As the electric parts of the car were responsible for said fire, it seems resonable that electric cars will burst into flames more often than gas burning cars. Therefore, it can be logically deduced that electric cars will result in much more smoke than the fossil fueled alternatives.
In what universe?
My microwave oven leaked and caused me to be exposed to some radiation. As the microwave oven was responsible for the radiation, it seems reasonable that houses with microwave ovens will release more radiation than houses with thermonuclear reactors. Therefore, it can be logically deduced that we should all use nuclear reactors to cook dinner. Ipso facto, etc, etc.
Look on the bright side: your train of logic has done an amazing job of demonstrating the "garbage, in garbage out" principle.
The dumb part... you may as well be arguing that it's more efficient to generate heat by lighting a fire, using it to boil water, using the steam to spin a turbine/generator, and using the resultant electricity to power an electric heater... than it is to just sit beside the friggin' fire. If you think that lightbulbs are an efficient way to heat your house, you're out of your mind.
The "wrong" part... what more is there to say? You're wrong. CFL's are not more toxic than normal bulbs, given their lifespan.
Take an 8-pack of normal bulbs and extract the tungsten - you'll have a lot more "toxic" stuff than what you find in a CFL. Just as importantly, coal and oil powered generating stations emit enough mercury into the atmosphere that the energy-savings afforded by the use of a CFL bulb result in a reduction of mercury output that is greater than the mercury content of the bulb itself. So, even assuming nobody ever bothers to recycle their CFL's, they'll still result in less hazardous waste (and CFL bulbs are recycled at a higher rate than incandescent).
The other two wrongs, I've already explained. I hope you weren't having trouble with those two...
Um, while you're mostly right, you couldn't have picked a worse example. The Aegis is primarily designed for defense. About the only part of the Aegis system which isn't defensive are the tomahawk missiles.
On the other hand, in the winter, using incandescant bulbs generates significant beneficial indoor heat from electricity so your heater pumps out less CO2. More importantly, it generates the heat in the room you're occupying, so you can turn down the central heat.
That's one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. Seriously.
When disposed, incandescents are way less toxic than CFLs
Wrong.
much better for "instant-on" lighting applications. (CFL's need a few minutes to "warm up" to full light output.)
Partly right. The warm-up time has nothing to do with "light output". You won't notice a difference in brightness. The warm-up time is related to efficiency.
The source of your electricity various by region and by individual, which is why the idea of mandating a particular technology like CFL is ham-fisted nonsense.
Also wrong. Environmental benefits are provided by CFL's regardless of your energy source. For one thing, you're reducing the volume of the material being shipped by a factor of 8. If it takes 1 truck to supply your local store instead of 8, that's pretty damn significant. No matter how you look at it, CFL's are better.
Naw, that's way too low tech. Me, I'd just wave my tentacles and quantumly teleportate the entire Earths right into my soup bowl. Remember, an imaginary civilization, who builds a Dyson Sphere, is not necessarily limited to anything.
We consider CFL bulbs to be "green" by the same reasoning - they still have an impact on the environment, but it's much lower than that of normal bulbs.
So... a heap of stone, which doubtless claimed thousands of lives during construction as well as binding production capacity of a nation for decades that could have been invested into future growth infrastructure. And all that for the single purpose of easing one man's afterlife - gobbling up tremendous amounts of other various kinds of resources which could have improved actual lives.of many That is what you consider to be a humanity's great achievement?
No, clearly walking on the moon doesn't come close to matching the invention of the Twinkie.
On a totally unrelated topic.... what the fuck is wrong with you???
Just a few days ago we got an article about a nanobot that can manipulate single atoms, with some help, yes but it's a start considering we've just started to develop the idea...
Sure, and we've successfully demonstrated quantum teleportation, but that doesn't mean it's possible to have Scotty beam you up to the moon. There's a world of difference between making a nano-scale apparatus capable of nudging atoms and building a nano-scale machine capable of being programmed and re-programmed, let alone a complex network of such machines which could follow schematics in order to build you a spaceship. Being able to do one does not automatically make the other possible, let alone easy or even practical.
And I bet you know that wonderfull quote about magic and advanced technology, right?
Yeah, and it's a quote based on a silly assumption. Sure, people who believe in gods and magic will be awed by complex technologies. We've yet to see how someone like, say, Carl Sagan, would react to a "sufficiently advanced technology".
Also I guess that gas giant has a neverending supply of materials, who would need more than one solar system...
I don't think you realize the scale we're talking about here. If you tore Jupiter into it's constituent atoms, you'd have enough material to build 300 PLANETS the size of the earth. Let's be extremely generous and say that all of mankinds creations put together have a mas of about 0.0001% of the earth - that means that your gas-giant-harvesting aliens would have enough material to build 300,000,000 times as much stuff as everything we've ever built. Assuming similar standards of living and biological requirements, they'd have enough resources to support a population of 1,800,000,000,000,000 individuals.
So, ok, let's say they're not only super-beings with magical technology, but also greedy assholes on a quest to harvest the galaxy. Why in the world would they come to earth instead of going to Jupiter? Better yet, why not mine a brown dwarf which can weigh in at as much as 24,000 Earths?
Pretty much the ONLY reason for any alien species to invade the earth would be in order to prevent future competition. However, we could easily file that under "for their own entertainment", and anyway, they certainly wouldn't be coming here for "economic reasons" which was the original claim.
Just use two grams of nanobots instead of one, one gram programed to replicate and kill/genocide and the other gram programed to replicate and build massive spacefaring ships to send back "home".
*facepalm*
You know, if you replace the word "nanobots" with "magic", your sentence will make a lot more sense.
We don't even know that such technology is POSSIBLE, so positing it offhand is ridiculous. If you're going to play that game, though, then you're suggesting that their "nanobots" can magically change matter at the atomic level, which means they wouldn't have any need to come this far. They'd get a fuck of a lot more resources from a gas-giant in their own system than they would from an earth-like planet dozens of light-years away.
I'd like to trust them again, I'd like to be able to believe in the "Captains of Industry" but they have FUCKED us and the world over so hard for the past couple generations that it's really really difficult.
Yeah, man, Intel and AMD have totally screwed us. If these wonderful Pixel Fairies hadn't come along to allow us to communicate over magical beams floating through the aether, we wouldn't even be able to bitch about those bastards.
Actually, I meant "three" and somehow wrote "two" I literally intended from the top of the list through public nudity. My bad.
Yeah, I figured.
If you violate traffic laws, dependent to some extent on the situation, you are creating an environment that endangers others.
Yeah, I acknowledged that.
Surely you see a difference in magnitude between these things, even though both only create an "increased statistical risk of injury or death", and why one of the two might be reasonable to make illegal versus the other?
Yeah, but then you start getting into trade-offs. So now you've gone from arguing that some things shouldn't be illegal because they're not harmful, to arguing that some things shouldn't be illegal because they're not harmful enough and, besides, we like doing them.
You're essentially correct, of course, but the amended claim directly contradicts the idea that things should only be made legal or illegal based on whether or not they're harmful. Which is what I was pointing out from the get-go. And as soon as you start considering laws to be a series of trade-offs, you're going to get a lot of disagreement on what should and should not be legal because such value judgments are inherently subjective. A pedophile and a concerned mother are going to have much different views on what constitutes an acceptable level of harm.
You're thinking "Mars Attacks". But an invasion might consist of a bit of nanotechnology together with some retroviruses and parasites. That's possibly only a gram of payload.
Uhuh. And then they do.... what, exactly? If we're talking about economic incentive, they still need to send massive ships here, load them up, and then get them back home. Or at the very least they need to send a few hundred thousand colonists plus enough factory ships to get a decent colony started. Throwing a magical "nanotechnology" thingy into the mix doesn't really change anything.
you haven't thought this out. energy isn't the only resource they might require (too much peak oil bunk you've been reading i suspect). a habitable planet is worth a lot more then just energy. even a huge energy source is useless if you don't have air to breath.
Who says they breathe air?
In any event, given enough energy you can fix your own planet without difficulty, and terraform a new one almost as easily. On our own planet, for example, we could easily build massive machines to extract CO2 and pollutants from the atmosphere in order to keep it in an optimum balance, but the amount of resources we'd consume in the process makes the proposition impractical. However, such a scheme would be a lot cheaper than trying to build an interstellar attack fleet, and then trying to move 6 billion people to a new planet.
Uhm... fyi, a scientist working for the British Ministry of Defense came up with the idea of the microchip, though he didn't create one himself.
I just came up with the idea of faster-than-light travel by means of a twinkie. What do I get?
Basically, discounting publicly funded academic research is a bad idea.
Not doing that. Both have a role to play.
Private industry turns basic research into stuff you can use, but it rarely does that basic research in the first place
Except I just gave you multiple examples of where it does. Want more? The radio. The telephone. Penicillin. Vulcanized rubber. The lightbulb. Electricity. Velcro. Zippers. Electric cars.
Private companies only produce as little science as they possibly can get away with, putting much more emphasis on patenting the crap out of the little they do produce, and then keep it for themselves.
Spoken like a true ignoramus. Who do you think developed the automobile? The airplane? The microchip? Who develops the pharmaceuticals which keep us living twice as long as our great-grandparents? Who's creating newer, more efficient forms of power, whether it be solar, wind, or nuclear? Who created the high-yield crops which are the only thing staving off mass starvation?
Private industry does more R&D than all the government organizations put together. Most of the great advances in our history were created by private individuals and small companies, and most of the incremental changes around us are driven by private industry. Governments are great for putting together huge research projects like the LHC and the ITER which cost billions and have no immediate practical application, but for everyday innovation and discovery nothing beats private business in search of larger profits.
Do mean all that money (bank bailouts) that was taken from the middle class in the form of taxes to bail out the filthy rich bankers so that they can get their BILLIONS of dollars in bonuses paid for by the US taxpayer?! THAT INCOME REDISTRIBUTION?!? ($$ Poor => Rich and well connected)
Sure, that's part of it. What communist government HASN'T done that?
The communist "ideal" may speak about equal distribution of income, but in reality it's "equality" for the masses, an underground capitalist market, and kickbacks and bonuses to the well-connected.
Slashdot Mirror
Haven't history taught you that violence begets violence?
North and South America serve as a shining beacon of disagreement with that claim.
As the electric parts of the car were responsible for said fire, it seems resonable that electric cars will burst into flames more often than gas burning cars. Therefore, it can be logically deduced that electric cars will result in much more smoke than the fossil fueled alternatives.
In what universe?
My microwave oven leaked and caused me to be exposed to some radiation. As the microwave oven was responsible for the radiation, it seems reasonable that houses with microwave ovens will release more radiation than houses with thermonuclear reactors. Therefore, it can be logically deduced that we should all use nuclear reactors to cook dinner. Ipso facto, etc, etc.
Look on the bright side: your train of logic has done an amazing job of demonstrating the "garbage, in garbage out" principle.
The dumb part ... you may as well be arguing that it's more efficient to generate heat by lighting a fire, using it to boil water, using the steam to spin a turbine/generator, and using the resultant electricity to power an electric heater ... than it is to just sit beside the friggin' fire. If you think that lightbulbs are an efficient way to heat your house, you're out of your mind.
The "wrong" part ... what more is there to say? You're wrong. CFL's are not more toxic than normal bulbs, given their lifespan.
Take an 8-pack of normal bulbs and extract the tungsten - you'll have a lot more "toxic" stuff than what you find in a CFL. Just as importantly, coal and oil powered generating stations emit enough mercury into the atmosphere that the energy-savings afforded by the use of a CFL bulb result in a reduction of mercury output that is greater than the mercury content of the bulb itself. So, even assuming nobody ever bothers to recycle their CFL's, they'll still result in less hazardous waste (and CFL bulbs are recycled at a higher rate than incandescent).
The other two wrongs, I've already explained. I hope you weren't having trouble with those two ...
Um, while you're mostly right, you couldn't have picked a worse example. The Aegis is primarily designed for defense. About the only part of the Aegis system which isn't defensive are the tomahawk missiles.
On the other hand, in the winter, using incandescant bulbs generates significant beneficial indoor heat from electricity so your heater pumps out less CO2. More importantly, it generates the heat in the room you're occupying, so you can turn down the central heat.
That's one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. Seriously.
When disposed, incandescents are way less toxic than CFLs
Wrong.
much better for "instant-on" lighting applications. (CFL's need a few minutes to "warm up" to full light output.)
Partly right. The warm-up time has nothing to do with "light output". You won't notice a difference in brightness. The warm-up time is related to efficiency.
The source of your electricity various by region and by individual, which is why the idea of mandating a particular technology like CFL is ham-fisted nonsense.
Also wrong. Environmental benefits are provided by CFL's regardless of your energy source. For one thing, you're reducing the volume of the material being shipped by a factor of 8. If it takes 1 truck to supply your local store instead of 8, that's pretty damn significant. No matter how you look at it, CFL's are better.
Naw, that's way too low tech. Me, I'd just wave my tentacles and quantumly teleportate the entire Earths right into my soup bowl. Remember, an imaginary civilization, who builds a Dyson Sphere, is not necessarily limited to anything.
So ... we're in agreement?
Maybe this would be a good time to re-arm Japan. They've always been good at taking down China when they've gotten too big for their britches...
China has nukes. Japan is just a little-bit bigger than New Mexico.
'nuff said.
Ok, if that upsets you just call them green-ER.
We consider CFL bulbs to be "green" by the same reasoning - they still have an impact on the environment, but it's much lower than that of normal bulbs.
Perhaps you should consider ditching that 2400 baud modem ....
posting to undo informative mod. meant to mod you "redundant and stupid", but my finger slipped.
So ... a heap of stone, which doubtless claimed thousands of lives during construction as well as binding production capacity of a nation for decades that could have been invested into future growth infrastructure. And all that for the single purpose of easing one man's afterlife - gobbling up tremendous amounts of other various kinds of resources which could have improved actual lives.of many That is what you consider to be a humanity's great achievement?
No, clearly walking on the moon doesn't come close to matching the invention of the Twinkie.
On a totally unrelated topic .... what the fuck is wrong with you???
Richard Branson would like to lodge a dissenting opinion.
I just can't see mining a trillion tons of anything to carry it back to earth being a good idea.
Why?
And mining a moon seems fraught with peril, an generally a bad idea.
Again, why?
For Christ sake if exhaling can destroy earth's environment, how could de-orbiting a trillion tons do the planet any good?
Talk about a non-sequitur. If inhaling pure CO2 can kill you, how could ingesting 500 liters of oxygen per day do you any good?
Just a few days ago we got an article about a nanobot that can manipulate single atoms, with some help, yes but it's a start considering we've just started to develop the idea...
Sure, and we've successfully demonstrated quantum teleportation, but that doesn't mean it's possible to have Scotty beam you up to the moon. There's a world of difference between making a nano-scale apparatus capable of nudging atoms and building a nano-scale machine capable of being programmed and re-programmed, let alone a complex network of such machines which could follow schematics in order to build you a spaceship. Being able to do one does not automatically make the other possible, let alone easy or even practical.
And I bet you know that wonderfull quote about magic and advanced technology, right?
Yeah, and it's a quote based on a silly assumption. Sure, people who believe in gods and magic will be awed by complex technologies. We've yet to see how someone like, say, Carl Sagan, would react to a "sufficiently advanced technology".
Also I guess that gas giant has a neverending supply of materials, who would need more than one solar system...
I don't think you realize the scale we're talking about here. If you tore Jupiter into it's constituent atoms, you'd have enough material to build 300 PLANETS the size of the earth. Let's be extremely generous and say that all of mankinds creations put together have a mas of about 0.0001% of the earth - that means that your gas-giant-harvesting aliens would have enough material to build 300,000,000 times as much stuff as everything we've ever built. Assuming similar standards of living and biological requirements, they'd have enough resources to support a population of 1,800,000,000,000,000 individuals.
So, ok, let's say they're not only super-beings with magical technology, but also greedy assholes on a quest to harvest the galaxy. Why in the world would they come to earth instead of going to Jupiter? Better yet, why not mine a brown dwarf which can weigh in at as much as 24,000 Earths?
Pretty much the ONLY reason for any alien species to invade the earth would be in order to prevent future competition. However, we could easily file that under "for their own entertainment", and anyway, they certainly wouldn't be coming here for "economic reasons" which was the original claim.
Just use two grams of nanobots instead of one, one gram programed to replicate and kill/genocide and the other gram programed to replicate and build massive spacefaring ships to send back "home".
*facepalm*
You know, if you replace the word "nanobots" with "magic", your sentence will make a lot more sense.
We don't even know that such technology is POSSIBLE, so positing it offhand is ridiculous. If you're going to play that game, though, then you're suggesting that their "nanobots" can magically change matter at the atomic level, which means they wouldn't have any need to come this far. They'd get a fuck of a lot more resources from a gas-giant in their own system than they would from an earth-like planet dozens of light-years away.
I'd like to trust them again, I'd like to be able to believe in the "Captains of Industry" but they have FUCKED us and the world over so hard for the past couple generations that it's really really difficult.
Yeah, man, Intel and AMD have totally screwed us. If these wonderful Pixel Fairies hadn't come along to allow us to communicate over magical beams floating through the aether, we wouldn't even be able to bitch about those bastards.
Actually, I meant "three" and somehow wrote "two" I literally intended from the top of the list through public nudity. My bad.
Yeah, I figured.
If you violate traffic laws, dependent to some extent on the situation, you are creating an environment that endangers others.
Yeah, I acknowledged that.
Surely you see a difference in magnitude between these things, even though both only create an "increased statistical risk of injury or death", and why one of the two might be reasonable to make illegal versus the other?
Yeah, but then you start getting into trade-offs. So now you've gone from arguing that some things shouldn't be illegal because they're not harmful, to arguing that some things shouldn't be illegal because they're not harmful enough and, besides, we like doing them.
You're essentially correct, of course, but the amended claim directly contradicts the idea that things should only be made legal or illegal based on whether or not they're harmful. Which is what I was pointing out from the get-go. And as soon as you start considering laws to be a series of trade-offs, you're going to get a lot of disagreement on what should and should not be legal because such value judgments are inherently subjective. A pedophile and a concerned mother are going to have much different views on what constitutes an acceptable level of harm.
You're thinking "Mars Attacks". But an invasion might consist of a bit of nanotechnology together with some retroviruses and parasites. That's possibly only a gram of payload.
Uhuh. And then they do .... what, exactly? If we're talking about economic incentive, they still need to send massive ships here, load them up, and then get them back home. Or at the very least they need to send a few hundred thousand colonists plus enough factory ships to get a decent colony started. Throwing a magical "nanotechnology" thingy into the mix doesn't really change anything.
you haven't thought this out. energy isn't the only resource they might require (too much peak oil bunk you've been reading i suspect). a habitable planet is worth a lot more then just energy. even a huge energy source is useless if you don't have air to breath.
Who says they breathe air?
In any event, given enough energy you can fix your own planet without difficulty, and terraform a new one almost as easily. On our own planet, for example, we could easily build massive machines to extract CO2 and pollutants from the atmosphere in order to keep it in an optimum balance, but the amount of resources we'd consume in the process makes the proposition impractical. However, such a scheme would be a lot cheaper than trying to build an interstellar attack fleet, and then trying to move 6 billion people to a new planet.
Uhm... fyi, a scientist working for the British Ministry of Defense came up with the idea of the microchip, though he didn't create one himself.
I just came up with the idea of faster-than-light travel by means of a twinkie. What do I get?
Basically, discounting publicly funded academic research is a bad idea.
Not doing that. Both have a role to play.
Private industry turns basic research into stuff you can use, but it rarely does that basic research in the first place
Except I just gave you multiple examples of where it does. Want more? The radio. The telephone. Penicillin. Vulcanized rubber. The lightbulb. Electricity. Velcro. Zippers. Electric cars.
Shall I keep going?
Private companies only produce as little science as they possibly can get away with, putting much more emphasis on patenting the crap out of the little they do produce, and then keep it for themselves.
Spoken like a true ignoramus. Who do you think developed the automobile? The airplane? The microchip? Who develops the pharmaceuticals which keep us living twice as long as our great-grandparents? Who's creating newer, more efficient forms of power, whether it be solar, wind, or nuclear? Who created the high-yield crops which are the only thing staving off mass starvation?
Private industry does more R&D than all the government organizations put together. Most of the great advances in our history were created by private individuals and small companies, and most of the incremental changes around us are driven by private industry. Governments are great for putting together huge research projects like the LHC and the ITER which cost billions and have no immediate practical application, but for everyday innovation and discovery nothing beats private business in search of larger profits.
Do mean all that money (bank bailouts) that was taken from the middle class in the form of taxes to bail out the filthy rich bankers so that they can get their BILLIONS of dollars in bonuses paid for by the US taxpayer?! THAT INCOME REDISTRIBUTION?!? ($$ Poor => Rich and well connected)
Sure, that's part of it. What communist government HASN'T done that?
The communist "ideal" may speak about equal distribution of income, but in reality it's "equality" for the masses, an underground capitalist market, and kickbacks and bonuses to the well-connected.
Haven't you heard, Comrade? From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!
How fucking stupid are you.
5-6 of the points you listed are specifically stuff that affects others.
No matter how fucking stupid I may be, I'm intelligent enough to know that the words "affect" and "harm" have two completely different meanings.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something."
- Plato