"In other words, power corrupts. It should really be regarded like super-heroin: no matter your initial purposes for getting it, you will be addicted and unwilling to put it down, until keeping it and getting more is all that really matters to you anymore. Which explains why the world is so dysfunctional: every society is led by junkies."

If "power" is addictive, maybe that explains the outrage on Slashdot regarding a plea to limit internet speed and access? :-)

More seriously, while you may well be right about the political motivation in this case, there was a recent Slashdot article on how social networks make people more depressed, and here are links to stuff by Paul Graham on the "Acceleration of Addictivess" and so on.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
http://www.paulgraham.com/addi...
http://www.amazon.com/Supernor...
http://www.sparringmind.com/su...
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
http://www.amazon.com/Moths-Fl...
http://www.amazon.com/Autonomo...

And something by Bill Joy on "How the Future Does Not Need Us".
http://archive.wired.com/wired...

One other example of what we have lost:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
"Nature deficit disorder refers to a hypothesis by Richard Louv in his 2005 book Last Child in the Woods that human beings, especially children, are spending less time outdoors resulting in a wide range of behavioral problems. ... Louv claims that causes for the phenomenon include parental fears, restricted access to natural areas, and the lure of the screen. Recent research has drawn a further contrast between the declining number of National Park visits in the United States and increasing consumption of electronic media by children."

So there are many obvious negatives of modern technology. Look at all the concern on Slashdot about ubiquitous surveillance of everyone that was effectively impossible decades ago. I don't know what the general solution is for the USA regarding technological choices. Obviously Iran has its own political and social dynamics and what may be right for that culture may not be right in the USA. But I'd suggest we need a more reflective attitude towards technology and social systems connected to it. Maybe that would be hard in Iran with its current politics and censorship, but at least, in the USA and on Slashdot, we may want to be more reflective on both what we have gained and what we have lost.

For example, the Amish don't shun technology as much as ask whether specific technologies promote community or not.
http://www2.etown.edu/amishstu...
"Many outsiders mistakenly think that the Amish reject technology. It is more accurate to say that they use technology selectively. Televisions, radios, and personal computers are rejected outright, but other types of technology are used selectively or modified to fit Amish purposes. Amish mechanics also build new machines to accommodate their cultural guidelines. Moreover, the Amish readily buy much modern technology, such as gas grills, shop tools, camping equipment, and some farm equipment.
    The Amish do not consider technology evil in itself but they believe that technology, if left untamed, will undermine worthy traditions and accelerate assimilation into the surrounding society. Mass media technology in particular, they fear, would introduce foreign values into their culture. By bringing greater mobility, cars would pull the community apart, eroding local ties. Horse-and-buggy transportation keeps the community anchored in its local geographical base. ...
    The Amish seek to master technology rather than become its slave. Like few other communities, they have shown the tenacity to tackle the powerful forces of technology in order to preserve their traditional way of life."

My OSCOMAK idea was in part a hope that communities (of any size) could more consciously design their own technical infrastructures. Maybe with a diversity of options, some communities would get a healthy mix and then would grow from that.

It is a reasonable question, when designing a community, to ask what sort of information access promotes a healthy society? Granted, that immediately leads to questions like "What is Health?" and "Healthy for Whom?" And those may be, in part, political and religious questions.

Religions may well get a lot of stuff wrong. But ultimately, religious groups may survive because their beliefs get the most important things right and then successfully raise children in good health who raise more children etc.. Some of those things they get right may include maybe the human need for face-to-face interaction, the need for forgiveness or avoidance of debts, the need to keep sociopathic behavior in check by various means (including perhaps fear of an omniscient God and judgement in an an afterlife), and placing artificial socially-based limits on supernormal stimuli that otherwise may bring us to our doom "like moths to the flame"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

BTW, it's saddening that most people on Slashdot don't know that for many centuries Islam was far ahead of Christianity on women's rights and several other progressive issues. Even Islamic banking has various merits... See for example:
http://www.pbs.org/muhammad/ma...
"At the time of Muhammad's birth, women in 7th century Arabia had few if any rights. Even the right of life could be in question, since it was not uncommon for small girls to be buried alive during times of scarcity. In the Qur'an, it is said that on Judgment Day "buried girls" will rise out of their graves and ask for what crime they were killed. Part of Muhammad's legacy was to end infanticide and establish explicit rights for women. Islam teaches that men and women are equal before God. It grants women divinely sanctioned inheritance, property, social and marriage rights, including the right to reject the terms of a proposal and to initiate divorce. The American middle-class trend to include a prenuptial agreement in the marriage contract is completely acceptable in Islamic law. In Islam's early period, women were professionals and property owners, as many are today. ..."

See also, on morality of the respective political systems of Iran vs. the USA:
"Has IRAN ever invaded a country?"
https://answers.yahoo.com/ques...

Typo: That should have been "*extrinsic* unilateral military might" not "intrinsic unilateral military might". Extrinsic means the security comes by extrinsically having soldiers defending supply lines, not intrinsically having local systems that can produce what you need or that can take a pounding.

Our current economic system has created existential risks by discounting the risks of centralization and just-in-time production and just-barely-works systems without huge margins of resiliency. One tragedy-in-the-making example is the USA recently selling off its emergency strategic grain supplies.
http://ppjg.me/2010/11/12/usda...
http://articles.latimes.com/20...

The USA could as a nation be putting in place a more distributed resilient production system (including indoors food production or even space habitats) to ensure the safety of its citizenry even under huge unexpected disasters. The USA has chosen not too because it does not fit with the current economic dogma that discount such "black swan" existential risks. Hurricane Katrina is an example of failure to systemically plan for obvious serious weather-related risks, Given that example, it is unlikely we can expect the USA to plan for even rarer risks like supervolcanoes, solar flares, pandemics, rogue AI technology, asteroid strikes, economic meltdown, civil war, or whatever else. Still, if you add up all the rare risks, taken together, the probability of some sort of "black swan" event may not otherwise be as rare as one might expect -- and they can all be addressed to some extent by creating a more resilient decentralized infrastructure and promoting more cooperation among people (rather than competition).

I find that situation frustrating because I find issues about resiliency to be very interesting civil defense problems to think about (e.g. my OSCOMAK idea), but the current notion of national security is focused on intrinsic unilateral military might, not intrinsic mutual resilient security. The "Lifeboat Foundation" and "The Living Universe Foundation" though are examples of some groups that have concerns in this area -- but with little funding and lots of competition for that funding compared with the effectively trillion US dollars a year the USA spends (or effectively incurs) annually for military-oriented defense.

Like George Orwell said:
http://blog.gaiam.com/quotes/a...
"We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, is possible to carry this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield [or a three foot deep ash field...]"

A resilient infrastructure coincidentally is also more compatible with "democracy" since there can't be real political democracy without some level of financial and material independence for the citizenry. At least the Maker movement is a bit of hope there. As are the changing economics of indoor agriculture given LED lights and robotics, even without potentially cheaper energy supplies if either hot fusion or LENR/QuantumEnergy/ColdFusion turns out to be workable.

And: http://cleantechnica.com/2012/...
"Nickel-Iron (Ni-Fe) batteries -- developed over a century ago by Thomas Edison -- are gradually replacing lead-acid batteries at a number of applications, especially for solar PV and renewable energy power systems. Unlike lead-acid batteries, they are highly reliable, featuring a longer service life and pollution-free operation.
    "The Nickel-Iron technology is great, because it's like rediscovering this great invention," adds Williams. "The fact that Thomas Edison developed this technology makes the history even more exciting."
    Modern Ni-Fe batteries are primarily used for stationary applications and usually last longer than their lead-acid counterparts. Williams says he expects at least 20+ years from his batteries, adding that some batteries over 50 years of age are still working well. He cites a "perfectly reversible polish / tarnish reaction" as a principle reason for top performance. As for pricing and performance comparisons, the Ni-Fe battery is more expensive than a lead-acid battery, yet it delivers three times more discharge, in addition to lasting far longer, says Williams."

I wonder what the problem is with making these batteries a lot cheaper?

Compressed air storage (like in salt mines) is also an interesting idea:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

See also: https://ironedison.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-mar...

No, it is still the lowest forms of argumentation, not because of the factuality of the ties of a speaker with the technology or industry they are defending, but because they attack the speaker instead of the arguments they present

But the son was not presenting an argument. He was putting words in his dead father's mouth.

In any case, whatever he meant, it was a rhetoric statement, torn completely out of context and expressing a personal sentiment, not the official stance of the atomic energy program.

At least you're tacitly admitting that saving consumers money was never part of the nuclear fission story.

We should be glad that it's Microsoft, so it's someone with deep enough pockets to fight this as long as the courts allow. As you say, it would be a terrible precedent, and too easily extensible to anything a government wished to see (or seize) worldwide.

You can only judge by the samples you've got. I suspect they're pretty durn representative, and they seem to be reasonably consistent.

But if selective breeding works for other plants, why not for pot? Considering the variation known in marijuana, and that anyone can do a "smoke test" of their own crop, how difficult could it be to select toward higher THC content? Why wouldn't they, when it can be done rapidly and easily, and best of all increases your profits?

Accusations of shilling are among the lowest form of argumentation.

Unless you happen to be identifying an actual shill.

The person who is attributed with explaining away his father's quote is not some pseudonymous person on the internet. He actually happens to be an nuclear industry shill. Calling him such is not a "form of argumentation". It is simply informative.

Now calling you a shill would be a low form of argumentation. I would never do that without evidence. So keep going. Before you're done, who knows?

Between COX, Time Warner and Charter we should be safe from High Speed Internets evil influences for the foreseeable future..

http://dojotoolkit.org/ "Dojo starts with a minimal loader (less than 4KB gzipped) with thousands of loosely coupled lightweight modules and plugins available when you need them that are tested and maintained together for the best quality possible."

A few things I like about it are:
* internationalization
* accessibility
* modules
* support for making your own widgets

The first two (especially the second, accessibility) are examples of really important things that many developers leave for later when you are locked into a framework and discover they are not there.

Example:
"jQuery UI Accessibility Analysis"
https://www.ssbbartgroup.com/b...
"To summarize, the public jQuery UI library widgets as of July 1, 2013, are mostly inaccessible for both screen reader and keyboard only users."

Dojo is used in some IBM projects, so that is probably a big reason for the emphasis on accessibility and internationalization.

Of course, there are various things I don't like about Dojo (to begin with, the documentation leaves a lot to be desired when you are starting out). However, in general, so far, it is supporting us in doing everything we want to do... For example, I was very pleasantly surprised when the back button "just worked" when I used the URL "hash" module to navigate between virtual "pages" in a single page app (at least in FireFox, still need to test elsewhere).

Although I still have a fondness for the brilliance of Knockout.js for hooking up widgets to models...

"I would say my father was referring to fusion energy. I know this because I became my father's eyes and ears as I travelled around the country for him."

So, a nuclear advocate covers for his nuclear advocate father's boneheaded remark pretending that nuclear energy would be cost effective. Or at least that's the assertion of someone named "Blubbaloo" who is the person who created the "too cheap to meter" wikipedia page. It is the only wikipedia entry that "Blubbaloo" has ever seemed to have made. And one that he seems to guard very carefully. And the only person who has ever disputed the meaning of Strauss' statement was his nuclear advocate son.

It's funny that a "physicist" wouldn't be able to understand the concept of externalities.

Here's a little detail from the talk pages of that very interesting wiki artifact:

We should not discount the popular impact of this statement. I added "Newspaper articles at the time..." and I wonder why there is any question about Strauss' meaning. Clearly the New York Times, writing about the Sept. 16 1954 speech, understood that Strauss was referring to the entire atomic energy program. Even if Strauss was misunderstood, he did not take any great pains to clear up the record. User:wkovarik -- Bill Kovarik, March 15, 2011.

A direct copy of the entire speech would clear up most of the questions around the usual (often mangled, as the one included today is) quotes. (Did the NYT reprint the entire speech or just portions?)
Robert Pool, 1997 p.71,[1] quotes this preceding line, often left out: "Transmutation of the elements--unlimited power ... these and a host of other results all in fifteen short years. It is not too much to expect that our children...." etc. There's little question that Strauss was waxing poetic; more to the point: many sources say he was encouraging science writers to promote fission power to these ends. Which completely makes sense considering their need to create more plutonium.
His view was not widely shared; in 1951, General Electric's own C. G. Suits, who was operating the Hanford reactors, said that "At present, atomic power presents an exceptionally costly and inconvenient means of obtaining energy which can be extracted much more economically from conventional fuels.... This is expensive power, not cheap power as the public has been led to believe."[2] Twang (talk) 16:53, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

"many sources say he was encouraging science writers to promote fission power to these ends."

Shills is shills, ya know?

Somehow I'm reminded of how when the horseless carriage came along, in some towns they were required by law to be preceded by a man on foot, carrying a lantern or other form of warning to others.

Being able to prescribe a set dosage in a pill one gets from the pharmacy would do a lot to dispel the perception of OMG DRUGS.

(I don't use, but I'm all for legalization if only to kill the 'war on drugs'.)