I was less bothered by the idea of the final five, which I thought actually worked pretty well, and more bothered with the idea that they didn't know what to do with the Opera House imagery. I mean, the integration of the final five plot worked. The Opera House stuff really did feel tacked on at the end. It had very little ultimate effect, and was just used to say, "here, we're using it, so we're not leaving you hanging." The real problem in the end was Moore deciding to go with his lame and unspecific view of what "god" is. You can have a god that is just the energy and flow of events in the universe, and you can have a god that is cognizant and causing very specific things to happen (reappearance of Starbuck), but you can't have it both ways. The better solution would have been one of the existing characters, or some new character, having been the driving force of things, and they could claim that they were inspired by god or some higher power. That way you still get to have it both ways but it could be convincing.
I'll second that sentiment. I can easily see how Caprica failed to catch on, and so maybe I should blame the writers for not making something that would draw a wider audience, but at the same time I think maybe I'm glad they made what they did for a season and change rather than risk making a POS show just to draw an audience. There probably is a well-balanced show somewhere in there that the writers and producers could have created, but I don't know that they would have found it even if they sought it. I suppose you could argue BSG did it.
The ambiance coupled with the themes that joined personal/emotional with grand questions about humanity, politics, and justice made for something truly striking and worthwhile to me. I will miss Caprica.
As for the Sci-fi channel in general, I'm as sick of the lame movies and ghost-hunters crap as anyone, but while I don't watch them regularly Warehouse 13 and Eureka are both solid shows, and I'm fully enjoying Stargate: Universe (even if it is just a cross between Stargate and BSG).
Write people an extremely hefty fine if they are involved in an accident while texting.
That sort of solution only works when the accident is more likely to occur and is less serious. While there are many car accidents, any given individual is at a fairly low probability for causing an accident. Texting while driving increases the odds considerably, but the odds are low to begin with, so your solution would fail because most people would just assume that they are good drivers and so will text away. A few people who a bit worse drivers on average but are mostly unlucky will end up paying a hefty fine and the overall rate of texting while driving will drop insignificantly or not at all. Anyone who got into an accident because they were texting would stop that behavior, and anyone who would keep texting after causing an accident are stupid enough to do it again regardless of a hefty fine.
I have been following the story, though not as closely as some here I'm sure. It is clear to me that there is a danger to US troops, NATO troops, and mostly Afghan informants (who are trying to improve their own country and fight off radical extremists who are indeed against freedom) in releasing the classified information without redacting certain information. However, I haven't heard yet whether or not such information has actually been released. The WikiLeaks site says, "We have delayed the release of some 15,000 reports from the total archive as part of a harm minimization process demanded by our source. After further review, these reports will be released, with occasional redactions, and eventually in full, as the security situation in Afghanistan permits." Does anyone here know of information that has been released containing names or identifying information of informants or other highly sensitive information that would put people at risk? If not then the op-ed is moot, and worse, ill-informed. If so, then IMHO the US government and military should go after WikiLeaks (in an international law-abiding way).
Slippery slope much? There is a strong grassroots movement to support Net Neutrality because a lot of people understand the good that comes from it (or really the bad that is likely to be prevented). Will some people push for the FCC try to pile on even more regulations? Maybe, and if they do we will fight them. What we really need is a full-scale discussion on traffic shaping because there are reasons to do it in some cases. I think Net Neutrality has to be the foundation though, and then we can start building a system in which urgent traffic relating to public safety and medicine perhaps get prioritization, or in which an ISP may be allowed to throttle down a client without sufficient security to ensure it isn't passing on viruses. I don't know exactly what those rules should be, but it's worth discussing them and implementing them AFTER the neutrality of content is respected as law.
That's not honest. If that was their intent, they could just as well ask for assistance or to look at the other team's code to understand how it works. Even then that could be considered cheating depending on the ground rules set out by the intructor.
While I am certainly disappointed in Obama and his administration on this issue, this was not something he campaigned on. There were many other hints that his civil liberty creds weren't particularly strong prior to his election, and it always concerned me. On the other hand, no one else was running with any interest in civil liberties (except maybe Ron Paul), and Obama was probably the best bet among all of them. At least he's not doing all of this in secret (as far as we know at this point anyway). That is a step up from the Bush administration, and is a sign of marginal change. Of course anyone who expected a complete turnaround from all prior administrations is extremely naive. I hoped it might happen, but Obama always struck me as almost too much of a pragmatist at times. Balancing pragmatism and ideals can be challenging, particularly in seeing when they can both be met and where they truly conflict and what the long-term implications are. Right now we just have to hope that we can drum up enough opposition that Obama will back down. Unfortunately I don't see that happening given the current state of the nation economically and security-wise.
So... one year under a Democratic president with a Democratic congress exactly how many corporate abuses have been curtailed?
If you believe that any substantial difference exists between the two parties you are nothing more than a useful idiot.
A little specificity would be nice rather than throwing about ignorance. There are substantial differences between the two parties as a number of recent policy and political battles have shown. On the issue of corporate responsibility and oversight the differences appear to be vanishingly small. The distinction is important. Another important distinction is that while the Democratic party as a whole is not pushing for change on this or associated issues, there are members that can be persuaded to take up these issues given sufficient grassroots political will. That cannot be said of Republicans simply due to their constituency.
I will admit I have not researched in depth the efforts of anyone in the political system on this topic (other than being on the mailing list of Food Democracy Now and reading relevant articles now and then), so if anyone has further details I would appreciate reading them.
We've been at the lower levels for a while now, and we've uncovered quite a bit. We do need a lot more data at the molecular, neuronal, and local network level, but to develop that data without good theories for what those lower components are doing is a non-starter. We need to know what questions to ask and where to go from one result to the next experiment. Having theories for how individual components fit together into larger systems provides a framework for how to make those determinations. We would have a pretty hard time figuring out how local networks work without thinking about how those local networks fit into how the larger network or brain region works. In other words, having a few good working theories for the larger system makes it easier to determine what to test and look for in the simpler underlying systems.
The problem isn't "you" personally, but the bank managers. While the government intervention might have an impact, the fact is that the corporate heads aren't being held responsible as their companies crumble because they are corrupt. While there are certainly issues with corruption in the government, that is not at the root of the problem here. If there were more oversight and transparency then perhaps we wouldn't see CEOs making obscene amounts of money because the people who decide on their compensation are contracted to do other jobs for said company by said CEO. And then perhaps the CEOs would have some actual incentive to provide for the long-term future of their company rather than the next few quarters. So many made their money, got out, and are sitting pretty while the companies they ruined, the lower level employees and the shareholders, deal with the consequences. Even when a CEO is fired win.
The free market, even absent government intervention, IS NOT FREE! Just look at what happened recently with gas prices. Oh yes, it was all just demand. Of course. Oh wait, when speculators... I mean investors had to pull their money to cover other losses the price of gas returned to what is was a couple of years ago. How about that?
Shouldn't we focus on getting the national debt down before we cut anyone's taxes? (Unless there are some harmful taxes going on right now. Are the poor really that taxed heavily right now?) Of course, I feel eliminating the national debt can be good for the economy.
Trying to get the national debt down before cutting taxes would be a horrible plan in the current situation. Taxes should be higher in good times to save up so that taxes can be lower in bad times. Then in the long term we wouldn't have a bit debt that sucks more money out of our government. But unfortunately we had some really bad planners recently and so we have to choose between avoiding a bigger disaster vs lowering our debt. In this case lowering the debt, which usually would be a good plan for long term growth, will in fact hurt long term growth by deepening the recession we are in and making it take much longer to get out and be able to pay that debt down. It's a shitty position to be in, but the best choice here is to lighten the tremendous burden and enable people to keep spending on necessities and some small amount of luxuries. If we get out of this rut I'll take wagers that Obama will work to eliminate the deficit.
Absolutely a sentient being can be governed by a set of pre-programmed laws. Can you see a color other than those in the rainbow? You can't because they're hard-coded into your brain. They are a pre-programmed law. The difficultly is being able to predict the outcome of a set of those laws (see law of unintended consequences).
There's very little certainty in the world, but there is quality control and good testing. The reason things turn out generally pretty well in Asimov's robot books is that the first (and at the time only) company to make robots had extremely stringent testing procedures. I like Asimov's outlook, but we have to recognize that great care and foresight is needed to avoid some potentially disastrous scenarios. The one in the I, Robot movie could happen, but not in Asimov's world (the primary reason I disliked the movie).
Altruism can be defined several ways. One of them is behaviorally, which only occurs because on average it is good for the agent. However, what we feel is an emergent property, that is more than and different from the sum of the components. While it exists in our brains because it has that evoltionary trait of improving fitness for the individual or population (and in many population cases altruism may result in not being good for the individual), the agent itself may very well feel true altruism.
Additionally, it doesn't have to be an either or scenario, one can feel true altruism on the one hand and still see a benefit for oneself. Our brains clearly are complex enough for this. After all, our brains are certainly complex enough, and "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." --F. Scott Fitzgerald
Others have already pointed out that the survey size is not an issue. More importantly is the question of the "video game". Did you even read the article?!? FTA: They "watched a simple reaction-time game, to earn money for themselves and for a selected charity (Supplementary Methods online). Informed written consent was obtained from all subjects and no deception was used"
Synopsis of the Supplementary Methods online (specifically from the methods): They earn money by playing the game. For some trials the money would go to them, and on others the money would go to the charity. That would provide a control for an individual, since you wouldn't expect to see altruism on trials in which the individual was earning the money.
I'm not really sure what good the survey was supposed to do, except maybe just to have yet another measure.
Glad to see the score going down on this one, that post was anything but informative. Keep negging it though, should be a 1, not a 3.
Slashdot Mirror
I was less bothered by the idea of the final five, which I thought actually worked pretty well, and more bothered with the idea that they didn't know what to do with the Opera House imagery. I mean, the integration of the final five plot worked. The Opera House stuff really did feel tacked on at the end. It had very little ultimate effect, and was just used to say, "here, we're using it, so we're not leaving you hanging." The real problem in the end was Moore deciding to go with his lame and unspecific view of what "god" is. You can have a god that is just the energy and flow of events in the universe, and you can have a god that is cognizant and causing very specific things to happen (reappearance of Starbuck), but you can't have it both ways. The better solution would have been one of the existing characters, or some new character, having been the driving force of things, and they could claim that they were inspired by god or some higher power. That way you still get to have it both ways but it could be convincing.
I'll second that sentiment. I can easily see how Caprica failed to catch on, and so maybe I should blame the writers for not making something that would draw a wider audience, but at the same time I think maybe I'm glad they made what they did for a season and change rather than risk making a POS show just to draw an audience. There probably is a well-balanced show somewhere in there that the writers and producers could have created, but I don't know that they would have found it even if they sought it. I suppose you could argue BSG did it.
The ambiance coupled with the themes that joined personal/emotional with grand questions about humanity, politics, and justice made for something truly striking and worthwhile to me. I will miss Caprica.
As for the Sci-fi channel in general, I'm as sick of the lame movies and ghost-hunters crap as anyone, but while I don't watch them regularly Warehouse 13 and Eureka are both solid shows, and I'm fully enjoying Stargate: Universe (even if it is just a cross between Stargate and BSG).
Write people an extremely hefty fine if they are involved in an accident while texting.
That sort of solution only works when the accident is more likely to occur and is less serious. While there are many car accidents, any given individual is at a fairly low probability for causing an accident. Texting while driving increases the odds considerably, but the odds are low to begin with, so your solution would fail because most people would just assume that they are good drivers and so will text away. A few people who a bit worse drivers on average but are mostly unlucky will end up paying a hefty fine and the overall rate of texting while driving will drop insignificantly or not at all. Anyone who got into an accident because they were texting would stop that behavior, and anyone who would keep texting after causing an accident are stupid enough to do it again regardless of a hefty fine.
I have been following the story, though not as closely as some here I'm sure. It is clear to me that there is a danger to US troops, NATO troops, and mostly Afghan informants (who are trying to improve their own country and fight off radical extremists who are indeed against freedom) in releasing the classified information without redacting certain information. However, I haven't heard yet whether or not such information has actually been released. The WikiLeaks site says, "We have delayed the release of some 15,000 reports from the total archive as part of a harm minimization process demanded by our source. After further review, these reports will be released, with occasional redactions, and eventually in full, as the security situation in Afghanistan permits." Does anyone here know of information that has been released containing names or identifying information of informants or other highly sensitive information that would put people at risk? If not then the op-ed is moot, and worse, ill-informed. If so, then IMHO the US government and military should go after WikiLeaks (in an international law-abiding way).
Slippery slope much? There is a strong grassroots movement to support Net Neutrality because a lot of people understand the good that comes from it (or really the bad that is likely to be prevented). Will some people push for the FCC try to pile on even more regulations? Maybe, and if they do we will fight them. What we really need is a full-scale discussion on traffic shaping because there are reasons to do it in some cases. I think Net Neutrality has to be the foundation though, and then we can start building a system in which urgent traffic relating to public safety and medicine perhaps get prioritization, or in which an ISP may be allowed to throttle down a client without sufficient security to ensure it isn't passing on viruses. I don't know exactly what those rules should be, but it's worth discussing them and implementing them AFTER the neutrality of content is respected as law.
That's not honest. If that was their intent, they could just as well ask for assistance or to look at the other team's code to understand how it works. Even then that could be considered cheating depending on the ground rules set out by the intructor.
While I am certainly disappointed in Obama and his administration on this issue, this was not something he campaigned on. There were many other hints that his civil liberty creds weren't particularly strong prior to his election, and it always concerned me. On the other hand, no one else was running with any interest in civil liberties (except maybe Ron Paul), and Obama was probably the best bet among all of them. At least he's not doing all of this in secret (as far as we know at this point anyway). That is a step up from the Bush administration, and is a sign of marginal change. Of course anyone who expected a complete turnaround from all prior administrations is extremely naive. I hoped it might happen, but Obama always struck me as almost too much of a pragmatist at times. Balancing pragmatism and ideals can be challenging, particularly in seeing when they can both be met and where they truly conflict and what the long-term implications are. Right now we just have to hope that we can drum up enough opposition that Obama will back down. Unfortunately I don't see that happening given the current state of the nation economically and security-wise.
So... one year under a Democratic president with a Democratic congress exactly how many corporate abuses have been curtailed?
If you believe that any substantial difference exists between the two parties you are nothing more than a useful idiot.
A little specificity would be nice rather than throwing about ignorance. There are substantial differences between the two parties as a number of recent policy and political battles have shown. On the issue of corporate responsibility and oversight the differences appear to be vanishingly small. The distinction is important. Another important distinction is that while the Democratic party as a whole is not pushing for change on this or associated issues, there are members that can be persuaded to take up these issues given sufficient grassroots political will. That cannot be said of Republicans simply due to their constituency. I will admit I have not researched in depth the efforts of anyone in the political system on this topic (other than being on the mailing list of Food Democracy Now and reading relevant articles now and then), so if anyone has further details I would appreciate reading them.
We've been at the lower levels for a while now, and we've uncovered quite a bit. We do need a lot more data at the molecular, neuronal, and local network level, but to develop that data without good theories for what those lower components are doing is a non-starter. We need to know what questions to ask and where to go from one result to the next experiment. Having theories for how individual components fit together into larger systems provides a framework for how to make those determinations. We would have a pretty hard time figuring out how local networks work without thinking about how those local networks fit into how the larger network or brain region works. In other words, having a few good working theories for the larger system makes it easier to determine what to test and look for in the simpler underlying systems.
The problem isn't "you" personally, but the bank managers. While the government intervention might have an impact, the fact is that the corporate heads aren't being held responsible as their companies crumble because they are corrupt. While there are certainly issues with corruption in the government, that is not at the root of the problem here. If there were more oversight and transparency then perhaps we wouldn't see CEOs making obscene amounts of money because the people who decide on their compensation are contracted to do other jobs for said company by said CEO. And then perhaps the CEOs would have some actual incentive to provide for the long-term future of their company rather than the next few quarters. So many made their money, got out, and are sitting pretty while the companies they ruined, the lower level employees and the shareholders, deal with the consequences. Even when a CEO is fired win.
The free market, even absent government intervention, IS NOT FREE! Just look at what happened recently with gas prices. Oh yes, it was all just demand. Of course. Oh wait, when speculators... I mean investors had to pull their money to cover other losses the price of gas returned to what is was a couple of years ago. How about that?
Shouldn't we focus on getting the national debt down before we cut anyone's taxes? (Unless there are some harmful taxes going on right now. Are the poor really that taxed heavily right now?) Of course, I feel eliminating the national debt can be good for the economy.
Trying to get the national debt down before cutting taxes would be a horrible plan in the current situation. Taxes should be higher in good times to save up so that taxes can be lower in bad times. Then in the long term we wouldn't have a bit debt that sucks more money out of our government. But unfortunately we had some really bad planners recently and so we have to choose between avoiding a bigger disaster vs lowering our debt. In this case lowering the debt, which usually would be a good plan for long term growth, will in fact hurt long term growth by deepening the recession we are in and making it take much longer to get out and be able to pay that debt down. It's a shitty position to be in, but the best choice here is to lighten the tremendous burden and enable people to keep spending on necessities and some small amount of luxuries. If we get out of this rut I'll take wagers that Obama will work to eliminate the deficit.
Absolutely a sentient being can be governed by a set of pre-programmed laws. Can you see a color other than those in the rainbow? You can't because they're hard-coded into your brain. They are a pre-programmed law. The difficultly is being able to predict the outcome of a set of those laws (see law of unintended consequences).
There's very little certainty in the world, but there is quality control and good testing. The reason things turn out generally pretty well in Asimov's robot books is that the first (and at the time only) company to make robots had extremely stringent testing procedures. I like Asimov's outlook, but we have to recognize that great care and foresight is needed to avoid some potentially disastrous scenarios. The one in the I, Robot movie could happen, but not in Asimov's world (the primary reason I disliked the movie).
Altruism can be defined several ways. One of them is behaviorally, which only occurs because on average it is good for the agent. However, what we feel is an emergent property, that is more than and different from the sum of the components. While it exists in our brains because it has that evoltionary trait of improving fitness for the individual or population (and in many population cases altruism may result in not being good for the individual), the agent itself may very well feel true altruism.
Additionally, it doesn't have to be an either or scenario, one can feel true altruism on the one hand and still see a benefit for oneself. Our brains clearly are complex enough for this. After all, our brains are certainly complex enough, and "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." --F. Scott Fitzgerald
Others have already pointed out that the survey size is not an issue. More importantly is the question of the "video game". Did you even read the article?!?
FTA:
They "watched a simple reaction-time game, to earn money for themselves and for a selected charity (Supplementary Methods online). Informed written consent was obtained from all subjects and no deception was used"
Synopsis of the Supplementary Methods online (specifically from the methods):
They earn money by playing the game. For some trials the money would go to them, and on others the money would go to the charity. That would provide a control for an individual, since you wouldn't expect to see altruism on trials in which the individual was earning the money.
I'm not really sure what good the survey was supposed to do, except maybe just to have yet another measure.
Glad to see the score going down on this one, that post was anything but informative. Keep negging it though, should be a 1, not a 3.