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maverickronin said:

The idea of trying to criminalize that act of rearranging the polarity of your own magnets to a pattern that someone else gave to you would be highly amusing if it weren't actually happening...

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... do you mind elaborating? xD
 
Though more simply,imo there is power in diversity, and weakness in conforming or congruency. For me attitude is how you react to a situation, people who share a similar attitude can still be very different people. I'd like to see more positive and constructive attitudes being encouraged, and more people utilizing a positive attitude to be as different as they can be and offering what ever unique skills they have for the benefit of those around them!

@ manveru
 
I think you might be a little unclear on what money actually is or why we use it.  Physically, money may be just a few scraps of paper, metal discs, or numbers on a spreadsheet.  When you say it shouldn't matter what something "costs" you seem to invoke the idea that all we need to do is change some numbers in a spreadsheet to solve world poverty.  In reality, money is a concept and bill, coins, spreadsheets are just tokens for keeping track of it and what it represents, the scarcity of resources.
 
There are all kinds of things that it is physically possible to do but it isn't physically possible to do all of them once.  The cost of something represents the available supply of that something as well as demand for it.  It determines what things are done and who gets what in a fair manner.  Or at least it would in perfect world.  I could go on about why markets fail in certain circumstances and how they should be regulated to nudge them closer to the ideal models but that's not terribly relevant.  The important thing is that most of the time most of the cost of something is determined by the resources spent in making it, what else those resources could have produced instead, how many people want that something, and how much they want that something.
 
As long as there is scarcity I can't imagine any alternative to actual money that isn't essentially a new name for money (like "spending" karma points).  Barter is completely impractical in the modern world of specialized jobs (How many malware infections do I have to remover for a new pair of headphones and where can I find someone who needs those services and has the headphones I want?) and our standard of living isn't possible without those specializations.  In a world with limited resources the only other way to eliminate money would be for the government to plan every last detail of every person's life down what groceries the get each week and the toys their kids get for Christmas.  No government can even properly run a command economy on macro scale so I think it's safe to say that working out such tiny details would be a failure.
 
Combining money with a market economy farms out all those decisions to individuals and makes a large economy practical.  Money is just any arbitrary object that we've decided as a society we will all accept as barter.  It allows for specialization.  I can barter my skill in fixing computers to my employer for money and then barter that money for things I need or want but which my employer doesn't have.  With some people cheating the system and others falling through the cracks it's hardly perfect but like democracy and the scientific method it's the best we've got so far.  The laws of supply and demand are just as much a part of reality as the law of gravity and we have to take them into account when planning an economic system just like we take the force of gravity into account when designing a building.
 
Even without money, something that is scarce and desirable will be worth something even if that worth is not expressed in dollars and cents.  People will barter for it, take risks to get it, or make whatever sacrifice is necessary in order to attain it and those trades, risks, will be in proportion to their assessment of its worth.
 
I'm all for reforming our economic system so as many people as possible can lead fulfilling lives and have as few economic worries as possible but barring the invention of a completely concept to replace it, the idea of eliminating all money is literally the very last step on the list of thing to do in order to achieve that goal.

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mshenay said:

... do you mind elaborating? xD
 
Though more simply,imo there is power in diversity, and weakness in conforming or congruency. For me attitude is how you react to a situation, people who share a similar attitude can still be very different people. I'd like to see more positive and constructive attitudes being encouraged, and more people utilizing a positive attitude to be as different as they can be and offering what ever unique skills they have for the benefit of those around them!

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That's just the "nuts and bolts" physical description of copying something to a hard drive...

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maverickronin said:

I think that using geothermal on a massive scale is potentially the most dangerous though.  It seems unlimited on a human scale the way fossil fuels used to and with the right technology you can take out as much as you want from anywhere in the world while fossil fuels have to be found, dug up, and sold.  They get more expensive with greater demand and scarcer supply influencing people to find alternatives long before they completely run out due to the fact that the demand for a particular fuel will be very inelastic in the short term (since most buyers really need to have it right now no matter what and can't quickly or easily switch to another fuel) causing small disruptions to supply or small increases in demand to cause large price increases but the demand is more elastic in the long term as eventually upfront costs of switching fuels is offset by the high cost.  Geothermal on the other hand could end up as a tragedy of the commons.  Eventually all you'll need is a patch of land and a drill rig and you can take as much as you want and I don't think its too "out there" to say that some disruption to the natural convection of heat through the core and mantle will occur before the temperature differential between the surface and as deep as we can drill is too small to make a decent heat engine.  This is admittedly pretty darn far in the future but what if after hundreds of years of using mantle taps to provide the majority of our energy very inexpensively we discover that we need to stop or severely cut back or risk not just our civilization, as with fossil fuels, but potentially the entire planet?  What if we don't notice until it's too late.

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You think, not know. Of course you can never be 100% sure about something, but some things are well within reason. I would encourage you to read up on geothermal heatpumps and the theories behind the inner workings of the Earth since you seem to have interest in both. Geothermal is not just a bore hole and you cannot "take as much as you want". The systems are much more complex and highly diverse in type and style. Also, the heat in the Earth is largely believed to be caused by residual heat left over from the Earth's formation, and radioactive decay. Again it's believed (deep earth sciences aren't that exact) that the Earth is constantly cooling, and the radioactivity is merely acting as a counter, slowing the process. 
http://www.popsci.com/stuart-fox/article/2008-09/could-tapping-planet-geothermal-energy-cool-earth%E2%80%99s-core
 
It's also worth noting that currently gas prises are rising because of market factors and the world economy, not because the supply is decreasing or the demand is increasing. 
 
 
 

Originally Posted by maverickronin /img/forum/go_quote.gif
 
At least with fusion we can calculate how many of whatever isotopes that we need are out there and attainable.  That will give us some kind of time line on when we need a new source of isotopes or a new source of energy.  Plus as their ratio decreases they'll get harder to extract and become more expensive motivating the search for a new source of isotopes or a new form of power generation.

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Again, that's not exactly how fusion works. We also don't generally "find" isotopes in or on the Earth's surface. Most useful isotopes have short half-lives, making them scarce in the natural world. Fission and other types of nuclear reactors exist to "breed" these isotopes. It also depends on which kind of fusion we end up using. 

Sharing is a voluntary action from the original owner. For example, I share a bag of chips with a Head-Fier - voluntary. If I don't want you to have some chips, yet you took some it's stealing. But people often get it mixed up. Imo, piracy is not stealing. It's basically copying.
 
P2P sharing is in the grey area. If say, I bought a KFC and I can exactly copy it in quality. I share them to my friends and people in the community, is that illegal? If I open a shop selling "counterfeit" chickens, is that illegal? The problem with P2P sharing is that it has gone too far - sharing among billions of people were never thought of in the past century. As the music producer, I would be pissed that I lost that much revenue. But if I were the composer, I'm happy that a lot of people are able to enjoy my music creation (and hopefully love it). 

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maverickronin said:

That's just the "nuts and bolts" physical description of copying something to a hard drive...

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Ahh when you said original you meant it, lol. Yea... that's not something we need to be criminalizing! Plus SOPA and PIPA got shut down so yay for the interwebs... although alot of Download links no longer work so they did their damage
 
 
ehm also welcome again DirkPitt  it's nice to see that your bringing a technical  understanding to this conversation also it seems my attempts to discuss an attitude have been dodged xD still it's great to see that the discussion has moved on!
 
Also Welcome nikp
 
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Originally Posted by nikp /img/forum/go_quote.gif

Sharing is a voluntary action from the original owner. As the music producer, I would be pissed that I lost that much revenue. But if I were the composer, I'm happy that a lot of people are able to enjoy my music creation (and hopefully love it).

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And speaking of " copying something to a hard drive" one of my favorite free and Legals sites to get music is so GREAT because it makes me download a 62 song ost ONE FLAC AT A TIME... but the great thing about the interwebs is I get to Compile this into a nice big Collection and share it my self! Because currently there is not a good collection of the Music from this Great game
 
Back to the money discussion I'm with you there, money has allowed for specialization in our society... although going back to a no money idea and your question about "how much malware do I have to remove" there is the concept that time is money... which reminds me of that newish Movie with Amanda Seyfried (wow I actually rememberd her name)[which I enjoyed btw] so taking that story into consideration... time would probably be a really bad form of currency.
 
Still what does piss me off is I dabble in P.c Repair, and people who are utterly ignorant of Pc's [which is most of my employers customers] don't like to pay our rates because they feel $50 an hour is to high a price... which is a concept that probably appears regardless of the economy you have, ignorance impairs worth... if some one doesn't understand the effort involved in being able to work quickly and efficiently... they'll assume your work isn't worth as much as it is... I guess there's really no way to factor in "experience" or "skill" into price... you can use it as an advertising gimmick but we both know even those who claim to be the most "experienced" p.c technicians lack skill or are serious con-artists... I've ye to meet an actual GOOD P.c repair guy who spend a lot of money on advertising :/ in fact most of them that I know are rather broke most of the time xD

maverick, I agree in theory, but the problem I see is that money as it is no longer corresponds to actual resources. I could go outside right now, pick up a handful of dirt, and if I can convince someone that it has magical properties that will cure some disease, I can charge $50,000 for something that is essentially worthless. It seems to have become a goal and a commodity in and of itself. If we had a spreadsheet that contained information about all the resources available to us, how many people there are, how much of this and that we need and where, that would actually be useful.
 
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maverickronin said:

Even without money, something that is scarce and desirable will be worth something even if that worth is not expressed in dollars and cents.  People will barter for it, take risks to get it, or make whatever sacrifice is necessary in order to attain it and those trades, risks, will be in proportion to their assessment of its worth.
 
I'm all for reforming our economic system so as many people as possible can lead fulfilling lives and have as few economic worries as possible but barring the invention of a completely concept to replace it, the idea of eliminating all money is literally the very last step on the list of thing to do in order to achieve that goal.

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I've been agreeing with this all along.   I think the difference is that my train of thought has been in kind of a "top to bottom" direction. Not a very practical way to looks at things I'll admit, but it's more a result of my own frustrations and dissatisfaction with the world I'm living in.

 
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mshenay said:

although alot of Download links no longer work so they did their damage

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I've been noticing this a lot too! xD

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dirkpitt45 said:

You think, not know. Of course you can never be 100% sure about something, but some things are well within reason. I would encourage you to read up on geothermal heatpumps and the theories behind the inner workings of the Earth since you seem to have interest in both. Geothermal is not just a bore hole and you cannot "take as much as you want". The systems are much more complex and highly diverse in type and style. Also, the heat in the Earth is largely believed to be caused by residual heat left over from the Earth's formation, and radioactive decay. Again it's believed (deep earth sciences aren't that exact) that the Earth is constantly cooling, and the radioactivity is merely acting as a counter, slowing the process. 
http://www.popsci.com/stuart-fox/article/2008-09/could-tapping-planet-geothermal-energy-cool-earth%E2%80%99s-core
 
It's also worth noting that currently gas prises are rising because of market factors and the world economy, not because the supply is decreasing or the demand is increasing. 
 
 
Again, that's not exactly how fusion works. We also don't generally "find" isotopes in or on the Earth's surface. Most useful isotopes have short half-lives, making them scarce in the natural world. Fission and other types of nuclear reactors exist to "breed" these isotopes. It also depends on which kind of fusion we end up using. 

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1.  I already know about all that and I'm not saying it would be an issue with current methods or rates of consumption.  The only thing stopping anyone from drilling super deep and cranking pressures as high as they want is the strength of the materials available to do it.  Doing it on a massive scale will, to some degree, increase the Earth's cooling rate and could be an issue in the future.
 
When people mention "geothermal" as a solution to our energy needs I don't picture the kind used today because those won't meet our needs.  I'm not talking about using underground water "pre heating" in colder climates of the close-to-the-surface stuff they do in places like Iceland with with a lot of vulcanism, hot springs, or whatever.  I'm talking about what could happen once we have the materials to drill to arbitrary depths and contain arbitrary pressure all the way back up to the turbine on the surface.
 
2.  Most of the probable fuel cycles use deuterium which is stable and is just sitting there in one out of every 3200 water molecules.  Assuming we go with a fuel cycle that uses deuterium on a large scale we can determine how much there is, how the naturally occurring ratio will change as we harvest more of it, and how it will take us to burn though it all.

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manveru said:

But the problem I see is that money as it is no longer corresponds to actual resources. I could go outside right now, pick up a handful of dirt, and if I can convince someone that it has magical properties that will cure some disease, I can charge $50,000 for something that is essentially worthless.

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I think some one did that already, they call it "Ramen Noodles" apparently it cures Starvation! ;3
 
There's another thing that bugs me, as our society advances "cheap food" is becoming less food and more "synthetic fillers" ... at least 2000 years ago if you where broke your were still able to eat actual food, maybe not a lot but heck what you did eat wasn't toxic >.> GMO crops are included in this too... granted there aren't as bad as some of whats out there but... there not that great for you either :/
 
Although I'm eating these things called "Wasa Crackers" My mom buys em all the time on sale... interestingly they are pretty good content wise, just flour water salt oats, whole grain... my only issue is I always wonder if they are stale... they taste stale but the have a not stale crunch... still they are delicious with Sauerkraut!
 
And yea, MegaUpload, File Serve ect.. ect... all those places got scared and pulled everything... and the people who upload there haven't re uploaded or packaged into p2p sharing sites yet so yea Iz no fun for nobody