That is just not true. New renewable energy power plants are on par with coal energy. With coal becoming more expensive in the future. Easily extractable and good quality coal is being used up fast. It is true that that existing power generation is cheaper with coal. But building new power plants is not.
Or maybe their school can't afford cable TV or satellite TV or TVs for that matter. Internet is just about a requirement these days. Just as a school library was back in the day.
Web references are ok, IF they are from reputable sources. There are excellent web sources. And I'm not talking about Wikipedia here. Take http://arxiv.org/ for example. I think there needs to be a grading process for reliability of sources. A structure where scientific papers are graded and their reliability checked by other opposing and supporting papers. Not just the number of references a paper gets.
You were busy minding your own business when funding murderers like Saddam, Osama and others in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Pakistan, Afghanistan and others for over 60 years?
Because it is all about winning the hearts and minds of people? Funding people that kill others is not a good way of going about doing that.
The war in the Persian Gulf will not matter. Peak Oil is here whether the US invaded Iraq or not. The slide down will not be as rough for you as it would have been without it. But rough none the less.
You might say that GWB is well on his way already. What with torture, eroding people's rights, 24/7 propaganda faux news, pillage and plunder of tax payers money.
"On his worst day, chimp boy is better than any government in any developing country on their best day...expects to be modded down for disagreeing with the waah! America sucks! groupthing."
That totally depends on who you talk to. Anyone from a developing country the U.S. has taken a shit on will probably punch you in the face.
George W. Shrub may be good for Americans but the rest of the world does not agree. In China and Russia at least they keep their human rights violations in their own country. Though Russia is exporting them to some degree to CIS-countries.
So how would you like it if I were to come there and and overthrow your pseudo-democratically elected government and use those same techniques on you ?!?
Using them overseas on a battlefield defined by you does not make them any more morally justified. What if I declared your house a battlefield? Better yet, what if your own president did that? If you don't like it you can rot in one of the internment camps already built in your country.
If the manual is public or not is not relevant in any way shape or form.
What the manual describes is not part of a country's conduct of operation that truly stands for freedom and democracy.
Now, I happen to think that the laws regarding environmental responsibility are a good thing: indeed, many of them don't go far enough, IMhO. But the "right" to do what I wish with the land that I "own" is a subject for law, not for some nebulous concept of "You don't have the right."
Agreed. It is just that the laws that we currently have are nebulous enough as they are. They cannot be easily understood by a lay person. They are just like code. Written in some obscure dialect of the language of the country in which it is applied.
If we wish to address the shortcomings of property ownership regarding such things as pollution and IP, then we must reform the laws.
Yes we must. And the laws should not be dictated by a lobbying group with deep pockets. As the current ones have been.
Legally speaking, however, you can control what can be done. You won't be able to bring the penalties of law onto every single person who violates them--and indeed, in my opinion, attempting to do so is futile--but as the law stands now, it is the legal, not the technological, control that matters. So yes, if I were to write a song and forbid copying, I have absolutely no way of technologically enforcing it. I do, however, have legal means of doing so. You certainly have that legal right under current legislation. The point I am trying to make is that as the law currently stands is not enforcible. It is also not in the best interest of human culture and development. And therefore the current law should not be allowed to stand.
There are many laws currently that are not enforcible. A Judge Dredd comic came to mind where he arrested a whole city block and assessed their level of guilt. Because everyone had broken some law somewhere.
In addition, I don't feel that copyright should be salable or transferable.
Air is inherently uncontrollable. But what about air pollution? You should not have the right to pollute my air just because you own a piece of land over there.
Land ownership can be tricky also. How deep do you own the land? At what point does your right to use/abuse your land end? Consider groundwater for example. You can pump water from the ground on your land but it will dry up all the land around your land also. Coca-Cola is wreaking havoc on some rural Indian farming communities because of this.
Intellectual Property is even trickier than that. You cannot control copying. No matter what copy protection you put on your media it will be broken if the thing is to be usable by an average consumer. And where are the boundaries of IP. Are ideas patentable? Trademarkable? Are they trade secrets? Are algorithms protected? Are story ideas? Are business practices? In my opinion none of them are. I find the whole notion of IP very much akin to controlling air. It has been true for ages that all culture borrows something from someone. We are all on the shoulders of giants. So enforcing IP on culture is counterproductive. IP should be abolished. Or at the very least reigned in substantially. I'm thinking copyright-term: life of the author + max(0,20-(age of work)) years if owned by a person. So that the artists children can grow up benefitting from it. And once they are adults they are on their own. 20 years if owned by a company. patent-term: 10 years
Come to think of it all ownership should have clearly defined boundaries.
All that dick waving however leads to Another Cold War. And possibly another World War. I for one don't want that again.
The world is heading towards true decolonization. And the industrialised part of the world is on the losing side. And rightly so.
China and India are now shedding their former bonds and becoming world powers in their own right. Slowly but surely. And it will not stop there. The same thing is happening in South America as well. In Africa it will take a long time however. China is asserting it's power there. At the same time Europeans and Americans are trying hard to keep the status quo. As despicable as it is. Same thing can be said of the Middle East. Middle East has always been a problem for the empires of the west/northeast. Iran would already be a major world power right now, had it not been for the destabilisation efforts made by the US in the 1950s. I see more instability for years to come for the region.
And interestingly the only thing to raise a discussion in our parliament about the latest copyright debacle was should churches be exempt of copyright charges when it comes to hymns.... Separation of church and state. HAH! Talk about the failure of democracy....
I have always found it funny how the supposed "leader" nation of the "free" world still has these archaic notions. And not just on abortion. In many European nations these "issues" have not been discussed publicly for a looong time. The reason being that they are essentially a non-issue. Just goes to show how outdated the religious mob is. Talk about groupthink...
Interpersonal violence is on the rise. Working hours are getting shorter (in some countries). People are spending like crazy and loaning to cover their asses. Good education is hard to come by around the world.
So are we headed for a collapse of epic proportions?
Yes it did. In fact I remember reading in school (waaay back) that in the middle ages the rations for soldiers was something like 8 litres of beer and one litre of spirits a week. This was for the hakkapeliitta soldiers if I remember correctly.
All the water was contaminated so they had to drink alcoholic beverages to stay healthy.
They also stayed drunk and didn't care so much whether they lived or died. They also died of liver failure early on but life expectancy then was not what it is now anyway.
..when compared with the imminent real estate-sub prime lending-lending-bond market-stock market chain collapse that is happening right now. We are going somewhere in between sub prime lending-lending and bond market. Bond market is starting to feel the first effects while sub prime lending is collapsing under the banks' feet.
The only reason US has a good credit rating is that everyone is afraid of the collapse it will cause. Hence artificially prolonging the inevitable and in doing so making the eventual collapse even worse.
All in all this will be a good thing. In the short term people will lose jobs and there will be misery all around but the end result will be a healthier economy and hopefully healthier world.
I think I have already begun to. I can see that you are agreeing with many of my main points.
No, you have only begun to understand what my points are. No change in opinion is required.
That's just it. You're TALKING about real action. EVEN you, claiming to be enlightened as to what must happen before we see change, are merely TALKING. This is EXACTLY why no change will occur. The fact of the matter is: We do not know HOW to solve these problems that religions attribute simply to personal failure of one type or another. There is NO failure on the part of the person. There is only failure on the part of PEOPLE, as a society. WE define the NORMS. WE define what WE want to do, and ONLY the leaders that WE choose can change that. That is not something that you or I as individuals can change unless WE become those leaders. But that can only happen by CHOICE of the people, and so we have an unbreakable cycle that was started long ago, and once started could not, and can not be stopped.
That is what one generally does in a forum such as Slashdot. You do not know me well enough to judge whether I take action. And I do. I recycle. I try to minimize greenhouse gas emissions I am causing. I try to shop according to my beliefs. I try to affect a change in people around me, my family, coworkers, fellow slashdotters. I vote and write to my parliamentary representatives regularly and try to affect change in them. I try to get others involved as well. Democracy needs active people. It does not work with the manufactured consent that has been created by mass media. The cycle you are referring to can be broken. It will take a lot of effort but it can be done. Whether it can be done before a global disaster remains to be seen. But I am trying to do my very best that it will not come to pass. Are you?
Thus, what we see in society REFLECTS the state of society. Social issues reflect the very essence of human nature. At one time it was possible to control human nature through the religious nature of man. Those days are fading quickly because, as science and technology progress, we see how truth becomes incompatible with the dogmas of religion. That's the beautiful thing about truth. It's like a diamond reflecting light from its many facets. It changes depending on your perspective. As we learn more our perspective is constantly changing. As that change becomes ever more apparent, tension will build, until we snap.
Our reality is indeed changing. We are long overdue a change in society. I like your analogy of the truth being like a diamond. Tension is indeed building in society. Worldwide. It remains to be seen how that tension will be released. Religion still is a powerful force in many parts of the world. In western countries its power is indeed fading fast. As it should. It has been largely replaced by another more subtle kind of control. Control by mass media and manufactured consent. People can be content to their existence when their basic needs are fulfilled and kept occupied by reality tv show of the week. Bread and circuses. This will not work indefinitely however.
The question is, do you have any better ideas? You're telling me you can come up with an idea that six BILLION people haven't been able to come up with? THEREIN, lies the problem. We are only as strong as our weakest link, and we are only as intelligent as the smartest man (or animal, for that matter), AT BEST. Humans, however, have been very resourceful and developed LANGUAGE. Language allows TWO people to increase their total intelligence. However, as the number of people grows, that "benefit" decreases, and reaches a limit. We can only talk to certain number of people in a day.
I think I have some good ideas. So do a lot of people. The problem is that a vanishingly small fraction of those six BILLION people have any hope ever implementing their ideas in a society bent on maintaining the status quo. The individual can be smart. Society at large isn't. Ther
Slashdot Mirror
What happens when a jet stream stops or significantly weakens from years of power extraction?
Earth's rotation goes haywire?
Severe weather anomalies?
They thought I was joking.
This was in back around y2k I think.
That is just not true.
New renewable energy power plants are on par with coal energy. With coal becoming more expensive in the future. Easily extractable and good quality coal is being used up fast.
It is true that that existing power generation is cheaper with coal. But building new power plants is not.
Or maybe their school can't afford cable TV or satellite TV or TVs for that matter.
Internet is just about a requirement these days.
Just as a school library was back in the day.
Web references are ok, IF they are from reputable sources.
There are excellent web sources. And I'm not talking about Wikipedia here.
Take http://arxiv.org/ for example.
I think there needs to be a grading process for reliability of sources. A structure where scientific papers are graded and their reliability checked by other opposing and supporting papers. Not just the number of references a paper gets.
The American propaganda machine has always, well at least from 1940 onwards, been the best in the world.
It is just that their tactics are becoming more and more obvious and the propaganda has lost it's effectiveness.
Stop praying and get your butt in gear.
All the praying in the world will not help when determined men and women ruin the world.
You were busy minding your own business when funding murderers like Saddam, Osama and others in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Pakistan, Afghanistan and others for over 60 years?
Because it is all about winning the hearts and minds of people?
Funding people that kill others is not a good way of going about doing that.
Who ever "wins" any war?
In war there are only losers.
Genocide?
The war in the Persian Gulf will not matter.
Peak Oil is here whether the US invaded Iraq or not.
The slide down will not be as rough for you as it would have been without it. But rough none the less.
You might say that GWB is well on his way already.
What with torture, eroding people's rights, 24/7 propaganda faux news, pillage and plunder of tax payers money.
Really does reveal the true colours of a country doesn't it. When they are given free reign over another. How they manage to fuck it up.
And Iraq is fucked up. Even more so than ever under Saddam.
Thanks for that link.
I knew about the Finnish part, but was unaware that it was this widespread.
The more you know, the less you believe.
"On his worst day, chimp boy is better than any government in any developing country on their best day. ..expects to be modded down for disagreeing with the waah! America sucks! groupthing."
That totally depends on who you talk to. Anyone from a developing country the U.S. has taken a shit on will probably punch you in the face.
George W. Shrub may be good for Americans but the rest of the world does not agree. In China and Russia at least they keep their human rights violations in their own country. Though Russia is exporting them to some degree to CIS-countries.
So how would you like it if I were to come there and and overthrow your pseudo-democratically elected government and use those same techniques on you ?!?
Using them overseas on a battlefield defined by you does not make them any more morally justified. What if I declared your house a battlefield? Better yet, what if your own president did that? If you don't like it you can rot in one of the internment camps already built in your country.
If the manual is public or not is not relevant in any way shape or form.
What the manual describes is not part of a country's conduct of operation that truly stands for freedom and democracy.
Sorry to pop your bubble.
Now, I happen to think that the laws regarding environmental responsibility are a good thing: indeed, many of them don't go far enough, IMhO. But the "right" to do what I wish with the land that I "own" is a subject for law, not for some nebulous concept of "You don't have the right."
Agreed. It is just that the laws that we currently have are nebulous enough as they are. They cannot be easily understood by a lay person. They are just like code. Written in some obscure dialect of the language of the country in which it is applied.If we wish to address the shortcomings of property ownership regarding such things as pollution and IP, then we must reform the laws.
Yes we must. And the laws should not be dictated by a lobbying group with deep pockets. As the current ones have been. Legally speaking, however, you can control what can be done. You won't be able to bring the penalties of law onto every single person who violates them--and indeed, in my opinion, attempting to do so is futile--but as the law stands now, it is the legal, not the technological, control that matters. So yes, if I were to write a song and forbid copying, I have absolutely no way of technologically enforcing it. I do, however, have legal means of doing so. You certainly have that legal right under current legislation. The point I am trying to make is that as the law currently stands is not enforcible. It is also not in the best interest of human culture and development. And therefore the current law should not be allowed to stand.There are many laws currently that are not enforcible.
A Judge Dredd comic came to mind where he arrested a whole city block and assessed their level of guilt. Because everyone had broken some law somewhere.
In addition, I don't feel that copyright should be salable or transferable.
I agree with you on this.Air is inherently uncontrollable. But what about air pollution? You should not have the right to pollute my air just because you own a piece of land over there.
Land ownership can be tricky also. How deep do you own the land? At what point does your right to use/abuse your land end? Consider groundwater for example. You can pump water from the ground on your land but it will dry up all the land around your land also. Coca-Cola is wreaking havoc on some rural Indian farming communities because of this.
Intellectual Property is even trickier than that. You cannot control copying. No matter what copy protection you put on your media it will be broken if the thing is to be usable by an average consumer.
And where are the boundaries of IP. Are ideas patentable? Trademarkable? Are they trade secrets?
Are algorithms protected? Are story ideas? Are business practices? In my opinion none of them are.
I find the whole notion of IP very much akin to controlling air.
It has been true for ages that all culture borrows something from someone. We are all on the shoulders of giants. So enforcing IP on culture is counterproductive. IP should be abolished. Or at the very least reigned in substantially. I'm thinking
copyright-term:
life of the author + max(0,20-(age of work)) years if owned by a person. So that the artists children can grow up benefitting from it. And once they are adults they are on their own.
20 years if owned by a company.
patent-term: 10 years
Come to think of it all ownership should have clearly defined boundaries.
All that dick waving however leads to Another Cold War. And possibly another World War.
I for one don't want that again.
The world is heading towards true decolonization. And the industrialised part of the world is on the losing side.
And rightly so.
China and India are now shedding their former bonds and becoming world powers in their own right. Slowly but surely.
And it will not stop there. The same thing is happening in South America as well.
In Africa it will take a long time however. China is asserting it's power there. At the same time Europeans and Americans are trying hard to keep the status quo. As despicable as it is.
Same thing can be said of the Middle East. Middle East has always been a problem for the empires of the west/northeast. Iran would already be a major world power right now, had it not been for the destabilisation efforts made by the US in the 1950s. I see more instability for years to come for the region.
That's my 2 euro cents.
And interestingly the only thing to raise a discussion in our parliament about the latest copyright debacle was should churches be exempt of copyright charges when it comes to hymns....
Separation of church and state. HAH!
Talk about the failure of democracy....
I have always found it funny how the supposed "leader" nation of the "free" world still has these archaic notions. And not just on abortion.
In many European nations these "issues" have not been discussed publicly for a looong time. The reason being that they are essentially a non-issue.
Just goes to show how outdated the religious mob is. Talk about groupthink...
Interpersonal violence is on the rise.
Working hours are getting shorter (in some countries).
People are spending like crazy and loaning to cover their asses.
Good education is hard to come by around the world.
So are we headed for a collapse of epic proportions?
Yes it did.
In fact I remember reading in school (waaay back) that in the middle ages the rations for soldiers was something like
8 litres of beer and one litre of spirits a week. This was for the hakkapeliitta soldiers if I remember correctly.
All the water was contaminated so they had to drink alcoholic beverages to stay healthy.
They also stayed drunk and didn't care so much whether they lived or died. They also died of liver failure early on but life expectancy then was not what it is now anyway.
..when compared with the imminent real estate-sub prime lending-lending-bond market-stock market chain collapse that is happening right now.
We are going somewhere in between sub prime lending-lending and bond market. Bond market is starting to feel the first effects while sub prime lending is collapsing under the banks' feet.
The only reason US has a good credit rating is that everyone is afraid of the collapse it will cause. Hence artificially prolonging the inevitable and in doing so making the eventual collapse even worse.
All in all this will be a good thing.
In the short term people will lose jobs and there will be misery all around but the end result will be a healthier economy and hopefully healthier world.
I think I have already begun to. I can see that you are agreeing with many of my main points.
No, you have only begun to understand what my points are. No change in opinion is required.
That's just it. You're TALKING about real action. EVEN you, claiming to be enlightened as to what must happen before we see change, are merely TALKING. This is EXACTLY why no change will occur. The fact of the matter is: We do not know HOW to solve these problems that religions attribute simply to personal failure of one type or another. There is NO failure on the part of the person. There is only failure on the part of PEOPLE, as a society. WE define the NORMS. WE define what WE want to do, and ONLY the leaders that WE choose can change that. That is not something that you or I as individuals can change unless WE become those leaders. But that can only happen by CHOICE of the people, and so we have an unbreakable cycle that was started long ago, and once started could not, and can not be stopped.
That is what one generally does in a forum such as Slashdot. You do not know me well enough to judge whether I take action. And I do. I recycle. I try to minimize greenhouse gas emissions I am causing. I try to shop according to my beliefs. I try to affect a change in people around me, my family, coworkers, fellow slashdotters. I vote and write to my parliamentary representatives regularly and try to affect change in them. I try to get others involved as well. Democracy needs active people. It does not work with the manufactured consent that has been created by mass media. The cycle you are referring to can be broken. It will take a lot of effort but it can be done. Whether it can be done before a global disaster remains to be seen. But I am trying to do my very best that it will not come to pass. Are you?
Thus, what we see in society REFLECTS the state of society. Social issues reflect the very essence of human nature. At one time it was possible to control human nature through the religious nature of man. Those days are fading quickly because, as science and technology progress, we see how truth becomes incompatible with the dogmas of religion. That's the beautiful thing about truth. It's like a diamond reflecting light from its many facets. It changes depending on your perspective. As we learn more our perspective is constantly changing. As that change becomes ever more apparent, tension will build, until we snap.
Our reality is indeed changing. We are long overdue a change in society.
I like your analogy of the truth being like a diamond. Tension is indeed building in society. Worldwide. It remains to be seen how that tension will be released. Religion still is a powerful force in many parts of the world. In western countries its power is indeed fading fast. As it should. It has been largely replaced by another more subtle kind of control. Control by mass media and manufactured consent. People can be content to their existence when their basic needs are fulfilled and kept occupied by reality tv show of the week. Bread and circuses. This will not work indefinitely however.
The question is, do you have any better ideas? You're telling me you can come up with an idea that six BILLION people haven't been able to come up with? THEREIN, lies the problem. We are only as strong as our weakest link, and we are only as intelligent as the smartest man (or animal, for that matter), AT BEST. Humans, however, have been very resourceful and developed LANGUAGE. Language allows TWO people to increase their total intelligence. However, as the number of people grows, that "benefit" decreases, and reaches a limit. We can only talk to certain number of people in a day.
I think I have some good ideas. So do a lot of people. The problem is that a vanishingly small fraction of those six BILLION people have any hope ever implementing their ideas in a society bent on maintaining the status quo.
The individual can be smart. Society at large isn't. Ther