Hey, I'm trying to see how many people who have low ID numbers are still using Slashdot. I know there must be a bunch of people with ID numbers lower than mine.
Although I admit that it is stupid, I still wish that I had signed up for my ID sooner so that I could have an even lower one. When CmdrTaco announced on Slashdot that accounts were available (before that everyone just typed whatever nickname they wanted to in with their posting - remember that?!?) I didn't bother to sign up until there was a topic I actually wanted to post about a few days later. If only I had signed up as soon as I saw the announcement I know I'd be under 100!!!
Anyway, here's some stuff:
- I started reading Slashdot back in '97 (or was it '98? Not sure. It was when it was really new and far and away the best place to get geeky news, especially about Linux). I don't remember how I first heard of it.
- I remember when it was called "Slashdot: News for Nerds on the Stuff That Matters". I always thought that the dropping of the "on the" clause signalled a corresponding drop of the geek-relevency of the articles.
- When Slashdot subscriptions were announced in (when was it? 2000? 2001?) I sent in $100. My original subscription STILL HASN'T RUN OUT!!! Although I have used up almost 9000 out of the 10000 ad-free page views I bought.
- I think I have scanned (not necessarily read) every headline on Slashdot since 1998, except for a period of two or three months last year when I got fed up with the lameness of the newer Slashdot admins, and decided to stop reading it regularly. But I came back because, well, I really like Slashdot despite the Zonks of the world. I have checked Slashdot two or three times a day at least daily since 1998, and for those occasions where I was away from a computer for weeks at a time (on vacations and stuff), I would go back and look at every back story that I missed in that time. It would take me hours or days after a long trip to "catch up" on Slashdot...
- Whatever happend to that JonKatz dude or whatever his name was? He was the cause of my first usage of the slashdot preferences settings - to ban him from my view of Slashdot
- Also, whatever happened to those really cool "Ask Joe Shmoe" stories or whatever they were called where all of the Slashdot community would come up with questions for a guest celebrity? I know they still do them every once in a while but back when there was one per week they were really cool.
- To show off my Slashdot-Geek factor: I got married in 1999. My wife, unbeknownst to me at the time, was preparing a little "time capsule" to represent our lives together as a gift on our wedding day. It sounds really cheesy I know but it really was an awesome and beautiful thing. She made it out of doll furniture and other custom miniaturized little bits and pieces, and it was a scene representing all of the things that we had in our lives, under a little half-dome of glass. There were little representations of our pets, my motorcycle, the magazines that I subscribed to at the time, her cooking paraphenalia, etc. Anyway, there was also a little laptop in there for me, and she got one of my co-workers to write her instructions on how to take a "screenshot" (using xwd I think) of my Linux system, and while I wasn't looking one day, she snapped my browser when it was on Slashdot, printed it out, and shrunk it down to like 2 cm by 1.5 cm. And so I have this little laptop in our time capsule that is showing a Slashdot page from sometime in 1999. That's how much of a Slash-geek I am - my wife knew back then that Slashdot was such a big thing for me that it was worth immortalizing in our wedding time capsule!
- I have been a huge fan of Slashdot over the years (obviously) but get really tired of the increasing tendency of the articles to simply be controversial topics to drum up the post count. The number of "Random idiot study group says Windows is more secure than Linux" type trolling is getting wors
Well that's good to know. I *wanted* to like Cadbury because it's got such a long history and because it's British and I tend to like British stuff (British beer mmm yummmm). I won't hold it against Cadbury UK that their Australasian divisions are so piss-poor...
I have read that because of the distance between North America and England, and the fact that English came over to America a long time ago and before some pretty drastic changes occurred to the language in England, that American English is in many ways closer to the classic English of the Shakespearean area than is modern British English.
I have no idea if it's true, but I thought it was pretty interesting. An example is "the fall" which I guess was used in olde Englande but replaced by Autumn in modern England.
Also, the oldest person alive in America today has been speaking English for about as long as the oldest person alive in England. So I'd say no citizen in either country can claim that they speak more original English than the other.
Also, the same thing always happens any time American culture is discussed on Slashdot. Some number of people will always point out how crappy American X, Y, or Z is, only because they live in some foreign country (or in some backwards part of the USA) and have only been exposed to the biggest, most nationally recognized brands. In actuality almost every part of the USA has regional and local producers of goods that rival the quality of those regionally and locally produced goods in whatever country the aspiring-to-be-superior poster is from. It's true that the biggest and most national brand of anything in the USA is terrible, and yet - those same brands are extremely popular in the native countries of aspiring-to-be-superior Slashdot posters as well. Here in NZ, Dominos seems to be the most ubiquitous pizza chain just like it is in the USA. I wouldn't feed dominos to a dog, and yet, it's popular enough with the broadest audience to be a viable chain in just about any country it enters.
You can poo-poo American products all you want but the truth is, the rest of the world eats this shit up just as much as America does.
Cadbury in New Zealand is TERRIBLE. There are very good chocolates in America - I'll bet hardly any Slashdot readers have been to the big yearly chocolate exhibition in NYC but I have, and there are definitely some awesome chocolates there. The aforementioned Guittard makes great chocolate to rival the best produced by any company in the world.
But back to the point - Cadbury in NZ is just ridiculously bad. I wouldn't be surprised if Cadbury here is ALREADY using vegetable oil instead of cocoa butter and whey protein instead of milk.
I have never had Cadbury in the UK. I had always thought they were supposed to be good stuff but when I got to NZ and tried it... probably the worst big-name confectionaries I have ever had.
The Germs. Heh. Haven't listened to them since high school. You can only play G.I. (their only good album) so many times until the lead singer's grating voice just becomes completely unbearable. Great music though.
On a tangent only marginally related to the topic... does anyone else find today's breed to pseudo-punk-acting bands just too funny for words? I don't follow modern music too much but have seen some music videos here and there and it cracks me up how all these new bands play this completely cheesepuff light rock ballad crap and have faux-hawks and punk-ish clothing and slam around like they're belting out hardcore. It's just so silly to see a bunch of guys jumping around acting like they're so tough and like the music is so raw all the while playing Justin Timberlake-esque fluff. I just couldn't do that with a straight face, I wonder how they manage it.
The Germs were the REAL DEAL, the lead singer would spread peanut butter on his naked chest while cutting himself with a broken bottle on stage. They didn't just looked the part, they sounded the part too, with some of the rawest late-70's-hardcore-punk around.
Now to the topic at hand - so what. Not every test is 100% reliable. False positives exist. This is a headline story for what reason exactly?
And for the obligitary Slashdot tongue-in-cheek comment: I don't see how having GHB in soap is helping anyone. If you've already convinced your date to take a shower with you the GHB is kind of redundant...
It seems like every day there are two or three stories on Slashdot that try to hype up the importance of "blogging". Why, just because someone put a really retarded sounding name on the concept of writing web pages, is blogging such a hyped thing?
It reminds me of the early days of Slashdot, when *anything* having to do with Linux was featured in big bold headlines like it was a miracle. This has toned down a little bit over the years but even today the hype factor for Linux on this site is a bit annoying (and I am a huge fan of Linux, it's the reason I started reading Slashdot back in '97 - despite the hyping of everything Linux, it was a good place to get news when such news sources were scarce).
I can't shake the feeling that people who don't really understand "them Internets" hear a word that has no meaning - "blog" - and assume that it just must be something really cool and important. Because really, it isn't. I nearly hurled at the idiocy of it all the first time I heard the word "blogosphere".
1) Harvard is not one of the top computer science universities in the United States. It is a good university nonetheless. And money can't buy better credentials:)
2) I think that alot of schools make half-assed attempts at the ACM contest. Meaning, maybe they get a handful of kids together to work on some practice problems a couple of times, maybe even once a week over a semester. When I went to CMU that's how it was, more or less. My friend was on the ACM team that went to nationals but didn't make it to internationals. I know what his course load was like that semester. I know that the ACM contest must have been pretty low on the priority queue.
There are some universities that I expect want the notariety of winning the ACM badly enough that the students who participate do little else besides prepare for the ACM. I would not expect Harvard to be one of those schools. What do they have to prove? They're Harvard for chrissakes!
Let me use a better analogy than your flawed one about bleach and cyanide (neither of which people think is safe to drink so this doesn't even satisfy the most obvious prerequisites for an anology here).
Let's say:
a) Ben Affleck is hunky enough to be a leading man. b) Tom Cruise is hunkier thank Ben Affleck.
Therefore,
c) Tom Cruise is hunky enough to be a leading man.
Now if (a) and (b) are true, then how can people NOT consider Tom Cruise to be hunky enough to be a leading man? The answer is that people are being illogical if they don't. Either they don't believe that Ben Afflect is hunky enough to be a leading man, or they don't believe that Tom Cruise is hunkier than Ben Affleck. Both are valid ways to not conclude (c). But there is no way to believe both (a) and (b) and yet not also believe (c).
So if we can accept that:
a) Coal to be safe enough for widespread use b) Nuclear is safer than coal
then we MUST accept that
c) Nuclear is safe enough for widespread use
This whole thing where you are introducing "is" vs "should" is irrelevent. We weren't talking about what is true versus what was true. People STILL DO consider coal to be safe enough for widespread use. Dirty maybe, but worth-the-risk safe enough. We *know* from evidence that nuclear is safer than coal (someone pointed out in another post that something like 30 people have died from exposure to radioactivity from nuclear power plants, whereas 30 people *each year* die in coal related accidents). Therefore it makes NO SENSE that some people say that nuclear is not safe. They either have to accept that coal is not safe, or that nuclear is not safer than coal, before they can say that nuclear is not safe. Now, there very well may be people who don't think that coal is safe enough. But we're not talking about those relatively few people. We're talking about the masses who have no problem with a coal fired plant next door but who would protest vigorously against a nuclear plant next door.
Anyway I think your whole posting could be refuted by this simple statement:
* When I said that people have thought that coal was safe enough for hundreds of years, I meant for hundreds of years in the past up to AND INCLUDING *now*. The statements aren't "people used to think that coal was safe" and "nuclear is safer than coal". They are "people DO think that coal IS safe" and "nuclear is safer than coal".
If you read the comments on the site in question it will become very clear that there's some kind of infighting going on between the group of people involved in this case. Some of those attacking her claim to be people whose cases resultd in the courts in bringing the case against her (or at least that's how I read it). So my point here is that those people didn't seem to be "random blog commenters" - they seemed to me to be people actually involved in the case in question.
I'm just saying that this person, Suzanne Shell, comes off as being alot more credible than the people attacking her. If the side that seems more reasonable is the one which has been slapped with a fine by the courts, and there are allegations that the courts are pushing a political agenda, then the whole issue looks very grey - maybe there is some legitimacy to what Suzanne Shell is trying to do? Maybe there was some malfeasance on the part of the courts? Who knows. Like I said I know very little of the specifics of the case. I'm just saying that people here on Slashdot are attacking this woman and she comes off alot better than her attackers, both on that site and here on Slashdot.
Anyway, this is all highly irrelevent because the only way to know who was right and who was wrong is to understand the case, which I don't. I'm just saying that my bias would be in favor of Suzanne Shell given what I read in those posts.
However, the fact that she's suing Internet Archives in such a ridiculous way is a major strike against her. So I don't know what to think.
Nope, I don't get it. If coal has been considered safe enough, and nuclear power is safer (once again let's assume this is true for the sake of this pretty useless argument), then nuclear power should also be considered safe enough. Seems pretty clear to me.
I think the GP's point was the nuclear power is safe enough for use, not that it's completely safe.
This is a very interesting piece of information. As pro-nuclear as I am, if the financial risks are too great (a single event being able to wipe out billions of dollars of capital is pretty scary from an economics standpoint), then I can understand it being difficult or impossible to get the capital to make a new nuclear power plant. I can't stand the ill-informed "safety" arguments against nuclear, but this financial argument of yours does sound like a significant strike against nuclear power.
Coal is unsafe. And yet it has been considered safe enough for practical use for hundreds of years. Nuclear power is safer than coal. Therefore it should be considered safe enough for practical use.
I think his point was pretty clear. Are you intentionally disregarding it due to an inherent bias against nuclear energy?
You know, I followed your link to the Colorado Confidential site and read a bit about what happened with Suzanne Shell there. I have to say that I don't know much at all about the cases in question, but reading that site, it's pretty clear that there are some very weird and not altogether decent characters attacking her. Her response to the court's decision seemed intelligent and believable.
I have no idea what the actual facts are here, but when one party seems intelligent, well-spoken, and does not engage in personal attacks, and the other party is incoherent, rambling, and engages in constant ad hominem attack, I think I know which party seems more believable to me.
I don't know all of the facts in the suit against Internet Archives either, but that one seems stupid and frivolous. It's very hard to understand what's going on in Colorado courts that is leading to all of this.
See my "spawning alternate universes unprovable bullshit" comment from my original post.
"Theories" that require that one escape the laws of logic or the bounds of our universe are fiction, and we should not be wasting our time treating them like they are anything else.
Anyway, you or anyone else can waste all the time they want to on such bullshit, but please don't waste *my* time with it or especially, *my* tax dollars:)
It makes me sad that this was modded 'insightful'. You are suggesting that current physics theory about the speed of light and information might turn out to be as fallacious as Plato's assertion that the earth is at the center of the universe.
There are alot of theories wrapped up in the whole speed of light and information thing, and I have no doubt that some of them may be disproven someday. But there is one thing, the thing that I think people get most excited about when they talk about experiments involving the speed of light, that will NEVER be disproven:
Nothing can go backwards in time. Not possible. The law of nature that says that nothing can go backwards in time WILL NEVER BE DISPROVEN. The theories which stipulate why this is so might change, but the law WILL NEVER CHANGE.
FORGET TIME TRAVEL. IT IS ***IMPOSSIBLE***.
And by impossible, I mean, you'd have to violate logical causality to do it, and if you're starting to talk about theorizations of ways to violate causality, then, well, you're no longer very interesting to talk to. You might as well be talking about purple men coming out of your ears and how you're going to harness their energy to build a super mega space dome. You're not talking sense when you start talking "going backwards in time", and you're welcome to not talk sense, but I won't listen.
And moreover, I don't think that any rational person should listen either. We should move on and spend our time and energy thinking about things which are possible (unless writing fiction, in which case time travel talk is appropriate and welcome).
It bugs me that people spend so much time working on experiments and theories and Slashdot comments concerning ways to violate the most fundamental laws of not just nature, of *logic*, such as going backwards in time.
I know, someone is going to respond and say, "well if we all felt like you, then there would never be any scientific advancement because no one would question scientific theories - just like not questioning Plato about the earth being at the center of the universe". And that will make me sad too, because that person will be *completely* missing the point. I'm not saying, don't challenge current physics theory, or come up with new theories, or try to think outside the box.
I'm just saying, if the goal of your theorization is to try to find a way to GO BACKWARDS IN TIME, then STOP RIGHT THERE. You might as well be trying to find a way to prove that 2 + 2 = 5. It is not possible, so don't waste your or my time.
By all means, try to prove that something can go faster than the speed of light. But at the same time, recognize that you're going to have to also prove that going faster than the speed of light does NOT mean travelling backwards in time. Because the end result of a valid law of nature CANNOT be that something can go backwards in time, just as the result of a valid law of nature CANNOT be that 2 + 2 = 5.
And if you start talking about how "maybe going backwards in time means forking off a copy of the universe" or similar unprovable fantasy bullshit, please, step aside and let real scientists get to work.
Slashdot Mirror
Your Slashdot ID is not low so you are not a person I was targeting with this post. Feel free not to read it.
Hey, I'm trying to see how many people who have low ID numbers are still using Slashdot. I know there must be a bunch of people with ID numbers lower than mine.
...
Although I admit that it is stupid, I still wish that I had signed up for my ID sooner so that I could have an even lower one. When CmdrTaco announced on Slashdot that accounts were available (before that everyone just typed whatever nickname they wanted to in with their posting - remember that?!?) I didn't bother to sign up until there was a topic I actually wanted to post about a few days later. If only I had signed up as soon as I saw the announcement I know I'd be under 100!!!
Anyway, here's some stuff:
- I started reading Slashdot back in '97 (or was it '98? Not sure. It was when it was really new and far and away the best place to get geeky news, especially about Linux). I don't remember how I first heard of it.
- I remember when it was called "Slashdot: News for Nerds on the Stuff That Matters". I always thought that the dropping of the "on the" clause signalled a corresponding drop of the geek-relevency of the articles.
- When Slashdot subscriptions were announced in (when was it? 2000? 2001?) I sent in $100. My original subscription STILL HASN'T RUN OUT!!! Although I have used up almost 9000 out of the 10000 ad-free page views I bought.
- I think I have scanned (not necessarily read) every headline on Slashdot since 1998, except for a period of two or three months last year when I got fed up with the lameness of the newer Slashdot admins, and decided to stop reading it regularly. But I came back because, well, I really like Slashdot despite the Zonks of the world. I have checked Slashdot two or three times a day at least daily since 1998, and for those occasions where I was away from a computer for weeks at a time (on vacations and stuff), I would go back and look at every back story that I missed in that time. It would take me hours or days after a long trip to "catch up" on Slashdot
- Whatever happend to that JonKatz dude or whatever his name was? He was the cause of my first usage of the slashdot preferences settings - to ban him from my view of Slashdot
- Also, whatever happened to those really cool "Ask Joe Shmoe" stories or whatever they were called where all of the Slashdot community would come up with questions for a guest celebrity? I know they still do them every once in a while but back when there was one per week they were really cool.
- To show off my Slashdot-Geek factor: I got married in 1999. My wife, unbeknownst to me at the time, was preparing a little "time capsule" to represent our lives together as a gift on our wedding day. It sounds really cheesy I know but it really was an awesome and beautiful thing. She made it out of doll furniture and other custom miniaturized little bits and pieces, and it was a scene representing all of the things that we had in our lives, under a little half-dome of glass. There were little representations of our pets, my motorcycle, the magazines that I subscribed to at the time, her cooking paraphenalia, etc. Anyway, there was also a little laptop in there for me, and she got one of my co-workers to write her instructions on how to take a "screenshot" (using xwd I think) of my Linux system, and while I wasn't looking one day, she snapped my browser when it was on Slashdot, printed it out, and shrunk it down to like 2 cm by 1.5 cm. And so I have this little laptop in our time capsule that is showing a Slashdot page from sometime in 1999. That's how much of a Slash-geek I am - my wife knew back then that Slashdot was such a big thing for me that it was worth immortalizing in our wedding time capsule!
- I have been a huge fan of Slashdot over the years (obviously) but get really tired of the increasing tendency of the articles to simply be controversial topics to drum up the post count. The number of "Random idiot study group says Windows is more secure than Linux" type trolling is getting wors
I think that both what you and the GP post said are very funny.
Well that's good to know. I *wanted* to like Cadbury because it's got such a long history and because it's British and I tend to like British stuff (British beer mmm yummmm). I won't hold it against Cadbury UK that their Australasian divisions are so piss-poor ...
It's not tolerable in NZ. I don't know who makes it here, but New Zealand Cadbury's is absolute crap. I'd much rather eat Hershey's.
Scharffenberger is overrated in my opinion. Good, but overrated. Guittard is better.
I have read that because of the distance between North America and England, and the fact that English came over to America a long time ago and before some pretty drastic changes occurred to the language in England, that American English is in many ways closer to the classic English of the Shakespearean area than is modern British English.
I have no idea if it's true, but I thought it was pretty interesting. An example is "the fall" which I guess was used in olde Englande but replaced by Autumn in modern England.
Also, the oldest person alive in America today has been speaking English for about as long as the oldest person alive in England. So I'd say no citizen in either country can claim that they speak more original English than the other.
Also, the same thing always happens any time American culture is discussed on Slashdot. Some number of people will always point out how crappy American X, Y, or Z is, only because they live in some foreign country (or in some backwards part of the USA) and have only been exposed to the biggest, most nationally recognized brands. In actuality almost every part of the USA has regional and local producers of goods that rival the quality of those regionally and locally produced goods in whatever country the aspiring-to-be-superior poster is from. It's true that the biggest and most national brand of anything in the USA is terrible, and yet - those same brands are extremely popular in the native countries of aspiring-to-be-superior Slashdot posters as well. Here in NZ, Dominos seems to be the most ubiquitous pizza chain just like it is in the USA. I wouldn't feed dominos to a dog, and yet, it's popular enough with the broadest audience to be a viable chain in just about any country it enters.
You can poo-poo American products all you want but the truth is, the rest of the world eats this shit up just as much as America does.
Cadbury in New Zealand is TERRIBLE. There are very good chocolates in America - I'll bet hardly any Slashdot readers have been to the big yearly chocolate exhibition in NYC but I have, and there are definitely some awesome chocolates there. The aforementioned Guittard makes great chocolate to rival the best produced by any company in the world.
... probably the worst big-name confectionaries I have ever had.
But back to the point - Cadbury in NZ is just ridiculously bad. I wouldn't be surprised if Cadbury here is ALREADY using vegetable oil instead of cocoa butter and whey protein instead of milk.
I have never had Cadbury in the UK. I had always thought they were supposed to be good stuff but when I got to NZ and tried it
"Music" is still around in 2007? Jesus, move onto a new form of entertainment alreadfy.
The Germs. Heh. Haven't listened to them since high school. You can only play G.I. (their only good album) so many times until the lead singer's grating voice just becomes completely unbearable. Great music though.
... does anyone else find today's breed to pseudo-punk-acting bands just too funny for words? I don't follow modern music too much but have seen some music videos here and there and it cracks me up how all these new bands play this completely cheesepuff light rock ballad crap and have faux-hawks and punk-ish clothing and slam around like they're belting out hardcore. It's just so silly to see a bunch of guys jumping around acting like they're so tough and like the music is so raw all the while playing Justin Timberlake-esque fluff. I just couldn't do that with a straight face, I wonder how they manage it.
...
On a tangent only marginally related to the topic
The Germs were the REAL DEAL, the lead singer would spread peanut butter on his naked chest while cutting himself with a broken bottle on stage. They didn't just looked the part, they sounded the part too, with some of the rawest late-70's-hardcore-punk around.
Now to the topic at hand - so what. Not every test is 100% reliable. False positives exist. This is a headline story for what reason exactly?
And for the obligitary Slashdot tongue-in-cheek comment: I don't see how having GHB in soap is helping anyone. If you've already convinced your date to take a shower with you the GHB is kind of redundant
It seems like every day there are two or three stories on Slashdot that try to hype up the importance of "blogging". Why, just because someone put a really retarded sounding name on the concept of writing web pages, is blogging such a hyped thing?
It reminds me of the early days of Slashdot, when *anything* having to do with Linux was featured in big bold headlines like it was a miracle. This has toned down a little bit over the years but even today the hype factor for Linux on this site is a bit annoying (and I am a huge fan of Linux, it's the reason I started reading Slashdot back in '97 - despite the hyping of everything Linux, it was a good place to get news when such news sources were scarce).
I can't shake the feeling that people who don't really understand "them Internets" hear a word that has no meaning - "blog" - and assume that it just must be something really cool and important. Because really, it isn't. I nearly hurled at the idiocy of it all the first time I heard the word "blogosphere".
This is such a gross misrepresentation of the incident that it doesn't even bear further comment.
Yes, and clearly YOU know better than someone who was actually THERE and participated in the event.
You have no idea what you're talking about and it shows. The GP's story is much more believable than your assertions.
Two points:
:)
1) Harvard is not one of the top computer science universities in the United States. It is a good university nonetheless. And money can't buy better credentials
2) I think that alot of schools make half-assed attempts at the ACM contest. Meaning, maybe they get a handful of kids together to work on some practice problems a couple of times, maybe even once a week over a semester. When I went to CMU that's how it was, more or less. My friend was on the ACM team that went to nationals but didn't make it to internationals. I know what his course load was like that semester. I know that the ACM contest must have been pretty low on the priority queue.
There are some universities that I expect want the notariety of winning the ACM badly enough that the students who participate do little else besides prepare for the ACM. I would not expect Harvard to be one of those schools. What do they have to prove? They're Harvard for chrissakes!
I just re-read the GP. I agree that he didn't make any sense. I tried to extrapolate what kind of meaningful statements he must have been implying.
Let me use a better analogy than your flawed one about bleach and cyanide (neither of which people think is safe to drink so this doesn't even satisfy the most obvious prerequisites for an anology here).
Let's say:
a) Ben Affleck is hunky enough to be a leading man.
b) Tom Cruise is hunkier thank Ben Affleck.
Therefore,
c) Tom Cruise is hunky enough to be a leading man.
Now if (a) and (b) are true, then how can people NOT consider Tom Cruise to be hunky enough to be a leading man? The answer is that people are being illogical if they don't. Either they don't believe that Ben Afflect is hunky enough to be a leading man, or they don't believe that Tom Cruise is hunkier than Ben Affleck. Both are valid ways to not conclude (c). But there is no way to believe both (a) and (b) and yet not also believe (c).
So if we can accept that:
a) Coal to be safe enough for widespread use
b) Nuclear is safer than coal
then we MUST accept that
c) Nuclear is safe enough for widespread use
This whole thing where you are introducing "is" vs "should" is irrelevent. We weren't talking about what is true versus what was true. People STILL DO consider coal to be safe enough for widespread use. Dirty maybe, but worth-the-risk safe enough. We *know* from evidence that nuclear is safer than coal (someone pointed out in another post that something like 30 people have died from exposure to radioactivity from nuclear power plants, whereas 30 people *each year* die in coal related accidents). Therefore it makes NO SENSE that some people say that nuclear is not safe. They either have to accept that coal is not safe, or that nuclear is not safer than coal, before they can say that nuclear is not safe. Now, there very well may be people who don't think that coal is safe enough. But we're not talking about those relatively few people. We're talking about the masses who have no problem with a coal fired plant next door but who would protest vigorously against a nuclear plant next door.
Anyway I think your whole posting could be refuted by this simple statement:
* When I said that people have thought that coal was safe enough for hundreds of years, I meant for hundreds of years in the past up to AND INCLUDING *now*. The statements aren't "people used to think that coal was safe" and "nuclear is safer than coal". They are "people DO think that coal IS safe" and "nuclear is safer than coal".
If you read the comments on the site in question it will become very clear that there's some kind of infighting going on between the group of people involved in this case. Some of those attacking her claim to be people whose cases resultd in the courts in bringing the case against her (or at least that's how I read it). So my point here is that those people didn't seem to be "random blog commenters" - they seemed to me to be people actually involved in the case in question.
I'm just saying that this person, Suzanne Shell, comes off as being alot more credible than the people attacking her. If the side that seems more reasonable is the one which has been slapped with a fine by the courts, and there are allegations that the courts are pushing a political agenda, then the whole issue looks very grey - maybe there is some legitimacy to what Suzanne Shell is trying to do? Maybe there was some malfeasance on the part of the courts? Who knows. Like I said I know very little of the specifics of the case. I'm just saying that people here on Slashdot are attacking this woman and she comes off alot better than her attackers, both on that site and here on Slashdot.
Anyway, this is all highly irrelevent because the only way to know who was right and who was wrong is to understand the case, which I don't. I'm just saying that my bias would be in favor of Suzanne Shell given what I read in those posts.
However, the fact that she's suing Internet Archives in such a ridiculous way is a major strike against her. So I don't know what to think.
Nope, I don't get it. If coal has been considered safe enough, and nuclear power is safer (once again let's assume this is true for the sake of this pretty useless argument), then nuclear power should also be considered safe enough. Seems pretty clear to me.
I think the GP's point was the nuclear power is safe enough for use, not that it's completely safe.
This is a very interesting piece of information. As pro-nuclear as I am, if the financial risks are too great (a single event being able to wipe out billions of dollars of capital is pretty scary from an economics standpoint), then I can understand it being difficult or impossible to get the capital to make a new nuclear power plant. I can't stand the ill-informed "safety" arguments against nuclear, but this financial argument of yours does sound like a significant strike against nuclear power.
Coal is unsafe. And yet it has been considered safe enough for practical use for hundreds of years. Nuclear power is safer than coal. Therefore it should be considered safe enough for practical use.
I think his point was pretty clear. Are you intentionally disregarding it due to an inherent bias against nuclear energy?
You know, I followed your link to the Colorado Confidential site and read a bit about what happened with Suzanne Shell there. I have to say that I don't know much at all about the cases in question, but reading that site, it's pretty clear that there are some very weird and not altogether decent characters attacking her. Her response to the court's decision seemed intelligent and believable.
I have no idea what the actual facts are here, but when one party seems intelligent, well-spoken, and does not engage in personal attacks, and the other party is incoherent, rambling, and engages in constant ad hominem attack, I think I know which party seems more believable to me.
I don't know all of the facts in the suit against Internet Archives either, but that one seems stupid and frivolous. It's very hard to understand what's going on in Colorado courts that is leading to all of this.
See my "spawning alternate universes unprovable bullshit" comment from my original post.
:)
"Theories" that require that one escape the laws of logic or the bounds of our universe are fiction, and we should not be wasting our time treating them like they are anything else.
Anyway, you or anyone else can waste all the time they want to on such bullshit, but please don't waste *my* time with it or especially, *my* tax dollars
Care to name one? And will you still be around to admit that it's bullshit once I show you that it is?
It makes me sad that this was modded 'insightful'. You are suggesting that current physics theory about the speed of light and information might turn out to be as fallacious as Plato's assertion that the earth is at the center of the universe.
There are alot of theories wrapped up in the whole speed of light and information thing, and I have no doubt that some of them may be disproven someday. But there is one thing, the thing that I think people get most excited about when they talk about experiments involving the speed of light, that will NEVER be disproven:
Nothing can go backwards in time. Not possible. The law of nature that says that nothing can go backwards in time WILL NEVER BE DISPROVEN. The theories which stipulate why this is so might change, but the law WILL NEVER CHANGE.
FORGET TIME TRAVEL. IT IS ***IMPOSSIBLE***.
And by impossible, I mean, you'd have to violate logical causality to do it, and if you're starting to talk about theorizations of ways to violate causality, then, well, you're no longer very interesting to talk to. You might as well be talking about purple men coming out of your ears and how you're going to harness their energy to build a super mega space dome. You're not talking sense when you start talking "going backwards in time", and you're welcome to not talk sense, but I won't listen.
And moreover, I don't think that any rational person should listen either. We should move on and spend our time and energy thinking about things which are possible (unless writing fiction, in which case time travel talk is appropriate and welcome).
It bugs me that people spend so much time working on experiments and theories and Slashdot comments concerning ways to violate the most fundamental laws of not just nature, of *logic*, such as going backwards in time.
I know, someone is going to respond and say, "well if we all felt like you, then there would never be any scientific advancement because no one would question scientific theories - just like not questioning Plato about the earth being at the center of the universe". And that will make me sad too, because that person will be *completely* missing the point. I'm not saying, don't challenge current physics theory, or come up with new theories, or try to think outside the box.
I'm just saying, if the goal of your theorization is to try to find a way to GO BACKWARDS IN TIME, then STOP RIGHT THERE. You might as well be trying to find a way to prove that 2 + 2 = 5. It is not possible, so don't waste your or my time.
By all means, try to prove that something can go faster than the speed of light. But at the same time, recognize that you're going to have to also prove that going faster than the speed of light does NOT mean travelling backwards in time. Because the end result of a valid law of nature CANNOT be that something can go backwards in time, just as the result of a valid law of nature CANNOT be that 2 + 2 = 5.
And if you start talking about how "maybe going backwards in time means forking off a copy of the universe" or similar unprovable fantasy bullshit, please, step aside and let real scientists get to work.