What's wrong with 4chan? Come at me bro

It's sure pretty on the surface, but as someone who's resided in it since 2002, I'll add that it also has the least friendly population in North America (I've lived in several other places in the US and Canada previously, and traveled to many more). (I'm the exception though; next time you visit, I'll buy you a rye.)

1. In virtually every nation, barter and trade are subject to taxes. Yes, if you're a a rancher in Texas and trade your horse for another's few cows and you don't pay tax on that, you have actually done something illegal.
2. You can only pay your taxes in the national currency, in the US and pretty much all other nations who are sovereign currency issues.
Now, put (1) and (2) together and you'll realize that the combination enforces the use of the official currency even if there is no explicit law banning other currencies, leaving bitcoin et al. for illicit transactions and as a type of commodity.

The euro is the primary cause of Europe's economic woes. It allows Germany to act in old-school mercantilist manner and beggar its neighbors. Floating currency exchange is needed by nations to protect themselves against trade deficits literally sucking money out of them, with the inability to compensate because they've given up one of the most powerful policy tools of a sovereign: control over their own money supply. Ordinary Germans do not really benefit either, as the nation's trade surplus is not driven only by efficiency, but also by internal wage suppression. You cannot have an effective and stable monetary union without also having an economic and fiscal union, and that can never work across Europe's heterogenous cultural and political patchwork, despite the megalomeniacal fantasies of creepy old men like Juncker, Schäuble, etc. http://www.spectator.co.uk/201...

I'll take the class of old money over noveau riche hipster anytime.

Actually, there is no difference on that point, because if you own, you also don't have a real right to live there, since the government can remove you from that land under eminent domain. You only have the privilege to pretend you own some land over which the government is sovereign.

Sounds as if they had hired slashdot's own mdsolar to write the article.

When I was I high school in Ontario in the mid-90s, we got a presentation by a gentleman from the AECB (now renamed CNSC), the Canadian nuclear regulator. He passed a hefty chunk of uranium ore around the school auditorium. Every student got to hold it. Yet, I'm still here to tell about it, and just fine (other than having become a slashdot poster), and I have no concerns about my former classmates, either. Why? Becase playing with that chunk of uranium increased our overall environmental exposure to radiation imperceptibly.

Uranium can be deadly in the long run if you eat it, breathe in uranium dust, or put on a night face lotion laced with a good amount. Aside from that, it's only critical amounts of it, and the byproducts of uranium, that are deadly. The sly wording of the author, though, is intended to associate uranium with death in a general sense, and is FUD that reveals his bias.

How about posting with your account, troll? How about addressing the statistics in the link I posted showing wind and hydro cause far more human deaths per amount of energy generated than nuclear? (Not to mention the huge environmental damage caused by dam construction!)

This sort of attack can be defeated by sealing the IC together with a small battery in a package that acts as a physical interlock and triggers key erasure when breached. This is not hard to do, actually. For example, you can use tiny optical fibres throughout the body of the package. It would not be possible to breach and insert a bridge quickly and accurately enough to avoid making a significant disruption in the reading of a sensitive photosensor. When used in a device, a warning would be provided to the user if the battery charge is running too low, which would eventually also trigger erasure.

The firehose voting is not enough. There are too few people voting on firehose article, making it more open to abuse by those with multiple sockpuppet accounts. There should be a way to downvote articles on the front page, and a karma-like score pre-applied to those people's firehose submissions.

Why this submissions is flamebait anti-nuclear energy FUD:
- 5 mSv is background radiation and is a ridiculously low threshold
- 50 mSv is the standard in places like the US
- of those 174 workers exposed to the highest radiation dose, we can expect that one will get cancer -- pretty damn good for what's supposed to be one of the worst nuclear disasters!
- in comparison, how many people got killed by the total lifetime (production to decommission) per energy generated by mdsolar's preferred methods? here's where nuclear stands in comparison: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/...
Of course, those that have been here for a while already knew this submission was going to be utter bullshit the moment we saw who posted it.

Please sign in and post this with your account. If there is to be any hope of the site operators taking action to contain his trolling, enough of us need to complain, and Anonymous Cowards don't count.

Please sign in and post this with your account. The site operators won't take action to contain his trolling unless enough of us complain, and Anonymous Cowards don't count.

As soon as I saw the word "nuclear" in the subject, I knew who the submitter was.

For those new around here, mdsolar is Slashdot's long-time anti-unclear troll, so I'm posting this as a forewarning to you. His posting history shows he regularly contributes anti-nuclear articles, and when he gets told, he typically resorts to personal attacks on those he disagrees with. If you're not interested in going down this path, the best option is just to ignore him. As they say: don't feed the trolls. Now if we could only get the powers-that-be here to ignore his submissions...

It doesn't matter if they can make it. Forcing them to make it is against the 13th Amendment.

It's highly doubtful that anyone can be consistently in Kohlberg's stage 5 (and certainly no one is in 6). It just runs counter to what we know from evolutionary psychology, as well as common sense. Often people try to make the argument that full-blown altruism exists and has been able to arise because evolution can happen on the scale of groups rather than just individuals (or, more precisely, individual genes), but these theories have never played out outside simplified computer models. The selection pressure even in as social species as humans is overwhelmingly biased towards individuals and closest relations, falling off very quickly with genealogical separation. While in modern society individuals have far more vast influences, potentially affecting much of the world, this has only been the case for a time multiple orders of magnitude shorter than what is needed to see any effect on our biology. Indeed, there remains a significant source of selection pressure against the top two of Kohlberg's levels: altruism leaves its adherents very vulnerable to exploit by selfish individuals (the flip side of this coin is that psychopathy is an effective strategy as long as the frequency of its occurrence is low enough, which explains the fairly consistent 1% rate; this is analogous to the sexual selection pressures that result in a minority of "alpha" males). A discussion about these issues in the context of Kohlberg's stages can be found at http://www.sfu.ca/psyc/faculty...