Studies have shown that dams on rivers and streams severely impacts reproduction in fishes, particularly since it alters stream volume and sediment load that directly impact on suitable nest and spawning sites as well as more indirectly on feeding sites, not to mention creates barriers that make it impossible for fishes to move to these sites from up or downstream. With this many projects under consideration you can pretty well kiss most of the North American fish fauna goodbye if these are approved. Of course, this probably won't bother those who won't mind leaving the earth a sterile and uninhabitable wasteland if they think they can make a buck or get a kickback to the their campaign.
I fully agree. Its just that I would prefer to hire them myself, rather than see my investments used to hire them for someone else, which is precisely what is going to happen to a very large fraction of crowdsourced "investments".
Subprime loans were only a part of the problem. A much larger problem was the creation of the credit default swap market that went entirely unregulated and led directly to the insolvency of nearly every major financial corporation, until we taxpayers bailed them out, crippling our economy in the process.
Obviously, you never really understood the credit default swap market and why the lack of regulation of this market proved disastrous, so I guess you are doomed to repeat a similar mistake.
"Don't worry... in 5 years we still won't be recovered enough for another crisis."
Don't worry. This will assure that we never will recover as most investments will prove to be little more than pump and dump scams targeted at mobs of overeager investors ready to get rich quick. After all, they may read a prospectus, but they surely don't understand it, so not having one won't alter their behavior, except of course when their investments collapse and they loose what little wealth they have. Why so many Americans think its no big deal if most of their fellow citizens go broke is beyond me.
On the bright side, the Chinese government won't have to wasted so much money trying to hack into our corporate and defense establishments to weaken us. They will simply be able to sit back and watch us do that all by ourselves.
So I guess the thrust of your post is that our economy should be based entirely on fraud, since the same people that are pushing this are the same people so eager to ensure that the government is too small to do anything about it. Coincidence? I wouldn't bet on it.
There isn't anything in the bill that limits the number such investments one can make, only the amount invested in any one company. So it will be relatively easy to set up a company, without a prospectus fake the value of the company, and then pitch it to numerous "crowds". You get a few thousand of these and you have most investors fully invested, siphon the money off to some Bahamian bank account or a subsidiary investment in a long line of high priced hookers, and when these companies go down simultaneously, as they most certainly will, they take the entire economy with it, just like the credit default swap market did.
Had Glass-Steagall been in place one thing would have surely happened. Those at Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sach's, AIG and others would now be in jail having sold credit default swaps from their own accounts to the detriment of their customers. Indeed, it is unlikely there would even have been a market for credit default swaps as the act prohibited commerical banks acting like investment banks. My sense is that Americans still haven't learned anything about the financial meltdown of 2008 and bought the Wall Street line, hook, line and sinker. Only, when America makes the 3rd time the charm, will they finally begin to catch on.
Obviously, you learned nothing about the economics of credit default swaps and why they were behind the financial meltdown. You just swallowed Wall Street's line that it was all those poor people conspiring against all those honest businessmen on Wall Street. Get ready to get fleeced, AGAIN.
See the interesting post "Scam?" below. Basically, this bill just gives the green light to Wall Street boiler rooms to start up their scams all over again, except this time there is even less money for enforcement. Sure they eventually caught Bernie, but how much money did they actually get back?
"the bill--it limits how much an individual can invest in such a company--only up to 10% of their income or $10k"
And of course there is nothing in the bill that says an "investor" can't invest 10% of his income in each of 10 companies for a full 100%, which of course when 99% of all investors fail, will have no material affect on the economy, just like the stock market crash in 2008. Funny how that managed to affect even those who didn't invest in the market at all.
This bill is a gift to the slow thinkers, who didn't learn anything in 2008 so we will have to repeat the performance to get their attention.
"That's to be expected; it's the joys of entrepreneurship, as long as they fail honestly."
Which is precisely why so many who run such business arrangements decide its far more profitable to let the company fail "honestly", while they profit far more by sticking the money in their pockets before it all comes crashing down. Its called the Bain Capital Management philosophy to business success.
"That may be true, but beyond assuring there is no outright fraud or dishonest dealing and/or breach of agreements/contracts, what freaking business is it of the government whether I invest my wealth wisely or unwisely?"
Even the biggest fools who have ever taken the time to study the history of Wall Street will recognize the assumption that there won't be any outright fraud, dishonest, or breach of contracts is a rather big assumption. Consequently, this bill is little more than a license for Wall Street firms to steal, not that anything else is new.
Because if you merely use your finances to pollute the planet, you are doing little more than killing everyone. Of course, most of the time people will be just seeing most of their "investment" go to great bars, restaurants, and hookers on Wall Street.
The poor are not included as investors as there is almost no way to defraud the poor out of money they don't have. This is meant to scam those who do.
It is amazing that as all have watched money be poured into speculation and seen it largely disappear, people still want to give their money away. Well at least all those Wall Street boiler rooms and scam shops will be back in business.
That there are a fair number of things that the Linux community could do to address the issue, but also for a variety of reasons, some discussed above, they probably won't and will be left next year making the same comments and lamentations as they would have last year.
Why not, rather than a long list of posts that amount to little more than hand-wringing, redirect this discussion toward the top 10 issues that make Linux on the desktop suffer/suck relative to Windows/OS, with finally some votes to establish the true "top 10". Then after that, set a broad community wide goal of addressing each of the top 10. At least one year latter Linux would be better for it and some additional cohesion would have been created for the community as a whole.
One of the most wonderful things about Linux is that anyone can do whatever they want with it. One of the worst things about Linux is that anyone can do whatever they want with it. If the Linux community is to ever see an increase in its use as a desktop environment, it has to find a happy medium between these two extremes, which is not the same as saying that one has to give up one's freedom to do what they want. However, interoperability and some standardization are essential for common solutions across a broad range of approaches that will address the "dearth of good applications issue" and the "different ways of doing things issue (ie hardware/software incompatibilities issue)". Being owned my monolithic and single-minded organizations, MS and Apple don't have these problems, at least not to the same degree.
My sense is that the Linux community might look at the entire approach of modularization, with some effort being directed toward making various "modules of functionality" interoperable, when different "functional modules" are switched in and out. That in itself, would do much to better stabilize the application level, while still permitting lots of experimentation across a range of activities. Perhaps those who work on the OS itself might do well to make it easier for higher levels of functionality to be more interchangeable, including more standard automated ways to recompile higher level code.
Rather than making this the "Year of the Desktop" or some such make this the year that at least some of the top issues actually get addressed across the entire Linux community. If nothing else, it would make Linux better and perhaps lead to improvements at both the OS level and at the applications level. Make this the "Year that a few more fundamental issues got solve". Do that for a few more years and then look back and have this discussion again. My sense is that given the nature and advantages of Linux in many areas, the entire community would benefit, including for many who are not now using Linux.
This is the typical average response from slashdot readers since most of us can only claim to be better than others rather than actually proving it. Hence, the need to make others smaller. Sadly, much of human interaction falls into this category and its likely that comparisons like that Wolfram's life log provides will only prove that to be true. I wish it weren't so as it would then be easier to find interesting things in slashdot without having to wade to inordinate amounts of self-preening to find interesting tidbits that one can use in one's own life. Then again, we're all human so we have to live with the consequences.
Sounds a lot more like BS to me than "super-intelligence", especially the part about "this explosion of increasing intelligence".
Perhaps somebody might want to build a working model to be taken seriously.
In any event, I look forward to seeing you receive your nobel prize. You will clearly deserve it. However, you might just want to recheck the handwaving before you mention your work to the committee.
If you are in deep space you are necessarily living in microgravity because there are no massive objects around.
The only source of gravity would be acceleration and the amount of fuel required to get even close to the speed of light which one would need to make the trip in terms of a human lifetime and payload would be absurdly high to realistically contemplate.
The fastest space craft New Horizons only had about a 1,000 pound payload and it travels at about 16.26 km/sec. Even assuming you could do better by a factor of 100 in terms of speed and totally ignoring payload, it would still take you about 77,437 years to make the trip to the nearest star at 4.2 light years distant. To go faster you would have to accelerate faster, but the human body can only withstand about 10-20 G's for a very brief time, lest one begins to get brain damage (restricted blood flow to the brain) and for prolonged periods organ failure due to shearing forces, ignoring cellular deformation and bone loss experienced by all astronauts for even short excursions into space. You couldn't grow plants without light so that would require even more fuel and you would need to have enough fuel to accelerate over thousands of years to stay within human tolerable limits. You would also need fuel to slow down and again to get back and slow down again.
The reality is that no mater how you designed the spaceship, humans wouldn't survive the trip. The best we can expect is to send probes and robots. Humans will be far better off exploring the oceans than deep space, since even now the richest nations can't afford to pay their debts, the poorer one's can't afford to feed their populations, and all are destroying the habitability of the planet so fast that humanity will be lucky to survive 300 years, much less wait for the those who left for Alpha Centauri or some other nearby star to return and tell us about the trip and show us their photos. We actually know less about the oceans than we do about space. Its more accessible and will certainly be far more profitable in the near term than any human space travel, even within the solar system, much less outside of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Studies have shown that dams on rivers and streams severely impacts reproduction in fishes, particularly since it alters stream volume and sediment load that directly impact on suitable nest and spawning sites as well as more indirectly on feeding sites, not to mention creates barriers that make it impossible for fishes to move to these sites from up or downstream. With this many projects under consideration you can pretty well kiss most of the North American fish fauna goodbye if these are approved. Of course, this probably won't bother those who won't mind leaving the earth a sterile and uninhabitable wasteland if they think they can make a buck or get a kickback to the their campaign.
I fully agree. Its just that I would prefer to hire them myself, rather than see my investments used to hire them for someone else, which is precisely what is going to happen to a very large fraction of crowdsourced "investments".
Subprime loans were only a part of the problem. A much larger problem was the creation of the credit default swap market that went entirely unregulated and led directly to the insolvency of nearly every major financial corporation, until we taxpayers bailed them out, crippling our economy in the process.
Obviously, you never really understood the credit default swap market and why the lack of regulation of this market proved disastrous, so I guess you are doomed to repeat a similar mistake.
and no regulations just kill people instead.
"Don't worry... in 5 years we still won't be recovered enough for another crisis."
Don't worry. This will assure that we never will recover as most investments will prove to be little more than pump and dump scams targeted at mobs of overeager investors ready to get rich quick. After all, they may read a prospectus, but they surely don't understand it, so not having one won't alter their behavior, except of course when their investments collapse and they loose what little wealth they have. Why so many Americans think its no big deal if most of their fellow citizens go broke is beyond me.
On the bright side, the Chinese government won't have to wasted so much money trying to hack into our corporate and defense establishments to weaken us. They will simply be able to sit back and watch us do that all by ourselves.
So I guess the thrust of your post is that our economy should be based entirely on fraud, since the same people that are pushing this are the same people so eager to ensure that the government is too small to do anything about it. Coincidence? I wouldn't bet on it.
There isn't anything in the bill that limits the number such investments one can make, only the amount invested in any one company. So it will be relatively easy to set up a company, without a prospectus fake the value of the company, and then pitch it to numerous "crowds". You get a few thousand of these and you have most investors fully invested, siphon the money off to some Bahamian bank account or a subsidiary investment in a long line of high priced hookers, and when these companies go down simultaneously, as they most certainly will, they take the entire economy with it, just like the credit default swap market did.
Had Glass-Steagall been in place one thing would have surely happened. Those at Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sach's, AIG and others would now be in jail having sold credit default swaps from their own accounts to the detriment of their customers. Indeed, it is unlikely there would even have been a market for credit default swaps as the act prohibited commerical banks acting like investment banks. My sense is that Americans still haven't learned anything about the financial meltdown of 2008 and bought the Wall Street line, hook, line and sinker. Only, when America makes the 3rd time the charm, will they finally begin to catch on.
Obviously, you learned nothing about the economics of credit default swaps and why they were behind the financial meltdown. You just swallowed Wall Street's line that it was all those poor people conspiring against all those honest businessmen on Wall Street. Get ready to get fleeced, AGAIN.
See the interesting post "Scam?" below. Basically, this bill just gives the green light to Wall Street boiler rooms to start up their scams all over again, except this time there is even less money for enforcement. Sure they eventually caught Bernie, but how much money did they actually get back?
"the bill--it limits how much an individual can invest in such a company--only up to 10% of their income or $10k"
And of course there is nothing in the bill that says an "investor" can't invest 10% of his income in each of 10 companies for a full 100%, which of course when 99% of all investors fail, will have no material affect on the economy, just like the stock market crash in 2008. Funny how that managed to affect even those who didn't invest in the market at all.
This bill is a gift to the slow thinkers, who didn't learn anything in 2008 so we will have to repeat the performance to get their attention.
"In most start-ups, the risk of business failure is thousands of times greater than the risk of fraud!"
Exactly, since the best fraudsters always make it look as though it wasn't fraud.
"That's to be expected; it's the joys of entrepreneurship, as long as they fail honestly."
Which is precisely why so many who run such business arrangements decide its far more profitable to let the company fail "honestly", while they profit far more by sticking the money in their pockets before it all comes crashing down. Its called the Bain Capital Management philosophy to business success.
Yeah, especially the Bernie Madoff's of the world.
And then they call it a Wall Street and Banking Bailout. We went here before. Its just we didn't learn anything, so we have to do it again.
"That may be true, but beyond assuring there is no outright fraud or dishonest dealing and/or breach of agreements/contracts, what freaking business is it of the government whether I invest my wealth wisely or unwisely?"
Even the biggest fools who have ever taken the time to study the history of Wall Street will recognize the assumption that there won't be any outright fraud, dishonest, or breach of contracts is a rather big assumption. Consequently, this bill is little more than a license for Wall Street firms to steal, not that anything else is new.
Because if you merely use your finances to pollute the planet, you are doing little more than killing everyone. Of course, most of the time people will be just seeing most of their "investment" go to great bars, restaurants, and hookers on Wall Street.
The poor are not included as investors as there is almost no way to defraud the poor out of money they don't have. This is meant to scam those who do.
It is amazing that as all have watched money be poured into speculation and seen it largely disappear, people still want to give their money away. Well at least all those Wall Street boiler rooms and scam shops will be back in business.
That there are a fair number of things that the Linux community could do to address the issue, but also for a variety of reasons, some discussed above, they probably won't and will be left next year making the same comments and lamentations as they would have last year.
Why not, rather than a long list of posts that amount to little more than hand-wringing, redirect this discussion toward the top 10 issues that make Linux on the desktop suffer/suck relative to Windows/OS, with finally some votes to establish the true "top 10". Then after that, set a broad community wide goal of addressing each of the top 10. At least one year latter Linux would be better for it and some additional cohesion would have been created for the community as a whole.
One of the most wonderful things about Linux is that anyone can do whatever they want with it. One of the worst things about Linux is that anyone can do whatever they want with it. If the Linux community is to ever see an increase in its use as a desktop environment, it has to find a happy medium between these two extremes, which is not the same as saying that one has to give up one's freedom to do what they want. However, interoperability and some standardization are essential for common solutions across a broad range of approaches that will address the "dearth of good applications issue" and the "different ways of doing things issue (ie hardware/software incompatibilities issue)". Being owned my monolithic and single-minded organizations, MS and Apple don't have these problems, at least not to the same degree.
My sense is that the Linux community might look at the entire approach of modularization, with some effort being directed toward making various "modules of functionality" interoperable, when different "functional modules" are switched in and out. That in itself, would do much to better stabilize the application level, while still permitting lots of experimentation across a range of activities. Perhaps those who work on the OS itself might do well to make it easier for higher levels of functionality to be more interchangeable, including more standard automated ways to recompile higher level code.
Rather than making this the "Year of the Desktop" or some such make this the year that at least some of the top issues actually get addressed across the entire Linux community. If nothing else, it would make Linux better and perhaps lead to improvements at both the OS level and at the applications level. Make this the "Year that a few more fundamental issues got solve". Do that for a few more years and then look back and have this discussion again. My sense is that given the nature and advantages of Linux in many areas, the entire community would benefit, including for many who are not now using Linux.
A 100 pound water cooled PC and a PC enclosed in a custom wooden box?
Sound more of interest to PC groupies rather than any serious computer users.
Come on. Isn't there anything interesting to show?
This is the typical average response from slashdot readers since most of us can only claim to be better than others rather than actually proving it. Hence, the need to make others smaller. Sadly, much of human interaction falls into this category and its likely that comparisons like that Wolfram's life log provides will only prove that to be true. I wish it weren't so as it would then be easier to find interesting things in slashdot without having to wade to inordinate amounts of self-preening to find interesting tidbits that one can use in one's own life. Then again, we're all human so we have to live with the consequences.
Sounds a lot more like BS to me than "super-intelligence", especially the part about "this explosion of increasing intelligence".
Perhaps somebody might want to build a working model to be taken seriously.
In any event, I look forward to seeing you receive your nobel prize. You will clearly deserve it. However, you might just want to recheck the handwaving before you mention your work to the committee.
If you are in deep space you are necessarily living in microgravity because there are no massive objects around.
The only source of gravity would be acceleration and the amount of fuel required to get even close to the speed of light which one would need to make the trip in terms of a human lifetime and payload would be absurdly high to realistically contemplate.
The fastest space craft New Horizons only had about a 1,000 pound payload and it travels at about 16.26 km/sec. Even assuming you could do better by a factor of 100 in terms of speed and totally ignoring payload, it would still take you about 77,437 years to make the trip to the nearest star at 4.2 light years distant. To go faster you would have to accelerate faster, but the human body can only withstand about 10-20 G's for a very brief time, lest one begins to get brain damage (restricted blood flow to the brain) and for prolonged periods organ failure due to shearing forces, ignoring cellular deformation and bone loss experienced by all astronauts for even short excursions into space. You couldn't grow plants without light so that would require even more fuel and you would need to have enough fuel to accelerate over thousands of years to stay within human tolerable limits. You would also need fuel to slow down and again to get back and slow down again.
The reality is that no mater how you designed the spaceship, humans wouldn't survive the trip. The best we can expect is to send probes and robots. Humans will be far better off exploring the oceans than deep space, since even now the richest nations can't afford to pay their debts, the poorer one's can't afford to feed their populations, and all are destroying the habitability of the planet so fast that humanity will be lucky to survive 300 years, much less wait for the those who left for Alpha Centauri or some other nearby star to return and tell us about the trip and show us their photos. We actually know less about the oceans than we do about space. Its more accessible and will certainly be far more profitable in the near term than any human space travel, even within the solar system, much less outside of it.
You might want to check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsec