hominem. And one that hints that you are still unsure of your own status as an adult, for why else would you instinctively assume that an unknown audience would assign any importance on whether they're thought to be at least on their mid-teens or not?
People who argue like that are the people who slow down society and ruin workplaces by consistently opposing any notion of quality control.
So you can't get animal porn and violent porn. Are you missing anything important?
Presumably animal porn and violent porn are important to people who access them since they do so. Simply disagreeing on the importance of particular material is not justification to deny others access to it, nor is finding it personally distasteful.
If anything, this act is pure sanity by defining "free speech" not as any speech, but as political speech, which was most likely the original intent.
Since we have a politician pushing for a law denying access to specific materials, these materials have been politicized, even if they weren't political originally. Anna-Maja just made posting pony porn a political act. I'm sure the various imageboards will be extremely pleased with her.
Pornography isn't speech.
Accessing or hosting pornography is communication, and it's dangerous to start excluding forms of communication from being (free) speech, since what's to stop the tyrant from excluding anything he won't want discussed?
But even ignoring that argument, just why do you think either you or a politician should have any say in what third parties are allowed to communicate to one another? Who are you to judge something important or unimportant on someone else's behalf?
If I ever go back on the job hunt, I sure as hell won't be pursuing any jobs with that clause.
And perhaps you can afford to be picky, for now. But with ever increasing unemployment, how long will that remain true? And for how many people is it true even today?
Unreasonable employment contracts exist because there's a class war going on, and the 1% are winning. And they'll continue to exist as long as this remains the case - for the foreseeable future, as is.
Not a super productive environment for employees.
It might be perfectly rational for a feudal lord to implement a measure that lowers productivity but helps keep the serfs in line.
Until the last 100 years, we did not need to burn billions of gallons of petroleum products to have energy. We made due with wind and water for the most part.
Actually, we burned wood like crazy, to the point of deforesting most of Europe. Then we switched to coal and finally to oil.
So all the oil dries up. These people want you to believe that humanity would just die out. What slugs I say to myself. Humanity would not die out, we would do exactly what we did before Oil boomed. We move closer together, we use Solar Wind and Water power more. We grow our own gardens, and become closer communities again. It's really not that bad, and definitely not the doomsday scenario they are trying to paint. So I sail to England instead of Flying to England. I deserve a nice long vacation!
Agrarian peasants don't get vacations. There is too much need for labour for that. For example, who look after your garden when you're away? Not your neighbour, since he's too busy tilling his own fields without a tractor. So yes, it really will be "that bad", and on top of that you probably get the return of religious tyranny too, since miserable people need some source of comfort. Which, of course, combines nicely with the close community of neighbour watchers.
Basically, it'll be a future where life will be nothing but misery, but at least it'll be short due to malnutrition, hard labour and lack of medicine.
Slashdot Mirror
Right. It's entirely safe despite releasing "several million times more energy than chemical reactions". It does this through weak nuclear force interactions, which are 10 orders of magnitude weaker than the electromagnetic ones that drive chemistry. Despite energy output per event being millions of times greater than typical binding energy of chemical bonds (because one event is described as consuming one atom of fuel), no ionizing radiation is released. Oh, and it sounds like getting this thing to work even in theory requires creating a non-thermal energy distribution in the electrons of the fuel.
I call bullshit.
So what is the cause, and what unpopular decisions would fix it?
Perhaps your brother shouldn't had bet his financial future on a plan that requires restricting what third parties may do with each other?
Every society where injustice exists - which is all of them - needs some sort of excuse why it's not really unjust. In the USA, that excuse is the American Dream, which says that the rich deserve to live in luxury because they earned their riches by working hard, whereas the poor deserve to live in misery because they lack ambition. In other words, success becomes evidence of great personal virtue and poverty a proof of moral failure - a classical Just World Fallacy.
Gambling directly contradicts this mythology, because correctly guessing random numbers cannot possibly be attributed to personal qualities. Someone going from poverty to riches through sheer dumb luck threatens the stability of the whole system, because if the mythology is wrong in one case, it might be so in others. And if the rich didn't earn their riches through personal virtue, if there was some element of luck involved, then what's to stop the have-nots from deciding their share of the pie is not fair, and demanding more?
In short, America despises gambling because it makes it harder to justify capitalism.
Which is precisely why Richardson went after Askey's means of producing food on his table instead. It's the beauty of western democracy: everyone has a voice and those who are independently wealthy can actually afford to use theirs.
Why? How much time does the CPU spend running kernel code vs. user code? 1%? If it slows to half speed, and takes 2% instead, is that actually detectable?
From what I've understood, the current bottlenecks in FOSS video drivers have to do with shader compilers, which seems exactly the kind of situation where trading some execution speed for development speed would be reasonable. And really, that's to be expected: since the whole point of a video driver is to offload work to the graphics card, it would be strange if its own execution speed on the CPU would be particularly relevant.
A monolithic kernel will inevitably get bloated over time as more features and drivers are added. This is a bad thing because any malfunction in any component has the potential to mess up the entire running kernel. Using a scripting language for less performance-intensive parts is an attempt to mitigate this risk. Whether it's a good idea remains to be seen.
How much disk space does this unnamed program take in proportion to your current disk versus the space taken by any of those programs in the disk you had back then? What does it do?
You seem to believe so, since you have it installed. The rest of us couldn't possibly judge an unspecified program.
However, I for one remember well the computers and programs of that era. Maybe you should revert back to DOS/Windows 3.1 and associated programs for a week or so? That should refresh your memory on why all the "bloat" was added.
"A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to its investors from their own money or the money paid by subsequent investors, rather than from profit earned by the individual or organization running the operation."
"Ponzi scheme" is not a synonym for "something to do with money I disagree with". Stop using it as such. Bitcoin isn't a Ponzi scheme because it's not an investment scheme. Furthermore, since all the details about Bitcoin are publicly known, it's hard to see how it could be called a scam at all - there are no below-table dealings there.
"Ponzi scheme" is quickly becoming the Godwin of economic discussion.
While it's likely that deflation makes Bitcoin unsuitable as a currency, that doesn't make it a scam, just flawed.
The problem is that the need for human labour is going down due to automation, and thus its market price - also known as wage - is also going down. However, the minimum resources needed to keep a human being alive is pretty much fixed. That leaves the options of:
Both of these options have the further choise between providing the necessary subsidies or letting people starve. Also, it's highly questionable whether leaving a large proportion of populace to live at mere subsistence level just for ideological reasons is either right or wise. Sure, it might result in an efficient economy as everyone desperately fights against everyone else for table scraps, but that efficiency comes at the cost of constant fear and uncertainty about your financial future, and furthermore the economy itself is extremely fragile and prone to cascade failures (like the start of the current depression).
Which is precisely why f=ma says nothing about the existence or nonexistence of free will. Free will is a concept in philosophy, and a pretty vague one even there; trying to contrast it with the physical concept of determinism leads to absurd results because they simply have nothing to do with each other.
Besides, it's questionable whether the whole concept of determinism even makes sense. No system can ever occur truly deterministic to you, because observing its initial stage requires interaction which makes you part of the system, at which point your internal model of the system is also part of the system and must thus sacrifice detail to fit inside just a part of the system (you), which in turn leads to inaccuracies. So if it's logically impossible to observe a fully deterministic systems even in principle, doesn't that make the whole concept of determinism itself self-contradictory?
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. - C. S. Lewis
Of course this assumes that Prof. Dines actually cares about porn stars as anything besides props in a classic "think of the childreeennnn!!!" argument.
Only if you choose something I approve. Otherwise, you're clearly too weak/naive/pure to choose wisely, and need my guidance.
Really? I was under the impression that it was a novel, not a document. Are you perhaps confusing "claim" and "reveal"?
Even if it is... so what? If I buy gold because I think someone is willing to offer more from it in the future, should that someone have the right to have it confiscated from me because I'm "goldsquatting"? Why should domain names be exempt from the free market - because the rich and the powerful don't have an inherent advantage there?
Or maybe Ron Paul thinks he should get the domain because he's more deserving than the current owners. Dirty commie.
Because, as this story demonstrates, enough people care about religion that it has a potential effect on your life. You can argue that this shouldn't be the case, but that won't stop it from being so. And that leaves you the choice of either understanding these "fairy tales" - and thus the reality the people who believe them operate in - or having your ability to influence society be crippled.
This is a perfect example of what I mean: it is impossible for a certain type of person to comprehend the meaning of the statement "atheism isn't a religion" because the concept simply doesn't exist in their perception of reality. And you keep on wasting your time explaining it anyway, since you in turn can't comprehend such inability. Neither of you is necessarily stupid, you simply don't agree about some key points about reality so every message one of you sends to the other that touches on these points gets interpreted differently than it was meant to, making the receiver think the sender is nuts. And the only way around that is for one to learn how the other sees the world.
That's why these religion-related threads always turn into pointless bickering: both sides think the other is intentionally trolling them, when in reality it's just a matter of bad translation. But of course acknowledging that would require acknowledging that there are other possible ways of interpreting reality, which might result in being less sure in one's convictions, which is uncomfortable.
Is it also supportable once you factor in the need for extra power generation and transmission capacity needed to load these cars? Because AFAIK the electric grid is already working beyond its safe capacity, so putting in the extra load would cause more black/brownouts, which in turn would leave people relying on electric vehicles stranded.
Is it actually impossible to type in umlauts? Or does the console simply not show them correctly?
Besides, doesn't ext2/3 reserve some disk space for the root by default? 5% if memory serves. Enough to get userspace - even X - running, at the very least.
A joystic is less accurate due to smaller range of motion, more prone to getting spurious input due to small muscle spasm or simply g-forces, and less reliable than a steering wheels due to the lack of mechanical connection to the wheels. On the other hand, it looks cooler, for some definitions of cool. So it's not better, but it is "better".
Which is very useful for troublesolving.
Comparisons to various dictatorial ideologies are perfectly valid in a discussion about censorship. After all, controlling what is and is not allowed to be discussed is what allowed totalitarian ideologies to wield sufficient power to perform their atrocities, and the justifications to establish such censorship in the first place are similar to those used by those who want to censor pornography.
Pointing out that a politician is sounding like a fascist is not an ad hominem, it is a perfectly valid political argument.
This, on the other hand, is an ad hominem. And one that hints that you are still unsure of your own status as an adult, for why else would you instinctively assume that an unknown audience would assign any importance on whether they're thought to be at least on their mid-teens or not?
That made no sense whatsoever.
Presumably animal porn and violent porn are important to people who access them since they do so. Simply disagreeing on the importance of particular material is not justification to deny others access to it, nor is finding it personally distasteful.
Since we have a politician pushing for a law denying access to specific materials, these materials have been politicized, even if they weren't political originally. Anna-Maja just made posting pony porn a political act. I'm sure the various imageboards will be extremely pleased with her.
Accessing or hosting pornography is communication, and it's dangerous to start excluding forms of communication from being (free) speech, since what's to stop the tyrant from excluding anything he won't want discussed?
But even ignoring that argument, just why do you think either you or a politician should have any say in what third parties are allowed to communicate to one another? Who are you to judge something important or unimportant on someone else's behalf?
And perhaps you can afford to be picky, for now. But with ever increasing unemployment, how long will that remain true? And for how many people is it true even today?
Unreasonable employment contracts exist because there's a class war going on, and the 1% are winning. And they'll continue to exist as long as this remains the case - for the foreseeable future, as is.
It might be perfectly rational for a feudal lord to implement a measure that lowers productivity but helps keep the serfs in line.
Actually, we burned wood like crazy, to the point of deforesting most of Europe. Then we switched to coal and finally to oil.
Agrarian peasants don't get vacations. There is too much need for labour for that. For example, who look after your garden when you're away? Not your neighbour, since he's too busy tilling his own fields without a tractor. So yes, it really will be "that bad", and on top of that you probably get the return of religious tyranny too, since miserable people need some source of comfort. Which, of course, combines nicely with the close community of neighbour watchers.
Basically, it'll be a future where life will be nothing but misery, but at least it'll be short due to malnutrition, hard labour and lack of medicine.
But the very act of burying and uncovering your savings change the supply, thus causing the value to change, thus making the money unsound.
So it's gonna be a griefer's paradise?