Apparently my initial point wasn't expressed clearly for you:
"Stop moderation" is simply not an option on a private platform. No private platform is obligated to provide - or interested in providing - for its members a platform which allows them to disseminate consequence-free speech. Do away with moderation? You'll see platforms require that you use your real name, or they'll simply disallow comments and posting altogether. Any expectation of "anonymous" speech on Facebook is ridiculous.
It does not matter to Facebook that you want to speak out in a manner that might get you expelled, beaten up, arrested, or killed. That is not their problem, nor is it their mission to provide you with a platform to do that, or protect you from the consequences if you do use their platform for it. In other words: If you want anonymous speech for any old thing you might want to say, don't expect to find that on Facebook, or any other private site which has terms of use.
The economics of radio suck if you try to cater to a very narrow segment of interest. That's why you end up with radio stations broadcasting the same Bieber/Idol/Britney compilation over and over again - because it's the lowest common denominator that lots of people will listen to.
If you're looking for a radio station that plays Bright Eyes and Pavement 24x7, or "Nothing but the Ramones, all day!", you've got a very narrow listening audience, which means your ads will be, generally speaking, a great way to lose money. If you want a customized playlist catered to your individual tastes, you probably need to be prepared to pay some fee for it, because ad-supported simply isn't going to cut it when your market self-segregates into tight little niches.
Maybe you should start your own site which will allow you to publish your speech in a truly anonymous fashion, then, instead of demanding other people provide one for you, or pretending to be outraged that somebody would set terms of use that govern what you say and how you say it on a site they have built & continue to operate.
Indeed, anonymity is important, but when we're talking about private platforms operated by private, for-profit enterprise, we're not talking about "free speech." Nobody's obligated to give others a platform from which to speak.
Suggesting - as the AC above did - that you have a right to un-moderated, unrestricted speech on somebody else's dime is rather disingenuous.
Yeah, if there's a lot of turnover, those personal bonds get very difficult to form. Most of my work with distributed teams has been with fairly stable international groups all working for a single large company, so we've had a chance to get to know one another a bit.
As trite as it'll sound here on Slashdot, using some social media types of stuff - Facebook, LinkedIn esp. - to "socialize" with your distributed team outside of official business channels can also help foster those bonds - from what I've seen, it helps remind us all that the people on the other end of that blistering email you're pounding out at 3 a.m. are, in fact, people - with families, friends, interests, and hobbies outside of writing software for a large multinational conglomerate.
I'm always curious when I see this "Buggy flash is better than no flash". I can't think of a single time where my only possible route to the information I need is through a flash web site.
My big gripe with flash is that not a single content provider has turned to it to deliver mobile media in an effective way
Care to explain why they need it, when a simple H.264 stream will deliver mobile media without it? (And, if we're to believe the speculation, hardware-accelerated WebM / VP8 video will also work just fine without flash in the near future?)
It sounds like you're saying, "I sure wish things came with more unnecessary and redundant packaging!"
I'm pretty sure RMS doesn't use Flash on his computers, on which he says he's dedicated to using only Free Software, from pretty much metal-on-up.
I suspect this is why the Linux users get lampooned over this issue - arguing in favor of Flash puts you squarely on the side of proprietary and closed systems. I've seen numerous Linux advocates suggest that people "simply shouldn't use" software that isn't Free; why is Flash suddenly exempt - simply because it has the market share? By that logic, you should all be arguing in favor of Microsoft's products, as well.
Do you really think it will always be out of reach?
Yes. It will always be "technically possible", and practically stupid, placing it squarely out of reach.
As the technology here increases to make everything more economical and more efficient, energy sources such as solar, wind, fuel cell & battery technologies, biofuels, etc. will continue to be *more economical,* and thus nobody will pursue these vast methane deposits a billion miles away which would likely require hundreds of trillions of dollars invested over decades to be able to exploit in any meaningful sense on any practical scale for power generation here on earth.
Methane from Titan burns just like methane from here on Earth, except you also have to extract it in a location that is hostile to human life which happens to be a billion miles away, and then ship it back to earth over a span of months or years (months assumes we have vastly improved propulsion systems) - increasing the cost of that methane astronomically.
Furthermore, there's the safety consideration: methane is volatile, and will burn or explode quite readily. "Free fall capsules" would involve giant containers filled with tons of explosive being dropped, in free fall, through the atmosphere, and - hopefully - not exploding during re-entry or landing. A space elevator would be a great concept, until something goes wrong and a container develops a leak and explodes, halting all offloading of methane until the damage is repaired. So you either build multiple redundant systems (at tremendous cost), or you're back to taking off and landing with many tons of payload, constantly.
In short: if dropping multi-ton bombs of methane through the atmosphere on a daily basis is our only way of "economically" generating energy back here on earth, we're already fucked.
And rockets are the only way to get to orbit? Or the only way to move between planets?
Even if we magically had some no-cost way of putting things in orbit and propelling them to Saturn, scaling up that solution such that:
1) Constructing a self-sufficient autonomous or minimally-manned mining operation on Saturn; 2) Constructing the fleet of transports you'd need to move that cargo back to Earth from Saturn; 3) Moving the material you've mined from Titan's surface up to those transports; 4) Making a ~750 million to 1 billion mile one-way trip; 5) Moving the material from transports to earth's surface; 6) Having the capacity at both ends to keep the transports turning around smoothly; 7) Building machinery capable of withstanding the extremes for long enough to make it economically reasonable to build & ship them in the first place;
And doing all of this in real-time as a "supply/fueling" operation is economically retarded. If your solution to our energy problems involves some sort of magical matter-transmission technology we haven't invented yet, then your solution is not a solution, it is a fantasy.
And interestingly, given the studies done on the benefits to students of a reasonably rounded "arts & music" program, some of the Cold War innovation may have been helped by that healthy balance of science and humanities. Anecdotal example - I work with some people who I know are very smart, but if you ask them to write their ideas down on paper, they come across as mildly retarded and functionally illiterate.
If they had tried to run the race to the moon with people like the guy I just watched scribble meaningless doodles on a whiteboard for a half hour while rambling about his project, I suspect that whole "Apollo program" thing would've turned out very differently.
For real? If we're ever approaching the point where shipping methane from the moons-of-fucking-Saturn is the most economical way to power our lifestyle, we're in for a nasty, and expensive, awakening. Not to mention that if shipping from Saturn is economical, you probably don't have the funds to build & launch a rocket to Saturn, much less a huge fleet of them large enough to create an actual supply line delivering a constant volume of methane back to Earth.
Remember cultural references are not universal, despite Coca-Cola Co's best efforts. Watch out for this when drawing analogies, especially with TV shows, social situations, and personal money.
But on the bright side, you can make some great personal connections if you just show a little curiosity about those cultural references. I spent a couple hours one evening introducing one of my Indian coworkers to NWA, Ice Cube, Public Enemy, and some other hip hop music. This came about after he asked whether a particular neighborhood of Boston was a good place to find an apartment; I described it as, "not exactly Compton, but a pretty tough area."
Scrubbing all cultural references and colloquialisms out of your speech makes it safe, but boring and stilted. Teach your team members that that politeness is important, but that it's also okay to say, "Wait, what does that mean? I'm not familiar with that expression."
Also see the parts of the presentation where it states that investments of ~860 billion Euro per year, for the next 20 years, are required to make that cost curve a reality. Also see the parts of the presentation where it states that China needs to cough up ~290 billion of that annual cost. Also consider the fact that China's demand for energy is not going to go DOWN no matter how much insulation they put in everybody's house. They may slow the growth of the demand, but they will not flatten it, or turn it negative.
None of those carbon abatement strategies change the fact that energy demand will grow as nations develop. The best that "reducing usage" will do is slow the growth of that demand, and that is not sufficient.
The demand for energy isn't going to go down. Consuming less simply means the demand for it will increase at a slightly slower rate. There are billions of people around the world living in developing countries, who sure would enjoy air conditioning, television, home computers, and a car. You going to tell them that they can't have that because we're all expected to "use less"? Tell them that while Americans and Europeans just turn off their air conditioners, the Indians and Chinese can go back to living in primitive conditions that haven't changed much in probably a thousand years?
If you make energy more scarce than it already is, the majority of people who will lose out are those who live in developing countries & poor people even in developed countries. There is no magical technology available that will allow us to suddenly consume 75% less energy per capita, allowing us to keep generating capacity static while we all continue improving our lifestyles with technological comforts like lights, indoor plumbing, and medicine.
This same principle applies to the US deficit: it will require a sizable tax increase and a sizable cut in benefits and funding, sustained over MANY years, to make any lasting change that doesn't cause more secondary problems than it purports to solve. But there are always credulous buffoons who are willing to suggest that simply cutting Program X (where "X" is usually "the military" or "NPR and Planned Parenthood"), or simply "taxing the rich!" (where "rich" is defined as "makes ~20% more than I make") are completely legitimate solutions to the problem that will make everything better the moment the policies are in place.
You can humbly submit it, but unless you're willing to be the first one to shut off the computer and go live in a cave with no comforts of modern civilization, your notion isn't worth much.
Legalese. The court makes findings of fact. The lawyers make claims about what they believe the facts to be, and supply evidence to support their claims.
To a lawyer, "it appears that Google lacks FISMA certification." In a court's findings, they will uphold or deny this claim, based on the evidence presented. If they find that Google does not have that certification, and that claim of certification is a key component of Google's case, their entire case could well be thrown out.
I'm very sorry to hear that your reading ability is so limited that you can't gloss over a single occurence of the words "Federal Bureau of Investigation" when you see "(FBI)" lurking 4 words away in the text.
Is it congenital, or did you suffer some sort of massive head trauma as a child? Does it hurt?
The New York Times and your local newspaper aren't "scholarly papers" either. The masthead of this site identifies Slashdot as "news for nerds" - if it aims to be a "news" site of any sort, it certainly should aspire to some minimum standards of clarity and usefulness in the writing being presented by its editors. The point of writing is communication - if you are communicating in a way that confuses your reader, or leaves them with more questions than answers, then you have failed as a writer. If we're going to abandon any idea of making the writing as clear & informative as possible here, we might as well fire all the editors, and simply turn/. into a simple list of links with a tag cloud attached. Yay, more Digg.
Given the complaint, it's entirely likely that many of the people asking "What's ALS?" have heard of "Lou Gehrig's Disease" without knowing its actual medical name or the abbreviation for it.
So you think that slashdot editors would rather send all of their readers to Google to search up cryptic abbreviations, rather than keep them here generating page views?
And then a single conventional shell hits your perfectly-aligned, perfectly-reflective armor, doing one of the following: changing the precision of the angle it's mounted at, making it less useful as a protective layer; damaging the surface to make it much less reflective and thus absorbing much more of the laser's energy; or simply destroying the reflective armor and the vessel it's mounted on.
Navy - 1; Hypothetical perfectly reflective armor - 0;
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently my initial point wasn't expressed clearly for you:
"Stop moderation" is simply not an option on a private platform. No private platform is obligated to provide - or interested in providing - for its members a platform which allows them to disseminate consequence-free speech. Do away with moderation? You'll see platforms require that you use your real name, or they'll simply disallow comments and posting altogether. Any expectation of "anonymous" speech on Facebook is ridiculous.
It does not matter to Facebook that you want to speak out in a manner that might get you expelled, beaten up, arrested, or killed. That is not their problem, nor is it their mission to provide you with a platform to do that, or protect you from the consequences if you do use their platform for it. In other words: If you want anonymous speech for any old thing you might want to say, don't expect to find that on Facebook, or any other private site which has terms of use.
The economics of radio suck if you try to cater to a very narrow segment of interest. That's why you end up with radio stations broadcasting the same Bieber/Idol/Britney compilation over and over again - because it's the lowest common denominator that lots of people will listen to.
If you're looking for a radio station that plays Bright Eyes and Pavement 24x7, or "Nothing but the Ramones, all day!", you've got a very narrow listening audience, which means your ads will be, generally speaking, a great way to lose money. If you want a customized playlist catered to your individual tastes, you probably need to be prepared to pay some fee for it, because ad-supported simply isn't going to cut it when your market self-segregates into tight little niches.
Maybe you should start your own site which will allow you to publish your speech in a truly anonymous fashion, then, instead of demanding other people provide one for you, or pretending to be outraged that somebody would set terms of use that govern what you say and how you say it on a site they have built & continue to operate.
Indeed, anonymity is important, but when we're talking about private platforms operated by private, for-profit enterprise, we're not talking about "free speech." Nobody's obligated to give others a platform from which to speak.
Suggesting - as the AC above did - that you have a right to un-moderated, unrestricted speech on somebody else's dime is rather disingenuous.
If we remove moderation, can we remove anonymity too, and force people to post with their real names if they wish to participate?
Or is taking real-world responsibility for the actual content of your speech something you're trying to avoid?
Yeah, if there's a lot of turnover, those personal bonds get very difficult to form. Most of my work with distributed teams has been with fairly stable international groups all working for a single large company, so we've had a chance to get to know one another a bit.
As trite as it'll sound here on Slashdot, using some social media types of stuff - Facebook, LinkedIn esp. - to "socialize" with your distributed team outside of official business channels can also help foster those bonds - from what I've seen, it helps remind us all that the people on the other end of that blistering email you're pounding out at 3 a.m. are, in fact, people - with families, friends, interests, and hobbies outside of writing software for a large multinational conglomerate.
I'm always curious when I see this "Buggy flash is better than no flash". I can't think of a single time where my only possible route to the information I need is through a flash web site.
What, you didn't realize that they meant "all at once" when they said that?
Care to explain why they need it, when a simple H.264 stream will deliver mobile media without it? (And, if we're to believe the speculation, hardware-accelerated WebM / VP8 video will also work just fine without flash in the near future?)
It sounds like you're saying, "I sure wish things came with more unnecessary and redundant packaging!"
I'm pretty sure RMS doesn't use Flash on his computers, on which he says he's dedicated to using only Free Software, from pretty much metal-on-up.
I suspect this is why the Linux users get lampooned over this issue - arguing in favor of Flash puts you squarely on the side of proprietary and closed systems. I've seen numerous Linux advocates suggest that people "simply shouldn't use" software that isn't Free; why is Flash suddenly exempt - simply because it has the market share? By that logic, you should all be arguing in favor of Microsoft's products, as well.
Yes. It will always be "technically possible", and practically stupid, placing it squarely out of reach.
As the technology here increases to make everything more economical and more efficient, energy sources such as solar, wind, fuel cell & battery technologies, biofuels, etc. will continue to be *more economical,* and thus nobody will pursue these vast methane deposits a billion miles away which would likely require hundreds of trillions of dollars invested over decades to be able to exploit in any meaningful sense on any practical scale for power generation here on earth.
Methane from Titan burns just like methane from here on Earth, except you also have to extract it in a location that is hostile to human life which happens to be a billion miles away, and then ship it back to earth over a span of months or years (months assumes we have vastly improved propulsion systems) - increasing the cost of that methane astronomically.
Furthermore, there's the safety consideration: methane is volatile, and will burn or explode quite readily. "Free fall capsules" would involve giant containers filled with tons of explosive being dropped, in free fall, through the atmosphere, and - hopefully - not exploding during re-entry or landing. A space elevator would be a great concept, until something goes wrong and a container develops a leak and explodes, halting all offloading of methane until the damage is repaired. So you either build multiple redundant systems (at tremendous cost), or you're back to taking off and landing with many tons of payload, constantly.
In short: if dropping multi-ton bombs of methane through the atmosphere on a daily basis is our only way of "economically" generating energy back here on earth, we're already fucked.
Even if we magically had some no-cost way of putting things in orbit and propelling them to Saturn, scaling up that solution such that:
1) Constructing a self-sufficient autonomous or minimally-manned mining operation on Saturn;
2) Constructing the fleet of transports you'd need to move that cargo back to Earth from Saturn;
3) Moving the material you've mined from Titan's surface up to those transports;
4) Making a ~750 million to 1 billion mile one-way trip;
5) Moving the material from transports to earth's surface;
6) Having the capacity at both ends to keep the transports turning around smoothly;
7) Building machinery capable of withstanding the extremes for long enough to make it economically reasonable to build & ship them in the first place;
And doing all of this in real-time as a "supply/fueling" operation is economically retarded. If your solution to our energy problems involves some sort of magical matter-transmission technology we haven't invented yet, then your solution is not a solution, it is a fantasy.
And interestingly, given the studies done on the benefits to students of a reasonably rounded "arts & music" program, some of the Cold War innovation may have been helped by that healthy balance of science and humanities. Anecdotal example - I work with some people who I know are very smart, but if you ask them to write their ideas down on paper, they come across as mildly retarded and functionally illiterate.
If they had tried to run the race to the moon with people like the guy I just watched scribble meaningless doodles on a whiteboard for a half hour while rambling about his project, I suspect that whole "Apollo program" thing would've turned out very differently.
For real? If we're ever approaching the point where shipping methane from the moons-of-fucking-Saturn is the most economical way to power our lifestyle, we're in for a nasty, and expensive, awakening. Not to mention that if shipping from Saturn is economical, you probably don't have the funds to build & launch a rocket to Saturn, much less a huge fleet of them large enough to create an actual supply line delivering a constant volume of methane back to Earth.
But on the bright side, you can make some great personal connections if you just show a little curiosity about those cultural references. I spent a couple hours one evening introducing one of my Indian coworkers to NWA, Ice Cube, Public Enemy, and some other hip hop music. This came about after he asked whether a particular neighborhood of Boston was a good place to find an apartment; I described it as, "not exactly Compton, but a pretty tough area."
Scrubbing all cultural references and colloquialisms out of your speech makes it safe, but boring and stilted. Teach your team members that that politeness is important, but that it's also okay to say, "Wait, what does that mean? I'm not familiar with that expression."
No, I can imagine a rocket that's much faster. So there.
Oh, you think you're pushing the button, for sure. But really, she's just faking.
Also see the parts of the presentation where it states that investments of ~860 billion Euro per year, for the next 20 years, are required to make that cost curve a reality. Also see the parts of the presentation where it states that China needs to cough up ~290 billion of that annual cost. Also consider the fact that China's demand for energy is not going to go DOWN no matter how much insulation they put in everybody's house. They may slow the growth of the demand, but they will not flatten it, or turn it negative.
None of those carbon abatement strategies change the fact that energy demand will grow as nations develop. The best that "reducing usage" will do is slow the growth of that demand, and that is not sufficient.
The demand for energy isn't going to go down. Consuming less simply means the demand for it will increase at a slightly slower rate. There are billions of people around the world living in developing countries, who sure would enjoy air conditioning, television, home computers, and a car. You going to tell them that they can't have that because we're all expected to "use less"? Tell them that while Americans and Europeans just turn off their air conditioners, the Indians and Chinese can go back to living in primitive conditions that haven't changed much in probably a thousand years?
If you make energy more scarce than it already is, the majority of people who will lose out are those who live in developing countries & poor people even in developed countries. There is no magical technology available that will allow us to suddenly consume 75% less energy per capita, allowing us to keep generating capacity static while we all continue improving our lifestyles with technological comforts like lights, indoor plumbing, and medicine.
This same principle applies to the US deficit: it will require a sizable tax increase and a sizable cut in benefits and funding, sustained over MANY years, to make any lasting change that doesn't cause more secondary problems than it purports to solve. But there are always credulous buffoons who are willing to suggest that simply cutting Program X (where "X" is usually "the military" or "NPR and Planned Parenthood"), or simply "taxing the rich!" (where "rich" is defined as "makes ~20% more than I make") are completely legitimate solutions to the problem that will make everything better the moment the policies are in place.
You can humbly submit it, but unless you're willing to be the first one to shut off the computer and go live in a cave with no comforts of modern civilization, your notion isn't worth much.
Legalese. The court makes findings of fact. The lawyers make claims about what they believe the facts to be, and supply evidence to support their claims.
To a lawyer, "it appears that Google lacks FISMA certification." In a court's findings, they will uphold or deny this claim, based on the evidence presented. If they find that Google does not have that certification, and that claim of certification is a key component of Google's case, their entire case could well be thrown out.
I'm very sorry to hear that your reading ability is so limited that you can't gloss over a single occurence of the words "Federal Bureau of Investigation" when you see "(FBI)" lurking 4 words away in the text.
Is it congenital, or did you suffer some sort of massive head trauma as a child? Does it hurt?
The New York Times and your local newspaper aren't "scholarly papers" either. The masthead of this site identifies Slashdot as "news for nerds" - if it aims to be a "news" site of any sort, it certainly should aspire to some minimum standards of clarity and usefulness in the writing being presented by its editors. The point of writing is communication - if you are communicating in a way that confuses your reader, or leaves them with more questions than answers, then you have failed as a writer. If we're going to abandon any idea of making the writing as clear & informative as possible here, we might as well fire all the editors, and simply turn /. into a simple list of links with a tag cloud attached. Yay, more Digg.
Given the complaint, it's entirely likely that many of the people asking "What's ALS?" have heard of "Lou Gehrig's Disease" without knowing its actual medical name or the abbreviation for it.
So you think that slashdot editors would rather send all of their readers to Google to search up cryptic abbreviations, rather than keep them here generating page views?
How curious.
And then a single conventional shell hits your perfectly-aligned, perfectly-reflective armor, doing one of the following: changing the precision of the angle it's mounted at, making it less useful as a protective layer; damaging the surface to make it much less reflective and thus absorbing much more of the laser's energy; or simply destroying the reflective armor and the vessel it's mounted on.
Navy - 1; Hypothetical perfectly reflective armor - 0;