Try reading the summary again. This is not about whether or not Ubuntu includes proprietary software--it ALWAYS has.
This is about whether or not proprietary software is clearly identified as such. This is useful for pragmatic reasons, not just ideological. I prefer to avoid proprietary software if there is an alternative, simply because it tends to be considerably less future-proof. If it's an end user application, I don't want to waste my time learning an interface that is more likely than not going to stagnate (with no possibility for a fork or a manual build) or get loaded up with crapware features. If it's a driver then I'm a little less likely to go out of my way to avoid it, but I will certainly look at the alternatives if it's a binary blob and I will make a mental note of what hardware doesn't have a good open source driver for future purchases, purely on the basis of future proofing, compatibility and security concerns.
Call me paranoid, but I really have to wonder what the motivation of the anti-Stallman brigade is. His ideas, like them or hate them, aren't negatively affecting anyone at this point. (This is assuming we ignore the fools who insist the GPL is killing Linux; the GPL has enabled access to a plethora of corporate-sponsored contributions that otherwise would have certainly been closed source. If you want to count OS X as a win for the BSD community that is your prerogative, but it is nowhere near customizable enough for my needs. If you want to pretend that Google would have open sourced Android out of the goodness of their heart even if they had been building on a 100% permissive-licensed codebase from the very beginning, you need to pull your head out of the sand.)
Proprietary stuff is and has been widely available. Nobody uses Gnewsense. There is no significant movement to remove proprietary software from the vast majority of distros. But there is every reason in the world to clearly indicate which pieces of software are proprietary... not so we can try to mindlessly boycott it, but so we can take into account how this might affect us in very real, non-ideological ways.
If you copyright your project's name and logo, shouldn't you be able to demand that it be re-branded? See: Icecat/Ice Weasel, CentOS, etc. The code stays open source, but SF would have to rename it and give it a different icon and that should hopefully alert anyone who has half a clue.
Lawfully purchased for distribution in the US. Not in Canada.
The distribution rights were negotiated by Netflix, not the consumer. Netflix can *try* to pass that restriction on to the consumer in the form of a EULA, but this is a highly theoretical approach, not a matter of settled law. Yes, courts have enforced *some* laws in a EULA, but unlike the contract Netflix has signed with the content producers, the EULA is a contract of adhesion. Courts tend to take a very dim view of jamming ridiculous restrictions into a contract of adhesion. The absolute most they might uphold is the right of Netflix to terminate customers who use VPNs. By no stretch of the imagination would they hold the customer liable for any sort of copyright violation. (If that is what you were implying at any point here.)
So, that takes care of the positive. As for the normative, if you believe that this anti-free market three ring circus is how our societies should operate (with full support from our courts), well, the best that can be said of you is you're in favor of crony capitalism. I'm still in search of a better pejorative to describe such people who not only believe that monopolies are good, but that they should be allowed to utterly destroy the law of one price. "Fascist" may be applicable here, but unfortunately it was never well-defined as an economic system and it has too many other connotations.
"America" is not the official name of any country and is a valid reference to anyone who lives in any of the American continents -- north, south, or central.
"Mexico" is not the official name of any country. Therefore, "Mexican" may refer to a citizen of the United Mexican States (the name of the country to our south), or a citizen of Mexico, Indiana or Mexico, Kentucky or Mexico, Maine or Mexico, Missouri or Mexico, Texas, etc.
I'm a tenacious pedant too but it's extremely stupid to attack a term that 1. is perfectly understood by all listeners and 2. has no widely understood substitute that isn't extremely wordy. I'm not going to say "citizen of the United States of America" every time, and neither is anyone else of importance.
I was taking capitalism as a synonym for free market capitalism. If you mean crony capitalism then why yes, this is perfectly capitalistic behavior!
Understand that this goes way beyond the monopoly offered by copyright (which by itself is already pretty suspect.) If the law of one price breaks down and the producer is able to gobble up arbitrary amounts of the consumer's surplus, free market capitalism is not operating in any meaningful sense of the term except in the very, very broad sense that it isn't communist.
no, you are paying for access to a content library, which is licensed by netflix for your region.
The key words are "by Netflix". Not "by me, the consumer."
There might be something in the EULA about agreeing to only use the service in the USA, but trying to sue using that clause is going to be pretty tough as the courts generally don't allow a bunch of bullshit gotchas being shoved in contracts of adhesion. (And revoking the right to use a product you've paid for the moment you step foot in another country is a pretty big gotcha.)
+4 Insightful? Seriously, do you people even know what a Saturday Night Special is? It's a gun that poor people can afford. That's all. I'm not sure exactly what the AC was trying to imply, it's not some kind of bizarre black market chopper thing, nor have they ever been especially popular with criminals.
It isn't "buying and using the exact same product that Americans [sic] are using," because Netflix didn't sell it to them. Netflix cannot legally sell it to them.
Like I said in my original post, this is incorrect. A Canadian [sic][1] can subscribe to Netflix while on vacation in the States and there is no issue with them watching using the hotel's wifi. Then they go back home with 20 days left on the subscription and, like someone with a bottle of cheap medicine in their pocket, want to take their lawfully purchased product with them and enjoy it. And they can, using a VPN. Netflix can sign all of the agreements it wants, but the large majority of the population will never view this scenario as theft.
Agreements that require a seller keep tabs on a customer's physical location (not merely the location of the server--as I stated elsewhere, with a VPN the packets *Netflix* addresses never leave the country) and actively deny them the already-purchased product when they venture outside invisible lines are ridiculous on their face.
1. "Canada" is an erroneous name that literally means "village". So if you're going to be pedantic about referring to Americans as Americans, why not also be pedantic about referring to Canadians as Villagers?
As you point out, the ticket is not the thing of value; it is merely an indicator of the thing of value (being able to go somewhere or attend something.) If resale of the thing of value is being prevented, then that is no way a "fully capitalistic practice".
Again, it's not about "good reasons." There are sometimes good reasons to do things that run against the free market, but that doesn't mean those things are pro-free market. An exception to a rule is (for better or worse) an *exception* to a rule, not an embodiment of it.
I would go further and say that no "good reason" exists here (re: Netflix in Canada), although that conversation is a messier because it involves analyzing the monetary motivations of a lot of interconnected parties. But in a truly free market, the default assumption should be that there is no good reason. The burden of proof should fall on the person or entity demanding an exception.
I agree that on the whole child-specific pricing is probably helpful to the economy. (Though I'm much less sure about student and senior discounts.)
But you are wrong to characterize it as a "fully capitalistic practice." Anything that prevents resale or transfer is anti-capitalistic. That isn't to say that absolutely everything in life has to be pro-free market, but when you begin your analysis you must begin by acknowledging that preventing someone from reselling something is in no way in the spirit of the free market. (Yes, I'm aware I'm using those two terms interchangeably, but as they are popularly understood they pretty much are interchangeable.)
Yeah, that did briefly occur to me but fascist is more frequently interpreted as a synonym for dictatorial or totalitarian states. Fascism as an economic policy was never well defined; it was just some nebulous form of state-corporate cooperation or melding. And it's also worth noting that it arose in a radically different legal context, when exclusivity agreements tended to be rarer and much harder to enforce in practice.
Similarly, Netflix has a distribution right to someone in the US; once they have to ship it across the border they don't have that right.
They aren't "shipping it across the border". They are "shipping" it to a server located in the United States; the customer, then, "ships" it across the border via the VPN. Essentially the same situation as with prescription drugs.
And I expect that a significant number of people do consider that to be illegal (if not specifically "stealing"), or at a minimum unethical. Not on/., however.
I don't know what kind of people you hang out with, then, but I don't think they're representative. I'm not saying they all agree with my or with./'s ethical worldview, but the average person is definitely subscribes to the "I bought it. I should be able to do what I want with it" point of view. This is an intuitive and particularly American POV that you will find is extremely common on both the right and the left (ordinary people; not politicians.) For example, there is no and has never been a widespread belief that jailbreaking a phone is unethical.
By circumventing the access controls (use of a VPN to masquerade as being in the US) you are obtaining content that you have not paid for.
No no, it was paid for. That's the friggin' point. They are paying what the Americans are paying and receiving the same product. "I'm not authorized to sell you that" ==> not my problem.
The analogy of a US resident buying drugs in Canada is also equally flawed, since the Canadian pharmacy has authority to sell him the drugs, it is US law that interferes in bringing them over the border.
This analogy is actually spot-on: compare to a Canadian subscribing to Netflix in the USA while on vacation and then trying to watch it back at home. The Canadian drug situation is a case of the same phenomenon--anti-competitive market segmentation given (some degree of) protection by law.
I think it is a fallacy to think that most of society would not call that "stealing", even if a smaller fraction would consider it significant./. is a VERY self-selected population and sampling opinion here and extrapolating that to society as a whole is begging for error.
We may have an echo chamber in here, but I think your perception of the population as a whole is pretty skewed. "Most people" are not in the habit of considering something to be theft just because some bullshit, counter-intuitive, anti-capitalistic laws says it is. I very much doubt that "most people" consider recording something on a DVR and fast-forwarding the commercials stealing, let alone buying and using the exact same product that Americans are using, for the exact same price.
Anyone who has passed an economics 101 class (micro or macro) should be grasp how this consumer discrimination stuff works: if the producer is able to discriminate against certain customers and offer different prices (and/or different products) then they are able to keep more surplus for themselves. It's blatantly anti-capitalistic in method and intent. If they are able to prevent arbitrage, if they can select and choose who has to pay how much and how (with no option of second sale), the free market breaks down entirely and what you end up with is simply one group fleecing another.
It's unfortunate that the left doesn't have a good pejorative (as with "socialist" or "communist") to describe the right's anti-capitalist bullshit. Phrases like "corporate greed" are way too vague for this kind of thing.
I've seen this approach advocated a few times and while I'm sure it works great in the southwest, it's worth pointing out that this simply does not work in hot-humid environments such as you'll find in much of the southeast.
The problem is twofold: one, you don't see the massive temperature reduction at night. Two, if you don't have the A/C removing humidity from the house then you're going to see rust and you're going to be uncomfortably sweating a lot of the time.
Ah, the anti-nuclear hysterics are out already. Please, go ahead and mod me down some more. Don't worry your pretty little heads with complicated issues like subtracting the number of people who died from Three Mile Island (statistically speaking, they think it might be as much one person. Years later, from cancer.) from the people who died from Deepwater Horizon (eleven did immediately. No word yet on whether the oil and oil dispersants will raise cancer risks, nor does the media care.)
I could be wrong on some of my speculation here and it's even conceivable I'm even deserving of a downmod for it, but I'm a little disappointed no one ever even tries to respond sensibly to the opportunity cost argument.
First the costs for long term securing spent fuel are grossly underestimated. After all, can we really estimate the cost of securing spent fuel for over 100'000 years? It's a bit of a philosophical question, but point is - it can't really be estimated.
Please. Just use the bin Laden solution. Once you have too much to store on-site just drop it in the Marianas trench. Problem fucking solved. Virtually impossible to locate (assuming coordinates are kept secret) and virtually impossible to retrieve even if you do know where it is. If any of it does ultimately dissolve in the seawater somehow, it would be utterly negligible compared to what coal power is doing to the ocean right now. Also, I'm curious about what isotopes we're producing in enough quantity that it would still be dangerous enough to worry about after 100k years. (And if there is such an isotope, why can't just we transmute it to something a little less stable first?)
Let me be clear on my sight. I am actually in favour of sensible use and development of nuclear energy. But this cannot be done without transparency, hiding the real costs.
The problem is the costs are done from some kind of utopian or hyper-paranoid point of view, instead of an opportunity cost vs. other forms of power generation. If we used a "cost of human life" approach where we look at the actual lives lost in actuarial terms, nuclear is far and away the cheapest. It's only when we look at the costs associated with senselessly pandering to anti-nuclear fears that it becomes pricey.
I will concede that reactors obviously need to have updated failsafes, as Fukushima painfully illustrated. However, I have yet to hear a newscaster or 'expert' mention Deepwater Horizon (or all of that mercury messing up our delicious tuna) in the same sentence as the Fukushima disaster.
And what about going in the other direction and figuring out how to harness the crazy excess power that nuclear offers? Thermal electrolysis of hydrogen in breeder reactors on a megaproject scale (with an embrittlement-proof pipeline) would completely revolutionize the economy whilst at the same time putting a huge dent in global warming.
I've no doubt the authors here have an agenda to push, but I've also no doubt that the truth lies much closer to their propaganda than it does to the hysteria that dominates all mainstream discussions on nuclear power.
The multiple desktops tool is impressively lightweight while being functional and easy to use, with both a mouse driven interface and shows a preview of other desktops and configurable keyboard shortcuts.
... annnnnnnnnnnnnnd it completely breaks a ton of apps like web browsers and parts of Microsoft Office. Most of the time it ends up such that you can only use an application on one virtual desktop at a time.
That's a separate issued that I addressed--for the sake of argument, I said let's assume we had a plausible space colonization tech to go along with the biological immortality tech.
The fact is that, right now, there is no global overpopulation problem. And although the challenges are many, given a few hundred years (at which point global overpopulation may indeed start to become serious) we may well have viable space travel and terraforming tech. So, I think the selfishness argument is premature and is ultimately vulnerable to obsolesce. If we have really mastered our biology to the supreme degree necessary to bestow practical immortality, I have a hard time believing we'd not also have the ability to terraform Mars with genetically engineered organisms.
I'm not saying that nonreligious people haven't found some profound and reassuring things to say about death, but their poignancy stems very heavily from death's inevitability. Certain wise men at their end wise men at their end do not fight for the simple and sole reason that they have had a lifetime to adjust themselves to their ultimately losing prospects. "Wisdom" that has evolved to explain away mortality as nothing to fear has evolved precisely because it is an inevitable enemy we have yet to vanquish.
I'm sorry to have to break this to you, but it isn't really wisdom so much as the ultimate in sour grapes.
It is only recently (in historic terms) that death has become stigmatised rather than accepted as inevitable, and even welcomed as a natural and positive progression.
I'm not sure if this is utter nonsense, or if you may have a point insofar as the Enlightenment was "historically recent" and has eaten away at some traditional sources of solace.
Attempts at immortality are still for the delusional, disconnected, and mentally ill.
Only if they are flawed attempts. If we eventually get some stuff that actually works, then (ignoring for a moment the larger social upheavals and eventual overpopulation issues--let's say we get plausible long term space travel, too) your choice to die at an arbitrary age of 80 or 90 becomes no different from a choice to die at 30. It is ultimately (and should always be) your choice, but it is not "mentally ill" for not wanting to check out on a timetable based solely on biology.
No, this isn't a very "consoling fact", but it seems very anthropocentric to assume that nature is here to console you or any other human....
Why do you keep assuming I give a shit about nature? In every reply, I have reiterated my contempt for any obsession over that which is "natural". I am pointing out that ecosystems can in fact die off due to catastrophe and to argue that this destruction is just some part of a larger million-year ecosystem is as foolish and irrelevant as arguing that the heat death of the universe is part of our ecosystem.
Obviously, the eruption from 30 years ago wasn't a major eruption and it looks like this one won't be, either. That said, it is worth examining how these eruptions affect the ecosystem in a careful and studied manner (beginning by examining eruptions prior to the one 30 years ago--has it been active for hundreds of thousands of years, or is this a more recent development?). We *can* in fact make a reasonably objective judgement about whether or not something is harmful to the ecology... because ecology is not a synonym for nature. That's my only point here.
Slashdot Mirror
Try reading the summary again. This is not about whether or not Ubuntu includes proprietary software--it ALWAYS has.
This is about whether or not proprietary software is clearly identified as such. This is useful for pragmatic reasons, not just ideological. I prefer to avoid proprietary software if there is an alternative, simply because it tends to be considerably less future-proof. If it's an end user application, I don't want to waste my time learning an interface that is more likely than not going to stagnate (with no possibility for a fork or a manual build) or get loaded up with crapware features. If it's a driver then I'm a little less likely to go out of my way to avoid it, but I will certainly look at the alternatives if it's a binary blob and I will make a mental note of what hardware doesn't have a good open source driver for future purchases, purely on the basis of future proofing, compatibility and security concerns.
Call me paranoid, but I really have to wonder what the motivation of the anti-Stallman brigade is. His ideas, like them or hate them, aren't negatively affecting anyone at this point. (This is assuming we ignore the fools who insist the GPL is killing Linux; the GPL has enabled access to a plethora of corporate-sponsored contributions that otherwise would have certainly been closed source. If you want to count OS X as a win for the BSD community that is your prerogative, but it is nowhere near customizable enough for my needs. If you want to pretend that Google would have open sourced Android out of the goodness of their heart even if they had been building on a 100% permissive-licensed codebase from the very beginning, you need to pull your head out of the sand.)
Proprietary stuff is and has been widely available. Nobody uses Gnewsense. There is no significant movement to remove proprietary software from the vast majority of distros. But there is every reason in the world to clearly indicate which pieces of software are proprietary... not so we can try to mindlessly boycott it, but so we can take into account how this might affect us in very real, non-ideological ways.
Yeah, sorry, that's what I meant.
If you copyright your project's name and logo, shouldn't you be able to demand that it be re-branded? See: Icecat/Ice Weasel, CentOS, etc. The code stays open source, but SF would have to rename it and give it a different icon and that should hopefully alert anyone who has half a clue.
Lucas can solve this by simply turning the blasters into walkie talkies in the next special edition.
Lawfully purchased for distribution in the US. Not in Canada.
The distribution rights were negotiated by Netflix, not the consumer. Netflix can *try* to pass that restriction on to the consumer in the form of a EULA, but this is a highly theoretical approach, not a matter of settled law. Yes, courts have enforced *some* laws in a EULA, but unlike the contract Netflix has signed with the content producers, the EULA is a contract of adhesion. Courts tend to take a very dim view of jamming ridiculous restrictions into a contract of adhesion. The absolute most they might uphold is the right of Netflix to terminate customers who use VPNs. By no stretch of the imagination would they hold the customer liable for any sort of copyright violation. (If that is what you were implying at any point here.)
So, that takes care of the positive. As for the normative, if you believe that this anti-free market three ring circus is how our societies should operate (with full support from our courts), well, the best that can be said of you is you're in favor of crony capitalism. I'm still in search of a better pejorative to describe such people who not only believe that monopolies are good, but that they should be allowed to utterly destroy the law of one price. "Fascist" may be applicable here, but unfortunately it was never well-defined as an economic system and it has too many other connotations.
"America" is not the official name of any country and is a valid reference to anyone who lives in any of the American continents -- north, south, or central.
"Mexico" is not the official name of any country. Therefore, "Mexican" may refer to a citizen of the United Mexican States (the name of the country to our south), or a citizen of Mexico, Indiana or Mexico, Kentucky or Mexico, Maine or Mexico, Missouri or Mexico, Texas, etc.
I'm a tenacious pedant too but it's extremely stupid to attack a term that 1. is perfectly understood by all listeners and 2. has no widely understood substitute that isn't extremely wordy. I'm not going to say "citizen of the United States of America" every time, and neither is anyone else of importance.
I was taking capitalism as a synonym for free market capitalism. If you mean crony capitalism then why yes, this is perfectly capitalistic behavior!
Understand that this goes way beyond the monopoly offered by copyright (which by itself is already pretty suspect.) If the law of one price breaks down and the producer is able to gobble up arbitrary amounts of the consumer's surplus, free market capitalism is not operating in any meaningful sense of the term except in the very, very broad sense that it isn't communist.
no, you are paying for access to a content library, which is licensed by netflix for your region.
The key words are "by Netflix". Not "by me, the consumer."
There might be something in the EULA about agreeing to only use the service in the USA, but trying to sue using that clause is going to be pretty tough as the courts generally don't allow a bunch of bullshit gotchas being shoved in contracts of adhesion. (And revoking the right to use a product you've paid for the moment you step foot in another country is a pretty big gotcha.)
+4 Insightful? Seriously, do you people even know what a Saturday Night Special is? It's a gun that poor people can afford. That's all. I'm not sure exactly what the AC was trying to imply, it's not some kind of bizarre black market chopper thing, nor have they ever been especially popular with criminals.
It isn't "buying and using the exact same product that Americans [sic] are using," because Netflix didn't sell it to them. Netflix cannot legally sell it to them.
Like I said in my original post, this is incorrect. A Canadian [sic][1] can subscribe to Netflix while on vacation in the States and there is no issue with them watching using the hotel's wifi. Then they go back home with 20 days left on the subscription and, like someone with a bottle of cheap medicine in their pocket, want to take their lawfully purchased product with them and enjoy it. And they can, using a VPN. Netflix can sign all of the agreements it wants, but the large majority of the population will never view this scenario as theft.
Agreements that require a seller keep tabs on a customer's physical location (not merely the location of the server--as I stated elsewhere, with a VPN the packets *Netflix* addresses never leave the country) and actively deny them the already-purchased product when they venture outside invisible lines are ridiculous on their face.
1. "Canada" is an erroneous name that literally means "village". So if you're going to be pedantic about referring to Americans as Americans, why not also be pedantic about referring to Canadians as Villagers?
As you point out, the ticket is not the thing of value; it is merely an indicator of the thing of value (being able to go somewhere or attend something.) If resale of the thing of value is being prevented, then that is no way a "fully capitalistic practice".
Again, it's not about "good reasons." There are sometimes good reasons to do things that run against the free market, but that doesn't mean those things are pro-free market. An exception to a rule is (for better or worse) an *exception* to a rule, not an embodiment of it.
I would go further and say that no "good reason" exists here (re: Netflix in Canada), although that conversation is a messier because it involves analyzing the monetary motivations of a lot of interconnected parties. But in a truly free market, the default assumption should be that there is no good reason. The burden of proof should fall on the person or entity demanding an exception.
I agree that on the whole child-specific pricing is probably helpful to the economy. (Though I'm much less sure about student and senior discounts.)
But you are wrong to characterize it as a "fully capitalistic practice." Anything that prevents resale or transfer is anti-capitalistic. That isn't to say that absolutely everything in life has to be pro-free market, but when you begin your analysis you must begin by acknowledging that preventing someone from reselling something is in no way in the spirit of the free market. (Yes, I'm aware I'm using those two terms interchangeably, but as they are popularly understood they pretty much are interchangeable.)
Yeah, that did briefly occur to me but fascist is more frequently interpreted as a synonym for dictatorial or totalitarian states. Fascism as an economic policy was never well defined; it was just some nebulous form of state-corporate cooperation or melding. And it's also worth noting that it arose in a radically different legal context, when exclusivity agreements tended to be rarer and much harder to enforce in practice.
Similarly, Netflix has a distribution right to someone in the US; once they have to ship it across the border they don't have that right.
They aren't "shipping it across the border". They are "shipping" it to a server located in the United States; the customer, then, "ships" it across the border via the VPN. Essentially the same situation as with prescription drugs.
And I expect that a significant number of people do consider that to be illegal (if not specifically "stealing"), or at a minimum unethical. Not on /., however.
I don't know what kind of people you hang out with, then, but I don't think they're representative. I'm not saying they all agree with my or with ./'s ethical worldview, but the average person is definitely subscribes to the "I bought it. I should be able to do what I want with it" point of view. This is an intuitive and particularly American POV that you will find is extremely common on both the right and the left (ordinary people; not politicians.) For example, there is no and has never been a widespread belief that jailbreaking a phone is unethical.
By circumventing the access controls (use of a VPN to masquerade as being in the US) you are obtaining content that you have not paid for.
No no, it was paid for. That's the friggin' point. They are paying what the Americans are paying and receiving the same product. "I'm not authorized to sell you that" ==> not my problem.
The analogy of a US resident buying drugs in Canada is also equally flawed, since the Canadian pharmacy has authority to sell him the drugs, it is US law that interferes in bringing them over the border.
This analogy is actually spot-on: compare to a Canadian subscribing to Netflix in the USA while on vacation and then trying to watch it back at home. The Canadian drug situation is a case of the same phenomenon--anti-competitive market segmentation given (some degree of) protection by law.
I think it is a fallacy to think that most of society would not call that "stealing", even if a smaller fraction would consider it significant. /. is a VERY self-selected population and sampling opinion here and extrapolating that to society as a whole is begging for error.
We may have an echo chamber in here, but I think your perception of the population as a whole is pretty skewed. "Most people" are not in the habit of considering something to be theft just because some bullshit, counter-intuitive, anti-capitalistic laws says it is. I very much doubt that "most people" consider recording something on a DVR and fast-forwarding the commercials stealing, let alone buying and using the exact same product that Americans are using, for the exact same price.
Anyone who has passed an economics 101 class (micro or macro) should be grasp how this consumer discrimination stuff works: if the producer is able to discriminate against certain customers and offer different prices (and/or different products) then they are able to keep more surplus for themselves. It's blatantly anti-capitalistic in method and intent. If they are able to prevent arbitrage, if they can select and choose who has to pay how much and how (with no option of second sale), the free market breaks down entirely and what you end up with is simply one group fleecing another.
It's unfortunate that the left doesn't have a good pejorative (as with "socialist" or "communist") to describe the right's anti-capitalist bullshit. Phrases like "corporate greed" are way too vague for this kind of thing.
I've seen this approach advocated a few times and while I'm sure it works great in the southwest, it's worth pointing out that this simply does not work in hot-humid environments such as you'll find in much of the southeast.
The problem is twofold: one, you don't see the massive temperature reduction at night. Two, if you don't have the A/C removing humidity from the house then you're going to see rust and you're going to be uncomfortably sweating a lot of the time.
I mean what's next, salted client-side hashing for all our web passwords? Nah, that's way too sensible.
Ah, the anti-nuclear hysterics are out already. Please, go ahead and mod me down some more. Don't worry your pretty little heads with complicated issues like subtracting the number of people who died from Three Mile Island (statistically speaking, they think it might be as much one person. Years later, from cancer.) from the people who died from Deepwater Horizon (eleven did immediately. No word yet on whether the oil and oil dispersants will raise cancer risks, nor does the media care.)
I could be wrong on some of my speculation here and it's even conceivable I'm even deserving of a downmod for it, but I'm a little disappointed no one ever even tries to respond sensibly to the opportunity cost argument.
First the costs for long term securing spent fuel are grossly underestimated. After all, can we really estimate the cost of securing spent fuel for over 100'000 years? It's a bit of a philosophical question, but point is - it can't really be estimated.
Please. Just use the bin Laden solution. Once you have too much to store on-site just drop it in the Marianas trench. Problem fucking solved. Virtually impossible to locate (assuming coordinates are kept secret) and virtually impossible to retrieve even if you do know where it is. If any of it does ultimately dissolve in the seawater somehow, it would be utterly negligible compared to what coal power is doing to the ocean right now. Also, I'm curious about what isotopes we're producing in enough quantity that it would still be dangerous enough to worry about after 100k years. (And if there is such an isotope, why can't just we transmute it to something a little less stable first?)
Let me be clear on my sight. I am actually in favour of sensible use and development of nuclear energy. But this cannot be done without transparency, hiding the real costs.
The problem is the costs are done from some kind of utopian or hyper-paranoid point of view, instead of an opportunity cost vs. other forms of power generation. If we used a "cost of human life" approach where we look at the actual lives lost in actuarial terms, nuclear is far and away the cheapest. It's only when we look at the costs associated with senselessly pandering to anti-nuclear fears that it becomes pricey.
I will concede that reactors obviously need to have updated failsafes, as Fukushima painfully illustrated. However, I have yet to hear a newscaster or 'expert' mention Deepwater Horizon (or all of that mercury messing up our delicious tuna) in the same sentence as the Fukushima disaster.
And what about going in the other direction and figuring out how to harness the crazy excess power that nuclear offers? Thermal electrolysis of hydrogen in breeder reactors on a megaproject scale (with an embrittlement-proof pipeline) would completely revolutionize the economy whilst at the same time putting a huge dent in global warming.
I've no doubt the authors here have an agenda to push, but I've also no doubt that the truth lies much closer to their propaganda than it does to the hysteria that dominates all mainstream discussions on nuclear power.
My car can fly, thanks to the power of lies!
--[some old bash.org quote I can't find at the moment]
The multiple desktops tool is impressively lightweight while being functional and easy to use, with both a mouse driven interface and shows a preview of other desktops and configurable keyboard shortcuts.
... annnnnnnnnnnnnnd it completely breaks a ton of apps like web browsers and parts of Microsoft Office. Most of the time it ends up such that you can only use an application on one virtual desktop at a time.
It's a toy. Not a Powertoy; just a toy.
I'll start holding my breath.
That's a separate issued that I addressed--for the sake of argument, I said let's assume we had a plausible space colonization tech to go along with the biological immortality tech.
The fact is that, right now, there is no global overpopulation problem. And although the challenges are many, given a few hundred years (at which point global overpopulation may indeed start to become serious) we may well have viable space travel and terraforming tech. So, I think the selfishness argument is premature and is ultimately vulnerable to obsolesce. If we have really mastered our biology to the supreme degree necessary to bestow practical immortality, I have a hard time believing we'd not also have the ability to terraform Mars with genetically engineered organisms.
I'm sorry to have to break this to you, but it isn't really wisdom so much as the ultimate in sour grapes.
It is only recently (in historic terms) that death has become stigmatised rather than accepted as inevitable, and even welcomed as a natural and positive progression.
I'm not sure if this is utter nonsense, or if you may have a point insofar as the Enlightenment was "historically recent" and has eaten away at some traditional sources of solace.
Attempts at immortality are still for the delusional, disconnected, and mentally ill.
Only if they are flawed attempts. If we eventually get some stuff that actually works, then (ignoring for a moment the larger social upheavals and eventual overpopulation issues--let's say we get plausible long term space travel, too) your choice to die at an arbitrary age of 80 or 90 becomes no different from a choice to die at 30. It is ultimately (and should always be) your choice, but it is not "mentally ill" for not wanting to check out on a timetable based solely on biology.
No, this isn't a very "consoling fact", but it seems very anthropocentric to assume that nature is here to console you or any other human....
Why do you keep assuming I give a shit about nature? In every reply, I have reiterated my contempt for any obsession over that which is "natural". I am pointing out that ecosystems can in fact die off due to catastrophe and to argue that this destruction is just some part of a larger million-year ecosystem is as foolish and irrelevant as arguing that the heat death of the universe is part of our ecosystem.
Obviously, the eruption from 30 years ago wasn't a major eruption and it looks like this one won't be, either. That said, it is worth examining how these eruptions affect the ecosystem in a careful and studied manner (beginning by examining eruptions prior to the one 30 years ago--has it been active for hundreds of thousands of years, or is this a more recent development?). We *can* in fact make a reasonably objective judgement about whether or not something is harmful to the ecology... because ecology is not a synonym for nature. That's my only point here.