You've got it backwards. A government forcing a private entity to do business in a certain way is tyranny. A company producing a product that you don't like is free enterprise.
I don't know why I bother pointing this out but it's not just that Microsoft is producing a product. That as you say is free enterprise. The problem is the interface layer that they force any non microsoft entity to use doesn't allow free competition with other microsoft entities. That is the tyranny.
1. What aspects of our current social arrangement allow these problems (exploitation of other humans in the numerous forms it takes)?
None, these problems have existed throughout time, it only becomes more apparent as communication speed improves and population density increases to where it seems we hear about them daily.
2. Would we be better off to actually spend resources to study the problem?
In my opinion.. NO Our resources would be much better spent anywhere else.
3. How do people become that way?
Who cares
4. If/how can we stop that from happening and/or detect them early on and/or fix them?
I think its more of a choice than something we can prevent, but if we could it would be nice. But I have very little faith in our ability to "fix" this.
I'm sorry but I'd have to disagree and point to the amazing success that Blizzard is experiencing with Worlds of Warcraft to say that if it is a niche its a pretty damn big niche.
IBM has a large presence in Second Life and recently built a virtual to real store for Circuit City in SL. On the IBM insider website it says that they consider second life a precursor for a 3D internet.
Here is a Reuters piece on their SL involvement.
IBM is ramping up its push into virtual worlds with an investment of roughly $10 million over the next 12 months, including an expanded presence within the popular 3D online universe Second Life.
Chairman and Chief Executive Sam Palmisano is set to visit Second Life on Tuesday, following a "town hall" meeting with some 7,000 employees in China, and speak with the more than 250 IBM employees on one of the company's virtual islands.
Second Life, where Reuters opened a bureau last month, is one of the best-known virtual worlds, with more than 1 million registered users and a well-established economy and currency. The equivalent of more than half a million U.S. dollars change hands there every day.
IBM has already established the biggest Second Life presence of any Fortune 500 company. It uses the world primarily for training and meetings but has also built a simulation of the Wimbledon tennis tournament.
The company is also looking to build a private 3D intranet where it will be able to discuss sensitive business information. It is moving to champion what it calls "v-business" -- short for virtual business -- just as it championed "e-business", or electronic business, during the dot-com boom.
"We always ask the question, 'if you knew 20 years ago what you know about the Web today, what would you do differently?'" said Sandy Kearney, IBM's director of emerging 3-D Internet and virtual business. "The Web took decades. This will likely take half that time."
The company said it is already holding meetings and conducting development inside virtual worlds with about 20 major clients, including telecommunications and aerospace firms, a petroleum company that wants to use virtual worlds for training and "a major grocer in the UK" that wants to build a virtual storefront that will allow consumers to buy real-world groceries online.
"The essence of e-commerce today is built around the idea of catalogs. That's very useful, it fits with the idea of Web pages and catalog pages, but most people don't think of shopping in terms of catalogs and pages, but in terms of stores that they go into," said IBM chief technology strategist Irving Wladawsky-Berger.
A spokesman for IBM said its goals go far beyond Second Life, although it currently has its largest virtual world presence there, and that the company eventually wants to see all multiverses integrated into a seamless whole.
"In addition to our desire to work more closely with Linden Labs, we're exploring how we can work with many virtual world players, including companies like Multiverse and Bigworld Technology, as well as open source platforms like Uni-Verse.org," the spokesman said in an email.
"IBM's ultimate aim is for inter-world integration, instead of separate islands of virtual worlds, where you cannot cross over from one to the other in a consistent way," he said.
Didn't those old subliminal adds in movie theaters that got banned that just flashed pictures of coke and popcorn get banned because they were too effective almost like commands.
I think your mind would process out most stuff like you said, but it its something that you might be thinking of anyway, an add in game might trigger something in you even if it is almost immediately processed out. It would have to be done correctly, but...
Going back to my previous post, if its been a long hot gaming session, if towards the end of the session seing some kind of drink add, even if quickly ignored might make you think man after this game I gotta grab a drink. Or in a game like WOW where a lot of the game is passive and receptive maybe some clever adds might make you think.
I'm not sure if its a good idea, but I think if done correctly, and for the right products, in game adds could be very effective.
They're not going to go insert advertisements into some first person shooter game.. that would just be silly.
I don't know if you were just poking fun at the Subway add in HL with that comment or not. But, I think if done right adds in a game could work. What if you are wandering through some french town seeing an old style add for Coca-Cola with a french theme painted on the side of a bldg with maybe a few holes knocked into it might be realistic enough that it would make some people think of grabbing a coke after the current game. Or if you were in some futuristic shooter ala Halo and a Mountain Dew Video clip was in a city area somewhere would probably fit in. I guess I wouldn't mind advertising in a game if it fit the theme of the game.
However, themed adds wouldn't work for every game but other things might. If Gehenas in WOW as he died sighed "Finally its Miller Time." I don't know if that would be funny/silly enough to work or just annoying. I might be willing to put up with some advertising if it would drop the monthly fee.
Long answer though has to be no. Think where we would be today without military killing technology. It is argueable that without serious R & D into better ways of killing people the world would now be ruled by some dictator that would deny us basic liberties. Humanity definitly has a dark side and without people willing to stand up and fight for those liberties we will lose them. The US still seems to be one of the best places to live with one of the highest degrees of personal liberties. Granted lately it seems to be veering towards the dark side, but at least here we have the ability to change that. Everyone please get out and vote for the people most likely to preserve our liberty!!
As for the soldier with the prosthetic, I agree it is heartbreaking. I heard yesterday about a guy in the Boston area building and giving houses to disabled vetrans. Where the houses have been specially designed to make it easy to live with thier disablilities. (Has built and given away over 10 houses in the last couple of years.) I'm trying to find a web site to donate to the cause, so if anyone has any info on that please let me know.
That sounds like something that should get laptop manufacturers drooling. If you could get a small laptop with a 21" display. Course the sphere they have in the article is nothing like that but...sounds like it could be reworked maybe??
The funny thing is that they have also the ideal location for solar power. Whats to stop them (once technology permits) from harvesting that and selling solar energy as they do now fossil energy.
But the official figures on the cost of coal don't tell the whole story. Coal is a killer: a more profligate one than you would expect.
And it maintains a lethal efficacy across its entire lifecycle.
One of the main objections held against nuclear power is its potential to take lives in the event of a reactor meltdown, such as occurred at Chernobyl in 1986. While such threats are real for conventional reactors, the fact remains that nuclear power - over the 55 years since it first generated electricity in 1951 - has caused only a fraction of the deaths coal causes every week.
Take coal mining, which kills more than 10,000 people a year. Admittedly, a startling proportion of these deaths occur in mines in China and the developing world, where safety conditions are reminiscent of the preunionised days of the early 20th century in the United States. But it still kills in wealthy countries; witness the death of 18 miners in West Virginia, USA, earlier this year.
But coal deaths don't just come from mining; they come from burning it. The Earth Policy Institute in Washington DC - a nonprofit research group founded by influential environmental analyst Lester R. Brown - estimates that air pollution from coal-fired power plants causes 23,600 U.S. deaths per year. It's also responsible for 554,000 asthma attacks, 16,200 cases of chronic bronchitis, and 38,200 non-fatal heart attacks annually.
The U.S. health bill from coal use could be up to US$160 billion annually, says the institute.
Coal is also radioactive: most coal is laced with traces of a wide range of other elements, including radioactive isotopes such as uranium and thorium, and their decay products, radium and radon. Some of the lighter radioactive particles, such as radon gas, are shed into the atmosphere during combustion, but the majority remain in the waste product - coal ash.
People can be exposed to its radiation when coal ash is stored or transported from the power plant or used in manufacture of concrete. And there are far less precautions taken to prevent radiation escaping from coal ash than from even low-level nuclear waste. In fact, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the U.S. estimates the amount of exposure to radiation from living near a coal-fired power plant could be several times higher than living a comparable distance from a nuclear reactor.
Then there are the deaths that are likely to occur from falling crop yields, more intense flooding and the displacement of coastal communities which are all predicted to ensue from global warming and rising oceans.
There's so much heat already trapped in the atmosphere from a century of greenhouse gases that some of these effects are likely to occur even if all coal-fired power plants were closed tomorrow. Whichever way you look at it, coal is not the smartest form of energy.
Nuclear is increasingly the only quickly viable alternative to fossil fuel generation of power. I'd encourage all to read the article its a very interesting breakdown of possible energy generation sources.
There are enough hungry lawyers out there that if the case is really that good, they will be happy to defend you for the promise of payment if they win by the other side. I disagree personally with copyright infringment of music and don't think the case is meritless in most cases, but the few ridiculous examples we've all heard of where they have gone overboard and sued grandmothers etc I should think that if the attorney or firm knew they could collect from the deep pocketed RIAA if they won they would be happy to take the case.
What if it requires more energy to create enough hydrogen to equal the energy produced from one barrel of oil. Oh -- it does.
Solution build a PBMR http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor next door. When you start getting to the higher production cost oils it becomes a similar solution to hydrogen. i.e. a transport mechanism rather than a source. The difference is that hydrogen would be a much cleaner source.
No it isn't, even if you do happen to live in a fairy world where money is irrelevant. If a power station or power distribution system gives you 25% efficiency over all, you need 4 times as many/much to deliver that 100% that you need. You need four times as many power stations, wind turbines, four times as many hydrogen gas pipelines. In short, four times the infrastructure. This is typically represented in the real world by money but there are environmental impacts to all infrastructure.
I doubt he is suggesting that we move to never never land, but look at the comparative costs here. As the price of oil goes up due to increasing scarcity lots of other alternatives start looking a lot better. As the price of gas produced from oil goes up to $10/ gallon, the costs associated with powering a car with hydrogen start looking a lot better.
Even the environmental costs that you allude to for the infrastructure necessary to support a hydrogen fuel structure don't matter as much when you realize that the fuel is as clean as hydrogen would be.
What I would love to see is a game where sometimes you have that kind of Challenge / Unpredictability in PVE content. Imagine if EQ hired chinese farmers to take control of some of the mobs in an area. Say that person decides the gnolls in South Karana are going to rise up and take control of the area. What if the next time you fight Rag in WOW he doesn't react the same way he always does, and instead starts trying different strategies of fights. If one in four times you ran an instance you faced a thinking reasoning opponent that would certainly make running the same instance more interesting. Or if instead of running an instance and picking things off one by one the longer you spend in there the more things reacted to your presence. I mean if there are people willing to play the game for $10/day farming money for people who are willing to buy it, wouldn't you be able to hire people and have them dropped into NPC's randomly around the world just to spice things up. Sure there are some implementation issues and you'd have to carefully define what is allowed and what isn't but I can imagine that there would be some extremely challenging, unpredictable situations that arise.
I believe that we can take action now that can minimize the effects of climate change. A fairly recent ban on CFCs has resulted in an average reduction in the size of the antarctic ozone hole
Ya except that same ban on CFC's supposedly has been a large contributor to mans contribution to global warming. ---- However that said I'm all for reducing our CO2 output if we do it by replacing foreign oil with some combination of nuclear, wind, solar etc.
The first thought that I have when I read this was a better solar energy collector than photovoltaic cells? But reading through this it doesn't seem to be on more than one or two peoples minds. So... I must be wrong -- can someone explain why this wouldn't be a better way to convert sunlight to energy?
Not disagreeing or agreeing with you, but I've never heard that before can you throw me a link?
Re:Scientific consensus not quite there yet...
on
An Inconvenient Truth
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· Score: 1
True, consensus doesn't mean "right." But the global warming issue aside...if the majority of real scientists without much financial interest tells you something they agree on, would you bet on or against it? Now add to that the people with financial interest tells you otherwise?
These days what scientist doesn't have "financial interests"? How does a scientist employed by an oil company have less credibility than a scientist who gets his grant money from sierra club or is paid by a government agency where the person controlling the purse strings is a supporter of a particular POV?
As I said above I believe global warming to be proven as much as I believe anything, but when it comes to it being caused by man or natural cycles or what we need to do about it thats anyones guess. However, if you want to stop people from using oil push alternative energy, some combination of nuclear, solar, wind, tidal, hydroelectric, to where we can generate enough electricity to make hydrogen a viable vehicle fuel. But, push it by advocating for weaning us off foreign oil ASAP. That should be a topic that would resonate with anyone in the US, and at the same time would advance your agenda for lowering CO2 emissions (US anyways).
For those who feel that man made emissions are at the heart of this, why not go an easier route to helping lower them by getting the consumer to embrace other aspects of these pollutants that are far more tangible? Such as weening ourselves off of foreign oil or air quality?
That sums up my attitude neatly. I believe that global warming is a fact. I'm undecided on how much a factor humanity is. But I would get behind (with my wallet) any effort to get us off foreign oil and onto whatever combination of nuclear, solar, wind etc is necessary to generate enough electricity for hydrogen to be a viable alternative for vehicle fuels. Now is the perfect time to push that too. You think we'd be in Iraq if it wasn't for the percieved need to protect our oil interests? People are all riled up about Iraq - turn that into support for alternative energy -- I just wish so many of our politicians both sides weren't bought and paid for by either oil or auto industry.
You want to find a real terrorist? He won't wear a turban or follow Islam. No, the real terrorist is the man that uses religion itself as a weapon and fuel for hatred.
WTF do you think islamic terrorists are doing? Have you read what the president of Iran is spewing lately? Their belief that the only way to bring about their prophecies is by the total and complete anihilation of Israel doesn't qualify as using religion as a weapon and fuel for hatred?
I think that many of these hateful Christian terrorists (again, not saying that Christians as a whole are hateful people, only that some few decide to be that way)
I'm not saying that all members of the islamic faith are hatefull people only some few that decide or are taught to be that way.
If you want to advance the idea that radicals of any religion are terrorists I'm right behind you there, but to espouse the idea that people who try and convert you to Christianity by preaching of hellfire and damnation are more terrorist than people who blow up themselves and others in the name of advancing their religion is complete and utter BS
And if you want to send your kid to a charter school, assume you are sending him to a _worse_ school
That isn't true everywhere, maybe NY but not in AK. My son went to a charter school there for 4 years, and BY FAR learned more in those years than any other part of his education so far. Of course part of the "charter" for this school required parent participation - 4 hrs per month per student. Either grading tests, playground monitor, janitorial, classroom assistant. When the charter school was forced to close due to change of school board policy, he spent the next 2 years bored out of his mind while the other schools caught up to where he was at.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know why I bother pointing this out but it's not just that Microsoft is producing a product. That as you say is free enterprise. The problem is the interface layer that they force any non microsoft entity to use doesn't allow free competition with other microsoft entities. That is the tyranny.
None, these problems have existed throughout time, it only becomes more apparent as communication speed improves and population density increases to where it seems we hear about them daily.
In my opinion.. NO Our resources would be much better spent anywhere else.
Who cares
I think its more of a choice than something we can prevent, but if we could it would be nice. But I have very little faith in our ability to "fix" this.
Then you need to look around a little more!! I live in seattle and I haven't seen prices over $2.49 and a lot of places with gas at 2.38
I'm sorry but I'd have to disagree and point to the amazing success that Blizzard is experiencing with Worlds of Warcraft to say that if it is a niche its a pretty damn big niche.
or Microsoft finds the patent officer who is considering the patent and pays them 10 Million under the table to deny the patent.
IBM has a large presence in Second Life and recently built a virtual to real store for Circuit City in SL. On the IBM insider website it says that they consider second life a precursor for a 3D internet.
Here is a Reuters piece on their SL involvement.Cause shipping costs would quadruple. The military has a long successfull safety record but their efficiency is not so good.
Are you sure?
Didn't those old subliminal adds in movie theaters that got banned that just flashed pictures of coke and popcorn get banned because they were too effective almost like commands.
I think your mind would process out most stuff like you said, but it its something that you might be thinking of anyway, an add in game might trigger something in you even if it is almost immediately processed out. It would have to be done correctly, but ...
Going back to my previous post, if its been a long hot gaming session, if towards the end of the session seing some kind of drink add, even if quickly ignored might make you think man after this game I gotta grab a drink. Or in a game like WOW where a lot of the game is passive and receptive maybe some clever adds might make you think.
I'm not sure if its a good idea, but I think if done correctly, and for the right products, in game adds could be very effective.
I don't know if you were just poking fun at the Subway add in HL with that comment or not. But, I think if done right adds in a game could work. What if you are wandering through some french town seeing an old style add for Coca-Cola with a french theme painted on the side of a bldg with maybe a few holes knocked into it might be realistic enough that it would make some people think of grabbing a coke after the current game. Or if you were in some futuristic shooter ala Halo and a Mountain Dew Video clip was in a city area somewhere would probably fit in. I guess I wouldn't mind advertising in a game if it fit the theme of the game.
However, themed adds wouldn't work for every game but other things might. If Gehenas in WOW as he died sighed "Finally its Miller Time." I don't know if that would be funny/silly enough to work or just annoying. I might be willing to put up with some advertising if it would drop the monthly fee.
In short yes.
Long answer though has to be no. Think where we would be today without military killing technology. It is argueable that without serious R & D into better ways of killing people the world would now be ruled by some dictator that would deny us basic liberties. Humanity definitly has a dark side and without people willing to stand up and fight for those liberties we will lose them. The US still seems to be one of the best places to live with one of the highest degrees of personal liberties. Granted lately it seems to be veering towards the dark side, but at least here we have the ability to change that. Everyone please get out and vote for the people most likely to preserve our liberty!!
As for the soldier with the prosthetic, I agree it is heartbreaking. I heard yesterday about a guy in the Boston area building and giving houses to disabled vetrans. Where the houses have been specially designed to make it easy to live with thier disablilities. (Has built and given away over 10 houses in the last couple of years.) I'm trying to find a web site to donate to the cause, so if anyone has any info on that please let me know.
That sounds like something that should get laptop manufacturers drooling. If you could get a small laptop with a 21" display. Course the sphere they have in the article is nothing like that but...sounds like it could be reworked maybe??
The funny thing is that they have also the ideal location for solar power. Whats to stop them (once technology permits) from harvesting that and selling solar energy as they do now fossil energy.
Nuclear is increasingly the only quickly viable alternative to fossil fuel generation of power. I'd encourage all to read the article its a very interesting breakdown of possible energy generation sources.
There are enough hungry lawyers out there that if the case is really that good, they will be happy to defend you for the promise of payment if they win by the other side. I disagree personally with copyright infringment of music and don't think the case is meritless in most cases, but the few ridiculous examples we've all heard of where they have gone overboard and sued grandmothers etc I should think that if the attorney or firm knew they could collect from the deep pocketed RIAA if they won they would be happy to take the case.
What if it requires more energy to create enough hydrogen to equal the energy produced from one barrel of oil. Oh -- it does.
Solution build a PBMR http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor next door. When you start getting to the higher production cost oils it becomes a similar solution to hydrogen. i.e. a transport mechanism rather than a source. The difference is that hydrogen would be a much cleaner source.
I doubt he is suggesting that we move to never never land, but look at the comparative costs here. As the price of oil goes up due to increasing scarcity lots of other alternatives start looking a lot better. As the price of gas produced from oil goes up to $10/ gallon, the costs associated with powering a car with hydrogen start looking a lot better.
Even the environmental costs that you allude to for the infrastructure necessary to support a hydrogen fuel structure don't matter as much when you realize that the fuel is as clean as hydrogen would be.
What I would love to see is a game where sometimes you have that kind of Challenge / Unpredictability in PVE content. Imagine if EQ hired chinese farmers to take control of some of the mobs in an area. Say that person decides the gnolls in South Karana are going to rise up and take control of the area. What if the next time you fight Rag in WOW he doesn't react the same way he always does, and instead starts trying different strategies of fights. If one in four times you ran an instance you faced a thinking reasoning opponent that would certainly make running the same instance more interesting. Or if instead of running an instance and picking things off one by one the longer you spend in there the more things reacted to your presence. I mean if there are people willing to play the game for $10/day farming money for people who are willing to buy it, wouldn't you be able to hire people and have them dropped into NPC's randomly around the world just to spice things up. Sure there are some implementation issues and you'd have to carefully define what is allowed and what isn't but I can imagine that there would be some extremely challenging, unpredictable situations that arise.
The first thought that I have when I read this was a better solar energy collector than photovoltaic cells? But reading through this it doesn't seem to be on more than one or two peoples minds. So... I must be wrong -- can someone explain why this wouldn't be a better way to convert sunlight to energy?
Not disagreeing or agreeing with you, but I've never heard that before can you throw me a link?
These days what scientist doesn't have "financial interests"? How does a scientist employed by an oil company have less credibility than a scientist who gets his grant money from sierra club or is paid by a government agency where the person controlling the purse strings is a supporter of a particular POV?
As I said above I believe global warming to be proven as much as I believe anything, but when it comes to it being caused by man or natural cycles or what we need to do about it thats anyones guess. However, if you want to stop people from using oil push alternative energy, some combination of nuclear, solar, wind, tidal, hydroelectric, to where we can generate enough electricity to make hydrogen a viable vehicle fuel. But, push it by advocating for weaning us off foreign oil ASAP. That should be a topic that would resonate with anyone in the US, and at the same time would advance your agenda for lowering CO2 emissions (US anyways).
That sums up my attitude neatly. I believe that global warming is a fact. I'm undecided on how much a factor humanity is. But I would get behind (with my wallet) any effort to get us off foreign oil and onto whatever combination of nuclear, solar, wind etc is necessary to generate enough electricity for hydrogen to be a viable alternative for vehicle fuels. Now is the perfect time to push that too. You think we'd be in Iraq if it wasn't for the percieved need to protect our oil interests? People are all riled up about Iraq - turn that into support for alternative energy -- I just wish so many of our politicians both sides weren't bought and paid for by either oil or auto industry.
If you want to advance the idea that radicals of any religion are terrorists I'm right behind you there, but to espouse the idea that people who try and convert you to Christianity by preaching of hellfire and damnation are more terrorist than people who blow up themselves and others in the name of advancing their religion is complete and utter BS
That isn't true everywhere, maybe NY but not in AK. My son went to a charter school there for 4 years, and BY FAR learned more in those years than any other part of his education so far. Of course part of the "charter" for this school required parent participation - 4 hrs per month per student. Either grading tests, playground monitor, janitorial, classroom assistant. When the charter school was forced to close due to change of school board policy, he spent the next 2 years bored out of his mind while the other schools caught up to where he was at.
RTFA -- This is paying for itself.