Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Black hole? (Score 2) 277

Because something that has to be done every year gets done every year, like taxes.

Something that has to be done every 10+ years is a lot more likely to get lost and forgotten. Sure, you could set a reminder...but where? Staff get replaced, calendars get replaced, software gets replaced, computers get replaced, offices get cleared out, and the people who trained the current employees weren't even around themselves the last time it needed to be done.

It's like the hundred year $DISASTER, which kills hundreds and causes billions in damage simply because it's so rare. If it happened every year, damages would paradoxically go down because building codes would improve and the public would be better prepared.

Comment Re:Brain ZAP! (Score 2) 284

The problem with dystopian theories like this is bullets are cheap. If you've subjugated the public to the point that you can force expensive brain surgery on them, why bother? Just shoot the people you don't like.

Besides, there's a huge market for non-lethal weapons; if this works on everyone and incapacitates rapidly, government labs and defense contractors will be tripping over themselves to reproduce this effect through external stimulus. No surgery necessary. Woo...

...and, of course, the end result is police and militaries doing whatever the hell they please with the excuse that their phasers were set to stun.

Comment Re:Not money (Score 1) 162

What's amusing is that because they have the word "coin" in their name, people automatically consider coins money. But they're not money. They're just tradeable metal discs. If they had called them Nickelplates or Copperounds, no one would think of them as money, and they would have gone nowhere.

*dons white beret*

Guess what! Everything is arbitrary! And it's wonderful! You can buy a house with colored pieces of paper or wear a beaver tail or race steam-powered airships or conduct a symphony underwater. The world we know is nothing but the sum of a billion crazy ideas, and the greatest people in history are the ones who made it a slightly weirder place...Or not! Who knows?

Comment Re:the NSA already thought of this. (Score 1) 104

Bluffdale Utah has a population of approximately 8000 residents who could at any time have seen the blimp, but the location of the site is so far to the outskirts of the city as to make it pointless.

If only someone had invented a tele-seeing apparatus— then people from all over the world could witness and converse about their protest.

Alas, such a thing does not exist, so no one even knows it happened.

Pity.

Slashdot Top Deals

I think there's a world market for about five computers. -- attr. Thomas J. Watson (Chairman of the Board, IBM), 1943

Working...