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Comment Re:google has no choice, like many others before t (Score 1) 128

Well the like of the Koch brothers have made it so now

Nonsense.

but you are obviously too indoctrinated by the US media to realise this.

Looks who's talking. Have some billionaires spend a little money and suddenly they own a whole political movement. Does that mean that Soros owns what's usually considered as the left by now?

Comment Re:google has no choice, like many others before t (Score 1) 128

So how does that description not fit the Koch brothers?

If they really support libertarianism, then that's one way the description doesn't fit.

Koch is seen as the guy promoting keeping society the way it is (or was) against Soros' attempt to disturb stability through more change.

"Seen" is not the same as "is".

Comment Re:google has no choice, like many others before t (Score 1) 128

that counts as right wing in my book

So what? Why should I care about your "book"?

I could not give a crap about the Gmail example, but the fact is that "libertarianism" in the US is just a front, funded by the likes of the Koch brothers (and others) and designed to facilitate a tax regime friendly to the richest 1% of the population. If that does not count as right wing I do not know what does.

You're right. You don't know what right wing is. Or facts for that matter. Libertarianism has been kicking around in the US since at least the end of the Second World War, long before the Koch brothers might have been a factor. It's never been a front for the rich. The ideology was developed long ago. Your "fact" is fraudulent.

Second, right wing vaguely means conservative/reactionary and someone who values social stability well over change. Libertarians are aggressive liberal on issues of personal freedom and economics even if that threatens social stability and other conservative notions. In those areas, they tend to be to the left of most leftists (aside from anarchists).

Comment Re:But what is "nuclear waste" ? (Score 1) 433

Everyone seems to forget that half of the entire fucking nuclear power station is also "waste" - it's radioactive and damned fucking hard to get rid of.

You don't need to immediately get rid of it. Just leave it in place until it's no longer radioactive waste. And it's low grade waste too. There's a reason for the lack of drama.

Comment Re:google has no choice, like many others before t (Score 1) 128

Well, I see you haven't established that the Koch brothers are actually right wing. And libertarianism != right wing (just one of the many ideologies that can't easily be shoehorned into a single sliding scale).

However, I can read the title and I know what Night Trap is, and I know that it has nothing to do with Gmail.

Which is why it was given as an example. It's a totally different example of the principle which doesn't involve Gmail at all by design.

My issue with your Gmail example is that Figueroa did not "want to ban it."

Destroying the business model is a classic political means for banning something. It's done all the time with adult video and sex product stores. The local government can zone the area so that the only place you can build such a store is well out of the way. As a result you get a lot less customers because your business is hard to get to. If that difference between a convenient and inconvenient location is enough to make the business unprofitable, then you destroyed the business's model.

Comment Re:Stop Now (Score 1) 174

But the point is that these structures are essentially _tents_

And my point is that these are essentially status projects. Well, the NASA one is a reused status project. Spending a lot more money than you have to is part of the project.

The same goes for pyramid shaped objects. Nobody builds a cheap pyramid just because even though it'd be relatively easy to do with a few earthmovers and other massive construction equipment. It's, for example, a place of worship, monument to your life, and/or a giant casino. Using historical examples for price estimates would give some amusing claims. "You would need 10,000 slaves to build a pyramid."

For example, I believe an inflatable structure of the appropriate scale with a medium vacuum in the center and properly anchored to the ground (or perhaps rather the inside of an abandoned open copper mine) could be had for low tens of millions of dollars (the inflatable components of the outer shell would be moderately over-pressurized cone-shaped wedges which would need to resist one atmosphere of pressure and wind loading with appropriate factor of safety). That includes building of smaller structures to get the many design issues worked out. That's not quite good enough a vacuum, but it's getting there.

High low Earth orbit in space has a similar density and composition to what a Farnsworth fusor would use, so you could just build a bare fusor in space, say 600 km up and use atmosphere (which would be mostly hydrogen and helium isotopes) at that point and see what happens. I haven't given it much thought past that point, the interactions with higher atomic weight atoms, Earth's magnetic or gravity fields, or the lower Van Allen belt might render it useless for most proper fusion research. But I think you could do such a thing for under a billion dollars today - even with today's high launch costs.

Comment Re:Nuclear is obvious, an energy surplus is desire (Score 1) 433

Oh and GPP probably meant whenever reasonably possible.

That will probably be the excuse for the AI program that ends the world in order to produce hamburgers a little faster.

And it's always possible that he didn't mean it that way. I have seen the occasional bit of magic thinking where someone believes something is so good that it should be optimized at the expense of everything else and it is only after being confronted with the logical consequences of that statement that they decide they really mean "reasonable".

Comment Re:Nope. (Score 1) 433

Unless we just really have no problem with every X years some spot on earth becomes uninhabitable for the next 50,000 years...

If X is big (like say greater than 50,000 years, for example), then it's not that big a deal. Chernobyl and Fukushima won't be considered uninhabitable for that long.

Plus, you can always put another nuclear plant in that spot.

Comment Re:Nuclear is obvious, an energy surplus is desire (Score 1) 433

Try to reduce your daily energy usage whenever possible.

I would suggest doing a modest cost/benefit analysis first. Energy usage reduction is not that valuable for most people outside of a few big things. And who's going to consider the more ludicrous optimizations like changing your sex to male just so they can save a little energy usage?

Comment Re:Renewables (Score 1) 433

The long and short of it..we're buggered.

It's not much of a buggering to be honest. I'm more concerned about poverty, overpopulation, and desertification. Some of these can be made worse through extreme global warming, but they are major problems, bigger than global warming even in the complete absence of global warming.

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