I don't really know what this has to do with the whole SJW thing, but this isn't even really communism either. We're headed towards a point machines/robots will essentially replace all unskilled labor and a lot of the service economy can be replaced by semi-sophisticated AI. This doesn't even consider other advancements or productivity gains that will change the way the world works.
Eventually we reach a point where it becomes possible to provide everyone with enough to live comfortably at no cost to anyone else. We'll be able to produce so much wealth that it doesn't matter if someone leaches off of the system or never contributes anything of value to society. There will probably be a lot of people like that, but there are going to be those who do add value back and move humanity even further ahead.
People will still likely have ownership over the things which they create, and I expect that more people will venture into artistic pursuits and make all manner of weird or interesting things when there's no pressure to make what's popular, but in such a world, reputation and renown are a new commodity instead of money as we understand it today. However, that system will still operate under market principles where something is only worth what the market considers it to be worth.
Suffering is rather subjective and considering that the outcome of a lot of research is the death of the subject, does it matter much whether it was a rat or a paramecium? Neither appear to have shown any sapience so pain is a useless metric unless someone is testing pain responses.
Let's turn the question around and ask how much suffering would you be willing to inflict to rats if it would yield a cure for cancer? Can you contemplate or measure the reduction in suffering that would reduce to humanity? What's 100 years of suffering in millions of rats against the rest of the life of the universe and trillions of humans of suffering prevented?
Obviously we can't know in advance the results of any experiment, but that's what review boards are for. Not every scientist is a Mengele and stopping progress until we have all of the answers is likely objectively worse from the point of amount of suffering inflicted than using animals in laboratory experiments.
The degree is largely a formality and there are a lot of companies that don't even care terribly much about GPA on top of that. Going to programming competitions and participating in other kinds of activities (anything related to mentoring or leadership is usually big) is far more valuable in the long run than the university from which the piece of paper you'll never look at again came from. Degrees, like certifications, are most an money extraction enterprise for those who offer them, so to paraphrase Twain, don't let your schooling get in the way of your education.
I take it you won't be using any antibiotics or other medication anytime soon then. No one seemed to ask those poor bacteria or viruses if they consented. If you have an issue with that, why is your arbitrary line that covers rats any better than the one I've suggested?
The SoC in modern devices doesn't take anywhere near as much power as the screen or the cellular/wireless connection, so improvements to the fabrication process aren't going to add a significant amount of battery life. Here's a link to an analysis of the power consumption of the Openmoko phone (PDF warning) that shows that for most use cases, the SoC is only a minor part of the total power draw of the system.
Thinness is mostly a by-product of being able to cram more circuits in a smaller space which cuts down on the size of the logic board more so than battery life improvements have allowed for smaller batteries.
You don't always get to make that choice and sometimes it's either surgery from some poor overworked bastard to keep you alive or not living through the misfortune. Some surgeons don't always get to have nice and neat schedules. Occasionally fate intervenes and there are a lot of people in need of help due to disaster or other terrible cause.
It's even more pointless considering that digital files are practically impossible to contain already (see the Pirate Bay) and that information can be encoded in any format a person cares to use and encryption or other techniques can be used on top of that to make it even more difficult to stop. Use some stegonography and suddenly that cute picture of a kitten contains the necessary data to reconstruct the banned content assuming you also have the necessary function to decode the hidden data.
At least with drugs that can't be magically disguised as something else until they're trivially converted back to their original substance, but they can't even come close to solving that problem which contains a physical element.
After reading the actual paper a bit, it seems likely that this is just an outcome of how the market works more than people being good predictors, especially considering this piece of data from the report:
In Figure 1, we report a histogram describing how long new products survive using the full sample of 8,809 new products. Of these items, 5,301 (60%) did not survive for 3 years (12 quarters). The average survival duration for these failed items was 84.68 weeks, or approximately 21 months.
If you have a person, who for whatever reason dislikes a big brand (e.g. Uncle Barry drinks Coke and he's a fuck head so I won't drink it) they're likely choosing among products that have a 60% failure rate, which makes it more likely than not that there will be some people who have histories including several failures. Another thing that makes this even more likely is that they mention even failed products often enjoy good initial sales due to retailer incentives, coupons, or other promotions, which suggests that some of this group may simply be price-sensitive consumers who are always looking to get the most value for their dollar, which you typically never get when dealing with established brands. The study even points this out:
The findings in Table 7 reveal that on average Harbingers purchase more items but visit a similar number of stores. They tend to buy slightly more items per visit, but make slightly fewer visits. Although statistically significant, the differences in these measures are relatively small. There are larger differences in the prices of the items that they purchase and the categories that they purchase from. Harbingers tend to choose less expensive items and are more likely to purchase items on sales and items with deeper discounts. They purchase a higher proportion of beauty items, but a lower proportion of healthcare items.
It seems to me that what they've found are people that care more about value than brand loyalty, so these people are naturally going to pick more products based on sales, discounts, etc. and given that ~60% of new products fail within 3 years, these people are more likely to try them out than a typical consumers. You practically expect that there will be people from that group on the tail-end of the curve who have purchased more products that fail than not, much like if you get enough people to flip ten coins, some of them will have 8+ come up tails.
Here's a link to the study in case anyone is interested. I don't have the time to go through it in detail right now myself, but perhaps someone else could pick over it.
You'd think that Slashdot editors would try to include that kind of link in the summary as if there's anything worth reading it's the source itself.
Greece is screwed either way. We can argue about blame all day (and there's plenty to go around) but Greece is not Iceland. They keep voting for more bread and circuses and then collectively refusing to pay taxes for it. If they go back to the Drachma, the government isn't going to suddenly get their shit together and fix the country's problems. They'll just end up printing more and more money and drive the inflation levels out of control.
You can't have no taxes and a government that wants to promise the world at the same time. Low taxes are fine if you have a government that isn't spending anything on programs and by the same token if you have a government that has or wants to have a lot of policies and programs, it is going to need to have a revenue stream to support them.
You're oversimplifying the legal case as well as leaving out the series of legal battles preceding the one which you're speaking about and failing to note that the payment was for legal fees. The reason that Apple Corps lost is because in a previous court battle they had agreed to legal terms that allowed Apple Computer to have the right to any services that allowed music to be played or delivered, which is essentially what the iTunes music store does, as long as they weren't distributing pre-recorded music on physical media, which is what Apple Corps was in the business of doing.
If the Apple Corps didn't want Apple Computer to even be able to sell music, they shouldn't have agreed to legal terms that would allow them to do so. Unfortunately they had a legal agreement with Apple that permitted Apple to do exactly that as long as they weren't distributing tapes, CDs, or other physical media. It's not really surprising that a record company failed to see the coming storm of digital music and was foolish enough to include language about physical media. Sucks to be them, but that was the agreement they made.
Wikipedia has a decent overview of the various court cases between the two over the years.
My guess is there's a distinction between an individual function/method signature and the entire API.
Arguing that Larry Ellison is going to come after you over a int min(int a, int b) function is a bit like all of the crazy rednecks that always say Obama is coming for all of their guns every time there's any kind of weapons bill in Congress.
It seems unlikely that you can lay claim to a single signature any more than you can copyright an individual sentence in a book and prevent someone else from using it. Not that it makes the decision any better, but spewing alarmist nonsense isn't being honest.
Whether or not it makes money has nothing to do with patents, but everything to do with whether or not a company or individual is likely to engage in such an endeavor at all.
For example, let's assume that a system in which patents last 100 years exists. Even in such a system where a company can reap the profits of their research for generations, that company would be unlikely to devote resources towards finding a cure for a condition that affects a few dozen people.
Patents, copyrights, and the notion of intellectual property is merely a tool to incentivize creation and discovery. Like anything else, it's simply a matter of finding the ideal balance that provides enough incentive for pursuing new knowledge without keeping it locked away from society. However, regardless of whether patents exist or not, businesses won't engage in activity that isn't expected to be profitable. Because the effectiveness of new technology or the yields of research are not knowable in advance, you need some form of a system to make the investment economically feasible. If not patents, then you likely rely on government grants, which is going to have its own set of issues.
The question becomes one of to what extent is is no longer possible to limit workforce replacements to a small enough percentage that it's beneficial to the overall economy.
As technology improves, we remove low-skill labor jobs from the workforce, leaving only jobs for which substantial amounts of training or education are required in order to fill, which means that eventually anyone who is removed from the work force may take several years before they are capable of being productive and adding to the collective wealth of the economy.
Realistically, this isn't an issue in terms of the capacity to produce wealth, but if demands falls of, supply would naturally decrease and at best the excess production capacity is used for something else. However, it does leave a lot of people without the ability to participate in the economy which is not good for society as a whole.
I think that eventually we'll reach a point where there's enough material wealth generated through automation that everyone can be given food, shelter, and clothing at no cost. The only stable alternative (at least that I can conceive of at this time) is for humans to start selectively breeding themselves so that their ability to learn and engage in new forms of labor is not outpaced by the rate at which they are able to figure out how to automate existing labor, which itself makes for an interesting equilibrium as being smart enough to quickly learn and adapt also implies being smart enough to find more efficient solutions to problems.
It still doesn't matter in the long term as even if China tries to hamstring adoption, other countries (like the U.S. that doesn't even have the large workforce to protect anymore) won't and therefore China loses business which means workers are laid off regardless. I suppose China could keep the people employed and limit parts of their production for internal use only, but even that's pointless. Let the robots produce the goods and let all of the people find something more productive to do. China is supposed to be a communist country, so what do they care if they have to redistribute wealth to people during an adjustment period.
Someone needs to invest the money necessary in order to prove that a GMO actually works or does what is claimed and then additional testing is done to ensure that it's safe for human consumption or that there aren't unintended side effects. If as soon as any company could prove a particular GMO safe and fit for use, another could simply start producing it as well without having to spend the initial investment, it makes companies more averse to doing the research.
Put frankly, you might spend $10,000 if you had a reasonable belief that you could generate $20,000 in return from your investment. You might not do the same if your $10,000 is a lot more likely to result in only $5,000 back for you.
Sorry, but when you make a claim, it's on you to provide either a source for it or your evidence for making it. It's not some other person's responsibility to keep up on your Slashdot posts so that you can be lazy and then be a dick about it on top of that. I've never seen the claim made before either, and there are probably a lot of other people who haven't either.
To some extent learning to program is more than just writing code. It's also learning to solve problems and to think in abstract terms. Eventually automation will remove all of the jobs that don't require those types of skills or make it economically unfeasible for that work to be done by humans.
Which is a good argument against affirmative action. If you don't have that policy in place, how can anyone make an argument that a person was only hired based on some characteristic (ignoring nepotism, which has nothing to do with gender, race, sexuality, etc.) other than their ability?
It especially sucks for anyone who didn't need to policy to get hired as it unfairly creates an assumption that they might be otherwise unworthy of their position, which probably leads to them feeling as though they constantly have to prove themselves when they really shouldn't.
Not that you're going to completely remove the idiots that make statements like "X because she's a woman". To some degree you'll get that anywhere you have a limited number of individuals in a group regardless of what that group is. It's human nature to try and find patterns and when your sample size is 2, it's pretty easy to fall prey to any number of cognitive biases. They really should spend more time on formal logic and logical fallacies in primary and secondary education. I don't think the world would be perfect, but it would be a lot better in general.
First, there's the obvious matter of how much said plant will cost, not only in nominal monetary terms, but also in terms of potential damage to the environment in order to acquire the materials necessary to build it. Solar has a reliance on rare earth metals and the DOE has pegged China as having about half of the world's estimates and they're rather protective of them, never mind their poor record on doing anything in an environmentally friendly manner. However, I'm rather optimistic that within 30 years we'll have solutions that work just as well if not better than what we currently have without these requirements.
Next, there's the obvious issue of constraints on energy production, which is where nuclear really stands out as it doesn't matter whether the sun is shining or which way the wind is blowing. To some extent you need a reliable source of power that can be tapped into regardless of what the conditions may be like, especially on a local level. I'm also fairly optimistic that we'll eventually solve many of the issues related to transmitting energy over long distances, but for now it's a good idea not to waste a lot of energy in moving that energy to where it needs to be.
Finally, we have nuclear solutions that can work today. The technology is already there and works well. It's not something that will be ready in five* years or some indeterminate point in the future. If I'm going to be just as optimistic here, nuclear can also get a lot better as well, especially if it were to get the same kind of money and mind-share thrown at it as some of the other alternatives.
Is nuclear the be-all, end-all solution? Of course not. Much like coal or any other fossil fuel, there's a limit to the amount of fuel we can extract from the Earth, but the energy density is rather good and many of the resources are untapped. I imagine that we'll get to some real space-age shit that we can't even comprehend at this point before we run out of nuclear fuel or that a combination of improvements in solar and general energy efficiency of products will be able to sustain humanity's needs over several centuries.
Not sure if that's the nonsense you were looking for.
Given that/. is a for-profit website, why is it permissible for them to run this story if what you're saying is true? For that matter, how can any story that mentions any brand ever be run on any news site, of which almost all are run as for-profit enterprises?
Your claims don't even meat a basic standard of common sense, so even not knowing the laws surrounding trademarks, that you could make such a claim at all boggles the mind.
Does anyone ever click those share buttons anyways, other than perhaps accidentally?
I don't use much social media so I have no idea if they show up frequently, if at all. The only time I can ever recall seeing one was in an image capture of someone who had (perhaps accidentally) shared a porn video, which for whatever damned reason had Facebook integration.
One would think that people come here to get away from the Facebook crowd and that the Facebook crowd has little interest in what's posted here, so why they bother incorporating such a feature is beyond me. Never mind that the layout seems fucked, but it could just be my browser.
If you can't beat them, destroy their revenue stream. It's the same reason Google released free online office software to combat Microsoft and why Android is free. It's just good business sense.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't really know what this has to do with the whole SJW thing, but this isn't even really communism either. We're headed towards a point machines/robots will essentially replace all unskilled labor and a lot of the service economy can be replaced by semi-sophisticated AI. This doesn't even consider other advancements or productivity gains that will change the way the world works.
Eventually we reach a point where it becomes possible to provide everyone with enough to live comfortably at no cost to anyone else. We'll be able to produce so much wealth that it doesn't matter if someone leaches off of the system or never contributes anything of value to society. There will probably be a lot of people like that, but there are going to be those who do add value back and move humanity even further ahead.
People will still likely have ownership over the things which they create, and I expect that more people will venture into artistic pursuits and make all manner of weird or interesting things when there's no pressure to make what's popular, but in such a world, reputation and renown are a new commodity instead of money as we understand it today. However, that system will still operate under market principles where something is only worth what the market considers it to be worth.
Suffering is rather subjective and considering that the outcome of a lot of research is the death of the subject, does it matter much whether it was a rat or a paramecium? Neither appear to have shown any sapience so pain is a useless metric unless someone is testing pain responses.
Let's turn the question around and ask how much suffering would you be willing to inflict to rats if it would yield a cure for cancer? Can you contemplate or measure the reduction in suffering that would reduce to humanity? What's 100 years of suffering in millions of rats against the rest of the life of the universe and trillions of humans of suffering prevented?
Obviously we can't know in advance the results of any experiment, but that's what review boards are for. Not every scientist is a Mengele and stopping progress until we have all of the answers is likely objectively worse from the point of amount of suffering inflicted than using animals in laboratory experiments.
The degree is largely a formality and there are a lot of companies that don't even care terribly much about GPA on top of that. Going to programming competitions and participating in other kinds of activities (anything related to mentoring or leadership is usually big) is far more valuable in the long run than the university from which the piece of paper you'll never look at again came from. Degrees, like certifications, are most an money extraction enterprise for those who offer them, so to paraphrase Twain, don't let your schooling get in the way of your education.
I take it you won't be using any antibiotics or other medication anytime soon then. No one seemed to ask those poor bacteria or viruses if they consented. If you have an issue with that, why is your arbitrary line that covers rats any better than the one I've suggested?
The SoC in modern devices doesn't take anywhere near as much power as the screen or the cellular/wireless connection, so improvements to the fabrication process aren't going to add a significant amount of battery life. Here's a link to an analysis of the power consumption of the Openmoko phone (PDF warning) that shows that for most use cases, the SoC is only a minor part of the total power draw of the system.
Thinness is mostly a by-product of being able to cram more circuits in a smaller space which cuts down on the size of the logic board more so than battery life improvements have allowed for smaller batteries.
You don't always get to make that choice and sometimes it's either surgery from some poor overworked bastard to keep you alive or not living through the misfortune. Some surgeons don't always get to have nice and neat schedules. Occasionally fate intervenes and there are a lot of people in need of help due to disaster or other terrible cause.
It's even more pointless considering that digital files are practically impossible to contain already (see the Pirate Bay) and that information can be encoded in any format a person cares to use and encryption or other techniques can be used on top of that to make it even more difficult to stop. Use some stegonography and suddenly that cute picture of a kitten contains the necessary data to reconstruct the banned content assuming you also have the necessary function to decode the hidden data.
At least with drugs that can't be magically disguised as something else until they're trivially converted back to their original substance, but they can't even come close to solving that problem which contains a physical element.
In Figure 1, we report a histogram describing how long new products survive using the full sample of 8,809 new products. Of these items, 5,301 (60%) did not survive for 3 years (12 quarters). The average survival duration for these failed items was 84.68 weeks, or approximately 21 months.
If you have a person, who for whatever reason dislikes a big brand (e.g. Uncle Barry drinks Coke and he's a fuck head so I won't drink it) they're likely choosing among products that have a 60% failure rate, which makes it more likely than not that there will be some people who have histories including several failures. Another thing that makes this even more likely is that they mention even failed products often enjoy good initial sales due to retailer incentives, coupons, or other promotions, which suggests that some of this group may simply be price-sensitive consumers who are always looking to get the most value for their dollar, which you typically never get when dealing with established brands. The study even points this out:
The findings in Table 7 reveal that on average Harbingers purchase more items but visit a similar number of stores. They tend to buy slightly more items per visit, but make slightly fewer visits. Although statistically significant, the differences in these measures are relatively small. There are larger differences in the prices of the items that they purchase and the categories that they purchase from. Harbingers tend to choose less expensive items and are more likely to purchase items on sales and items with deeper discounts. They purchase a higher proportion of beauty items, but a lower proportion of healthcare items.
It seems to me that what they've found are people that care more about value than brand loyalty, so these people are naturally going to pick more products based on sales, discounts, etc. and given that ~60% of new products fail within 3 years, these people are more likely to try them out than a typical consumers. You practically expect that there will be people from that group on the tail-end of the curve who have purchased more products that fail than not, much like if you get enough people to flip ten coins, some of them will have 8+ come up tails.
Here's a link to the study in case anyone is interested. I don't have the time to go through it in detail right now myself, but perhaps someone else could pick over it.
You'd think that Slashdot editors would try to include that kind of link in the summary as if there's anything worth reading it's the source itself.
Greece is screwed either way. We can argue about blame all day (and there's plenty to go around) but Greece is not Iceland. They keep voting for more bread and circuses and then collectively refusing to pay taxes for it. If they go back to the Drachma, the government isn't going to suddenly get their shit together and fix the country's problems. They'll just end up printing more and more money and drive the inflation levels out of control.
You can't have no taxes and a government that wants to promise the world at the same time. Low taxes are fine if you have a government that isn't spending anything on programs and by the same token if you have a government that has or wants to have a lot of policies and programs, it is going to need to have a revenue stream to support them.
You're oversimplifying the legal case as well as leaving out the series of legal battles preceding the one which you're speaking about and failing to note that the payment was for legal fees. The reason that Apple Corps lost is because in a previous court battle they had agreed to legal terms that allowed Apple Computer to have the right to any services that allowed music to be played or delivered, which is essentially what the iTunes music store does, as long as they weren't distributing pre-recorded music on physical media, which is what Apple Corps was in the business of doing.
If the Apple Corps didn't want Apple Computer to even be able to sell music, they shouldn't have agreed to legal terms that would allow them to do so. Unfortunately they had a legal agreement with Apple that permitted Apple to do exactly that as long as they weren't distributing tapes, CDs, or other physical media. It's not really surprising that a record company failed to see the coming storm of digital music and was foolish enough to include language about physical media. Sucks to be them, but that was the agreement they made.
Wikipedia has a decent overview of the various court cases between the two over the years.
My guess is there's a distinction between an individual function/method signature and the entire API.
Arguing that Larry Ellison is going to come after you over a int min(int a, int b) function is a bit like all of the crazy rednecks that always say Obama is coming for all of their guns every time there's any kind of weapons bill in Congress.
It seems unlikely that you can lay claim to a single signature any more than you can copyright an individual sentence in a book and prevent someone else from using it. Not that it makes the decision any better, but spewing alarmist nonsense isn't being honest.
Whether or not it makes money has nothing to do with patents, but everything to do with whether or not a company or individual is likely to engage in such an endeavor at all.
For example, let's assume that a system in which patents last 100 years exists. Even in such a system where a company can reap the profits of their research for generations, that company would be unlikely to devote resources towards finding a cure for a condition that affects a few dozen people.
Patents, copyrights, and the notion of intellectual property is merely a tool to incentivize creation and discovery. Like anything else, it's simply a matter of finding the ideal balance that provides enough incentive for pursuing new knowledge without keeping it locked away from society. However, regardless of whether patents exist or not, businesses won't engage in activity that isn't expected to be profitable. Because the effectiveness of new technology or the yields of research are not knowable in advance, you need some form of a system to make the investment economically feasible. If not patents, then you likely rely on government grants, which is going to have its own set of issues.
The question becomes one of to what extent is is no longer possible to limit workforce replacements to a small enough percentage that it's beneficial to the overall economy.
As technology improves, we remove low-skill labor jobs from the workforce, leaving only jobs for which substantial amounts of training or education are required in order to fill, which means that eventually anyone who is removed from the work force may take several years before they are capable of being productive and adding to the collective wealth of the economy.
Realistically, this isn't an issue in terms of the capacity to produce wealth, but if demands falls of, supply would naturally decrease and at best the excess production capacity is used for something else. However, it does leave a lot of people without the ability to participate in the economy which is not good for society as a whole.
I think that eventually we'll reach a point where there's enough material wealth generated through automation that everyone can be given food, shelter, and clothing at no cost. The only stable alternative (at least that I can conceive of at this time) is for humans to start selectively breeding themselves so that their ability to learn and engage in new forms of labor is not outpaced by the rate at which they are able to figure out how to automate existing labor, which itself makes for an interesting equilibrium as being smart enough to quickly learn and adapt also implies being smart enough to find more efficient solutions to problems.
It still doesn't matter in the long term as even if China tries to hamstring adoption, other countries (like the U.S. that doesn't even have the large workforce to protect anymore) won't and therefore China loses business which means workers are laid off regardless. I suppose China could keep the people employed and limit parts of their production for internal use only, but even that's pointless. Let the robots produce the goods and let all of the people find something more productive to do. China is supposed to be a communist country, so what do they care if they have to redistribute wealth to people during an adjustment period.
Someone needs to invest the money necessary in order to prove that a GMO actually works or does what is claimed and then additional testing is done to ensure that it's safe for human consumption or that there aren't unintended side effects. If as soon as any company could prove a particular GMO safe and fit for use, another could simply start producing it as well without having to spend the initial investment, it makes companies more averse to doing the research.
Put frankly, you might spend $10,000 if you had a reasonable belief that you could generate $20,000 in return from your investment. You might not do the same if your $10,000 is a lot more likely to result in only $5,000 back for you.
I bet you could make a killing selling fans advertised to not cause fan death there.
There are probably a few people who fall for this nonsense that might even buy rocks that don't cause cancer.
Sorry, but when you make a claim, it's on you to provide either a source for it or your evidence for making it. It's not some other person's responsibility to keep up on your Slashdot posts so that you can be lazy and then be a dick about it on top of that. I've never seen the claim made before either, and there are probably a lot of other people who haven't either.
To some extent learning to program is more than just writing code. It's also learning to solve problems and to think in abstract terms. Eventually automation will remove all of the jobs that don't require those types of skills or make it economically unfeasible for that work to be done by humans.
Which is a good argument against affirmative action. If you don't have that policy in place, how can anyone make an argument that a person was only hired based on some characteristic (ignoring nepotism, which has nothing to do with gender, race, sexuality, etc.) other than their ability?
It especially sucks for anyone who didn't need to policy to get hired as it unfairly creates an assumption that they might be otherwise unworthy of their position, which probably leads to them feeling as though they constantly have to prove themselves when they really shouldn't.
Not that you're going to completely remove the idiots that make statements like "X because she's a woman". To some degree you'll get that anywhere you have a limited number of individuals in a group regardless of what that group is. It's human nature to try and find patterns and when your sample size is 2, it's pretty easy to fall prey to any number of cognitive biases. They really should spend more time on formal logic and logical fallacies in primary and secondary education. I don't think the world would be perfect, but it would be a lot better in general.
First, there's the obvious matter of how much said plant will cost, not only in nominal monetary terms, but also in terms of potential damage to the environment in order to acquire the materials necessary to build it. Solar has a reliance on rare earth metals and the DOE has pegged China as having about half of the world's estimates and they're rather protective of them, never mind their poor record on doing anything in an environmentally friendly manner. However, I'm rather optimistic that within 30 years we'll have solutions that work just as well if not better than what we currently have without these requirements.
Next, there's the obvious issue of constraints on energy production, which is where nuclear really stands out as it doesn't matter whether the sun is shining or which way the wind is blowing. To some extent you need a reliable source of power that can be tapped into regardless of what the conditions may be like, especially on a local level. I'm also fairly optimistic that we'll eventually solve many of the issues related to transmitting energy over long distances, but for now it's a good idea not to waste a lot of energy in moving that energy to where it needs to be.
Finally, we have nuclear solutions that can work today. The technology is already there and works well. It's not something that will be ready in five* years or some indeterminate point in the future. If I'm going to be just as optimistic here, nuclear can also get a lot better as well, especially if it were to get the same kind of money and mind-share thrown at it as some of the other alternatives.
Is nuclear the be-all, end-all solution? Of course not. Much like coal or any other fossil fuel, there's a limit to the amount of fuel we can extract from the Earth, but the energy density is rather good and many of the resources are untapped. I imagine that we'll get to some real space-age shit that we can't even comprehend at this point before we run out of nuclear fuel or that a combination of improvements in solar and general energy efficiency of products will be able to sustain humanity's needs over several centuries.
Not sure if that's the nonsense you were looking for.
Given that /. is a for-profit website, why is it permissible for them to run this story if what you're saying is true? For that matter, how can any story that mentions any brand ever be run on any news site, of which almost all are run as for-profit enterprises?
Your claims don't even meat a basic standard of common sense, so even not knowing the laws surrounding trademarks, that you could make such a claim at all boggles the mind.
Does anyone ever click those share buttons anyways, other than perhaps accidentally?
I don't use much social media so I have no idea if they show up frequently, if at all. The only time I can ever recall seeing one was in an image capture of someone who had (perhaps accidentally) shared a porn video, which for whatever damned reason had Facebook integration.
One would think that people come here to get away from the Facebook crowd and that the Facebook crowd has little interest in what's posted here, so why they bother incorporating such a feature is beyond me. Never mind that the layout seems fucked, but it could just be my browser.
If you can't beat them, destroy their revenue stream. It's the same reason Google released free online office software to combat Microsoft and why Android is free. It's just good business sense.