In terms of home power, nuclear power is insanely cheap. Specifically Thorium power. There is not much reason we could not power cars with miniature nuclear generators if we put enough research into it so that crashing into them doesn't leak radiation everywhere, but right now that is not feasible, so mobile power would still be an issue.

The biggest reason it isn't used internationally is mainly because every government is scared of a meltdown even though any modern Nuclear engineer would build a reactor which has a non reactive default state, that even if catastrophic failure happens it can not melt down.

Very few of those reactor designs have ever been put in practice (I don't know of any that have) because of the perpetual banning of new reactors in many parts of the world.

The other reason is the massive up front costs, mainly because we have had this international armistice against it for two decades, nobody has the manfacturing tech to make these reactors in a rigorous patterned way.

So it is a perpetual failure, but if we had sustainable nuclear power with the modern safe reactors, specifically Thorium power, energy costs would probably drop in the long run because a single reactor can last a hundred years and the fuel costs nothing compared to the costs of maintaining the plant or building it in the first place or staffing it properly. But modern designs would not require as much oversight if their failure state is to power down.

I'd rather us just do a great currency conversion, and make the lowest denomination a whole dollar. That might not be fine grained enough now, but in a decade of the increasing inflation we will be getting, that will quickly level out.

More importantly, we could just all around eliminate cents at once. Would be a great switch over. We could print $1, $5, $10, and 20% coins, and have bills for $50 and $100. We wouldn't need a higher currency because any large purchase is already done via credit or check, and checks are going as fast as traditional currencies are.

That is technological progress. A huge swathe of the retail industry will be out of business by the end of this next decade, but it isn't a bad thing. All those clerks being paid minimum wage will drive society to reconsider the importance of full time employment for everyone if they can't stand around scanning items at a register.

I don't want to come off as belittling to anyone working retail though. But it is a crap job. Nobody wants to do it, besides for the money. And when we get all our goods directly through websites and direct delivery, a lot of the middle men of transportation and delivery can go away, and everything gets more streamlined.

Every clerk at a register today is bordering on functionally equivalent to new deal policies like digging holes to fill them. Once they no longer create value in the economy, they are functionally doing nothing.

Sounds like it is time for the iCar, iHouse, and iFood!

More importantly in this vein, as long as the yuan is pegged to the US dollar the cost of labor will never rise for China. They get the benefits of huge GDP growth without having any changes in wages or per capita growth because they are doing the same thing Germany does with the Euro on a grander scale.

Oh my god, I can't believe it!

Excuse the sarcasm, but it has been obvious for a decade that publishers and traditional investment firms into game development have been a defunct and dying breed, it has just taken forever for any real game studios to take the risk to stop getting fucked (losing the copyright to their own media, sharing most of the sales, having no rights to distribution or advertising) to get funding and publicity.

We have tons of waste from the traditional uranium plants to use up, might as well start building some reactors that produce almost no leftovers.

When Kepler comes out expect all these cards to significantly drop in price.

GCN was a huge cost on AMDs part, and Kepler will be a refinement of Fermi, so Nvidia will aggressively price the 600 series (especially since they won't launch for another 2 months) and make profit on them. And expect AMD to take a loss on the investment but not on the returns from fabrication on the 7900 series (assuming they fab the 7800 and lower cards on their old VLIW architecture like the roadmap from last years aid they would).

So when Kepler comes out, it will probably be aggressively priced, and AMD will drop prices to match. For now they are exclusively the only maker of "next gen" gpus after 2010s 500 and 6000 series, and Kepler is 2 months away, so AMD is milking it.

Average global temperatures are up 4c in the last century, 2c in the last decade, and it is more severe near the poles. Coastal water levels have risen by a few inches in the last decade.

Not doing anything possible to stop the planet from heating up until we get a runaway greenhouse effect is what is insane, especially when all we have to do is not even "that" hard - just stop burning fossil fuels that are just large amounts of carbon locked up in a solid as opposed to being in the atmosphere.

I'd call it a mistake just because they are dodging the bullet on parallel computing. Javascript is becoming a general purpose application architecture on the user side, except you have to use tricks to get multithread support. Either do the hard work to make JS work in parallel or give an alternative scripting language that uses static typing and a standard stack so we can easily mutlithread it for more computationally intensive web apps.

But I don't care what dangly bits are in your pants. I will probably never see you in person, you are just an ally, possibly a friend, in development.

I mean, the fundamental problem is that there are thousands of (general case) engineering major men who never interact with women because there IS a cultural divide on the front of women in engineering. Until the early years problem of women being indoctrinated into thinking the only way to live life is through socialization and pop culture knowledge dictates how good of a person you are, the fundamental problem won't be fixed. The open source community is full of people in the general sense that love developing software for everyone to use. That isn't a sex deterministic thing, and attraction to open source development shouldn't be sex derived.

The basic answer is that you won't change the thousands of men who think it is ok to sexually harass anyone with two X chromosomes on the internet. They just need to take the same stance on it that everyone else does on everything else - ignore them and they go away. If there are active developers on a project that would harass someone for having a 50% chance at birth roll one way instead of another, I wouldn't want to associate with them either.

But like I said, the problem is cultural. We might have laws saying women are equal in the workplace, but modern families raise kids on two distinct tracks depending on their chromosome composition, and it breeds this behavior. That needs to be fixed rather than trying to do damage control after the fact.

I'm not saying information being distributed on the internet accomplishes nothing, I just mean the political circle jerk on sd & hn & reddit about how broken and horrible the US political system has become, but you are preaching to the choir in all these places - educated, often technical, engineers, who are at least somewhat active in politics and in the 15 - 35 age bracket. In other words, the biggest voting minority block there is. If the message never reaches older people, or less educated people, then you have a tiny minority stake in the whole population of the country. And those groups aren't using social news sites, so you aren't winning anyone over talking about it here.

I am for the distribution of information, fact checking, and transparency of the crimes of politicians through the medium, just not the rampant circle jerk about how broken the system is. We arn't changing it by bitching about it to each other.

I'm already in change congress and rootstrikers, and I do vote. The point of my post was more along the lines that the majority of middle class America is complacent in its ignorance of the issues and they don't react as a body to the loss of freedoms because they are glued to reality TV and moral issues between candidates more so than the more technical and unsettling issues like how the US still maintains a larger military force than the rest of the world combined, spends more on military than the rest of the world combined, and goes deeper into debt every year than the rest of the world combined.

I do my part to try to change it, but an outspoken minority won't get the constitutional convention Lessing wants, and its what we need, but until either congress does something blatantly evil enough to upset the middle class and baby boomers into action, we are still a vocal, tiny minority.

And it isn't much of a conspiracy theory. There is plenty of documentation about how the corrupt congressmen take huge campaign contributions from big business, and then act on their behalf when elected. There are dozens of districts across the US that will always vote along a single party line no matter who runs, and they produce some of the most corrupt scum of the Earth because they rise to the top because they know to exploit the moral leanings of an unmovable voting block.

And no, I have not had first hand experience with corruption elsewhere because I live in the US. I know how bad it is elsewhere, how totalitarian the governments of Bulgaria, China, Pakistan, etc are, but saying we have it better than everyone else when what we have is corporate sellouts exploiting ignorance says a lot about progress in this modern age. Having the best pile of shit on Earth still leaves you with a pile of shit, and trying to make it less shitty is something everyone should be trying to do.

I know this thread is old, but I feel like trying to defend myself because quintus seems to think I'm a smug asshole. And don't get me wrong, I am a smug asshole, but I like to think I'm not evil all the time.

I don't claim to make perfect GUIs. I don't claim to be a know it all about everything Linux - I always tell myself I suck at software engineering because I don't like the command line and prefer Eclipse over Vi. And I speak from my personal experiences - I recently tried out Ubuntu again after having a long running Debian install that I have had work (and I was always using Synaptic to manage packages because of the aforementioned stupidity of myself in using apt-get). But I always seem to come back to needing to use BASH to get around seemingly simple problems, that a lot of the utilities I use that seem like they would have good GUIs end up being CL based, and that to fix a lot of problems or tweak settings I often need to resort to the CL.

That is my personal experience - other people have their own. That goes back to the GUI design thing, and the original point of the thread and all. And someone else said that artists and techologists are distinct and rare traits - I feel they are more closely intwined, because they are both creative practices. I feel creativity is a rare trait in people and is the general lead in to coding, architecture, engineering, art. They are all a means to an end - fulfilling a creative impulse. I can't draw worth a crap, but I feel like I have a sense of beauty and elegance that can lead me to design decent UIs, and I acknowledge beauty is opinionated and no design is perfect for everyone, but understanding general cases, what works for the average joe, newbie, and master, is really all that counts - not having that cursory understanding when designing UIs is pretty lazy.

And yes, many programmers don't want to make GUIs. That is fine, have someone else do it. No one tells you to, no one makes you, and nobody has the right to tell you you are lesser for finding button positioning droll. I am just saying there is no correlation between writing code and having no personal ability to design a coherent usable interface. They are different disciplines and one who is technical need not be artistic or vice versa, but the traits are correlated but there is no causal basis between them.

I know it is drony and hive minded and all that other jazz, but let us be honest: those in congress do not care if you want this bill or not. They just want it passed, so they get their payout by big media for passing it. They barely know how to use email because they are all ancient farts, but they are not ignorant - they know this law is destroying the most open medium of communication and exchange of information in history, and for politicians, it is a bad thing - educated and informed people will decide representatives based on their voting records, rather than talking points, and they want anything but to be held accountable.

SOPA / PIPA / NDAA all show the true colors of our political system in the USA - paid for by corporations, and always against the interests of the people, because career politicians need ways to keep people ignorant, voting for them, and preferably, not voting at all. The fewer people vote, the smaller their message needs to be, the less they need to spend on campaigning, and the more they can pocket. And then they can get paid off day after day by big business to pass laws completely against the spirit of America, freedom, and entrepreneurship (hello hundred year copyright) and sit on their laurels waiting for the next election cycle to talk about abortion, illegal immigrants, and nebulous "jobs" and who is making more "jobs".

I know I'm extremely hypocritical about saying it, because honestly, I do not want to inconvenience myself to change a broken political system I have inherited from hundreds of years of Americans. I want change to happen without having to make sacrifices for it. I want government to be run the way I want, even though I have no political experience. But we are losing our freedoms and we have lost our representation, so unless someone much better than myself, and much braver than myself, will step up (along with millions of other better, braver people) out of the woodwork to fix the broken system, we are just going downhill. And talking about it on the internet accomplishes nothing.