Who says everyone needs to contribute back? If someone wants to live off absolutely no money in a hole somewhere, why not let them? The idea is there will be a percent that will give back hand over fist more then those that want to live in a hole. It doesn't need to be a 1:1 ratio, it doesn't even need to be a 10:1 ratio. Some people simply do and are worth a hell of a lot more to society then that one guy who wants to live in a hole.

And if society shifts enough, it may actually start to make those people living in that hole feel bad, and they too will eventually crawl out and try to better society. There are a LOT of different ways of benefiting society, not just earning minimum wage working at Tbell. That is something that can't be quantified in economics. Empowering people and making people feel like they can make a difference without being punished for simply trying is extremely important. Our society IS way too dependent on the whole idea that you have to get ahead over everyone else, so you have the bloody battle of capitalism in which everyone tries to claw, scratch, and fight their way to the top... All so they can buy $250 plates at an expensive restaurant somewhere.

I'm actually in a slightly different category. I think a stipend for the average citizen is a great idea. I also think a income cap is also a very good idea. This most definitely will get a lot of hate, but income has huge diminishing returns for people. Perhaps not for a company as it can continue to grow, but once you meet a certain income to cover basic necessities as an individual it makes less and less of a difference. So if you have a income cap at like 100x the yearly income of a minimum wage worker, like $7.5 x 40hours/week x 52 = $15,600 you'd end up capped at a yearly income of $1,560,000, which is more then enough to live off of comfortably for like 95% of the population and that 5% that spend in extreme excess would simply have to trim back their ridiculous lifestyles.

If the person earns more then that amount they either have a choice of paying it in taxes (which then gets put into public services and bettering the country as a whole) or reinvesting it in wherever it came from, such as a company. And if that company has an excess income it'll look to either reinvest it, which helps society as a whole, or they'll simply sit on it, just like the person in the hole. But eventually, someday, they too will realize that just sitting on money doesn't do anyone any good and there is no reason to actually acquire money just to have money.

Obviously there are a lot of ways to cheat the system (such as having your company pay for everything as a business expense), but we have branches of the government to deal with that and I'm sure they'll get better at doing it once they have more practice.

...what happens when you aren't home or around to manually flip your breaker? That sounds like a hazard at someone else's expense.

Not everyone is an electrical engineer so keep that in mind when talking to everyone with skillsets in other areas.

They'd be better off hijacking some old shermans then driving that thing around. All I could do is look at it and laugh. One RPG and that thing is toast. They'd be better off with no armor all together or simply buying a humvee and putting a 7.62 on top. Heck some WW2 armored cars were better off then this thing. I'm surprised they don't simply buy some russian surplus... I'm sure there are plenty of t-80s for sale.

So I understand Valve is going to make a killing off of this, but why would I as a PC gamer want to buy a console that pretends to be a PC? This isn't a PC, although Valve is going to market the shit out of it as that. This isn't increasing customer awareness by telling them what their computer can or can't run. This wont have adaptive and ever increasing hardware. There is really NO benefit to buying one of these except to fit the trend.

If it can run on a steambox, it can run in windows. With big mode you can have the same experience simply by buying a Xbox PC controller and hooking your PC up to your living room TV. I am personally ashamed and devestated by the direction Valve is taking with this. PCs were the last bastion for gamers wanting more then the watered down console experience and now Valve is going in to fuck that up too. There will no longer be a better version for the PC, there will be a better version for the PC (aka Steambox), which will be nothing more then another watered down PC wannabe in a year or two... let alone when it's going on seven. The PC moniker is going to mean nothing more then the Steambox in the future.

Fuck this, fuck Valve for killing the one last arena for PC gamers. Hardware baselines are killing the gaming industry and encourage nothing more then regurgitations of CoD23. I thoroughly hope developers don't develop for this and it dies before it gets off the ground (I doubt it though).

It's just a wood mockup. They get a A for effort, but when nothing works (some of the controls are cardboard?!?) and it just looks like it's made out of what they found in the trash it loses a lot of it's luster. I did the same thing when I was like five with leftover washing machine boxes and a sharpie. This is getting a huge amount of publicity for what it is too. Some of the models don't even look like they're the right scale either (like the back of the cockpit).

The way these devices are made they make hand over fist back in money. I'm guessing these also have the ads on them.

They could give these away for free to everyone and they'd still make plenty of money back on them simply through sales and ads on the device. Consumers seem to feel the need to still pay for them though.

I'm surprised in this day and age there isn't online voting. Pretty much everyone has a computer and those that don't can still go and vote normally. All the results being fed into a giant database is a good way to verify information (dead voters) and would get all the people that are too lazy to actually go vote. I don't think it could be worse then diebold machines. It would provide instant results too and allow people to analyze the data.

Of course there are ways it could be misused and there are opportunities to hack it, but people do that already in real life since you can't verify anyone or compare them against other districts. I've heard of people voting in multiple districts already.

So... if you sleep for six-eight hours, you actually only spend six-four hours with your family? Not actually counting cooldown between waking up and going to bed or any other chores in life that may side track you (most people burn about a hour waking up, hour for dinner, 30 minutes for bed). Apparently once a month you are unable to spend time with them or you only sleep for three hours.

That astrix is incredibly deceiving unless you read it.

It's actually quite amazing how many people don't add up hours in their life and instead just continue the day in and out grind. We all have a finite amount of time, you are no different.

Science only indicates that which it can measure. Any time something falls outside that measure science can't justify it's existence. Like science nowdays would be seen as miracles, when it's clearly not. In the same way prayer could be some supernatural form of science that involves 'willing' things better. Not understood and seems completely like hog wash to the scientific community, yet somehow could still be possible. Perhaps even more so because we don't fully understand how prayer works.

The lag, oh god the lag. Once the server receives data (if you’re playing online) it has to then forward it to you, which then you respond to and forward it back to the server, which then forwards it to wherever you’re playing. You’re talking about a quadruple jump in latency. Double simply to respond. If you’re cruising along at 20ms that is a lot less noticeable, but chances are people aren’t. Basic input just to move your character is very noticeable.

Video quality.

Number one reason it was stillborn is bandwidth caps. Getting a 1080p experience you’re streaming every time you play a game (for some people 8 hours a day), that’ll eat your bandwidth cap in a few days. This is something no amount of technology will get around as it’s a fixed part of the market. Unless Onlive builds their own infrastructure, a-lah google, no amount of cash injection will fix this.

The best thing Onlive could’ve done was build a bunch of micro-datacenters instead of one big data center in TX or where ever it’s cheap. Pretty much one per state, so the games have low latencies to onlive, onlive lowers it’s bandwidth costs, and possibly even link onlive centers for extremely fast play. Of course they would’ve done this if they were smart. Possibly even rolling out a ‘extreme’ package to local gamers in the form of fiber lines bring latency down below 10ms for even online gaming.

Honestly though, the disconnect between when you push a button and when the screen reacts is huge. I personally would never want to play cloud gaming unless we’re talking about 1ms response time.

I actually read the article too... Nothing to see there besides the headline. The author makes it seem like this happens today and his extremely hazy memory is representative of walking straight into a active nuclear reactor (think of the kids! they're so unsafe). There are a lot of other explanation that people are leaving on the page that are more likely. How did this even make it on slashdot?

So let me get this straight, people are afraid of a dig site in the middle of no where that MAY have a earthquake in the next two thousand years, which MAY cause a catastrophe that would cause barrels of nuclear waste to seep into the ground water in the middle of no where, which could be easily detected and the closest town which is like 100 miles away could be evacuated...

But people don't care when we're actually causing earthquakes, pumping said 'waste' directly into the ground in various locations around the US that more then likely will not be taken care of properly in the future or watched with such a diligent eye? WTF is wrong with people? This is supposed to be a better option then nuclear?

The spice must flow...

People shouldn't be turning away from nuclear, they should be embracing it. One of the greatest discoveries in the last 100 years and people are shying away from it because of teething issues. Of course the teething issues left huge marks, but so do a lot of things of tremendous amounts of potential and power. Leaps and bounds have been made in the field too. Everyone wants to get back to the basics, but harnessing the atom still remains an extremely viable option, let alone what would happen if it went mainstream.

Stuff like this really makes me sad. It's made me sad ever since I learned about nuclear power and found out it was never widely used... It made me ask why. And so far, after all these years, the only reason I can come up with is fear.

I'm going to disagree with the quarter system and any variants that have a shorter 'break' duration then that. I agree that a loooong summer break is a bad idea. I personally know I'm losing a lot of information during this (in college and during high school this was pretty evident). But people need time to recuperate after putting in their all so giving them a standized couple weeks off in which all families around the country need to schedule their family time isn't necessarily a good idea.

A good month off is about what you need to recuperate and both in the fall and in the spring time I've found myself suffering fatigue towards the end of the semester. Moreso in spring during that lethargic period before may (mainly due to Christmas brightening things up).

A trimester would fit this perfectly and still give kids a chance to have a life outside of school and do fun things/family things. Japan does this and it works out very well for them. They do a lot of things over there that are quite a bit different from the US (like job fairs and cultural festivals that everyone is required to participate in), but that's one I agree with the most. I know as a kid I would hate the idea of this, but it really is a better system and it's not as invasive as a quarterly system or one that simply doesn't offer a break.

In this example I would say that marijuana lowers motivation and drive of these teenagers. Motivation and drive are very important facets in learning. Essentially if you don't give a crap about anything, you wont take time to learn it or be interested in it. So essentially you have a bunch of people who aren't interested in anything and therefore don't learn anything and as such they appear to have lower IQs, even though it's entirely possible for them to still be smart...

A flaw of the IQ test not being a absolute measure of intelligence and pot smoking casing a change in personality rather then physiology.