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Comment Ummm. (Score 1) 17

It looks weirdly like some sort of baby transport accessory. Maybe perfect for iphone air users hoping that a warm, soothing, environment conducive to frequent suckling will help their purchase recover developmentally normal weight?

Comment Re:It'll never stop (Score 2) 15

You have to have punishments to stop the people who are stopped by the threat of them. Those people do exist. We don't think about them much because the existing deterrents work just fine on them.

But you also shouldn't waste your time either believing that they will deter everyone, nor that stronger punishments will deter statistically more people. There are always those who think they won't get caught, and those who don't care.

Somehow authoritarians always forget the carrot. The stick isn't invalid, it just isn't a complete solution, and you shouldn't be rushing to apply it in all situations.

Comment What a shock. (Score 1) 70

Even when you try to keep the implementation fairly practical just deciding that there should be a city somewhere without any historical logic for the presence of a city is a strategy with a pretty dubious success rate. Doesn't fail every time; but unless you get lucky and manage to find an attractive chunk of real estate that was missing nothing but critical mass; or you have a very specific purpose in mind like 'new administrative center without restive urban population' that allows you to just tell the civil service to live there unless they like 8 hour commutes and declare victory your odds aren't good.

In this case the Saudis started with that downer; picked a particularly grim environment, likely to get at least a couple of degrees grimmer in the comparatively near future, and treated aggressive deviations from practicality as a virtue. There's probably something they could have done to doom the plan harder; but I'm not sure offhand what it would have been.

Comment Re: Without my money (Score 1) 91

What you call destruction of service jobs, I would call the introduction to the age of plenty, and the end of the age of scarcity. There shouldn't be an "upheaval", but I know there will be. The haves are too good at dividing the have nots for them to stop.

You debunked your own comment, there's nothing for me to do here :)

Comment Re:Meh? (Score 1) 42

The source code is written in assembly

FTFS, "it's the first version of UNIX in which the kernel and some of the core utilities were rewritten in the new C programming language"

Put this source code in front of 99.9% of the people here on Slashdot and they'd be able to do nothing with it.

Yes, this place really has gone to shit.

Comment Re:Without my money (Score 1) 91

Some of the technologies that would enable space exploration could also help us with the goal of repairing our biosphere though.

Yes, but we could also develop the same technologies and then not spend the money going to space, and instead implement them here, and think about space exploration once we're sure we have a future.

Comment Re: Without my money (Score 1) 91

The game alpha centauri is a lot more applicable here. However what you are talking about requires future technology. You would need self repairing machines for that. While this is arguably semi-feasible (design machines to be more modular and therefore serviceable by robots which could swap modules) they don't exist yet. And once they do we will be too busy dealing with the upheaval from the destruction of service jobs to think about colonizing other planets or moons.

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