Yep... The even sadder thing is that you and people like you are still going to pay $15 to see it.
Ask people if they think big budget Hollywood blockbusters are crap, 90% say yes. Ask people if they are going to see the next big budget Hollywood blockbuster, 90% say yes.
Is it masocism? Or do people really like the movies and it is fashionable to be a player hater nowadays?
Al Gore didn't take a lead creating in the creation of the internet... the internet started as ARPAnet in the 60's, way before Al Gore had much of a political career.
So, even the idea that Al Gore took a political role in creating the Internet is a falsehood. Al Gore had nothing to do with creating, supporting, enhancing the internet, other than give some nice pork contracts to tech companies that donated money to the Democratic party.
Canada: Native North Americans Britain: Just about everywhere in the world during the height of their empire. Japan: Millions of Chinese. Australia: Aborigional Austrialians.
And that is just blatent genocide. In all those countries, minorities are more likely to be imprisoned, more likely to be murdered, more likely to be victims of racial motivated attack.
Except that banning guns is usually followed by banning the people.
I mean, I know that there have been no documented cases of Genocide in world history... and I know that the United States is the pinnacle of democracy where poor and minorities are never disenfranchised... And police officers are always good and honest and ALWAYS there to protect people and never to harm them.
But, imagine a science fiction scenario (nothing like this could happen in real life, of course!), where our "Great Society" and "War on Poverty" programs are used as an excuse to force minorities into segregated ghettos (er, I am sorry, fabulous Soviet style housing projects), where under the guise of providing "equitable public education" the government rounds up and warehouses the young 5 days a week where they don't learn anything and their culture and pride is slowly destroyed... and then under the guise of "protecting them from greed", made all kinds of insane rules and regulations that make starting a buisness or earning a living impossible, forcing them to commute to less regulated areas to work menial jobs for those allowed to start buisnesses... and then, under the guise of "War on Drugs", and "Fighting Crime", they are constantly stopped, searched, harrassed, and imprisoned for life for doing things that harm nobody else but themselves.
And now, imagine the same people who did all those other terrible things to them, now decided they would "help" them by disarming them. Well, I would say that in that imaginary science fiction reality which bears no resemblance to our modern world, that it looks suspiciously like they want to remove the last tiny vestige of power that those people have left: the power to defend themselves.
Now, I know that you and all upper middle class gun control advocates are good tolerant and open minded people, and wanting to ban guns has nothing to do with the fact that the gun owner is stereotyped as either a ignorant redneck (i.e. rural poor and disadvantaged), or a street thug (i.e. urban poor and disadvantaged)... and certainly is not because you as a white middle class suburbanite know that the police who enforce gun control laws like your kind of people more than those kind of people.
But perhaps, as a kind of intellectual exercise (after all, self-rightous liberals are always telling us how smart they are), you could imagine what it would be like if the fantastical world I described really existed. And why, in that mythical world, getting rid of privatly owned guns would be the worse thing that could happen
"I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarctic - with its vast fossil hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice caps. And I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain."
"The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws. There were truncated cones, sometimes terraced or fluted, surmounted by tall cylindrical shafts here and there bulbously enlarged and often capped with tiers of thinnish scalloped disks; and strange beetling, table-like constructions suggesting piles of multitudinous rectangular slabs or circular plates or five-pointed stars with each one overlapping the one beneath. There were composite cones and pyramids either alone or surmounting cylinders or cubes or flatter truncated cones and pyramids, and occasional needle-like spires in curious clusters of five. All of these febrile structures seemed knit together by tubular bridges crossing from one to the other at various dizzy heights, and the implied scale of the whole was terrifying and oppressive in its sheer gigantism. The general type of mirage was not unlike some of the wilder forms observed and drawn by the arctic whaler Scoresby in 1820, but at this time and place, with those dark, unknown mountain peaks soaring stupendously ahead, that anomalous elder-world discovery in our minds, and the pall of probable disaster enveloping the greater part of our expedition, we all seemed to find in it a taint of latent malignity and infinitely evil portent."
Yes, it was clearly G. W. Bush's fault that the dot coms failed. It certainly wasn't the fact that most dot coms never had a viable product, and out of those that did, they had no viable profit model (they were giving their product away for free). It certainly wasn't that dot com companies were springing up, getting loads of capital without any kind of scrutiny, and then chashing out as quick as possible.
The real people to blame for the IT crash are all those dotcom millionares who were essentially running Blue Sky scams, and drove up the price and then supply of IT labor, and then chashed out to move to Maui after the whole thing crashed.
Why don't YOU try using cash to purchase a plane ticket, a car rental, a hotel room, a web server? See how far you get! You cannot even pay a speeding ticket with cash any more, check or credit card only! ("Legal tender for all debts, public and private... except speeding tickets!"). Even if you only traveled by bike, sleep on street corners, and never use the internet, you are still going to need to get cash from an ATM (letting the government know exactly where in the world you are). And just try to get your boss to pay you in cash without telling the government (it is illegal to do so, punishable by 20 years in prison, so he won't be that worried about it, I am sure!).
Ummm, I know everyone on Slashdot is all hip to ban any commerce with any of those "evil foriegners stealing our jobs"... but did anyone ever consider that maybe trade is a two way street?
What makes you think you are going to ban outsourcing to India, and India won't ban stuff from the United States? What incentive would any country have to do buisness with the United States when the U.S. stops any kind of financial transaction they deem to be to their disadvantage? I mean, far more jobs are outsourced TO the United States than outsourced FROM the United States. Do you think those other countries are going to keep hiring highly trained and well paid professionals from the U.S. when we refuse to allow a few low paid tech-support jobs go to them?
Why is concept almost totally ignored on Slashdot?
OK, so it might sound 1984ish to have cameras everyone in public. Certainly it makes me nervous. But how is this survailence worse than what the IRS has been doing for the last 20 years at least? The IRS is already entitled to every bank and ATM transaction, every credit card transaction, a record of all the charities you give to, a record of all income you make, and if you are a buisness, a record of everything you spend your money on. All this long before The Patriot Act or 9/11 or George W Bush or the War on Terror / War on Drugs.
Certainly tracking a person's every financial transaction is far more dangerous to democracy - (Did you order those movie tickets to Farienheit 9/11 by phone? The government has a record! Did you donate to the Green Party, or the Natural Law Party, or The Libertarian Party? Who you vote for might be secret ballot, but the government knows who you donated to! Did you fly out and rent a hotel to participate in a protest? The government knows! Pay by credit card for your web server? Don't think your controversial political web blog can't be traced to you!).
You never hear a peep from so called "Civil Libertarians" about what I mentioned above... probably because challenging the complete and total financial survailence of every American means that it would be hard to tax people, and be hard to pay for those expensive government entitlement programs that have so effectivly eliminated poverty, racism, and war (yeah right!).
Having cameras in public places is more akin to having a police officer on every corner. Yes, it can (and probably will) be abused... but people are regularly abused by Police officers without using any hidden cameras. And at least in public places, there is the understanding that you are in public and can't expect total privacy.
It seems to me that people are OK with Big Brother, so long as Big Brother will give us the illusion of "freedom". The government can know everything single detail about your political, social, and economic life. But god forbid they catch you on camera picking your nose or something!
Of course we all know about G.W.Bush and the patriot act and all kinds of other bad stuff. No need to beat a dead horse on that, as most Slashdotters hate Bush already. We all agree that Bush is a bad, bad man.
But why the mindless cheerleading for those on the left?
It was the left who pushed the government to crack down on protests as a way to silence anti-choice protestors, and those same laws are now being used to crack down on protests of Bush.
It is the left that supported terrible censorship in the way of political correctness.
Leftists always scream bloody murder when the FBI wants to be able to access private information on demand in order to catch terrorists, but will support without question the right of the IRS to access private information on demand in order to tax people.
The left complains that the media is being controlled by a handfull of powerful corporations... their solution: put the media under the control of a handfull of powerful politicians.
The left always tell us about the need for the government to strongly regulate the economy. But when the government does enforce regulation like the DMCA, they suddenly change their tune.
The left protests when the U.S. government bombs children in other countries (and rightfuly so), but when the U.S. bombs children in Waco Texas U.S.A, they wholehearted support it.
The lefists complain about Republicans cheating the elections... and then use every dirty trick in the book to exclude candidates of other parties (Libertarians, Green Party).
I hate G. W. Bush and everything he stands for... but, come on, these people protesting are just as bad as G.W. Bush. Are people really so cought up in their political jingoism that they can't see how they are just as facist in action, and probably even more so in idiology, as G.W.Bush?
Really, are the Olympics anything more than sponser corporations and television networks and the tourist boards of cities trying to capitalize on the nationalism of their respective states?
I have no problem with the commercialization of sports... But I am disturbed by several things.
First, shouldn't the athletes get a cut of the money? I mean, it is the single most popular sporting event in the world. Look how much they make in the NBA, or how much footballers are paid. The athletes are the stars of the show, and other than maybe some endorsement deals afterwords, they get non of the share of the billions made from the Olympic Games.
Second, why do taxpayers have to pay to support the Olympics? Since it is just big buisness now (and there is nothing wrong with that in of itself), shouldn't those profiting from the Olympics bear the sole burdon. I don't see why I need to pay taxes to help the Olympic team promote their new softdrink. The hardworking taxpayer is being extorted to help a bunch of corporations increase their bottom line.
Third, why is it my patriotic duty to have some sort of nationalistic concern over who can throw a heavy object the farthest, or who can shoot a basket? They should give us the reports of how much the multinational corporations make/lose on the olympic games, and we should give the winners metals. Gold for Cocacola, Silver for Mitsubishi, and Bronze for IBM. That would be just as entertaining, and wouldn't stoke nationalistic rivalry.
While it is fashionable to claim to support free speech, only a tiny minority of people actually support free speech. Some people want campaign finance reform (esentially limiting how much people can donate to a party, so that only the two big parties can get enough money to advertize), some people want to ban advertizements against products they feel are bad (cigarettes, for example). Some people want to ban "hate speech". Left wing people and right wing people want to ban pornography, either because it "exploits women", or "is against the bible".
And now there are people on the left who are so angry about the Iraq War and The Patriot Act that they are willing to abandon the principle of free speech to win votes for... well... to win votes for someone else who wholeheartedly supported the Iraq War and Patriot Act.
When are people going to learn that it isn't some secret cabal of evil facists who are destroying free speech? It is people like your typical Slashdot reader who thinks they are enlightened and opened minded and support free speech, but who are willing to make exceptions for whatever speech they want to ban. YOU, the person reading this right now, more likely than not does not support freedom of speech.
No, no. If Librarians wanted to protect your right to check out books anonymously, you could just leave a deposit greater than the value of the books you are checking out. Librarians are government employees, and most governments want to track what kind of books people buy.
You also live in a very small, very rich country, that allows almost no immigration.
Of course it's easy to offer a free education to a tiny mono-ethnic group of people richer than 99.9% of the planet.
If all the richest people in the United States formed their own little national enclave and kept it carefully isolated from everyone else, and refused to share with anyone but their select few, I am sure it would be quite easy for them to provide free education and healthcare to everyone. It is hardly what I consider a model of egalitarianism.
Not true at all. Remember, your employer is paying unemployment insurance, your employer is also matching your social security deductions, and that doesn't include state income tax or city income tax, property tax, sales tax on the goods and services you buy, hidden taxes like gasoline tax or entertainment tax, inheritance tax, luxury taxes, capital gains on investments, etc., etc. Add in service fees (drivers licence, marrage registration, car registration, etc.)
The average person is probably paying closer to 60-80% of their income to the government in some form.
Even though nuclear energy is relatively safe, environmentally friendly, and the only practical solution to global warming we have right now, getting people of Mr. Sterling's generation to accept it will be impossible.
These people have grew up their whole lives with the word "nuclear" being associated with the word "Armageddon". Nuclear energy is permanently associated in their brain with "biblical disaster". They have been sold fear of nuclear annihilation from childhood (duck-and-cover propaganda), to adolescence (China Syndrome), to adulthood (The Day After), and are even now being sold fear about nuclear energy (Iraq weapons of mass destruction, anyone?). Baby Boomer response to nuclear energy is like a Catholic priest response to Satanism. They are never going to be psychological capable of viewing the situation rationally. Nuclear power has been their "Satan" figure for their entire lives, and they will never change.
Once the Boomers start dying off, people will realize the benefits of nuclear power once again. Hopefully global warming won't mess things up too bad before that happens.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep... The even sadder thing is that you and people like you are still going to pay $15 to see it.
Ask people if they think big budget Hollywood blockbusters are crap, 90% say yes. Ask people if they are going to see the next big budget Hollywood blockbuster, 90% say yes.
Is it masocism? Or do people really like the movies and it is fashionable to be a player hater nowadays?
Al Gore didn't take a lead creating in the creation of the internet... the internet started as ARPAnet in the 60's, way before Al Gore had much of a political career.
So, even the idea that Al Gore took a political role in creating the Internet is a falsehood. Al Gore had nothing to do with creating, supporting, enhancing the internet, other than give some nice pork contracts to tech companies that donated money to the Democratic party.
Canada: Native North Americans
Britain: Just about everywhere in the world during the height of their empire.
Japan: Millions of Chinese.
Australia: Aborigional Austrialians.
And that is just blatent genocide. In all those countries, minorities are more likely to be imprisoned, more likely to be murdered, more likely to be victims of racial motivated attack.
Except that banning guns is usually followed by banning the people.
I mean, I know that there have been no documented cases of Genocide in world history... and I know that the United States is the pinnacle of democracy where poor and minorities are never disenfranchised... And police officers are always good and honest and ALWAYS there to protect people and never to harm them.
But, imagine a science fiction scenario (nothing like this could happen in real life, of course!), where our "Great Society" and "War on Poverty" programs are used as an excuse to force minorities into segregated ghettos (er, I am sorry, fabulous Soviet style housing projects), where under the guise of providing "equitable public education" the government rounds up and warehouses the young 5 days a week where they don't learn anything and their culture and pride is slowly destroyed... and then under the guise of "protecting them from greed", made all kinds of insane rules and regulations that make starting a buisness or earning a living impossible, forcing them to commute to less regulated areas to work menial jobs for those allowed to start buisnesses... and then, under the guise of "War on Drugs", and "Fighting Crime", they are constantly stopped, searched, harrassed, and imprisoned for life for doing things that harm nobody else but themselves.
And now, imagine the same people who did all those other terrible things to them, now decided they would "help" them by disarming them. Well, I would say that in that imaginary science fiction reality which bears no resemblance to our modern world, that it looks suspiciously like they want to remove the last tiny vestige of power that those people have left: the power to defend themselves.
Now, I know that you and all upper middle class gun control advocates are good tolerant and open minded people, and wanting to ban guns has nothing to do with the fact that the gun owner is stereotyped as either a ignorant redneck (i.e. rural poor and disadvantaged), or a street thug (i.e. urban poor and disadvantaged)... and certainly is not because you as a white middle class suburbanite know that the police who enforce gun control laws like your kind of people more than those kind of people.
But perhaps, as a kind of intellectual exercise (after all, self-rightous liberals are always telling us how smart they are), you could imagine what it would be like if the fantastical world I described really existed. And why, in that mythical world, getting rid of privatly owned guns would be the worse thing that could happen
Remember the doomed Lake expedition!
"I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarctic - with its vast fossil hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice caps. And I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain."
"The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws. There were truncated cones, sometimes terraced or fluted, surmounted by tall cylindrical shafts here and there bulbously enlarged and often capped with tiers of thinnish scalloped disks; and strange beetling, table-like constructions suggesting piles of multitudinous rectangular slabs or circular plates or five-pointed stars with each one overlapping the one beneath. There were composite cones and pyramids either alone or surmounting cylinders or cubes or flatter truncated cones and pyramids, and occasional needle-like spires in curious clusters of five. All of these febrile structures seemed knit together by tubular bridges crossing from one to the other at various dizzy heights, and the implied scale of the whole was terrifying and oppressive in its sheer gigantism. The general type of mirage was not unlike some of the wilder forms observed and drawn by the arctic whaler Scoresby in 1820, but at this time and place, with those dark, unknown mountain peaks soaring stupendously ahead, that anomalous elder-world discovery in our minds, and the pall of probable disaster enveloping the greater part of our expedition, we all seemed to find in it a taint of latent malignity and infinitely evil portent."
Heed H.P. Lovecraft's warning!
Yes, it was clearly G. W. Bush's fault that the dot coms failed. It certainly wasn't the fact that most dot coms never had a viable product, and out of those that did, they had no viable profit model (they were giving their product away for free). It certainly wasn't that dot com companies were springing up, getting loads of capital without any kind of scrutiny, and then chashing out as quick as possible.
The real people to blame for the IT crash are all those dotcom millionares who were essentially running Blue Sky scams, and drove up the price and then supply of IT labor, and then chashed out to move to Maui after the whole thing crashed.
Why don't YOU try using cash to purchase a plane ticket, a car rental, a hotel room, a web server? See how far you get! You cannot even pay a speeding ticket with cash any more, check or credit card only! ("Legal tender for all debts, public and private... except speeding tickets!"). Even if you only traveled by bike, sleep on street corners, and never use the internet, you are still going to need to get cash from an ATM (letting the government know exactly where in the world you are). And just try to get your boss to pay you in cash without telling the government (it is illegal to do so, punishable by 20 years in prison, so he won't be that worried about it, I am sure!).
Ummm, I know everyone on Slashdot is all hip to ban any commerce with any of those "evil foriegners stealing our jobs"... but did anyone ever consider that maybe trade is a two way street?
What makes you think you are going to ban outsourcing to India, and India won't ban stuff from the United States? What incentive would any country have to do buisness with the United States when the U.S. stops any kind of financial transaction they deem to be to their disadvantage? I mean, far more jobs are outsourced TO the United States than outsourced FROM the United States. Do you think those other countries are going to keep hiring highly trained and well paid professionals from the U.S. when we refuse to allow a few low paid tech-support jobs go to them?
Why is concept almost totally ignored on Slashdot?
OK, so it might sound 1984ish to have cameras everyone in public. Certainly it makes me nervous. But how is this survailence worse than what the IRS has been doing for the last 20 years at least? The IRS is already entitled to every bank and ATM transaction, every credit card transaction, a record of all the charities you give to, a record of all income you make, and if you are a buisness, a record of everything you spend your money on. All this long before The Patriot Act or 9/11 or George W Bush or the War on Terror / War on Drugs.
Certainly tracking a person's every financial transaction is far more dangerous to democracy - (Did you order those movie tickets to Farienheit 9/11 by phone? The government has a record! Did you donate to the Green Party, or the Natural Law Party, or The Libertarian Party? Who you vote for might be secret ballot, but the government knows who you donated to! Did you fly out and rent a hotel to participate in a protest? The government knows! Pay by credit card for your web server? Don't think your controversial political web blog can't be traced to you!).
You never hear a peep from so called "Civil Libertarians" about what I mentioned above... probably because challenging the complete and total financial survailence of every American means that it would be hard to tax people, and be hard to pay for those expensive government entitlement programs that have so effectivly eliminated poverty, racism, and war (yeah right!).
Having cameras in public places is more akin to having a police officer on every corner. Yes, it can (and probably will) be abused... but people are regularly abused by Police officers without using any hidden cameras. And at least in public places, there is the understanding that you are in public and can't expect total privacy.
It seems to me that people are OK with Big Brother, so long as Big Brother will give us the illusion of "freedom". The government can know everything single detail about your political, social, and economic life. But god forbid they catch you on camera picking your nose or something!
Of course we all know about G.W.Bush and the patriot act and all kinds of other bad stuff. No need to beat a dead horse on that, as most Slashdotters hate Bush already. We all agree that Bush is a bad, bad man.
But why the mindless cheerleading for those on the left?
It was the left who pushed the government to crack down on protests as a way to silence anti-choice protestors, and those same laws are now being used to crack down on protests of Bush.
It is the left that supported terrible censorship in the way of political correctness.
Leftists always scream bloody murder when the FBI wants to be able to access private information on demand in order to catch terrorists, but will support without question the right of the IRS to access private information on demand in order to tax people.
The left complains that the media is being controlled by a handfull of powerful corporations... their solution: put the media under the control of a handfull of powerful politicians.
The left always tell us about the need for the government to strongly regulate the economy. But when the government does enforce regulation like the DMCA, they suddenly change their tune.
The left protests when the U.S. government bombs children in other countries (and rightfuly so), but when the U.S. bombs children in Waco Texas U.S.A, they wholehearted support it.
The lefists complain about Republicans cheating the elections... and then use every dirty trick in the book to exclude candidates of other parties (Libertarians, Green Party).
I hate G. W. Bush and everything he stands for... but, come on, these people protesting are just as bad as G.W. Bush. Are people really so cought up in their political jingoism that they can't see how they are just as facist in action, and probably even more so in idiology, as G.W.Bush?
...gives me a +3 Informative moderation bonus on Slashdot.
I hope I make this lame joke before all the other Slashdotters beat me in initiative and post it first!
Really, are the Olympics anything more than sponser corporations and television networks and the tourist boards of cities trying to capitalize on the nationalism of their respective states?
I have no problem with the commercialization of sports... But I am disturbed by several things.
First, shouldn't the athletes get a cut of the money? I mean, it is the single most popular sporting event in the world. Look how much they make in the NBA, or how much footballers are paid. The athletes are the stars of the show, and other than maybe some endorsement deals afterwords, they get non of the share of the billions made from the Olympic Games.
Second, why do taxpayers have to pay to support the Olympics? Since it is just big buisness now (and there is nothing wrong with that in of itself), shouldn't those profiting from the Olympics bear the sole burdon. I don't see why I need to pay taxes to help the Olympic team promote their new softdrink. The hardworking taxpayer is being extorted to help a bunch of corporations increase their bottom line.
Third, why is it my patriotic duty to have some sort of nationalistic concern over who can throw a heavy object the farthest, or who can shoot a basket? They should give us the reports of how much the multinational corporations make/lose on the olympic games, and we should give the winners metals. Gold for Cocacola, Silver for Mitsubishi, and Bronze for IBM. That would be just as entertaining, and wouldn't stoke nationalistic rivalry.
While it is fashionable to claim to support free speech, only a tiny minority of people actually support free speech. Some people want campaign finance reform (esentially limiting how much people can donate to a party, so that only the two big parties can get enough money to advertize), some people want to ban advertizements against products they feel are bad (cigarettes, for example). Some people want to ban "hate speech". Left wing people and right wing people want to ban pornography, either because it "exploits women", or "is against the bible".
And now there are people on the left who are so angry about the Iraq War and The Patriot Act that they are willing to abandon the principle of free speech to win votes for... well... to win votes for someone else who wholeheartedly supported the Iraq War and Patriot Act.
When are people going to learn that it isn't some secret cabal of evil facists who are destroying free speech? It is people like your typical Slashdot reader who thinks they are enlightened and opened minded and support free speech, but who are willing to make exceptions for whatever speech they want to ban. YOU, the person reading this right now, more likely than not does not support freedom of speech.
No, no. If Librarians wanted to protect your right to check out books anonymously, you could just leave a deposit greater than the value of the books you are checking out. Librarians are government employees, and most governments want to track what kind of books people buy.
You also live in a very small, very rich country, that allows almost no immigration.
Of course it's easy to offer a free education to a tiny mono-ethnic group of people richer than 99.9% of the planet.
If all the richest people in the United States formed their own little national enclave and kept it carefully isolated from everyone else, and refused to share with anyone but their select few, I am sure it would be quite easy for them to provide free education and healthcare to everyone. It is hardly what I consider a model of egalitarianism.
Not true at all. Remember, your employer is paying unemployment insurance, your employer is also matching your social security deductions, and that doesn't include state income tax or city income tax, property tax, sales tax on the goods and services you buy, hidden taxes like gasoline tax or entertainment tax, inheritance tax, luxury taxes, capital gains on investments, etc., etc. Add in service fees (drivers licence, marrage registration, car registration, etc.)
The average person is probably paying closer to 60-80% of their income to the government in some form.
Even though nuclear energy is relatively safe, environmentally friendly, and the only practical solution to global warming we have right now, getting people of Mr. Sterling's generation to accept it will be impossible.
These people have grew up their whole lives with the word "nuclear" being associated with the word "Armageddon". Nuclear energy is permanently associated in their brain with "biblical disaster". They have been sold fear of nuclear annihilation from childhood (duck-and-cover propaganda), to adolescence (China Syndrome), to adulthood (The Day After), and are even now being sold fear about nuclear energy (Iraq weapons of mass destruction, anyone?). Baby Boomer response to nuclear energy is like a Catholic priest response to Satanism. They are never going to be psychological capable of viewing the situation rationally. Nuclear power has been their "Satan" figure for their entire lives, and they will never change.
Once the Boomers start dying off, people will realize the benefits of nuclear power once again. Hopefully global warming won't mess things up too bad before that happens.