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Comment Re:A sad world. (Score 1) 268

Where I live, there have always been plate readers. We call them 'Sir'. They register plates that seem suspicious to them and store them in little black notebooks that they keep 'til retirement, half a century sometimes. They work only 8 hours a day and want wages, uniforms, typing machines, unions, sick time, vacations, retirement money and other stuff the new ones don't need. The new ones are much cheaper for us taxpayers. They also know every fucking stolen car's plate by heart and can't be bribed by a doughnut. When we want to be anonymous, we walk or use a bike and not a car which have had license plates to identify them since the last 100 years. I guess that this new stuff is definitely eroding the right to drive a car in public that is registered as stolen, used in a robbery, kidnapping or murder.

Your observations are spot-on in a world where 1984 is only a fictitious book by George Orwell. Otherwise... not so much.

Comment Re:I wonder (Score 1) 433

Reinventing their cell walls is an evolutionary step that would also imply other things (i.e. would the bacterium be able to survive with the new cell wall structure; would it be less susceptible to alcohol but more susceptible to something else; would it be able to replicate the new structure, etc). I'm no bacteriologist but aren't bacteria in endospore-mode not susceptible to alcohol?

Comment Re:What is good for the consumer? (Score 1) 232

To some degree this is correct; however when you let Cheap and Plentiful run rampant you get what you have now -- everything made to last for about a year, landfills full of cellphones and similar that will be intact a thousand years from now, etc. Our planet simply can't sustain that kind of mentality.

Comment Re:Yeah... Cheating... Sure... (Score 2) 232

It seems as if you're not taking into account the subsidization by the Chinese government that takes place so that Chinese products almost always undercut domestic-made products in price, driving domestic companies out of business. It's one thing to "compete" on product quality; it's another to simply flood the market with subsidized waste.

Comment Re:Real scifi isn't about predicting the future (Score 1) 258

6: And the big one; fewer and fewer people will have traditional jobs, letting the robots/computers do the admin / manual work for them. Instead, we'll be exploring, learning, creating, having fun, or socializing (eventually mankind will realize that higher unemployment is a good thing, and not a bad) .

The problem with this is that it's exactly what they said would happen back in the 50's... we'd have all this leisure time and it would become a problem since no one had anything to do. I don't know about you, but I have less time for anything now than ever before.

Comment Re:The box for Schrödinger's cat (Score 1) 285

So perhaps it should be renamed to "dark force" (or something not so ridiculous-sounding) so as to not make it sound as if it describes an actual physical thing (i.e. "matter" which has mass and occupies space.) While this seems to express some of the qualities of matter (gravitation) we haven't actually seen or recreated it as in antimatter.

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