The next step will be a modification to the "stingray" fake cell site unit to brick all phones in an area and prevent uploading of audio or video. This will be used during demonstrations.

(Note, I tried to make the subject line read, "Books>Kindle>Audiobooks", but for some reason, Slashdot removed the ">"s.)

I absorb least of all from audiobooks, only partly because I usually fall asleep in the first five minutes.

Ever since the Kindle app got rid of the little graphical representation of where you are in the book (like a timeline, at the bottom, where you saw whether you were 1/4 of the way through, halfway or close to the end), I've been a little uncomfortable with my ebooks.

Say what you will about those old paper-and-board book things, at least you knew exactly where you were, and could get some mental image of the progression of the narrative arc. So when you'd only got maybe 1/10th of the book read (based upon the fact that only a little bit of the book was on the left hand side) and you were reading a mystery, you could pretty much rest assured that there were some pretty big plot twists to come. Maybe that has something to do with any less absorption from ebooks (if there really is less, which I doubt this study proves).

Even so, I read mostly everything on a tablet, except sheet music. And when a really good sheet music e-book reader (and editor) comes out at less than $2000, I'm going to grab one. Musical manuscripts are just too small, even on a 10" tablet. I need to be able to see two pages of music at a time (at least).

Complexity. the "vertical" transport system only goes to given floors in a given building. The roads go everywhere. I can drive from NYC to Los Angeles... and anywhere in between.

But I only need to go between points A and B, and don't much care about hypothetical point C (since I can always rent transport there, if needs be).

The ad hominem was not yours, it was in the article you approvingly cited from The Federalist.

A hundred years ago, the first group of progressives concluded that this country needed to change in a big way. They argued explicitly for a refounding of the United States on the grounds that the only absolute in political life is that absolutes are material and economic rather than moral in nature.

The people from that "first group of progressives" that I cited were starting purely from moral grounds, and demanding that the United States live up to the morality professed by the very "federalists" from whom the group got its name.

In order to transition an economy or government to true socialism,

Finland has been social democrat since the World War II. It's only in the recent years American-style capitalism has become fashionable. I'm sure it's a pure coincidence that our economy switched to an apparently permanent tailspin at the same time.

Gaze upon our debt-free university-level education and despair. Or grow balls and demand it from your own government. Either way, I'm gainfully employed and paying taxes because and only because my government gave me an education offer I could had refused, but didn't see any rational reason to.

How is this blow against Uber?
Uber is illegal in Finland as taxis here need a license to operate and they have service obligation.

Why would anyone use a taxi to get around Helsinki? It's the one city even I just leave my car parked at the outskirt (Mellunmäki metro station 24h free parking with enough space to make sure some is always available - take note everyone, that's what it takes to get people to abandon cars) and switch to mass transit.

Nuclear power requires uninterrupted police powers for tens of thousands of years to control nuclear waste.

Anything that stays active for ten thousand years is either not dangerous or fuel. The exact same power that damages your tissues will just as happily turn a steam turbine for you.

Lots of things kill birds, and actually wind turbines are pretty low on the scale. Even nuclear plants kill more by some estimates:

Yes, obviously it takes a retarded bird to be hit by an easily visible object moving at a perfectly regular path. That doesn't stop people from protesting wind power on behalf of birds, though. And the thing is, they aren't necessarily wrong: while it takes spectacular bad luck for a bird to die from an encounter with a windmill, it also takes a ridiculous amounts of windmills to replace a single nuclear plant.

Of course, there's always the possibility of not having a single large turbine, but a tower full of small turbines. That would not only make them bird-safe, but also allow them to run right up to and including hurricane winds, unlike a single large one (due to stress to bearings because windspeed varies across the area).

I think he was just pinging me for the ideas, which do predate my efforts and is certainly fair -- I started my whole "object" approach to c in 1985.

Of course, the whole point was to avoid using compiler tech that generated code I didn't intend it to generate, and in that sense, I got what I was after.

I wish I could still write my code in assembler, though. I was never more at home than when churning out 6809 or 68000 code.

Be happy. The universe is not structured that way. Copying happens all the time in nature. Billions and billions of bacteria create copies of themselves every day. Events that generate light or sound radiate faithful copies of energy in many directions and also can generate echoes. One person can address a crowd of thousands, and radio stations can broadcast one signal to millions, because nature does work that way.

The insanity is the direction we tried to take ideas. We've tried to treat ideas like they're gold. Try to hoard them, try to demarcate and issue certificates of ownership. Tried to apply the logic of material ownership to the immaterial. Many people have fallen for the oversimplification, and have bought the lines that "property is property" and "stealing is stealing". But those pesky ideas just won't stay safely locked up. Someone else might get the same idea without ever breaking into the vault. The people who are regularly appalled and unhappy that vaults don't protect ideas are fools. That DRM exists and has been forced into so many products agasint the wishes of people who know better, is a testament to the large numbers of people who have failed to grasp this aspect of nature. The universe is a better place because ideas can't be locked up. It's the fools who have tried mightily to make patents and copyrights work who are struggling against reality. They're fighting an unwinnable battle. They will eventually lose, but until that day comes, they continue to cause a lot of waste, grief, and damage.

Thanks California. Human impact of using coal fired plants? Nope, think of the children has been replaced by "think of the birds".

It's not California. It's everywhere. Anything whatsoever has some impact, thus enviromental groups oppose it. Even damn wind turbines have been opposed on the grounds that they might chop up birds.

None of which means we shouldn't think about how this effect could be mitigated or prevented (maybe use optic fibers rather than open space to transport and concentrate light? Put a glass roof on the whole thing?) but no matter what, there's going to be some negative ones.

Those are just tabletop gardening robots. That was done 20 years ago.

There's lots of real robotic agricultural machinery, much of it mobile. Building a gantry over a tabletop doesn't scale.

The soviet government was unable to keep the lie going. The USA government does not have that problem: They are funded by biased taxation and trade agreements, a monopoly on many forms of intellectual property, a monopoly on 'world police' duties, and sale of most of the international currency. When all that fails, they simply invent 1/3rd of their federal revenue from thin air.

The US government is hardly synonymous with capitalism. Whether that's a good or bad thing I won't get into, but it's entirely possible that US might survive the fall of capitalism and recover. However, should this not be the case, it doesn't matter how much money it can print for itself. Money only has value within a functioning economic system; all the money in the world can't buy anything is no one is selling.

All the people provide is disposable labour and babies for future labour markets.

And they're starting to admit that, too. Once you consciously admit that the promises offered by some Power that Be are lies, it no longer has any power to compel your loyalty. It might try coercion, but as the Soviet coup demonstrated, that's a desperate gambit that has low chances of working, even if the people who make up the army still stay under its spell.

In short, capitalism is going to fall for failing the same test it judges people by: can you deliver? And it could had avoided its fate by showing mercy for those who can't. There is irony in that. But the stupid thing is that it already got a stay of execution back when communism first arose by becoming lighter and softer with unemployment benefits and keynesian stimulus economics, and is really only dying due to abandoning those - and could still repent a second time, it's just bloody unlikely to.

Thanks, looks like very interesting reading. Bookmarked it.