Religion is not the root of all evil

Sure it is. Before religion, was there even a concept of 'evil'? I bet you that religion was what invented the concept of evil when creation myths were being concocted ten thousand years ago.

C is broken. Here is my analogy to prove to you why: C is a very powerful low level language, that has few guard rails to get in the way of whatever it is you are trying to do. It is like a giant wood chipper, in that it will easily eat up anything you feed into it: Oak trees, 2 x 4's, old couches, anything. It also has no safety mechanisms, like guard rails, kill switches, occasional mechanical inspections, etc. Would you consider ever going near such a device in the real world? Of course not, it would be far too easy to make one mistake and die horribly.

Why would you choose a language that is the virtual equivalent of a huge dangerous tool, when there are better options available, like Rust or Go? Oh, sure, you are a skilled and expert level coder and you would never make rookie mistakes with void pointers or buffer copies, but are you writing all the code at your org yourself? What about all the other bozos that you work with, you trust them not to screw up?

I grew up with C/C++, and it has a special place in my heart, but I also know that much better things have come along in recent years. Just because you grew up driving a 57 Chevy, doesn't mean it is better than a modern car with ABS, Air Bags, Cruse control and 42 mpg.

Well, that is a very thoughtful response to the issue, but the actual amount of carbon that is sequestered is small compared to the amount of energy that is used in extraction and transportation before the crude is even turned into bricks. There is some research I saw that was published online a few years ago (perhaps an academic paper?), where the energy budget of Lego sets were studied. I wish I could find the link for that paper, it was really interesting.

Anyway, the best way to reduce Co2 isn't to dig it up and sequester it, it is to not dig it up in the first place. I think Lego is doing the right thing in trying to reduce the demand to dig up petrochemicals.

Industry loves to be collectively anthropomorphized? Industry isn't a being. It doesn't have feelings. Your line certainly has a 'Hollywood oppressed masses' romance about it, but saying that all Industry (perhaps you mean capitalists?) is just out to exploit workers is like saying all black people are lazy. It is just a sloppy generalization that doesn't hold much water.

Pick out specific bad actors and focus your attention there, ex: "Walmart is an exploitative company that deserves to burn in hell for all its shitty dealings with its workers."

Yes, you are right, we should have invested in hi-tech manufacturing so we could have a few companies here that run on razor thing margins, employ a scant few people at high salaries, and are rapidly replacing every step of the manufacturing process with automated machinery. We would be far better off, indeed.

Look, it doesn't matter what you are manufacturing or what part of the world you are in. Manual labor jobs are 20th century jobs, and its all going away.

...And you should be sorry for what you did. Shame! Shame on your whole family! You should know better!

...than to ship product with a four digit security code. You know how easy that is to break? You are practically giving away passwords with a length of four. My god man, I bet you DIDN'T EVEN SALT YOUR DB.

I am so very dissapoint.

The principal fallacy that I am rather surprised that nobody calls out when the pro-gun shills start talking about protecting themselves, is that guns are protection. They are not shields, they don't 'protect' you in any way. ballistic vests are protection. Helmets are protection. Guns just give you a chance to engage in retaliatory violence on even footing. (Although even that is really questionable, since most people don't carry the same type of weapons that mass shooters do. I would feel pretty stupid if I got in a gunfight against a guy in level 3 body armor and carrying a fully automatic assault rifle while armed with a short barrel 9mm.)

This was a shitty show, they actors were little more than mean caricatures of nerds and geeks. They were doing the equivalent of wearing 'geek blackface'. If the show was focusing its humor on black people instead of nerds, the studio would be firebombed the day the first episode aired. It was a shitty show, and it belongs in the same category as 'Song of the South' - if not actually truly offensive, pretty tasteless none the less.

But, it is hugely popular in America, because for the past 20 years, we have been going through a profound cultural and economic shift. The nerd has gone from the mocked and outcast spaz of the 80's comedies (Revenge of the Nerds, various John Hughes movies) to ruling every aspect of modern life. (The founders of Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, etc.) The common blue collar worker has been utterly crushed by nerds and geeks, his work is being threatened by automation and disruptive startups, and he is slowly being gentrified out of house and home as the middle class is crushed by the new class of tech workers made up of these strange spastic twerps that he picked on in high school. This is no less than a dimly veiled mocking of geek culture, and emasculation of their threat to middle class America.

"Oh look, they aren't going to create a new start-up that shuts down the plant and puts me out of work, they are just a bunch of stupid gits that are scared of girls"

It's not a big deal. Just scientists peddling fear for more grant money.

Wow, you are stupid. Lets just consider the motivations of scientists in general. These are generally pretty smart people, who have chosen careers that they know will not make them money the same way that they would were they to go into, say investment banking. A vast majority are going to be motivated by things like curiosity, a passion for the natural environment, discovering truth (regardless of what that truth reveals). None of these things tends to encourage falsifying results, lying to the media, and tricking people into giving them grant money.

Oh sure, there are a few bad apples in every barrel, but they are pretty few and far between. Moreover, other scientists tend to find them pretty quick when they start checking each other's work, because sniffing out the truth is what these people try to do.

I'm not saying they are always right, but only a true idiot doesn't listen carefully to what they have to say.

Because objects have to be pretty big to make it through the atmosphere without exploding. Most meteors don't make it to the ground, because they aren't large enough. It is probably cheaper just to put a MIRV on a sat than it is to build your own faux 15 meter meteor.

You miss the point of space based weapons. Space is big. Really big. You take advantage of that space. You wouldn't put them in LEO. That would be stupid. You would put them way-way out, so that there is little chance you can preemptively eliminate them. This is why we wanted a nuke base on the moon in the 60s. Strategically its the most survivable deterrent.

You are correct, space is big. But LEO or as close to that as you can be is critical. The reason ICBMs were so popular, is the speed that they have, and the lack of reaction time that gives your opponent. If bombers take six hours to get their payload to Moscow, then an ICBM that can get there in twenty minutes is a vast improvement. LEO basically cuts that time in half or more, since there is only the coming down part.

Yeah, the Moon is far out of reach of aircraft launched ASAT weapons, but it is also three days away. Old propeller driven aircraft is faster than that, by twelve times. Days gives your enemy plenty of time to get their anti-missile weapons platform carefully lined up, and perhaps time to even have secondary measures prepared. Entire cities can be evacuated in three days. Sub pens and silos can be emptied, and divisions can be dispersed.

This of course ignores how incredibly fragile nukes and rockets are, and how space is incredibly expensive and dangerous to be in. One solar flare or fleck of paint can reduce your billion dollar weapon platform to junk. Space is a stupid place to put nukes, and LEO is the only place they would be 'fast' enough to be scary.

Want another reason not do space weapons at all? There is zero stealth in space. You cannot hide shit up there. We can see things in thermal really easily against the cold background. Anything man-made will stick out like a sore thumb because of its heat signature. Everyone with a cheap telescope will be able to watch everything you do on your moon base, unless you put it on the far side of the Moon, and that creates a whole new set of problems.

This space force is yet another idea from an inept imbecile who isn't listening to his advisors. We could have put nukes in orbit anytime in the last sixty years, and yet, somehow we chose not to. We had plenty of hawks in the oval office during that time, and yet not one of them even suggested such an idea. Why is that? Old Ronnie was a commie hating hawk, and even he only suggested the Star Wars Defense Initiative as an anti-missile deterrent. Far smarter presidents (from both sides of the aisle) have passed on the idea, for very good reasons.

The Air Force traditionally has been the branch that has had responsibility for space related weapon platforms (ASAT, spy sats, high altitude recon, etc), so why would you create a whole new branch for this? I would wager if I had high enough security clearance, I could find an existing AF officer in charge of super secret space based weapon research projects that are already underway. This is just pointless redundancy in creating a new branch. "Drain the Swamp", indeed!

I think the study missed a few control groups.

It would be interesting to try this with a bunch of programmers and tech people who understand what AI actually is, vs a group of technological illiterate people. I think that the techies would have a much lower time to switch off the robot because they aren't fooled into thinking that the robot is in any way alive.

Also motivation is a major consideration. Were people pausing because of compassion for a perceived sentient being, or because they were amused by the silly antics of an inanimate object pretending to be alive? I would personally leave it on longer to see how elaborate of a charade had been coded into the robot. I would want to watch and see how far the 'joke' would go, since I know that it isn't alive or sentient.

Motivation in this test should be considered.

Ancestry, 23andMe and several other top genetic testing companies pledged on Tuesday TO STOP SHARING users' DNA data with others without consent.

Fixed that for you.

You are correct, to some degree, but this is like saying that the invisible hand of the market will always find the right level. It will, but on occasion it causes a bit of discomfort to the silly little monkeys before it does.

I think the point that you are missing is that, rather than wait for everything to correct itself, perhaps we should be aware of the system we live in and proactively try to avoid painting ourselves into a corner in the first place. Because, accidentally causing a biosphere collapse or something similar can cause us a * few * inconveniences while mother nature figures out how to fill the vacuum.

Slashdot's moderating system awful, but it is the least awful solution to the problem of managing user generated content I have seen to date. (It is a tough problem, to be fair). There is still plenty of room for improvement though. 'Anon' posting for example, should probably just go away at this point, as the number of insightful posts by whistle-blowers and people who need discretion to be able to participate in a conversation are truly insignificant compared to the number of trolls and spammers.

The Internet is full of awful people with terrible ideas, and they all want to share them with you. Good luck moderating that....