I don't necessarily disagree with your predicted results but you're wrong about the lack of viable alternatives to oil. We could fairly easily sustain the world's energy requirements using Fission, Beamed Orbital Solar and a combination of the various traditional 'green' solutions out there. The problem is that the people with the power to make that happen are all short sighted fools who can't see/accept the basic facts of where we're heading (or just think that the problems will "sort themselves out" because of the "invisible hand of the free market") or greedy sociopaths who see where we're heading and don't give a shit because they're either old enough to be dead before the shit really hits the fan or think that they're rich enough to be able to ride out any problems in comfort.
You're right that switch probably won't be made within the required time-frame, but not from lack of ability so much as from a lack of willpower to do so from those who occupy the halls of power.
I'm not necessarily sure we're going to go into a complete collapse like you're suggesting but it's a near certainty that things will get a lot worse than most people expect...
Machiavelli actually wrote The Prince as a parody/criticism of everything he found wrong with the nobles of his day. Of course they completely missed the point and decided to use it as a How-To Guide...
Firstly, the inefficiency difference isn't as bad as you make it out to be since the power plants are vastly more efficient at extracting power from that fuel than the cars would be and because a lot of our power comes from non-oil sources anyway (admittedly a lot of them aren't very green, but still).
The other thing to consider is that using electric cars means that all you have to do to move away from fossil fuels is to switch your power plants over to a different energy source (admittedly no mean task) whereas if you're running all your cars of petroleum products when it gets to be impractically expensive to pull oil out of the ground (ie Peak Oil, which a number of experts believe we're hitting right now) you've still got to switch the fossil fuel burning parts of your grid to a different energy source but on top of that you've then get to either deal with the inefficiency of the Fischer–Tropsch process or replace every car on the road and all your fueling infrastructure in one go (and with no real experience in creating/using/maintaining electrics or whatever alternative you end up using because you've refused to use any out of some harebrained notion of them not being green).
Lastly, I'm what you'd probably consider a green and am a staunch supporter of Nuclear Fission in the immediate future and Beamed Orbital Solar + Nuclear Fusion in the medium to far future. Just because there are plenty of loons out there that don't realize the need for reliable baseload power capacity and spend all their time fapping over solar and wind doesn't mean that everyone that supports sustainable, environmentally friendly development is a moron.
Do you know anything about history at all? When the party was first created the Democrats were the conservative party. Over time they slowly ended up switching roles with the republicans a process that solidified starting with the new deal with the death knell for the conservative, southern wing of the party being the passage of the CRA. The republican party started taking on a more and more conservative tone, especially once Reagan pulled in the Ultra Religious set.
I don't think the Democrats have been an effective liberal force in years but ignoring the split between the Yellow Dog Dems and the main body of the party is just retarded...
If it's high school, then why would it be wrong to be attracted to them?
People often have trouble differentiating illegal from immoral (yes, I realize that spying on someone without their knowledge or consent can be both regardless of age and that simply being attracted to >18s isn't what's illegal, don't get in the way of a good rant with facts...).
This is pretty much classic trolling shit, but for your information, in referencing Poe's Law I was implying that you were expressing opinions so idiotic that on most issues I would attribute them to trolling but because of the subject being discussed I felt there was a better than even chance that they were genuine. Thanks for confirming that you're a troll for me, my already low level of respect for humanity was in danger of dropping another notch there...
Except that if you try option B you'll more than likely be stopped before you can actually off any of the big cheats and whether or not succeed do the best thing you can hope for is to die in a hail of gunfire when the police come to get you (or to just swallow the barrel of your own gun) 'cause if they get hold of you you're about to get stuffed into an overcrowded prison where the guards will beat your ass and your cellmate bubba will make you his new lady...
As long as it meets your needs who gives a shit how many other people use it? Popularity != Quality. Though given your name I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that you'd take an idiotic, superficial stance like that...
Yeah, you could install whatever you wanted on them without 'jailbreaking', even another OS if you so desired. And you had full access to the filesystem. And you could load files on and off them without using iTunes. And you could develop applications for them without having to pay licensing fees, going through a byzantine review process or splitting your profits with the manufacturer.
All of them fit. Google's strategy is to offer a crapload of 'free' services to end users. I put free in quotes because, while the users don't pay Googlef any money to use their stuff, Google does make money off every user. How? By collecting information about them and using it to sell targeted advertising to a bunch of different people. Every service they offer is one more reason for people to stay where Google can track them, which gives them more information to use, which makes their targeted advertising more valuable.
And I'm not really against that as an end user either. Google's generally pretty good about not actually giving identifying information out to 3rd parties and I get plenty of neat stuff without having to pay any money for it. And if there's something I really want to remain private, well I generally don't put it on the internet at all, but if I did I'd certainly avoid putting it up through any of Google's services if there was any choice about it. That's only common sense...
Well you have a choice: pay for all those standards upfront or pay for them later as horrible pollution and mangled corpses at the side of the road. If you want safe, clean cars it's going to cost you.
And you can't really just leave it to people to decide for themselves either: pollution affects everyone, not just the asshole driving around in a smog-mobile, and even if you accept that people have a right to put their own lives at risk driving around in a deathtrap what about their children, or anyone they happen to give a lift to? And what about the sort of safety features which are designed to prevent accidents happening in the first place? Does someone have the right to put everyone else at risk by driving a car that makes getting into an accident more likely?
You can bitch and moan about how expensive this makes everything but I'd choose expensive cars and a cleaner safer world over cheaper cars any day of the week.
That's a strawman. Did he say it was 'perfectly healthy'? Or that there was nothing wrong with it? No. He said that it wasn't on the same scale as Chernobyl because by all measurable data it isn't worse than Chernobyl.
You know what the solution is: vote 3rd party in 2012 and tell all your friends to do the same. Obama's been a joke. The Democrats in general are quite willing to let the country slowly slide into ruin and the Republicans seem bound and determined to rush there as fast as possible.
Neither major party is willing to implement the kind of policies we need to solve the problems with our economy, curb climate change or stop fucking around with our civil liberties and as the tea party showed attempts at grassroots reform will just get co-opted, 90% of the party structure will stay intact and all you'll get is a few token 'true believers' and the occasional soundbite from the same people who've been screwing you over the whole time.
If you actually want things to change the only way to make it happen is to get people into office who are willing to go against the established interests and make the radical changes needed to fix our country.
Except for the part where the US hit 'peak-socialism' around the time of LBJ's great-society and has been deregulating ever since, but don't let me get in the way of your ignorant ranting with inconvenient facts...
Slashdot Mirror
I don't necessarily disagree with your predicted results but you're wrong about the lack of viable alternatives to oil. We could fairly easily sustain the world's energy requirements using Fission, Beamed Orbital Solar and a combination of the various traditional 'green' solutions out there. The problem is that the people with the power to make that happen are all short sighted fools who can't see/accept the basic facts of where we're heading (or just think that the problems will "sort themselves out" because of the "invisible hand of the free market") or greedy sociopaths who see where we're heading and don't give a shit because they're either old enough to be dead before the shit really hits the fan or think that they're rich enough to be able to ride out any problems in comfort.
You're right that switch probably won't be made within the required time-frame, but not from lack of ability so much as from a lack of willpower to do so from those who occupy the halls of power.
I'm not necessarily sure we're going to go into a complete collapse like you're suggesting but it's a near certainty that things will get a lot worse than most people expect...
Machiavelli actually wrote The Prince as a parody/criticism of everything he found wrong with the nobles of his day. Of course they completely missed the point and decided to use it as a How-To Guide...
Firstly, the inefficiency difference isn't as bad as you make it out to be since the power plants are vastly more efficient at extracting power from that fuel than the cars would be and because a lot of our power comes from non-oil sources anyway (admittedly a lot of them aren't very green, but still).
The other thing to consider is that using electric cars means that all you have to do to move away from fossil fuels is to switch your power plants over to a different energy source (admittedly no mean task) whereas if you're running all your cars of petroleum products when it gets to be impractically expensive to pull oil out of the ground (ie Peak Oil, which a number of experts believe we're hitting right now) you've still got to switch the fossil fuel burning parts of your grid to a different energy source but on top of that you've then get to either deal with the inefficiency of the Fischer–Tropsch process or replace every car on the road and all your fueling infrastructure in one go (and with no real experience in creating/using/maintaining electrics or whatever alternative you end up using because you've refused to use any out of some harebrained notion of them not being green).
Lastly, I'm what you'd probably consider a green and am a staunch supporter of Nuclear Fission in the immediate future and Beamed Orbital Solar + Nuclear Fusion in the medium to far future. Just because there are plenty of loons out there that don't realize the need for reliable baseload power capacity and spend all their time fapping over solar and wind doesn't mean that everyone that supports sustainable, environmentally friendly development is a moron.
Do you know anything about history at all? When the party was first created the Democrats were the conservative party. Over time they slowly ended up switching roles with the republicans a process that solidified starting with the new deal with the death knell for the conservative, southern wing of the party being the passage of the CRA. The republican party started taking on a more and more conservative tone, especially once Reagan pulled in the Ultra Religious set.
I don't think the Democrats have been an effective liberal force in years but ignoring the split between the Yellow Dog Dems and the main body of the party is just retarded...
If it's high school, then why would it be wrong to be attracted to them?
People often have trouble differentiating illegal from immoral (yes, I realize that spying on someone without their knowledge or consent can be both regardless of age and that simply being attracted to >18s isn't what's illegal, don't get in the way of a good rant with facts...).
This is pretty much classic trolling shit, but for your information, in referencing Poe's Law I was implying that you were expressing opinions so idiotic that on most issues I would attribute them to trolling but because of the subject being discussed I felt there was a better than even chance that they were genuine. Thanks for confirming that you're a troll for me, my already low level of respect for humanity was in danger of dropping another notch there...
( Are they just an inferior non-registered gang that seeks the privilege of the reigning court? )
yes
Did you perchance hear a whooshing noise as you were clicking submit? It was the sound of his humor going over your head...
Except that if you try option B you'll more than likely be stopped before you can actually off any of the big cheats and whether or not succeed do the best thing you can hope for is to die in a hail of gunfire when the police come to get you (or to just swallow the barrel of your own gun) 'cause if they get hold of you you're about to get stuffed into an overcrowded prison where the guards will beat your ass and your cellmate bubba will make you his new lady...
As long as it meets your needs who gives a shit how many other people use it? Popularity != Quality. Though given your name I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that you'd take an idiotic, superficial stance like that...
I was going to say don't feed the trolls, but then I realized that this might be a case of Poe's Law :/
Yeah, you could install whatever you wanted on them without 'jailbreaking', even another OS if you so desired. And you had full access to the filesystem. And you could load files on and off them without using iTunes. And you could develop applications for them without having to pay licensing fees, going through a byzantine review process or splitting your profits with the manufacturer.
So basically it's smarter and more polite than 99% of /.ers?
Someone should trick Timothy into reposting this article. Then he'd be duped into posting a dupe about hadoop.
You need one to browse the links...
How could you use it to browse the links if you didn't?
All of them fit. Google's strategy is to offer a crapload of 'free' services to end users. I put free in quotes because, while the users don't pay Googlef any money to use their stuff, Google does make money off every user. How? By collecting information about them and using it to sell targeted advertising to a bunch of different people. Every service they offer is one more reason for people to stay where Google can track them, which gives them more information to use, which makes their targeted advertising more valuable.
And I'm not really against that as an end user either. Google's generally pretty good about not actually giving identifying information out to 3rd parties and I get plenty of neat stuff without having to pay any money for it. And if there's something I really want to remain private, well I generally don't put it on the internet at all, but if I did I'd certainly avoid putting it up through any of Google's services if there was any choice about it. That's only common sense...
I see I wasn't the only one thinking of Sim Copter...
Well you have a choice: pay for all those standards upfront or pay for them later as horrible pollution and mangled corpses at the side of the road. If you want safe, clean cars it's going to cost you.
And you can't really just leave it to people to decide for themselves either: pollution affects everyone, not just the asshole driving around in a smog-mobile, and even if you accept that people have a right to put their own lives at risk driving around in a deathtrap what about their children, or anyone they happen to give a lift to? And what about the sort of safety features which are designed to prevent accidents happening in the first place? Does someone have the right to put everyone else at risk by driving a car that makes getting into an accident more likely?
You can bitch and moan about how expensive this makes everything but I'd choose expensive cars and a cleaner safer world over cheaper cars any day of the week.
I know you're a big fat liar cause I'm Dave
-Dave
That's a strawman. Did he say it was 'perfectly healthy'? Or that there was nothing wrong with it? No. He said that it wasn't on the same scale as Chernobyl because by all measurable data it isn't worse than Chernobyl.
I'm out of a job right now so I was wondering, how much do they pay you to astroturf on slashdot?
You know what the solution is: vote 3rd party in 2012 and tell all your friends to do the same. Obama's been a joke. The Democrats in general are quite willing to let the country slowly slide into ruin and the Republicans seem bound and determined to rush there as fast as possible.
Neither major party is willing to implement the kind of policies we need to solve the problems with our economy, curb climate change or stop fucking around with our civil liberties and as the tea party showed attempts at grassroots reform will just get co-opted, 90% of the party structure will stay intact and all you'll get is a few token 'true believers' and the occasional soundbite from the same people who've been screwing you over the whole time.
If you actually want things to change the only way to make it happen is to get people into office who are willing to go against the established interests and make the radical changes needed to fix our country.
Except for the part where the US hit 'peak-socialism' around the time of LBJ's great-society and has been deregulating ever since, but don't let me get in the way of your ignorant ranting with inconvenient facts...
The plural of anecdote is not data, and repeating the exact same argument that was just refuted does not suddenly make it correct. Nice try though.