To make it a fair comparison, you must move the time window such that the oldest boomers alive are the same age as the oldest millenials are now. That makes it the late 70s at earliest.

In the late 70s, the World Wide Web did not exist yet, and would continue to not exist for a decade.

The Internet was invented by the generation before them, and it was not yet all that important.

If you want to do intergenerational comparisons, you need to do one of three things:

1. Wait ~50 years.
2. Restrict yourself to the world as it existed when the oldest Boomer was in their early 30s (even if they already a great thing, it must be recognized as a great thing).
3. State your values clearly so we can know what defines "improvement of America".

I don't find Barack Obama particularly damning as a Presidential choice (it's not like he was a big drop-off from the last guy). You obviously don't value social media, which is kind of interesting actually, given that:

- In my experience things like facebook are more widely appreciated by the older generations than by the Millenials.
- Web forums, including slashdot, are social media. Forums were invented at the tail end of the pre-millenial generation, so you get a bye on using social media to complain about social media's worthlessness, but what makes you like forums but dislike others? What is the essential difference that makes the latter worthless?

This is not a new issue; this is not a Millenial invention.

First: so what?

Second: literally every generation ever has done that. The US had a cultural norm that slavery was okay, and it was later replaced by a norm that slavery was abhorrent.

Note: I'm not an American so I have no horse in the "who improved America most" race.

And we all know that if even one person survives in the West, then civilization is saved!

I don't know what point you think you're making. She's a religious person who is *herself* damaged by religious fanaticism regarding abortion.

Everything ends up hitting poor people though. That's the problem with poverty.

If you just outright banned dirty gas, prices would rise and that disproportionately impacts the poor.

If you just outright allow whatever to happen, then health costs will rise and will disproportionately impact the poor.

Poverty means everything impacts you disproportionately, including inaction. Money provides cushioning.

Is there a way we can attempt to solve this problem in a way that is not overly onerous on the poor? Instead of just deciding not to do anything?

You're thinking of net income. Median net worth is closer to $81k (as of 2014), and the mean considerably higher than the GP's estimate.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/...

Regardless though, there's a huge problem here where there is an assumption that the total charitable contributions of this guy in his lifetime is encompassed by one charity auction purchase.

Let's flip that around:

Right, it will go on a spree to exterminate all humans. Like every other program.

How can you be so sure?

Seriously? You seriously believe that?

If there is no opposition, then let's do it already. Sounds like everybody is for it.

Then stop coming to a tech news site.

This is literally what slashdot is here for.

The rings are not mandatory and signal unavailability.

Those words aren't contradictions.

Powerful is one thing, and unclear whether it's an important thing.

Wealthiest? Not quite, but it's up there and it beats the US, which is the only country it was being contrasted against:

http://www.worldatlas.com/arti...

Just pull the same trick again, now that you're far away, and the distant observer is *past you*. Now you're talking to yourself in the past. Then actually go to past you. Keep doing the trick as you approach to make your past self observe you in a causality violating way.

This is a vacuous statement. The word "now" doesn't have a global meaning in this context. Simultaneity does not exist in an absolute sense -- going there "instantly" can't possibly mean you're there "right now" because "right now" is a property of your current position, and you just said that you changed position.

It's not about the light itself. Information propagates at the same speed as light does. In other words, central to the theory of relativity is the idea that *the actual event* propagates at the speed of light, not just our perception of such. This is why the word "now" is ill-defined in relativistic terms, and simultaneity does not exist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

No, you missed the other part about the lightspeed barrier being overcome. If you can overcome it, then either humans are the first to ever overcome the lightspeed barrier, or we never do, or there is a gigantic coincidence where two species evolve exactly in sync to the scale of mere hundreds of years, despite having billions of years to develop.

Of course there is a last option: aliens exist, have overcome lightspeed, but are for whatever reason uninterested in galactic colonization.

No, it's not at all reasonable to assume that. And the massive scientific progress in the last 300 years has made it *substantially less* likely than it was before (300 years ago we didn't have any notion that there *was* a theoretical barrier to speed). It's reasonable to assume that it can never be overcome. It is *conceivable* that there might be a workaround that doesn't require infinite energy and give you infinite mass and infinitely compress you into a black hole, but it is unreasonable to believe it's nearly as likely as that there is no such workaround at all. Part of learning is discovering what is not possible. I know this isn't what people want to hear, and that's why it's rejected.

I don't mean this as an insult, it's an honest suggestion -- you need to read up on this way more than a forum comment can adequately describe to see why that's the case. There's a famous result that is tricky to understand that shows that faster than light travel is tantamount to time travel into the past, which means now you have to resolve the grandfather paradox, and figure out not only why we haven't been contacted by aliens, but also by our future selves (start at Light Cones: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...).