... champion of traditional American values like free speech and personal responsibility!
Back in the Middle Ages we used to have an agrarian society with an aristocracy based on land ownership. With our modern industrian society the membership in aristocracy is based on corporate ownership instead. Why are you so shocked about this? Did you perhaps think that human nature had changed, and aristocracy was a thing of the past?
"Traditional values" everywhere have always meant the defence of the rich and the powerful at the expense of everyone else. Always vote left-wing unless you happen to be in the top 1%, and even then only vote right-wing if you're willing to sell your soul for a bit more money.
Of course, getting the people and parts assembled in the USA would be rather difficult, especially now, and smuggling in a completed unit would be perceived as even harder.
Why "smuggle" anything? Just ship the thing in a standard cargo container through New York and rig it to explode when the container is opened. That way it'll explode in the harbor as the customs is opening it, terribly damaging New York and doing even worse to US economy due to the interruption of cargo flow.
As to getting the fissionable material, it can be done, but if you want the good stuff it's not easy, not even for a recognized nation.
Fire alarms contain a small amount of radiactive material. Didn't someone manage to build a working reactor from those a while ago?
That's why I don't think tempting fate with fanatics is ever a good idea, but on the other hand, rational intelligent people will tend to impede large scale atrocities and killing if they are able to.
Intelligence does not imply rationality. It doesn't even imply sanity. It certainly doesn't imply giving a flying fuck about how many people die as a result of your actions.
I agree that those topics are discussed. I disagree that those are significant problems on Wikipedia.
They are significant enough to keep people from getting in and contributing. That means they are significant.
Posters have even been complaining about Firefox in the past several years. If it gets popular, it will be complained about on Slashdot.
Firefox 4 has a 100% CPU usage bug that keeps me from switching to it. In general, Firefox seems to be getting worse: options keep getting removed and irrelevant new features - such as "personas" - added, all of which is balanced by the extension mechanism - for now.
You had a Professor that said you could cite Wikipedia? Hell, I had a teacher said Wiki is a great place to start but if you ever cite it in one of your papers you fail the course not the paper the course; wiki is an encyclopedia and you are in college.
So... Out of curiosity, what kind of sources is it okay to cite in college? Because just excluding encyclopedias seems rather arbitrary and pointless.
Im not really clear on how not giving unemployment benefits has gone from being "how the world works (dont work, dont eat)" to "its unfair, i deserve this".
Well, there was this guy, Karl Marx was his name. He realized that there are a lot more poor and weak people than rich and powerful people, and together these poor and weak are more powerful than the rich and powerful. He wrote a book about this, "Communist Manifesto" it was called, and some people took note and put theory to practice. At this point the rich and powerful got scared and decided it's better to give the poor and weak something to lose besides their chains before they realize they have the whole world to win if they just work together, and created social security systems to act as the "bread" part of "bread and circuses" (mass media is the "circus" part).
Mind you, in some countries a sort of balance was reached, where the weak and powerful worked together for common good. This was called a "welfare state", and it was a huge success (as cooperation between partners who can trust each other always is), until Reagonomics spawned in America and infected the whole Western world, at which point things started going to Hell.
I hope that the welfare state and the voluntary (truly voluntary, for threat of starvation doesn't force your obedience) cooperation and pride in one's work it embodies can eventually be resurrected, but right now, keeping the Western world from outright falling to the not-so-voluntary cooperation of China - which still is superior to the "everyone for themselves" model of Capitalism - is an immediate priority, for it is a prerequisite for such undoing of Reagan's dark legacy. And I guess the second step would be to get the libertarians behind welfare-statists, as a welfare state is the closest to the voluntary cooperation ideal humanity is likely to get as long as resources are still scarce.
The program has its good points, but when people start feeling entitled to it, perhaps its a clue that its gone overboard.
The program is legally mandated, so as a matter of fact people are entitled to it. They are just as entitled to social security as you are entitled to protection of life and property. And, more importantly, you are no more entitled to protection of life and property as the weak and poor are entitled to social security.
There is only so far you can push people before they push back, and years of right-wing evil have pushed them pretty far. I, for one, will vote communists from now on, and if that doesn't help... we shall see.
Except here it's a case of Hitler complaining about annexations and racial discrimination.
He did. "Mein Kampf" is basically one long diatribe about how Jews were trying to destroy Germans, and how Germany's areas had been forcibly taken and annexed to other countries. The last part was actually true, which is part of how Hitler managed to get power.
All of which, BTW, makes an excellent answer to anyone who says "world is not fair, deal with it": the more unfair the world is, the easier it is for the next Hitler/Stalin/Mao to get into power and start World War 3. So go ahead, cut those unemployment benefits and social security, if you feel lucky. Well, do ya, punk?
Current energy usage is 474 EJ per year, and doubling every 20 years or so. Let's say we're willing to sacrifice 25% of the world's photosynthetic land area (ignoring oxygen) to solar panels (currently 22% for top-notch silicon stuff).
For large-scale solar power production, you don't use solar panels, you use concentrating solar plants. They don't use any exotic materials, but simply use mirrors to concentrate sunlight (hence the name), boil water, and use the steam to drive turbines.
If you think it requires "massive upper body strength" to lift your hand and point, you should really rethink your fitness plan.
If you think it doesn't require massive upper body strength to keep your hands lifted and pointing at something for 8 hours straight 5 days a week, you should try it.
And THAT drives innovation to predict who is most likely to need hospitalization and educate and treat them before they become critical.
Or, alternatively, deny them life-saving treatments should any unfortunate accidents happen to them.
You are thinking like a normal human being. Insurance company thinks like a psychopath. That's why theory and practice continue being so far away in capitalism.
It's not bad, it's just unlikely. After all, compared to insurance firms - especially medical insurance firms - lawyers, politicians, and even the RIAA itself are shining pillars of ethical perfection.
Anyone who goes after this price money is committing murders. Seriously.
The same investors' money that has valued then at X billion dollars and the ad-sellers wouldn't be there unless they could prove statements put on FB's public page. It doesn't matter what slashdot believes because money is what talks. Remember that those guys have access to FB's private logs, and need them before plunking their hard cash to pay for your bandwidth, hard drive costs and so on.
More likely, the investors simply remember having heard of Facebook and throw money at them after a nominal examination, if that. Just like they did during the housing bubble, and before that the dotcom bubble, and every other bubble in history.
Investors are just as much a bunch of lazy bastards as the rest of us. The sooner people realize that, and that people don't stop being people because money's involved, the sooner we can stop blindly trusting their judgement and implement the economic controls needed keep crashes from happening.
In the meantime, most investors who's money's at Facebook likely tought like you do, and skipped any serious investigation because surely those who came before them did it, right?
Excellent. Go right ahead snarking, Slashdot. The sooner fission gets shut down, the fewer catastrophic 'once in a million years' leaks every twenty years we'll have.
And instead, far more people, animals and plants die from the usage of coal power. Why do you hate humanity and nature so much?
This kid has Aspergers syndrome and is making the most of it.
Does he? Or is that a knee jerk diagnosis for smart people who also don't really care much about social crap?
Usually, it's a self-diagnosis for people who want an excuse for their bad behaviour, one which also makes them seem better than the rest - you know, "too good for this sinful Earth" updated for the sentiments of the age of science.
However, in this case the diagnosis seems to be done by an actual psychologist, so it's probably trustworthy.
I really can't wait for the new DSM, when we all can kiss Aspergers goodbye. Its a completely useless diagnosis. Going by the DSM, I could be diagnosed with it; yet I have a very long term (7 years), cohabitational, girlfriend (sinmate), friends (not a lot, but a small number of high quality ones), etc... So what exactly does that diagnosis show?
Yes, amazingly enough it's possible to lead a happy, succesful and productive life even if you have a mental or physical condition. That might have something to do with how the purpose of diagnosis is not to divide the world into winners and losers, but to identify potential problems that might need to be treated or otherwise taken into account.
But I suppose you can't be faulted for being under such an impression, given the "excuse" aspect of self-diagnosed Asperger's I mentioned above.
This is especially true for aspergers, which doesn't actually translate to something meaningful or useful.
It translates into ensuring that children who have the condition train social contacts enough to become full-functional adults, since that's where the condition often causes problems. It's the same as any other diagnosis: defend against potential problems before they have a chance to develop, and solve any that already have.
If he's got any sense (as opposed to being intelligent) he'll get a job writing complex trading algorithms for some big Wall Street firm. There's no money in doing something productive, might as well be rich.
If he has both sense and intelligence, he writes a stock performance predictor, uses it himself, and makes money himself rather than enriching some parasite.
The section of brain next to the spatial reasoning piece never formed in Einstein's brain. This allowed his spatial reasoning section to fill the empty space and be twice as large as a normal person's. This is exactly the sort of thing that makes me dubious of genetic engineering of humans.
But it's exactly the kind of thing that supports cyborgization. Suppose you could remove your brains from inside your skull and put them into a giant jar and remote-control your body? Then they would no longer be limited by the need to pass your head through your mothers birth canal. How intelligent could you become, then?
Then you are not a very strong programmer at all. Assembler is necessary to understand exactly how a processor works, and how well any given algorithm will work on that architecture.
Except, of course, that with modern processors assembler is really a highly abstracted virtual machine running over the actual hardware. The modern processor typically has multiple pipelines, out-of-order execution, and a greater number of general-purpose registers than is made available by the instruction set.
Programming is very easy, but requires math and logic skills.
Programming main requires an insane attention to detail, since getting any detail wrong will cause the program to either crash or develop security holes. Most people aren't monomaniacs, so most programs are full of bugs.
Managed environments help, but don't solve the underlaying problem: any error causes completely unpredictable behaviour, rather than a few hiccups the system could recover from. We know that Turing powerful systems can degrade gracefully: human brains are (at least) Turing powerful, yet drunk humans can still walk - not a gracefully as when sober, but can anyway.
Now, the question is: how do you make a system where errors don't cause a cascade failure, as they do in current programs? How do you build a system where programming errors are more like a badly tuned car engine than Chernobyl meltdown?
We don't have overpopulation, we are well within the carrying capacity of this world. And with population growth leveling off everywhere, we'll also stay within it.
starvation,
As I said, famine has been ended in industrialized countries. It still occurs in developing ones like it did here, and for the same reason: their technology - applied science - hasn't gotten good enough yet.
war,
War has been with us as long as there has been humans, and likely before, judging by how chimpansees act. It has nothing to do with science.
HIV,
What does HIV have to do with science, apart from science keeping the victims alive and non-contagious while looking for a cure?
pollution
Compare the pollution now and, say, a century ago. Why are the skies clear now? Because science came up with more efficient processes and waste treatment.
and a lot of other problems.
Well, some people still seem to think that "ignorance is strength", but perhaps advancing psychology can help with that.
So while science solved one problem it created many other bigger problems in it's place. It's like cutting the head off a hydra. Until science is used to actually solve the problem of human nature, it's not going to really work to progress us forward.
You'll be happy to know, then, that work is being done here all the time: psychology, mass psychology, social engineering, political theory, and if you want to be generous enough to count them as sciences even philosophy and theology are working on it all the time. They have also accomplished some rather smashing successes - unless of course you wish to argue that living as a land-slave under a feudal lord with first-night rights to your wife is better than a modern democratic republic?
Oh, and the very reason you have time to think about "human nature" is that science has progressed to the point where you don't spend it all looking for something to eat.
Automatically give every American citizen a clearance, and if they're found by a court to have leaked info to non-citizens, they're guilty of treason.
And since protests inevitably bring up the thing people are protesting against, taking part in one is treason. So is reporting about those protests, for the same reason. And of course the matter can't be discussed in a public forum like this one, newspapers, TV, etc.
You people keep on demonstrating over and over again that you have exactly the government you deserve.
Most people have no problem with the product in adult hands, but would like it to be as easy as possible to block traffic from.xxx domains to an elementary school library without some stupid third party whitelist or blacklist.
I wouldn't. The easier it's to block something from elementary school library, the easier it is to block it from my home. And once they've come for porn peddlers, it's easier to continue to silence wikileaks, IRC, P2P, etc. After all, they'll have a previous example to point to, and besides anything that can transfer information can transfer porn.
I saw porn as a preteen kid, and it didn't kill, scar or pervert me. In fact it didn't affect me at all, it simply looked weird. It won't kill, scar or pervert anyone else either. I wish people would stop with this idiotic idea that children are harmed if they see sex already.
At some point, having a puritanical upbringing stops being an excuse for harming others with your hysterics.
* Having names for various minor variations in sexual acts. [...] * Taking vacation (30 per year legal minimum vacation plus 10 holidays). [...]
* Organizing nation-paralyzing strikes.
So... you're saying that the French workers actually have backbones and balls and get to reap the benefits of both?
Science isn't in itself any more noble than chess. We have the most advanced science in the world but our society hash't changed much has it?
Well, it did got rid of smallpox. And polio. And famine. And backbreaking farm work. And cities get clean drinking water and their waste is purified before being released.
But apart from medicine, plentiful food, clean water, warm houses, comfortable clothes, fast transportation, long-distance communication, contraceptives, weather forecasts, food preservation, insect repellants, electric light, sunglasses, robots, tractors, waste disposal, fire, wheel and beer... what has science ever done for us?
It disturbs me that Monty Python seems to be such an accurate portrayal of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the Middle Ages we used to have an agrarian society with an aristocracy based on land ownership. With our modern industrian society the membership in aristocracy is based on corporate ownership instead. Why are you so shocked about this? Did you perhaps think that human nature had changed, and aristocracy was a thing of the past?
"Traditional values" everywhere have always meant the defence of the rich and the powerful at the expense of everyone else. Always vote left-wing unless you happen to be in the top 1%, and even then only vote right-wing if you're willing to sell your soul for a bit more money.
Gives a whole meaning to Humans are Cthulhu.
Why "smuggle" anything? Just ship the thing in a standard cargo container through New York and rig it to explode when the container is opened. That way it'll explode in the harbor as the customs is opening it, terribly damaging New York and doing even worse to US economy due to the interruption of cargo flow.
Fire alarms contain a small amount of radiactive material. Didn't someone manage to build a working reactor from those a while ago?
Intelligence does not imply rationality. It doesn't even imply sanity. It certainly doesn't imply giving a flying fuck about how many people die as a result of your actions.
1. ^ comment, Gregg Alan (31.03.2011), Slashdot
They are significant enough to keep people from getting in and contributing. That means they are significant.
Firefox 4 has a 100% CPU usage bug that keeps me from switching to it. In general, Firefox seems to be getting worse: options keep getting removed and irrelevant new features - such as "personas" - added, all of which is balanced by the extension mechanism - for now.
So... Out of curiosity, what kind of sources is it okay to cite in college? Because just excluding encyclopedias seems rather arbitrary and pointless.
Well, there was this guy, Karl Marx was his name. He realized that there are a lot more poor and weak people than rich and powerful people, and together these poor and weak are more powerful than the rich and powerful. He wrote a book about this, "Communist Manifesto" it was called, and some people took note and put theory to practice. At this point the rich and powerful got scared and decided it's better to give the poor and weak something to lose besides their chains before they realize they have the whole world to win if they just work together, and created social security systems to act as the "bread" part of "bread and circuses" (mass media is the "circus" part).
Mind you, in some countries a sort of balance was reached, where the weak and powerful worked together for common good. This was called a "welfare state", and it was a huge success (as cooperation between partners who can trust each other always is), until Reagonomics spawned in America and infected the whole Western world, at which point things started going to Hell.
I hope that the welfare state and the voluntary (truly voluntary, for threat of starvation doesn't force your obedience) cooperation and pride in one's work it embodies can eventually be resurrected, but right now, keeping the Western world from outright falling to the not-so-voluntary cooperation of China - which still is superior to the "everyone for themselves" model of Capitalism - is an immediate priority, for it is a prerequisite for such undoing of Reagan's dark legacy. And I guess the second step would be to get the libertarians behind welfare-statists, as a welfare state is the closest to the voluntary cooperation ideal humanity is likely to get as long as resources are still scarce.
The program is legally mandated, so as a matter of fact people are entitled to it. They are just as entitled to social security as you are entitled to protection of life and property. And, more importantly, you are no more entitled to protection of life and property as the weak and poor are entitled to social security.
There is only so far you can push people before they push back, and years of right-wing evil have pushed them pretty far. I, for one, will vote communists from now on, and if that doesn't help... we shall see.
He did. "Mein Kampf" is basically one long diatribe about how Jews were trying to destroy Germans, and how Germany's areas had been forcibly taken and annexed to other countries. The last part was actually true, which is part of how Hitler managed to get power.
All of which, BTW, makes an excellent answer to anyone who says "world is not fair, deal with it": the more unfair the world is, the easier it is for the next Hitler/Stalin/Mao to get into power and start World War 3. So go ahead, cut those unemployment benefits and social security, if you feel lucky. Well, do ya, punk?
For large-scale solar power production, you don't use solar panels, you use concentrating solar plants. They don't use any exotic materials, but simply use mirrors to concentrate sunlight (hence the name), boil water, and use the steam to drive turbines.
If you think it doesn't require massive upper body strength to keep your hands lifted and pointing at something for 8 hours straight 5 days a week, you should try it.
Or, alternatively, deny them life-saving treatments should any unfortunate accidents happen to them.
You are thinking like a normal human being. Insurance company thinks like a psychopath. That's why theory and practice continue being so far away in capitalism.
Humanity is just fine. It's just that scum rises to top.
It's not bad, it's just unlikely. After all, compared to insurance firms - especially medical insurance firms - lawyers, politicians, and even the RIAA itself are shining pillars of ethical perfection.
Anyone who goes after this price money is committing murders. Seriously.
More likely, the investors simply remember having heard of Facebook and throw money at them after a nominal examination, if that. Just like they did during the housing bubble, and before that the dotcom bubble, and every other bubble in history.
Investors are just as much a bunch of lazy bastards as the rest of us. The sooner people realize that, and that people don't stop being people because money's involved, the sooner we can stop blindly trusting their judgement and implement the economic controls needed keep crashes from happening.
In the meantime, most investors who's money's at Facebook likely tought like you do, and skipped any serious investigation because surely those who came before them did it, right?
And instead, far more people, animals and plants die from the usage of coal power. Why do you hate humanity and nature so much?
Usually, it's a self-diagnosis for people who want an excuse for their bad behaviour, one which also makes them seem better than the rest - you know, "too good for this sinful Earth" updated for the sentiments of the age of science.
However, in this case the diagnosis seems to be done by an actual psychologist, so it's probably trustworthy.
Yes, amazingly enough it's possible to lead a happy, succesful and productive life even if you have a mental or physical condition. That might have something to do with how the purpose of diagnosis is not to divide the world into winners and losers, but to identify potential problems that might need to be treated or otherwise taken into account.
But I suppose you can't be faulted for being under such an impression, given the "excuse" aspect of self-diagnosed Asperger's I mentioned above.
It translates into ensuring that children who have the condition train social contacts enough to become full-functional adults, since that's where the condition often causes problems. It's the same as any other diagnosis: defend against potential problems before they have a chance to develop, and solve any that already have.
If he has both sense and intelligence, he writes a stock performance predictor, uses it himself, and makes money himself rather than enriching some parasite.
But it's exactly the kind of thing that supports cyborgization. Suppose you could remove your brains from inside your skull and put them into a giant jar and remote-control your body? Then they would no longer be limited by the need to pass your head through your mothers birth canal. How intelligent could you become, then?
Except, of course, that with modern processors assembler is really a highly abstracted virtual machine running over the actual hardware. The modern processor typically has multiple pipelines, out-of-order execution, and a greater number of general-purpose registers than is made available by the instruction set.
Programming main requires an insane attention to detail, since getting any detail wrong will cause the program to either crash or develop security holes. Most people aren't monomaniacs, so most programs are full of bugs.
Managed environments help, but don't solve the underlaying problem: any error causes completely unpredictable behaviour, rather than a few hiccups the system could recover from. We know that Turing powerful systems can degrade gracefully: human brains are (at least) Turing powerful, yet drunk humans can still walk - not a gracefully as when sober, but can anyway.
Now, the question is: how do you make a system where errors don't cause a cascade failure, as they do in current programs? How do you build a system where programming errors are more like a badly tuned car engine than Chernobyl meltdown?
We don't have overpopulation, we are well within the carrying capacity of this world. And with population growth leveling off everywhere, we'll also stay within it.
As I said, famine has been ended in industrialized countries. It still occurs in developing ones like it did here, and for the same reason: their technology - applied science - hasn't gotten good enough yet.
War has been with us as long as there has been humans, and likely before, judging by how chimpansees act. It has nothing to do with science.
What does HIV have to do with science, apart from science keeping the victims alive and non-contagious while looking for a cure?
Compare the pollution now and, say, a century ago. Why are the skies clear now? Because science came up with more efficient processes and waste treatment.
And since protests inevitably bring up the thing people are protesting against, taking part in one is treason. So is reporting about those protests, for the same reason. And of course the matter can't be discussed in a public forum like this one, newspapers, TV, etc.
You people keep on demonstrating over and over again that you have exactly the government you deserve.
I wouldn't. The easier it's to block something from elementary school library, the easier it is to block it from my home. And once they've come for porn peddlers, it's easier to continue to silence wikileaks, IRC, P2P, etc. After all, they'll have a previous example to point to, and besides anything that can transfer information can transfer porn.
I saw porn as a preteen kid, and it didn't kill, scar or pervert me. In fact it didn't affect me at all, it simply looked weird. It won't kill, scar or pervert anyone else either. I wish people would stop with this idiotic idea that children are harmed if they see sex already.
At some point, having a puritanical upbringing stops being an excuse for harming others with your hysterics.
So... you're saying that the French workers actually have backbones and balls and get to reap the benefits of both?
Well, it did got rid of smallpox. And polio. And famine. And backbreaking farm work. And cities get clean drinking water and their waste is purified before being released.
But apart from medicine, plentiful food, clean water, warm houses, comfortable clothes, fast transportation, long-distance communication, contraceptives, weather forecasts, food preservation, insect repellants, electric light, sunglasses, robots, tractors, waste disposal, fire, wheel and beer... what has science ever done for us?
It disturbs me that Monty Python seems to be such an accurate portrayal of the world.