Comment Re:So What (Score 1) 324
No I don't. I agree there are cold, hard things in the world, but *you* choose to focus on that.
No I don't. I agree there are cold, hard things in the world, but *you* choose to focus on that.
Oh, him. After I donated in 2008 he kept sending me emails. It does occasionally come in handy, like when my wife tells to mow the grass. "Not right now, honey, Barack Obama just sent me an email."
It is your choice to make your eventual obliteration the focus of your life. That's something you can either try to change (good luck with that), or it's something you can choose to accept. But choosing to accept that doesn't mean you have to sit around being miserable and resentful while you wait for the Grim Reaper. The world is only as cold and hard as the things in it you choose to focus on. There's also more wondrous and amazing and even funny things in the world than you an get around to thinking about in a lifetime.
It's like summer vacation when you're in school. You only get ten weeks or so of it, not nearly enough to get to all the things you want to do. And there are some people who will react to that by spending the whole time from day 1 unhappy about going back to school. What a waste of existence! But that's definitely a choice open to you.
Imagine your last few seconds of consciousness before you die. How would you like to spend them? Being angry? Sad? I think that's a waste of precious time. I'd like to have someone I love very much tell me a very funny joke.
No, we all make the choice of the kind of world we want -- or maybe it'd be better to say the kind of world we can live with. It just so happens that some people can live with a world that they don't like very much, so long as that doesn't demand very much of them.
Anyone can by choice have an immense effect on the world around them. Maybe they can't change the *whole* world very noticeably, but they can transform their own neighborhood.
Yeah it makes no sense. They have separate categories for Software Engineer, Programmer, and Software Developer. They are the same job, although often they have slightly different connotations in that in some organizations the word engineer has more prestige than programmer but it varies.
Pretty much useless... a distinction that makes no different at best. Even if some pedant comes along and says "a software engineer has XX degree and a programmer has YY degree" it is still meaningless because these types of distinctions are not generally agreed upon.
And so it goes.
Yet another step to insert a system to mediate and "facilitate" peer-to-peer transactions. I can almost feel the middle class getting poorer as more and more middlemen scrape off their percentage.
The technology that so many people thought would set us free is being applied to bring us back 100 years when most labor was casual and few people knew if they'd have a job next year.
Car sharing, house sharing, "free" content generation, task rabbit type casual labor.... no wonder the middle class in the USA is hurting. This might be more effect than cause but we're in an undiscovered country, that's for sure.
The world is cold and hard as we allow it to be. It is a *choice*, albeit one made by default for people who think like you.
So, what precisely was the device? Simple enough. Every molecule has an absorption line. It can absorb energy on any other frequency. A technique widely exploited in physics, chemistry and astronomy. People have looked into various ways of using it in medicine for a long time.
The idea was to inject patients with nanoparticles on an absorption line well clear of anything the human body cares about. These particles would be preferentially picked up by cancer cells because they're greedy. Once that's done, you blast the body at the specified frequency. The cancer cells are charbroiled and healthy cells remain intact.
It's an idea that's so obvious I was posting about it here and elsewhere in 1998. The difference is, they had a prototype that seemed to work.
But now there is nothing but the sound of Silence, a suspect list of thousands and a list of things they could be suspected of stretching off to infinity. Most likely, there's a doctor sipping champaign on some island with no extradition treaty. Or a future next-door neighbour to Hans Reiser. Regardless, this will set back cancer research. Money is limited and so is trust. It was, in effect, crowdsource funded and that, too, will feel a blow if theft was involved.
Or it could just be the usual absent-minded scientist discovering he hasn't the skills or awesomeness needed, but has got too much pride to admit it, as has happened in so many science fraud cases.
Oh, yeah. The rational actor theory. But by the same postulates that underly that theory there should be no human being who eats unhealthy, boozes or gambles excessively, or picks fights he obviously can't win.
I have an alternative theory which states that going by actual behavior most people discount their future welfare to zero when there's an immediate reward, even a trivial one. It's almost impossible to resist an immediate burst of pleasure a nasty habit's got you hooked, whether it's a relaxing smoke or that glow of self-righteousness you get when you act on your bigotry.
People will literally kill themselves for a little short-term reward. Forgoing a little profit is nothing compared to that. If you look at places where segregation was historically sanctioned, you'll see you're entirely right: it's economically irrational. That didn't stop people from doing it.
It's certainly not a 'hoax'. Coal contains (to varying degrees) all of these pollutants.
Coal plants do often have filters these days, but always:
http://www.epa.gov/mats/powerp...
the emissions are significant, and not everything gets filtered out.
Also the filtering is expensive and the carbon dioxide that coal emits is becoming a *massive* problem. Although carbon capture has been trialled, it makes coal non competitive with other technologies.
This open source policy is open for comments.
Eight of 17 reactors have been shut down, so you're right, it's not "most", it's just "half of them".
Where do you get "two or three"? Are you confusing Germany with Belgium?
Most isotopes are poisonous
Runner up for dumbest statement ever, only beaten my "most food contains chemicals".
When it goes wrong, it renders a different large area of land [uninhabited].
FTFY.
"Sometimes insanity is the only alternative" -- button at a Science Fiction convention.
