Do you believe that there are more terrorists in the USofA than there are perverts who would have access to that system?
And just what would a pervert do with that access, apart from leaving behind lots of logs that he's been looking up Jane Victims movements just before she was attacked? As opposed to laying in wait in the bushes somewhere for a random victim - and remember, Joe Pervert would need to do that physical part anyway to do anything to Jane - who has no tracable connection to him.
palantir drives people mad and doesn't tell exactly what's going to happen anyhow!
It's not the Palantir that drives them mad, it's Sauron using it to feed them misinformation that makes them do really stupid things, drawing the Good Guy's forces away from dealing with the actual attack. Which, I might add, shows a potential problem with such systems: all you have to do is have your underlings act suspiciously, so the system starts throwing alarms, and then have them pass by the same town. You don't even need to actually do anything, just act suspiciously and let paranoia do the rest.
There is only one "solution" to the world's energy problems - demand below renewable supply.
This means de-industrializing and devoting most of what's left to maintaining the power supply, which'll lower the standard of living back to pre-industrial times and prevents humanity from ever advancing. It other words, it's even worse choice than burning coal and letting climate change run wild.
Uranium is not a renewable resource. It may seem abundant at current rates of consumption, but the supply is finite.
Uranium is plentiful, especially since a gigawatt reactor only requires a few hundred kilograms per year, and thorium is even more so. Pull up the entire world to Western standards of living and uranium and thorium will still last for hundreds of years.
Also, no energy source is truly renewable, according to the second law of thermodynamics.
Why not spend the money on renewable technology that can also be sold around the world into both existing and developing markets, and for which demand is increasing?
Because even if you do, they won't produce enough energy to meet the demand (the sources have too low energy density), while nuclear does.
Seeing how "it" here refers to the continued ability to run a technical civilization which in turn is necessary to keep 90% or so of Frances and Germanys population alive, I'd have to disagree.
Sure you can, you just stick in the Win 7 DVD and set the partition size to less than 2.2Tb.
At which point it's foolish to get a 3TB drive instead of a 2TB drive, even if a 3TB drive costs less per gigabyte, since it'll cost more overall.
why would you want a 3Tb C: drive anyway? What the hell are you installing that you need THAT kind of space for the OS?
I don't need it for the OS, I need it for the home dir, which Windows insist on keeping in the C: drive. It's simply more convenient to keep all my stuff there.
How is "allow the prices to rise to market-clearing levels" a "planned economy"?
It wouldn't be. However, it's not what the GP said. What the he said was: "Increase prices so people who don't really need a drive right now don't buy it and you'll be able to buy your urgently-needed drive for twice the price it would have been a few months ago." Rising prices to reduce demand so supplies can be used for something else seems like planned economy to me.
That's why I'm confused - the GP was comparing one planned economy plan against another, then continued as if he'd been talked about market economy versus (badly) planned economy.
Make another law, like requiring these immunizations to collect mortgage tax deductions (if that exists in Australia), or some other law that affects more people.
Or just quite beating around the bush and outright force immunization. It's what these laws are trying to do anyway, so why not be honest about it? Seeing how that's the intent here anyway.
And only then do we find out that the vaccine "accidentally" causes sterility among the masses of poor.
Unlikely, because a significant reduction in total population tends to result in labour shortages, which drive up the wages and improve the working conditions. The current situation where there are plenty of unemployed people suits the rich and powerful just fine.
What will be interesting, however, is what people do with this.
Probably nothing. Inkjets tend to have their jets clog, which in turn leads to imperfections which render the circuit inoperative. While this can in part be helped by printing larger features, the resolution is already pretty low, and that makes the effective resolution - and thus the amount of components you can fit on a paper - even lower.
In short, in all but the most specialized applications it's better to just get a regular chip.
It doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but I guess people are still buying the 2T drives instead of the 3T drives, even though the latter actually is ~10% cheaper per gig now.
You can't boot from a 3T drive under Windows unless you have EFI instead of the normal PC BIOS, which most systems don't have. So once again, it's all Microsoft's fault.
You put their claims to the test. Is the universe eternal? Nope... there goes most Eastern religions.
Last I heard the Universe was just below critical density, making it unbound (eternal). Furthermore, there are all kinds of theories about how one could go about making new universes by manipulating vacuum energy levels, for example. Finally, even if the Universe is bound and eventually collapses, we don't know if this would actually destroy it because we don't have a theory of quantum gravity yet (for the same reason we can't really say that it hasn't existed always - we simply don't know what happens near or at a gravitational singularity).
For that matter, do you actually know those Eastern religions (or any religion) well enough to know what they're claiming in any sufficient detail to test? Especially when such claims would have been described by people lacking training or context to understand what they're seeing to other people who also lacked it, and the subject is notoriously difficult even for modern people to comprehend.
It's easy to take a theme park version of a religion (or any subject, really) and disprove it. Apart from making you feel smarter than the morons who believe such obvious bullshit, that accomplishes nothing, and especially doesn't disprove the original. Unless, of course, when you yourself don't know the science you're using ot "disprove" your strawman, and thus end up losing to it - then it's A-class parody:).
Objective morality does not require god or gods, though. It only requires accepting a certain point as a basis. An atheist can accept some external notion as such (as e.g. secular humanists do), or accept his own perception as absolute.
And since different people can and do pick different points, leading to different systems of morality, such morality is subjective, not objective.
There has never been any physical phenomena successfully explained by reference to supernatural phenomena.
That's a tautology, because "supernatural" is simply used for things not (currently) covered by physics. If you could prove that, say, sudden temperature changes in an old house were caused by ghosts, then ghosts would become a subject of research and would thus not be supernatural anymore.
That's why this entire discussion is pretty pointless, IMO: either a given kind of entity or phenomenom exists or not, but if it does, on what basis would it be any less "natural" than any other entity or phenomenom?
Everyone on slashdot LOATHES corporations, presuming that anyone trying to turn a profit in groups of more than 3 people must be horrible monsters and parasites.
Not "must be", just "probably is". It's a reasonable suspicion, because corporations are specifically designed to separate profits from responsibility - that's what "limited liability" means.
When your potential losses are bound but your potential profits unbound, it should come as no great surprise that human brains start making unsound decisions.
Now don't me wrong make it legal and license it and ensure safety. Until that happens I sure as heck don't want one next door.
Nobody wants any factory next door. That's why we have zoning laws, which a legal meth factory would naturally be required to obey and have no reason not to obey.
That's not really the DEA's fault that there's a lot of people out there that are more interested in getting high than dealing with the consequences.
Yes, and it follows that piling on extra consequences - jail time - is never going to be effective. We should instead accept that this is human nature and concentrate on mitigating the consequences, for example by having the government run drug dens where people can get their high while under guard, on safe dosages and substances, and with overall usage monitored to keep it on safe level. Of course such measures would be needed only for drugs likely to result in dangerous behaviour, rather than, say, cannabis or tobacco.
People routinely blame the DEA and the prohibition on the war in Mexico, but the fact is that if there weren't so many self entitled jack asses willing to pay for the product despite its illegality it wouldn't be an issue.
So DEA is not responsible for the unintended side effects of its actions, but drug users are? Despite this being the same unintended side effect? After all, if drugs were not illegal the war in Mexico would not be an issue.
At the end of the day it's just rationalizing a previously held view point rather than attempting to get the law changed in a reasonable way. This isn't a human rights issue, civil disobedience isn't exactly going to represent any meaningful sacrifice.
At the end of the day human rights are whatever people agree they are. There are several competing versions, and I'd argue that the right to alter your body chemistry should be included, because after all it's your body.
Also, who are you to say what sacrifice is meaningful or not to someone else?
Then there is the most important and significant component of all of this drug making -- knowledge and understanding. If people don't know how to do stuff, they will be less likely to do stuff. Let's regulate knowledge and learning....can I just ask "are we there yet?"
"Students, you should study hard so you can make your own drugs instead of relying on street vendors."
I guess it's worth a try. Maybe Despair, Inc could make an appropriate motivational poster for the schools?
I really gotta say, in cases like this it seems so insanely obvious that this should NOT be patent-able. Someone else came up with the EXACT same technique very shortly thereafter or simultaneously, without reading your patent or any of your work? If it really is just an incremental update, nothing novel but taking existing ideas and tying them together, it seems the opposite of innovative; it seems to me this algorithm was inevitable.
An innovation is all about taking existing ideas and putting them together in new ways. Innovations don't occur in vacuum, they are the logical continuation to what came before.
That said, this should not be patentable because software should not be. The reason patents exist is that it takes capital to manufacture a physical invention, so unless the inventor is already rich, he's shit out of luck without patents. On the other hand, software can be copied ad infinitum at practically no cost, so anyone who's in a position to innovate in the field can also sell his software, library or toolkit for profit without needing patents. Add the fact that the field moves at breakneck speed, and one should not be surprised that a patent model designed for 18th-century technology for producing physical goods fails quite miserably and turns against its purpose.
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And just what would a pervert do with that access, apart from leaving behind lots of logs that he's been looking up Jane Victims movements just before she was attacked? As opposed to laying in wait in the bushes somewhere for a random victim - and remember, Joe Pervert would need to do that physical part anyway to do anything to Jane - who has no tracable connection to him.
Brits do one better and use outright Liddless Eye symbology.
It's kinda depressing to realize our leaders consider Sauron their ideal.
It's not the Palantir that drives them mad, it's Sauron using it to feed them misinformation that makes them do really stupid things, drawing the Good Guy's forces away from dealing with the actual attack. Which, I might add, shows a potential problem with such systems: all you have to do is have your underlings act suspiciously, so the system starts throwing alarms, and then have them pass by the same town. You don't even need to actually do anything, just act suspiciously and let paranoia do the rest.
This means de-industrializing and devoting most of what's left to maintaining the power supply, which'll lower the standard of living back to pre-industrial times and prevents humanity from ever advancing. It other words, it's even worse choice than burning coal and letting climate change run wild.
Uranium is plentiful, especially since a gigawatt reactor only requires a few hundred kilograms per year, and thorium is even more so. Pull up the entire world to Western standards of living and uranium and thorium will still last for hundreds of years.
Also, no energy source is truly renewable, according to the second law of thermodynamics.
Because even if you do, they won't produce enough energy to meet the demand (the sources have too low energy density), while nuclear does.
Can't use that, it's clearly a Blue Goo Disaster waiting to happen.
Seeing how "it" here refers to the continued ability to run a technical civilization which in turn is necessary to keep 90% or so of Frances and Germanys population alive, I'd have to disagree.
At which point it's foolish to get a 3TB drive instead of a 2TB drive, even if a 3TB drive costs less per gigabyte, since it'll cost more overall.
I don't need it for the OS, I need it for the home dir, which Windows insist on keeping in the C: drive. It's simply more convenient to keep all my stuff there.
It wouldn't be. However, it's not what the GP said. What the he said was: "Increase prices so people who don't really need a drive right now don't buy it and you'll be able to buy your urgently-needed drive for twice the price it would have been a few months ago." Rising prices to reduce demand so supplies can be used for something else seems like planned economy to me.
That's why I'm confused - the GP was comparing one planned economy plan against another, then continued as if he'd been talked about market economy versus (badly) planned economy.
Or just quite beating around the bush and outright force immunization. It's what these laws are trying to do anyway, so why not be honest about it? Seeing how that's the intent here anyway.
Unlikely, because a significant reduction in total population tends to result in labour shortages, which drive up the wages and improve the working conditions. The current situation where there are plenty of unemployed people suits the rich and powerful just fine.
Probably nothing. Inkjets tend to have their jets clog, which in turn leads to imperfections which render the circuit inoperative. While this can in part be helped by printing larger features, the resolution is already pretty low, and that makes the effective resolution - and thus the amount of components you can fit on a paper - even lower.
In short, in all but the most specialized applications it's better to just get a regular chip.
It is interesting that you contrast "lefties" with "sane people" when the option you associate with said sane people is planned economy.
You can't boot from a 3T drive under Windows unless you have EFI instead of the normal PC BIOS, which most systems don't have. So once again, it's all Microsoft's fault.
Last I heard the Universe was just below critical density, making it unbound (eternal). Furthermore, there are all kinds of theories about how one could go about making new universes by manipulating vacuum energy levels, for example. Finally, even if the Universe is bound and eventually collapses, we don't know if this would actually destroy it because we don't have a theory of quantum gravity yet (for the same reason we can't really say that it hasn't existed always - we simply don't know what happens near or at a gravitational singularity).
For that matter, do you actually know those Eastern religions (or any religion) well enough to know what they're claiming in any sufficient detail to test? Especially when such claims would have been described by people lacking training or context to understand what they're seeing to other people who also lacked it, and the subject is notoriously difficult even for modern people to comprehend.
It's easy to take a theme park version of a religion (or any subject, really) and disprove it. Apart from making you feel smarter than the morons who believe such obvious bullshit, that accomplishes nothing, and especially doesn't disprove the original. Unless, of course, when you yourself don't know the science you're using ot "disprove" your strawman, and thus end up losing to it - then it's A-class parody :).
And since different people can and do pick different points, leading to different systems of morality, such morality is subjective, not objective.
That's a tautology, because "supernatural" is simply used for things not (currently) covered by physics. If you could prove that, say, sudden temperature changes in an old house were caused by ghosts, then ghosts would become a subject of research and would thus not be supernatural anymore.
That's why this entire discussion is pretty pointless, IMO: either a given kind of entity or phenomenom exists or not, but if it does, on what basis would it be any less "natural" than any other entity or phenomenom?
Not "must be", just "probably is". It's a reasonable suspicion, because corporations are specifically designed to separate profits from responsibility - that's what "limited liability" means.
When your potential losses are bound but your potential profits unbound, it should come as no great surprise that human brains start making unsound decisions.
Nobody wants any factory next door. That's why we have zoning laws, which a legal meth factory would naturally be required to obey and have no reason not to obey.
Yes, and it follows that piling on extra consequences - jail time - is never going to be effective. We should instead accept that this is human nature and concentrate on mitigating the consequences, for example by having the government run drug dens where people can get their high while under guard, on safe dosages and substances, and with overall usage monitored to keep it on safe level. Of course such measures would be needed only for drugs likely to result in dangerous behaviour, rather than, say, cannabis or tobacco.
So DEA is not responsible for the unintended side effects of its actions, but drug users are? Despite this being the same unintended side effect? After all, if drugs were not illegal the war in Mexico would not be an issue.
At the end of the day human rights are whatever people agree they are. There are several competing versions, and I'd argue that the right to alter your body chemistry should be included, because after all it's your body.
Also, who are you to say what sacrifice is meaningful or not to someone else?
"Students, you should study hard so you can make your own drugs instead of relying on street vendors."
I guess it's worth a try. Maybe Despair, Inc could make an appropriate motivational poster for the schools?
But as you just demonstrated, this won't actually solve the problem, since there will still be murderous lunatics walking around.
Speaking of cancelation, whatever came of that Cold Fusion project Slashdot was reporting a month ago? Or regular hot fusion, for that matter?
Graphene is a form of carbon usually found in pencils ("the lead"). It's single-atom-thick carbon sheets, basically.
An innovation is all about taking existing ideas and putting them together in new ways. Innovations don't occur in vacuum, they are the logical continuation to what came before.
That said, this should not be patentable because software should not be. The reason patents exist is that it takes capital to manufacture a physical invention, so unless the inventor is already rich, he's shit out of luck without patents. On the other hand, software can be copied ad infinitum at practically no cost, so anyone who's in a position to innovate in the field can also sell his software, library or toolkit for profit without needing patents. Add the fact that the field moves at breakneck speed, and one should not be surprised that a patent model designed for 18th-century technology for producing physical goods fails quite miserably and turns against its purpose.