Comment most jobs are already useless or harmful (Score 2) 456
Comment where does all the extra productivity go? (Score 1) 409
1.) marx hints in the manifesto what happens with the overproduction: it creates a crisis within capitalism. "In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of over-production." capitalism has learnt do deal with this but to some degree the mechanisms are still the same as 150years ago. creating extra demand via advertising. destroying the existing production. war. legally limiting access. e.g. via so called "intellectual property". as a more permanent solution: capitalism in former centuries had the opportunity to expand into other continents. but this is gone. and there is a limit to aggressive advertising. the "best" method to get rid of access production today is via war. works twice: you need weapons and you do need to rebuild what has been destroyed.
2.) so if we are not able to limit the excess productivity by shorting labour hours and installing basic income then what we will see is heading to is war and destruction. if you look today: most jobs are in areas that are useless or harmful to society: advertising (an industry that creates dissatisfaction), financial products creating fictional capital and of course war. also most products could last much longer then they do..etc.. also think of the ecological footprint of the useless crap.
3.) so if we do not want to wake up in an even more distyopian world we better make sure that we compensate the productivity gains with working less hours and demanding more money and fighting for a universal basic income..
Comment Re:It's called "Capitalism" (Score 2) 674
.. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property
Comment Night trips (Score 1) 648
Forget working or web surfing while the car drives you somewhere... why even be conscious and have to remember the time it takes to get somewhere?
I want self-driving sleeper cars.
Everywhere within 8 hours drive would be just a night's sleep away. Get off work on Friday, sleep, wake up in some mid-point town with a dozen friends from different cities, party for the weekend, as I sleep Sunday night the car gets me back to where I work.
Numerous social and economic knock-on effects follow from self-driving sleeper cars.
U.S. In Danger of Losing Earth-Observing Satellite Capability 258
Comment mechanical oscillation is the source of CPU clock (Score 1) 37
Comment "half-state between alliance and a federation" (Score 1) 152
Comment Oh how the mighty have fallen... (Score 1) 219
Comment In the words of one of my inspirations... (Score 1) 1521
Don't like the new layout, the editors screw up far too often, the polls have become eerily akin to the marketing polls that pop up from time to time in the right column on Facebook, and my list of complaints goes on - but for all of that, I stick around because at its heart Slashdot has been one tech geek's blog about stuff he finds interesting. With Rob gone though, I honestly don't know how much longer I'll be reading. Emo as it sounds, CmdrTaco is the heart of this place, and without him there is the very real possibility that it will become (even more of) a shell of what it once was. For now I'm gonna dutifully keep my homepage set to "http://slashdot.org" in Opera and Firefox, and hope it stays that way. We'll see.
Rob, thanks for all those years of doling out news for us nerds; as much as we all whine and bitch, I think I can safely speak for the majority when I say that in the end we still appreciate it. To conclude, only two words exist that adequately express the solemnity and gravity of this event:
OMG!!! PONIES!!11
Comment debian squeeze (Score 2) 264
Comment Banana equivalent dose (Score 2, Informative) 256
Bananas are radioactive—But they aren't a good way to explain radiation exposure. When you eat a banana, your body's level of Potassium-40 doesn't increase. You just get rid of some excess Potassium-40. The net dose of a banana is zero.
and
Many common artificial radioisotopes are categorically more dangerous than the type of radioisotope naturally in bananas, even if the equivalent dose (Sv) is reported as the same. Nuclear power accidents tends to release radioiodine, which is known to be especially dangerous to children because it concentrates in the thyroid gland. Other radioisotopes may accumulate in the lung. The dose from potassium in bananas is less harmful because it is distributed more evenly throughout the body, and does not accumulate.
i might loose some carma points for pointing this out on a
Comment for the paranoid: sha512 rounds=250000 (Score 1) 409
password required pam_unix.so nullok obscure min=8 max=20 sha512 rounds=250000
this needs a few seconds on a 2.5Ghz AMD. so you should be safe against dictionary attacks as long has your password is not 12345678 or april1