Still people say it is not enough and unemployed people should be a workforce of the government to clean parks etc. -.-
As long as these people are paid a normal monthly salary for such work, sure, no problem. Or did I misunderstand, and this is actually an attempt to get unpaid slave labour? Coming to think of it, it probably is. And once you start such a program, you can expand it to provide workforce for private companies in a guise of "training" - perhaps for the very company that fired the person in the first place! Yes, the way to compete with Chinese slave labour is to have domestic slave labour!
The point is that for some things animals are still better than mechanised vehicles, even ones with tracks or artificial legs.
It is almost certain that a horse or a donkey is better than this thing, but it's also almost certain that this thing will improve faster than horses or donkeys do, and with far less ethical problems or unfortunate implications. It might well be worth it to invest in a solution that's inferior in the short run to get long-term benefits.
And one obvious benefit this thing has is the ability to scale up, all the way to heavy equipment size. Walking trucks have obvious military benefits, walking forestry machines would allow efficient harvesting without damaging the ecosystem, walking firetrucks could make rescue operations easier, walking and climbing police spider robots would make it easy to terrorize the general population into submission, and so on.
But, the key is that if there was a need for LS3, then the US would already be using pack animals. They aren't, so there probably isn't.
Don't think of it as a robotized donkey, think of it as a jeep that can move in really rought terrain. Also, there's obvious future benefits to supporting this kind of thing, since walking is far superior to wheels anywhere except roads - and nothing stops you from attaching wheels on the bottoms of a walking robot's feet.
Just imagine it: a two-ton walking, climbing, rollerblading autonomous spider tank armed with lasers, capable of dodging rockets, never sleeping, never resting, tirelessly prowling the night looking for its intended targets... And just to go that extra mile, we could equip it with a glucose-burning fuel cell and have it suck its victims dry with its titanium mandibles. And if you do get a lucky hit, the thing will release a horde of flying robotized killer bees that attack everything in sight.
The one single problem with renewables is energy storage.
And the second is that in order to capture dispersed energy you need a lot of infrastructure, which requires maintenance and eventual replacement. This is expensive and dangerous (especially for wind).
Their POTENTIAL deaths is massively higher than anything else.
No, hydro has them beat: a dam breaking will kill everyone downstream. And of course coal's actual annual death toll beats nuclear's potential one hands down.
And whenever I post on this subject I get modded to -1 by Nokia fanboys.
Does Nokia have any fans left? Sure, Microsoft fanboys might like Nokia by proxy, but is there anyone who's specifically interested in Nokia phones? Is Nokia a brand anymore, rather than just another Microsoft reseller?
There's ups and downs for any company, but Elop has ensured that Nokia will never again be anything to choose on anything but price, thus it won't recover.
Where do you draw the line between large and small?
Any such line would be artificial. Instead, we should tighten the reins gradually.
How are you measuring power?
Total income + total spending + total assets should be a good enough estimator of economic power, or at the very least the potential amount of havoc caused if said power is abused.
You have to actually think through these issues and justify the conclusion of why you apply the principle only to some and not to all.
The principle should apply to all. That's the entire point.
That pesky Fourteenth Amendment, you know...
Kindly explain how my suggestion violates either the letter or spirit of it.
Right, because coal is the only alternative to nuclear.
Pretty much, yes: it's plentiful, reliable and cheap.
It's not like you can burn, oh I don't know, gas or something to produce electricity.
You can, as long as gas lasts, but it'll be more expensive and still pollute.
And renewables, let's just dismiss those out of hand.
Renewables are fine if you're willing to put up with the downside: huge land use required to harvest sufficient amounts of energy, the expense of maintaining the hardware required to cover this land area, very limited total generation potential due to these restrictions, and random blackouts whenever it's cloudy or there's not enough wind.
Basically, going with renewables means putting up with rationing and shortages with the rest of your life, and that means things like choosing whether you cook your food or post on Slashdot tonight (or sit in the dark, if the wind hasn't picked up enough). If you're fine with that, fine. I'm not.
Both Chernobyl and Fukushima resulted in an uninhabitable zone that will take decades to clean up, if that is at all possible, and long-lasting effects on the ecosystem.
Chernobyl's main effect on the ecosystem seems to be reforestation.
You have to understand that it is the institution of government issuing the apology, not the individuals or the party currently in power. It's a big like suing a public company - doesn't matter if it is sold on, all the staff are changed and so forth, you are suing the institution and it can still be held accountable for prior actions even if none of the people responsible are still around.
And this gets us to the real problem: giving a pardon implies that this is sufficient to make up for the misdeed. Turing died before his time, which is a tragedy both for himself and the world, and nothing can change that anymore. Pardon is something a malefactor needs, not its victims, but none remains anymore who could give it. So let the UK always be remembered as the country which drove Turing to suicide and carry that shame around for however long it exists. It has been well deserved.
The mere fact that they're large businesses does not mean that they are forbidden from behaving like any small business or individual
But it should. As it is, they wield orders of magnitude more power than a small business or individual, yet have no more responsibility. This is a recipe for disaster, and indeed we are all paying the bill for the utter irresponsibility of financial businesses right now.
If you demand censure of someone's speech, you allow him a loophole to demand the censure of yours.
People aren't demanding censure of Phelps's speech, they're demanding censure of his habit of disturbing funerals, which other people don't do so him demanding the same in turn is an empty threat.
And by the way, it irks me to no end how much people care about hate.
It must really burn you how you got a +5 Insightful then.
Human beings are only fit to judge actions, not the feelings behind those actions.
Shoot your hunting pal because you thought he's a moose, it's an accident or negligenct manslaughter at worst. Shoot him because he slept with your wife, it's murder.
It's impossible to judge actions without considering the motives behind them.
Or he could just say that the email was forged. It's not like that's a new concept that didn't exist before computers. And it's not like people have trouble understanding the concept of forgery even if they're not familiar with the particular skills and techniques a forgerer uses.
The only real difference a computer makes is letting the whole forgery process be entirely automated right down to finding out your friends and relatives names, so the forgerer can send mass-produced yet personalized forged emails to millions of victims rather than carefully crafting them one at a time.
That's never enough though... now they need cell phones and laundry service and food/care for their pets and transportation and better living conditions. (Did I mention that despite the government assistance, they don't take care of themselves or their kids, so now there are more health care costs, etc.?)
Yeah, the damn freeloaders should simply go find a place within walking distance which hires a sick guy who turns up unnannounced in dirty clothes.
By the time you pay for health insurance and everything else that puts you on the same level as a typical freeloader, you are left with little money to spend as you want.
That your quality of life is at the level of someone who needs to beg for clean clothes is unfortunate. But the fault lies with the powerful, not the weak. And partly yourself, for blaming the easy victim rather than the real, but powerful, culprit.
I guess we all share an awful lot of contempt for human life.
Yes, we do. We do in fact consider peanut butter, home lighting and easy transportation worth certain number of deaths. This is an ugly truth about the world: everything has a price, and it's often paid in blood.
Which is why this "guns don't kill people oh yes they do" is pointless: of course guns kill people, as does everything else. The questions are: how many gun related deaths are an acceptable price for whatever benefits there might be for lax gun laws? Is it possible to meet that target without losing the benefits? If not, could an acceptable benefit/dead kid ratio be had through compromise?
This is all extremely callous, of course, but unfortunately the alternatives are to either lie ("guns don't kill people") or react with feel-good gestures without considering the consequences ("think of the chiiiildreeen").
Or maybe even if we consider each human life to be particularly sacred, things that account for 0.000001% of our mortality rate just are not worth making major sacrifices to prevent, and if we did bend over to address each possible threat at that scale, life would not be worth living in the first place.
So, can you live with the actual rate of 0.5%? I don't know, but please understand that anyone who swallows your lie might turn on you any moment - they might learn the truth, they might have been willingly deceived but have a chance of heart the next time there's a mass shooting, or whatever. Lying to influence public policy is ultimately a bad tactic, since you can never be secure in what you've got but must always be pulling more bullshit from where your number came from, and even then reality is going to crush you like a bug - it's just a matter of time.
Or perhaps you simply tried to appear tough, in which case you failed miserable because toughness starts by being able to look into mirror without pretending you're six orders of magnitude less ugly than you actually are.
Automation is shifting repetitive, uncreative, brutish work to repetitive, uncreative, brutish machines, thus freeing humans to pursue nobler interests.
That might be true in a better world. But in this one, being freed from your job by an automaton - or any other way - means the only interest your pursue is that from overdue bills.
But for the larger society, the benefits outweigh the costs.
Do they? Does financially ruining many and leaving the rest with a sword hanging over their head benefit the society - which, after all, is just all these people together? Or does it simply benefit the few fat cats on the top?
In every change some prosper, some lose. But the same happens in every status quo. We may as well choose technological progress.
The problem is that the amount of losers and winners are in no way balanced, and neither are the losses and gains.
If we are compassionate, we can give the displaced workers opportunities to learn new skills.
Training costs money which the unemployed don't have, and in any case those new skills won't help any because they, too, can and will be automated.
A 90lb 5ft tall college girl isn't going to be able to fight off a gangrape with her strength alone, with a gun she can.
Unless the gang also have guns. Which they will, of course. So all this accomplishes is turn a few rape victims into murder victims instead, and add guns into the already volatile mix of booze, drugs and general chaos of lots of young people living away from home the first time.
That's one of the problems we have today, everyone gets upset when their feelings get hurt, and do crazy things.
Such as fallowing in and publicly posting their revenge fantasies over imagined crimes? Control your own emotional reactions before demanding that others control theirs.
Yes, this one is dead. But if we had a public torture and slow, painful death of the Batman killer, maybe he would have thought twice.
We used to have public torture and slow, painful death for pretty much every crime for most of human history, and it didn't work. If anything it made things worse by making violence and cruelty acceptable norms rather than disgusting aberrations only mentally ill people would engage in. And of course crazy people are not exactly known for carefully considering the potential consequences of their actions.
I only use my guns to shoot targets, an activity i enjoy thoroughly.
That's what it comes down to, isn't it? There are plenty of people who want to own guns for whatever reason, and value this higher than a few dead kids every now and then. "For the children" only works as an argument when it's someone else that gets hit with the direct consequences.
Strip all the bullshit away, and what's left is "I want a gun more than I want other people not die from gun-related crime."
Slashdot Mirror
As long as these people are paid a normal monthly salary for such work, sure, no problem. Or did I misunderstand, and this is actually an attempt to get unpaid slave labour? Coming to think of it, it probably is. And once you start such a program, you can expand it to provide workforce for private companies in a guise of "training" - perhaps for the very company that fired the person in the first place! Yes, the way to compete with Chinese slave labour is to have domestic slave labour!
It is almost certain that a horse or a donkey is better than this thing, but it's also almost certain that this thing will improve faster than horses or donkeys do, and with far less ethical problems or unfortunate implications. It might well be worth it to invest in a solution that's inferior in the short run to get long-term benefits.
And one obvious benefit this thing has is the ability to scale up, all the way to heavy equipment size. Walking trucks have obvious military benefits, walking forestry machines would allow efficient harvesting without damaging the ecosystem, walking firetrucks could make rescue operations easier, walking and climbing police spider robots would make it easy to terrorize the general population into submission, and so on.
Don't think of it as a robotized donkey, think of it as a jeep that can move in really rought terrain. Also, there's obvious future benefits to supporting this kind of thing, since walking is far superior to wheels anywhere except roads - and nothing stops you from attaching wheels on the bottoms of a walking robot's feet.
Just imagine it: a two-ton walking, climbing, rollerblading autonomous spider tank armed with lasers, capable of dodging rockets, never sleeping, never resting, tirelessly prowling the night looking for its intended targets... And just to go that extra mile, we could equip it with a glucose-burning fuel cell and have it suck its victims dry with its titanium mandibles. And if you do get a lucky hit, the thing will release a horde of flying robotized killer bees that attack everything in sight.
The possibilities are endless.
You can't just turn real animals off when you don't need them.
And the second is that in order to capture dispersed energy you need a lot of infrastructure, which requires maintenance and eventual replacement. This is expensive and dangerous (especially for wind).
No, hydro has them beat: a dam breaking will kill everyone downstream. And of course coal's actual annual death toll beats nuclear's potential one hands down.
The problem is, what's flaw to some is a tool for others. There are many who like people just the way they are: easily manipulable.
Does Nokia have any fans left? Sure, Microsoft fanboys might like Nokia by proxy, but is there anyone who's specifically interested in Nokia phones? Is Nokia a brand anymore, rather than just another Microsoft reseller?
There's ups and downs for any company, but Elop has ensured that Nokia will never again be anything to choose on anything but price, thus it won't recover.
Any such line would be artificial. Instead, we should tighten the reins gradually.
Total income + total spending + total assets should be a good enough estimator of economic power, or at the very least the potential amount of havoc caused if said power is abused.
The principle should apply to all. That's the entire point.
Kindly explain how my suggestion violates either the letter or spirit of it.
Pretty much, yes: it's plentiful, reliable and cheap.
You can, as long as gas lasts, but it'll be more expensive and still pollute.
Renewables are fine if you're willing to put up with the downside: huge land use required to harvest sufficient amounts of energy, the expense of maintaining the hardware required to cover this land area, very limited total generation potential due to these restrictions, and random blackouts whenever it's cloudy or there's not enough wind.
Basically, going with renewables means putting up with rationing and shortages with the rest of your life, and that means things like choosing whether you cook your food or post on Slashdot tonight (or sit in the dark, if the wind hasn't picked up enough). If you're fine with that, fine. I'm not.
Chernobyl's main effect on the ecosystem seems to be reforestation.
And this gets us to the real problem: giving a pardon implies that this is sufficient to make up for the misdeed. Turing died before his time, which is a tragedy both for himself and the world, and nothing can change that anymore. Pardon is something a malefactor needs, not its victims, but none remains anymore who could give it. So let the UK always be remembered as the country which drove Turing to suicide and carry that shame around for however long it exists. It has been well deserved.
But it should. As it is, they wield orders of magnitude more power than a small business or individual, yet have no more responsibility. This is a recipe for disaster, and indeed we are all paying the bill for the utter irresponsibility of financial businesses right now.
Hard to say, since you didn't explain why you are. Explain your reasons, then we can discuss whether they make sense or not.
People aren't demanding censure of Phelps's speech, they're demanding censure of his habit of disturbing funerals, which other people don't do so him demanding the same in turn is an empty threat.
It must really burn you how you got a +5 Insightful then.
Shoot your hunting pal because you thought he's a moose, it's an accident or negligenct manslaughter at worst. Shoot him because he slept with your wife, it's murder.
It's impossible to judge actions without considering the motives behind them.
This rises two important questions: is disturbing funerals a protected form of speech, and if it is, is it obscene?
Just because Phelps has a right to spout his bullshit doesn't mean he has a right to disturb private or semi-private events.
Or he could just say that the email was forged. It's not like that's a new concept that didn't exist before computers. And it's not like people have trouble understanding the concept of forgery even if they're not familiar with the particular skills and techniques a forgerer uses.
The only real difference a computer makes is letting the whole forgery process be entirely automated right down to finding out your friends and relatives names, so the forgerer can send mass-produced yet personalized forged emails to millions of victims rather than carefully crafting them one at a time.
Yeah, the damn freeloaders should simply go find a place within walking distance which hires a sick guy who turns up unnannounced in dirty clothes.
That your quality of life is at the level of someone who needs to beg for clean clothes is unfortunate. But the fault lies with the powerful, not the weak. And partly yourself, for blaming the easy victim rather than the real, but powerful, culprit.
Yes, we do. We do in fact consider peanut butter, home lighting and easy transportation worth certain number of deaths. This is an ugly truth about the world: everything has a price, and it's often paid in blood.
Which is why this "guns don't kill people oh yes they do" is pointless: of course guns kill people, as does everything else. The questions are: how many gun related deaths are an acceptable price for whatever benefits there might be for lax gun laws? Is it possible to meet that target without losing the benefits? If not, could an acceptable benefit/dead kid ratio be had through compromise?
This is all extremely callous, of course, but unfortunately the alternatives are to either lie ("guns don't kill people") or react with feel-good gestures without considering the consequences ("think of the chiiiildreeen").
There were 12,632 homicide gun deaths in the US in 2007, while the total death rate was about 2,4 million, making the actual rate 0.5%. True, not that much, but also 5 million times your number. Which means that you simply pulled a number from your ass to make your argument seem more convincing - in other words, lied.
So, can you live with the actual rate of 0.5%? I don't know, but please understand that anyone who swallows your lie might turn on you any moment - they might learn the truth, they might have been willingly deceived but have a chance of heart the next time there's a mass shooting, or whatever. Lying to influence public policy is ultimately a bad tactic, since you can never be secure in what you've got but must always be pulling more bullshit from where your number came from, and even then reality is going to crush you like a bug - it's just a matter of time.
Or perhaps you simply tried to appear tough, in which case you failed miserable because toughness starts by being able to look into mirror without pretending you're six orders of magnitude less ugly than you actually are.
That might be true in a better world. But in this one, being freed from your job by an automaton - or any other way - means the only interest your pursue is that from overdue bills.
Do they? Does financially ruining many and leaving the rest with a sword hanging over their head benefit the society - which, after all, is just all these people together? Or does it simply benefit the few fat cats on the top?
The problem is that the amount of losers and winners are in no way balanced, and neither are the losses and gains.
Training costs money which the unemployed don't have, and in any case those new skills won't help any because they, too, can and will be automated.
And yet, ironically, it's the pans which have problems in The Hobbit, at least in the 2D version.
Unless the gang also have guns. Which they will, of course. So all this accomplishes is turn a few rape victims into murder victims instead, and add guns into the already volatile mix of booze, drugs and general chaos of lots of young people living away from home the first time.
Such as fallowing in and publicly posting their revenge fantasies over imagined crimes? Control your own emotional reactions before demanding that others control theirs.
We used to have public torture and slow, painful death for pretty much every crime for most of human history, and it didn't work. If anything it made things worse by making violence and cruelty acceptable norms rather than disgusting aberrations only mentally ill people would engage in. And of course crazy people are not exactly known for carefully considering the potential consequences of their actions.
That's what it comes down to, isn't it? There are plenty of people who want to own guns for whatever reason, and value this higher than a few dead kids every now and then. "For the children" only works as an argument when it's someone else that gets hit with the direct consequences.
Strip all the bullshit away, and what's left is "I want a gun more than I want other people not die from gun-related crime."