I know several people who formerly supported Assange and Wikileaks who now say, "To hell with Assange, he's a rapist," and by association now believe that Wikileaks has no credibility. Even in the unlikely event he's cleared of the charges, the damage is done -- and given the timing of the events, the idea that this was a deliberate smear campaign is not only credible, but ought to be the default assumption.
Generally speaking, the purpose of PR is to make people feel good about an organization. Psy-Ops does that kind of work ("winning hearts and minds," to use a phrase popular in a previous failed guerilla war) but they also try to scare the shit out of other people. The general idea is to convince neutrals that you'd make a good ally, allies that you're steadfast and capable, and enemies that you're invincible and the best thing they can do is surrender right now. That last bit may be the ultimate goal of a lot of PR in the civilian world, but the methods are by necessity very different.
RTFA. This was more than looking up voting records. They were targeting their fellow Americans with techniques designed specifically for use against the enemy, which is prohibited by law for good reason. It's no different than if a soldier pointed his rifle at a visiting politician and said, "Senator, vote for the new defense appropriations bill or I'll blow your head off."
You may be right that it's the same thing any business or news organization would do. The difference is that We, the People, do not invest in Microsoft or the New York Times the authority to kill people in our name. The rules are different for the military, and they damn well should be. If you want to live in a country where the military runs like a business, there are plenty of places in the world for you to try. Most of them aren't very pleasant places to live. Why don't you give it a shot, so to speak -- the experience will be very educational for you, if you survive it.
Not just whores: temple whores. It is an article of their faith that the free market is always more innovative than the government and no government program has ever done anything good for the economy. The fact that this belief serves the interest of the people lining their pockets is a nice bonus. In other words, they're whores, but they'd be happy to do it for free, because God in His form of the Invisible Hand told them to. I'm not exactly sure how this dogma fits in with the Christianity so many of them so loudly profess, but apparently enough money buys indulgence for a multitude of sins.
Don't be so sure they won't pass it. It's an amendment, not a bill; IIRC, that means they would have to vote specifically to strip the amendment out before they vote on the entire bill, and I'm not at all confident that enough members of the thin (and historically spineless) Democratic majority in the Senate have the will for that fight. Adding riders to "must-pass" bills is a time-honored technique for sneaking all kinds of looniness into law.
That would have been a lot funnier if you'd used a Japanese name instead of a Chinese one in the punchline. But hey, Chinese, Japanese, what's the difference? "Arr rook arike" to you, I suppose.
No, it wasn't the TP. Other posters on the story have done a breakdown: Republicans identified with the TP voted for the bill in the same proportion as their standard-issue-GOP counterparts. And, of course, their self-identified TP constituents will enthusiastically support the vote.
A majority of Democrats voted against the bill, and a majority of Republicans (including the vaunted TP'ers) voted for it. That's a plain fact, available for all to see. So what's the basis in reality for your "alternate headline" speculation?
Those 2010 outbreaks are surely just flukes. No cause for alarm folks, we've got that whole biology thing understood, constrained and conquered.
In every single case of an outbreak of a vaccine-preventable disease, it's easily traced to anti-vaccination hysteria. In other words, we do in fact have the biology understood; the only reason it's not "constrained and conquered" is because there's no vaccine for stupidity.
Corporations are simply groups of individuals who freely enter into an agreement.
If you truly believe that's all corporations are, you are too ignorant to have a meaningful opinion on the subject. People acting as agents of a corporation do not act solely "on the basis of their rights as individuals," and anyone who pays any attention at all is well aware of this fact. Now, if the people of New Hampshire decide to stand up for themselves and start granting corporate charters which grant only the same powers and privileges as those possessed by any married couple or "charity, club, community Web-site, etc.", I'll cheer them on... but I'm reasonably sure that weak-minded propagandists like you won't be the ones to do it.
Corporations are made up of people... just thought you might like to know.
People who, when acting under the aegis of the corporation, have certain powers and privileges which they do not have when acting as individuals. We, the people, grant these powers and privileges conditional on good behavior, and have both the right and the duty to revoke them when the people exercising them break the rules. The rights of the individuals who make up the corporations are in no way affected by this.
Short version: corporations aren't people, and it's damn well time we stopped acting as though they were.
I invite you to provide evidence for your ridiculous claim.
It's hard to provide evidence when you're dealing with a thought experiment (so-called; thought experiments in philosophy are very different from thought experiments in science) which is completely evidence-free to begin with. But I'll state the assumption he's making: "There are qualities called 'understanding' and 'intentionality' which humans can possess but machines cannot." That's it, that's the whole argument, right there, and all the elaborations Searle and others have piled on it derive from this assumption while attempting to obscure it.
I linked to no article.
My mistake; I thought you were the person who had brought up the CR in the first place. That poster linked to the Wikipedia article and breezily stated that it meant strong AI is impossible. It means no such thing, of course; it just means that very smart people can still make very dumb assumptions.
As for your claim that CR is circular, I defy you to point to a single scholarly source.
Here is a very good essay which lays it all out neatly. If by "scholarly" you mean "published in a peer-reviewed journal," I recommend Thomas Weiss' "Closing the Chinese Room" (Ratio 3(2):165-181, Dec. 1990, DOI 10.1111/j.1467-9329.1990.tb00022.x) or Patricia Hanna's "Causal Powers and Cognition" (Mind 94(373):53-63, Jan. 1985). Be sure to follow the reference trees forward and backward too.
No, GPP understands it just fine. Searle is assuming what he's trying to prove, and building an elaborate philosophical construct around that assumption which -- surprise! -- proves his assumptions. IOW, it is exactly a circular argument, no different from millennia of sophisticated theological arguments which "prove" the existence of God based on the assumption that God exists. And your claim that "I've never seen anyone as completely off as you appear to be" is either a lie or a statement of extreme ignorance, since the circularity of the Chinese Room argument has been pointed out many times by many people, many of them cited in the very article you link to.
t is revelvent because a lot of people think that GL is a front for IBM.
A lot of people think an invisible man in the sky wants them to kill people, too. In both cases, they're best left to their delusions unless they actually act on their loony ideas, in which case it is incumbent on the rational people of the world to slap them down and get on with our lives.
No, it's not; you're absolutely right. In our frame of reference, it just happened recently -- and while you could say, "yeah, but in the star's reference frame, it happened tens of millions of years ago," it's also true that in the star's reference frame, dinosaurs on Earth are just now going extinct. IOW, it's not a very meaningful reference frame from where we're sitting.
The "well, actually it happened X million years ago" comments that seem to accompany every/. story about some distant, recently observed astronomical event are an example of the classic nerd failing of assuming that because we're smart people who know a lot about a lot of things, we're geniuses who know everything about everything. And I'm probably as guilty of it as anyone else...
Seriously, what is the significance of finding a 9000 year old grave? We know people existed 9000 years ago. We also know they're all dead. It's not news.
Turn in your nerd card, leave the clubhouse, and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
A plain reading shows that Congress can only grant a patent to an inventor, not just any person who happens to file for the patent. IIRC an IP attorney (perhaps cptkangarooski) stating that he believed a first-to-file patent regime would be unconstitutional.
A plain reading would prevent 99% of the IP bullshit that goes on today, since corporations neither invent nor author works of any kind. But I'm afraid that battle was lost a long time ago.
As for the person who doesn't want an idea patented - if a person finds a gold nugget and tosses it back onto the ground, should another not be able to pick it up?
If I find a gold nugget on the ground and decide to give it away to someone for free, you do not have the right to claim in court that because I didn't charge for the nugget, you somehow own it.
Hold up... I've never heard anyone claim that it's the magnetic field which keeps hydrogen from escaping. AFAIK it's simple gravity which keeps our atmosphere in place. Given a large enough planetary body, I'm having a hard time imagining hydrogen atoms reaching escaping velocity, regardless of what kind of radiation they're being bombarded with. You got a source for that?
This is pretty well known. Here is one reference of many: "Our neighboring planet, Mars, which has little or no magnetic field, is thought to have lost much of its former oceans and atmosphere to space. This loss was caused, at least in part, by the direct impact of the solar wind on Mars' upper atmosphere. Our other close planetary neighbor, Venus, has no appreciable magnetic field, either. Venus is also thought to have lost nearly all of its water to space, in large part owing to solar wind-powered ablation."
Slashdot Mirror
I know several people who formerly supported Assange and Wikileaks who now say, "To hell with Assange, he's a rapist," and by association now believe that Wikileaks has no credibility. Even in the unlikely event he's cleared of the charges, the damage is done -- and given the timing of the events, the idea that this was a deliberate smear campaign is not only credible, but ought to be the default assumption.
Again, please RTFA. I really, really doubt your wife uses any tactics on schoolkids like those the Army was using on visiting politicians.
Generally speaking, the purpose of PR is to make people feel good about an organization. Psy-Ops does that kind of work ("winning hearts and minds," to use a phrase popular in a previous failed guerilla war) but they also try to scare the shit out of other people. The general idea is to convince neutrals that you'd make a good ally, allies that you're steadfast and capable, and enemies that you're invincible and the best thing they can do is surrender right now. That last bit may be the ultimate goal of a lot of PR in the civilian world, but the methods are by necessity very different.
RTFA. This was more than looking up voting records. They were targeting their fellow Americans with techniques designed specifically for use against the enemy, which is prohibited by law for good reason. It's no different than if a soldier pointed his rifle at a visiting politician and said, "Senator, vote for the new defense appropriations bill or I'll blow your head off."
You may be right that it's the same thing any business or news organization would do. The difference is that We, the People, do not invest in Microsoft or the New York Times the authority to kill people in our name. The rules are different for the military, and they damn well should be. If you want to live in a country where the military runs like a business, there are plenty of places in the world for you to try. Most of them aren't very pleasant places to live. Why don't you give it a shot, so to speak -- the experience will be very educational for you, if you survive it.
Not just whores: temple whores. It is an article of their faith that the free market is always more innovative than the government and no government program has ever done anything good for the economy. The fact that this belief serves the interest of the people lining their pockets is a nice bonus. In other words, they're whores, but they'd be happy to do it for free, because God in His form of the Invisible Hand told them to. I'm not exactly sure how this dogma fits in with the Christianity so many of them so loudly profess, but apparently enough money buys indulgence for a multitude of sins.
Don't be so sure they won't pass it. It's an amendment, not a bill; IIRC, that means they would have to vote specifically to strip the amendment out before they vote on the entire bill, and I'm not at all confident that enough members of the thin (and historically spineless) Democratic majority in the Senate have the will for that fight. Adding riders to "must-pass" bills is a time-honored technique for sneaking all kinds of looniness into law.
OK, it's a stretch.....
Yeah, the kind of stretch where you might need to see a doctor afterward. ;)
That would have been a lot funnier if you'd used a Japanese name instead of a Chinese one in the punchline. But hey, Chinese, Japanese, what's the difference? "Arr rook arike" to you, I suppose.
No, it wasn't the TP. Other posters on the story have done a breakdown: Republicans identified with the TP voted for the bill in the same proportion as their standard-issue-GOP counterparts. And, of course, their self-identified TP constituents will enthusiastically support the vote.
A majority of Democrats voted against the bill, and a majority of Republicans (including the vaunted TP'ers) voted for it. That's a plain fact, available for all to see. So what's the basis in reality for your "alternate headline" speculation?
it was largely the newly minted Tea Party caucus that sunk these three provisions
[citation needed]
Those 2010 outbreaks are surely just flukes. No cause for alarm folks, we've got that whole biology thing understood, constrained and conquered.
In every single case of an outbreak of a vaccine-preventable disease, it's easily traced to anti-vaccination hysteria. In other words, we do in fact have the biology understood; the only reason it's not "constrained and conquered" is because there's no vaccine for stupidity.
Corporations are simply groups of individuals who freely enter into an agreement.
If you truly believe that's all corporations are, you are too ignorant to have a meaningful opinion on the subject. People acting as agents of a corporation do not act solely "on the basis of their rights as individuals," and anyone who pays any attention at all is well aware of this fact. Now, if the people of New Hampshire decide to stand up for themselves and start granting corporate charters which grant only the same powers and privileges as those possessed by any married couple or "charity, club, community Web-site, etc.", I'll cheer them on ... but I'm reasonably sure that weak-minded propagandists like you won't be the ones to do it.
Corporations are made up of people... just thought you might like to know.
People who, when acting under the aegis of the corporation, have certain powers and privileges which they do not have when acting as individuals. We, the people, grant these powers and privileges conditional on good behavior, and have both the right and the duty to revoke them when the people exercising them break the rules. The rights of the individuals who make up the corporations are in no way affected by this.
Short version: corporations aren't people, and it's damn well time we stopped acting as though they were.
I see you've learned Searle's lessons well with respect to argument by assertion. Whatever, feel free to enjoy your self-referential nattering.
I invite you to provide evidence for your ridiculous claim.
It's hard to provide evidence when you're dealing with a thought experiment (so-called; thought experiments in philosophy are very different from thought experiments in science) which is completely evidence-free to begin with. But I'll state the assumption he's making: "There are qualities called 'understanding' and 'intentionality' which humans can possess but machines cannot." That's it, that's the whole argument, right there, and all the elaborations Searle and others have piled on it derive from this assumption while attempting to obscure it.
I linked to no article.
My mistake; I thought you were the person who had brought up the CR in the first place. That poster linked to the Wikipedia article and breezily stated that it meant strong AI is impossible. It means no such thing, of course; it just means that very smart people can still make very dumb assumptions.
As for your claim that CR is circular, I defy you to point to a single scholarly source.
Here is a very good essay which lays it all out neatly. If by "scholarly" you mean "published in a peer-reviewed journal," I recommend Thomas Weiss' "Closing the Chinese Room" (Ratio 3(2):165-181, Dec. 1990, DOI 10.1111/j.1467-9329.1990.tb00022.x) or Patricia Hanna's "Causal Powers and Cognition" (Mind 94(373):53-63, Jan. 1985). Be sure to follow the reference trees forward and backward too.
No, GPP understands it just fine. Searle is assuming what he's trying to prove, and building an elaborate philosophical construct around that assumption which -- surprise! -- proves his assumptions. IOW, it is exactly a circular argument, no different from millennia of sophisticated theological arguments which "prove" the existence of God based on the assumption that God exists. And your claim that "I've never seen anyone as completely off as you appear to be" is either a lie or a statement of extreme ignorance, since the circularity of the Chinese Room argument has been pointed out many times by many people, many of them cited in the very article you link to.
t is revelvent because a lot of people think that GL is a front for IBM.
A lot of people think an invisible man in the sky wants them to kill people, too. In both cases, they're best left to their delusions unless they actually act on their loony ideas, in which case it is incumbent on the rational people of the world to slap them down and get on with our lives.
No, it's not; you're absolutely right. In our frame of reference, it just happened recently -- and while you could say, "yeah, but in the star's reference frame, it happened tens of millions of years ago," it's also true that in the star's reference frame, dinosaurs on Earth are just now going extinct. IOW, it's not a very meaningful reference frame from where we're sitting.
The "well, actually it happened X million years ago" comments that seem to accompany every /. story about some distant, recently observed astronomical event are an example of the classic nerd failing of assuming that because we're smart people who know a lot about a lot of things, we're geniuses who know everything about everything. And I'm probably as guilty of it as anyone else ...
Seriously, what is the significance of finding a 9000 year old grave? We know people existed 9000 years ago. We also know they're all dead. It's not news.
Turn in your nerd card, leave the clubhouse, and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
A plain reading shows that Congress can only grant a patent to an inventor, not just any person who happens to file for the patent. IIRC an IP attorney (perhaps cptkangarooski) stating that he believed a first-to-file patent regime would be unconstitutional.
A plain reading would prevent 99% of the IP bullshit that goes on today, since corporations neither invent nor author works of any kind. But I'm afraid that battle was lost a long time ago.
As for the person who doesn't want an idea patented - if a person finds a gold nugget and tosses it back onto the ground, should another not be able to pick it up?
If I find a gold nugget on the ground and decide to give it away to someone for free, you do not have the right to claim in court that because I didn't charge for the nugget, you somehow own it.
until the revamped iLive is released in 2017
At that point I suspect it will be called iEatBrains.
Hold up ... I've never heard anyone claim that it's the magnetic field which keeps hydrogen from escaping. AFAIK it's simple gravity which keeps our atmosphere in place. Given a large enough planetary body, I'm having a hard time imagining hydrogen atoms reaching escaping velocity, regardless of what kind of radiation they're being bombarded with. You got a source for that?
This is pretty well known. Here is one reference of many: "Our neighboring planet, Mars, which has little or no magnetic field, is thought to have lost much of its former oceans and atmosphere to space. This loss was caused, at least in part, by the direct impact of the solar wind on Mars' upper atmosphere. Our other close planetary neighbor, Venus, has no appreciable magnetic field, either. Venus is also thought to have lost nearly all of its water to space, in large part owing to solar wind-powered ablation."
The best advice for someone who wants to "make millions" came from the Buddha.
If you meet the millionaire on the road, kill him?