No, BSD are like library books that you can check out and use as reference materials for your own works with impunity.
GPL is like a library with no windows where you can't remove any books or take any notes. Instead you have to write your new work inside the library and can't take it back out (trying to do so is a copyright violation). To some degree, you can take things in, but again, not out.
There's no reasonable question at all that the rules of the GPL library are more strict, the debate is whether in the long run you end up with better access to information stuck in the GPL library compared to when you can draw information from many other libraries which don't enforce derivative works to be contributed back to the same library.
But at that point, the analogy isn't any better than the reality, is it?
If there WAS something in the GPL that prevented that, then the restriction would be one of the GPL, not a restriction of the App Store.
I think that's a semantic distinction without a lot of merit. Incompatibilities between two licenses exist in the interaction between licenses, not in the licenses themselves. The only exception would be if the App Store literally said "the terms are not compatible with the GPL", in which case I would put the restriction solely on the App Store, or vice versa if the GPL literally said "oh yeah, and fuck Apple, this license won't work on their store", then the restriction would be on the GPL.
AFAIK you're correct with GPLv2 anyway. The source doesn't have to be distributed in the same channel as the software according to the GPL, so long as the software is accompanied by a written offer to get the source. I don't know about GPLv3. I know some people think it's incompatible, and some people think it's compatible, and it's not instantly obvious from reading the terms, and I'm not a lawyer: that combination of facts makes me nervous about making assertions here.
The kid has two parents, so you could get the mother's partner to pay up rather than the father. The other woman explicitly chose to be a parent, thus the burden should be her responsibility. Why aren't they? Perhaps because this guy has more income so he's the guy they can extract money from, or perhaps they just think the law is written heteronormatively enough that this will work better.
I don't know the breakdown of $6000 of assistance but I wouldn't just assume that's over and above what another parent might get without more information, since there are numerous tax effects of having a kid. I'm not assuming the other way either. It's just really hard to infer from no information whatsoever.
Note that the state doesn't stop the extremely poor from having a kid together, and then target the midwife for child support payments. Why should this be any different? There were two parents signed up. If the state doesn't like the poor having kids, maybe the state can consider a solution that affects all poor people having kids (it's easy to imagine that going wrong, but it's an option).
I can imagine a market for self driving car taxis that cater specifically to smokers. Part of why you can't do it in taxis now is that there's a driver to consider, and another part is the lingering effects of smell etc.. The majority of autotaxis would be nonsmoker but there would be smoker vehicles as well, and your wife could refuse to ride the nonsmoker autotaxis and call the smoker taxi company.
Another thing is that even in the "world of taxis" theory, I don't think private cars are outlawed. A smoker could still get their our private self-driving car because they want to smoke on the way to work, but most would not because these days most people do not smoke, and even most smokers can deal with the stretch of time in a car as you can (and then, if you can't afford the private self-driving car and still want to smoke in the car, *that's* where the "well then you should quit because you can't afford it" arguments come in).
The theory would be that the number of taxis would be basically the same as present cars during peak traffic (give or take), since they are replacing private vehicles, and they will be distributed appropriately.
I'm not convinced of the "world of taxis" theory. I'm not even sure it will lead to reduced private car ownership. You can in principle have a private car for young children at an age where today we wouldn't trust them with a driver's license but we would trust them to bike to the store. It can drive itself to a parking lot you don't need parking on your property for all your vehicles, just your main "I decided to go out right now" vehicle (similarly, you don't need a parking lot at every last box store).
But you have to make reasonable assumptions. Asserting a 45 minute wait for a peak period taxi is like saying that cars can't replace horses because you can't switch to a new car at the stables when your old one gets tired of carrying you on a long journey. That's only an argument against the world of taxis if you simply cannot imagine a reasonable scenario that doesn't have a 45 minute wait, and we surely can imagine such a scenario -- 1:1 replacement of all private cars with taxis would be more than enough; you realistically only need a fraction of that. Especially if the world can get behind the idea of staggered work hours.
Or you can look at the line of reasoning that lead to this guy making terrible predictions: http://www.newsweek.com/cliffo... (he has commented with embarrassment about the article).
Does it mean, if you don't understand something, and physicists don't understand it, that means it doesn't exist?
No, it doesn't. You're being really bizarre here. What Neil deGrasse Tyson was arguing is that if you don't understand something, and physicists don't understand something, then it says nothing about whether or not God did it. That's really, really obvious.
Note that Neil deGrasse Tyson explicitly does NOT identify as an atheist.
Nobody is seriously suggesting everything outside our understanding = God anymore.
Umm...you just did. Your initial post started with a strawman about atheists, a proclamation that this isn't science's "final triumph over God". Then it goes on about how we don't know anything and need to be humble about our knowledge.
From that, we infer that you do believe in God and are specifically arguing God exists on the basis of our puny knowledgelessness.
How is that not a god of the gaps argument? Or else, how is that not the argument you made?
And then just now, you've made up this story where physicists pretend things don't exist when they don't understand it, the implication being that if they recognized they exist, then they would believe in God. Which is exactly a god of the gaps argument because that's the argument you were mimicking and trying to reverse in the first place.
breathlessly waiting for the announcement confirming life on another planet because they believe that will be the final triumph of science over God.
...huh?
I think you overestimate how important god is to atheists.
God is extra-terrestrial life by definition
I'm not familiar with any definition of life that includes an omnipotent omnipresent timeless entity.
There is life on other planets/in other dimensions, and that life is possibly many many orders of magnitude more intelligent than us.
Umm, maybe. You seem to be talking about extraterrestrial life beyond just your notion of god here. How do you know?
Meanwhile, our narcissistic belief that our discovery of the metaphorical light switch [...]
I have no idea what the metaphorical light switch is.
entitles us to stand before the universe and claim "knowledge"
This is poetic, and I understand you're warning against hubris, but this it doesn't actually have meaning. What is overweaning pride here? How much pride in advancement is too prideful?
Every great discovery in man's history has only made the universe bigger, not smaller, nor easier to understand.
Well, no. At least depending on what you mean by "easier to understand" and "great discovery". For instance, heliocentric theory makes the universe easier to understand. It's not actually more "correct" than geocentric theory with its epicycles (certainly not less correct, though!) -- we can choose a geocentric frame of reference today and still calculate everything we calculate today with great precision. But heliocentrism was a great advance that made the universe easier to understand.
We have made a lot of progress, but we also must have the humility to recognize that scarcely 500 years ago, the overwhelming majority of the population was completely illiterate, and that science was the purview of a vanishingly small number of people.
Shouldn't that be a source of pride rather than humility? It means we're getting better, and when you say "scarcely" 500 years ago, it sounds like we're getting better quickly.
A toddler who learns to wipe his own ass has every right to be proud of his accomplishment, and it is, indeed, an accomplishment. The 10 year old who gets an A+ on his math test isn't scorned because his engineer dad can solve the same problems correctly while drunk and having not slept for 3 days.
We must have the humility to understand the limits of our intellect
I think it's arrogant to assume we have a strong understanding of the limits of our intellect, given all the things you said in this very post. I also don't understand why we must have this humility. What are the limits of human intellect? How can we know until we test them?
without wisdom and the human soul, the world is nothing but a very complex spreadsheet.
Again this is poetic but not meaningful. What are you trying to say here?
Also I thought you were talking about god but he pretty much disappeared from your post after the first sentence of the third paragraph. Did you just change topics part way through, or is this a god of the gaps argument?
There's a huge mass of geeks that were right onboard with facebook. I strongly suspect that far even after pulling out the "neutral" majority, more geeks were for Facebook than against. Geeks are social creatures too, 80s movies notwithstanding.
I think a huge part of the problem is that the inertia inertia is to putting up an adblock at all, but once you do, now you have to convince those people to unblock your site.
So every time one person who gets fed up with their search results autoplaying audio ads and searching in vain for that one tab that's being annoying, even if it's not your ad that's the problem, you get punished.
Given that others are already doing it, why wouldn't you? People who don't install adblock obviously won't (unless you're the straw that breaks the camel's back), and people that will already have. The likelihood of somebody manually enabling ads on your site is quite low (not zero, but low).*
It's kind of like the prisoner's dilemma, and being an annoying git with your ads is like defecting.
* An individual site that a person returns to has a decent chance, eg. a webcomic site or a fairly famous site like slashdot, but a site that gets most of its traffic from news aggregators probably does not.
It's to make monsters feel the pain they inflicted on others
...which you do to make yourself feel better.
and to deter future monsters
Not convinced that has ever worked. I am doubtful anybody has ever sat down and thought "man, I'd blow up this school if I thought I'd go to federal pound me in the ass prison for life, or if I was humanely executed, but if there's a chance I might get tortured for ten minutes and then executed it's just not worth it".
No, but a car isn't alive because no car can self-replicate.
Aside from that, I think you've strayed off topic. A mule is not a cell, and a human is not a cell. A vasectomy has no bearing whatsoever on whether a thing needs to be self-replicating in order to be a cell. The biological definition of cell given by wikipedia is "Cells are the smallest unit of life that can replicate independently, and are often called the "building blocks of life"." I'm sure you can find a definition that doesn't include self-replicating, if for no other reason than that it is rarely important.
Really this comes down to a semantic argument, which is ultimately not very interesting (and has no bearing whatsoever on the infertile). What is significant is whether this thing is not self-replicating. Assuming the sandertje's interpretation is accurate, anyway -- the article is thin on details and only mentions that chemists have made self-replicating cells before (without the multiple reactions) and doesn't seem to mention whether this guy can self-replicate.
The employee they hire to review the code might be compromised by the NSA or CIA. You have to stop somewhere, and if your core competency isn't software development, then you can't stop with yourself.
If I solved the Navier-Stokes problem, I'd be stoked about lots of things, and among them would be a million dollars.
If you can't enjoy two things, your priorities aren't fucked up because they *don't exist at all*. Since priorities are comparisons between multiple things you want.
My desire for 1 million dollars would be greater than my desire to delay publication so that no Russian speakers learn of this before Frans Faase does.
I'm really wondering about your priorities if you think delaying publishing this until it is in English has value. Depending on this guy's flluency, this might lead to it getting published in English *faster* than if he kept it secret until he could publish in English. Plus he can understand the initial responses this way.
That's the quote for communism, not socialism. Socialism is "to each according to his contribution/work". The communist form decouples your needs and your abilities in a way that socialism does not.
If that's the result of capitalism, then capitalism is a failed system that needs to be abandoned before your predictions come to pass.
Conversely, if capitalism is not a failed system that needs to be abandoned, then there must be solution to this (either the situation is impossible in the first place, or we spice up the capitalism with a bit of socialism, or something along those lines).
Because I have to have this funny thing called MONEY to buy FOOD, because I get HUNGRY without it.
The whole premise is that producing and distributing food is a solved problem (otherwise humans would still do it because that's something humans can do). Money is an allocation mechanism.
a) socialism (which is evil according to many),
Well that's just stupid. If socialism is evil, there's a reason for its evil.
b) means I will sit on my ass all day long doing nothing, because why would I do anything else? The machines do all the work that matters! I could just sit here, ask my robo-butler to bring me the gourmet food my robo-chef cooked up for me, and I will turn into a fat slob who can't get off my bed/couch/floor. After all, it's not like I *need* to go anywhere - everything I *need* is provided for me by robots and free money/food/water!
And the problem is...? About the only thing there that sounds bad at all is the "fat slob", but that's your own choice in this hypothetical world where you have all the time in the world to exercise at your own pace.
c) communism, where the government assigns you a job (much like joining the military - you want to be a computer geek but they assign you to clean big guns and swab the deck) and in exchange the gov't gives you money/food/water and whatnot. Also not really something most Americans consider "good".
What? That's not what communism is, and that's also not a result of robot labour. It's actually contrary to it. Why wouldn't the government just assign you no labour (since the premise is that robots do it better and cheaper in the first place), and then give you money/food/water? Which *is* communism ("from each according to his capacity" where capacity = 0 leads to just "to each according to his needs").
If capitalism requires us to have human labour do things rather than machines, then capitalism is a failure. Also nobody tried communism in a world where all menial labour was doable by machines, which is the premise of this...
Replacing human labour is the goal of technology. Tying human labour to consumption is a necessary evil, not a good thing.
Speed of Light in a vacuum is a fundamental constant expressed in units of m/s. In this case, space (m), and time (s) are the fundamental units.
I think you might be interested in looking up the concept of linear independence. It's kind of like being Turing complete. Your system doesn't have to have a fundamental unit for space or time at all, any more than you need one for speed. It's enough to be able to combine other fundamental units to generate a derived unit of space or time.
There is absolutely no reason that the fundamental units can't be c (the fundamental unit of speed) and seconds (the fundamental unit of time), with distance being the derived unit. C makes a wonderful unit precisely because it's a universal constant, and because it makes it really easy to remember how fast the speed of light is (it's 1!). You could even make your fundamental units a velocity unit and an acceleration unit, with both time and space being defined in terms of those.
That's very smug and glib, but your attitude is like saying that trains and cars are a waste of time because we'll eventually invent airplanes, and we can stick with horses until then.
I actually *really like* that analogy. You can imagine your left side struggling more than your right side, and this ultimately turning you.
Since I must be pedantic, I think in practice, to a degree, denser water would be easier to swim through, since it gives you more substance to push against. This is similar to how even if you lay on a low-friction surface (eg. a big skateboard) in air (considerably less dense than water), making the motions of swimming* doesn't get you nearly as far as it does underwater. That's where we fall back to "it's just an analogy, guys".
*Hereby acknowledging all possible breast stroke jokes that can be made here.
Sure he does. The analogy is unsatisfying because an analogy is being drawn between gravity and gravity. It just removed one space dimension. A bunch of posters here have commented that they don't see how it explains gravity in a relativistic sense any more than it does in a Newtonian sense, since we're mapping time to time and not making it clear that it's part of the time-space continuum.
That analogy never really worked for me either (to be fair, nobody ever tried to formally present this to me; it's an analogy I saw on science shows and the Internet after I learned the fundamentals in school).
To attempt a meta-analogy, it's like explaining a tornado by pointing to the drain of a sink or bathtub or toilet (or to planet / solar system formation, etc.). It's an analogy, and it's not completely off-base, but it is unsatisfying because chances are whoever didn't know how tornadoes work also doesn't really know how the whirlpool is formed in a sink or bathtub or toilet, and they really just look like the same phenomena at different scales instead of a "simpler to understand" phenomenon. You don't have to explain all of angular momentum completely. If the person can skate, getting them to spin and then tuck their arms in might make a better analogy -- it's actually still the same angular momentum phenomenon minus the fluid portion (and coriolis effect at tornado scales, and a thousand other little details), but this time you're relating it to a thing that actually seems quite different than a vortex and has an intuitive component.
Of course, the rubber sheet analogy, and the bathtub vortex analogy, both have some uses because you can actually make a model of them more practically than an actual gravity well or tornado:) (yes, I know you meant a different sense of model).
Slashdot Mirror
No, BSD are like library books that you can check out and use as reference materials for your own works with impunity.
GPL is like a library with no windows where you can't remove any books or take any notes. Instead you have to write your new work inside the library and can't take it back out (trying to do so is a copyright violation). To some degree, you can take things in, but again, not out.
There's no reasonable question at all that the rules of the GPL library are more strict, the debate is whether in the long run you end up with better access to information stuck in the GPL library compared to when you can draw information from many other libraries which don't enforce derivative works to be contributed back to the same library.
But at that point, the analogy isn't any better than the reality, is it?
If there WAS something in the GPL that prevented that, then the restriction would be one of the GPL, not a restriction of the App Store.
I think that's a semantic distinction without a lot of merit. Incompatibilities between two licenses exist in the interaction between licenses, not in the licenses themselves. The only exception would be if the App Store literally said "the terms are not compatible with the GPL", in which case I would put the restriction solely on the App Store, or vice versa if the GPL literally said "oh yeah, and fuck Apple, this license won't work on their store", then the restriction would be on the GPL.
AFAIK you're correct with GPLv2 anyway. The source doesn't have to be distributed in the same channel as the software according to the GPL, so long as the software is accompanied by a written offer to get the source. I don't know about GPLv3. I know some people think it's incompatible, and some people think it's compatible, and it's not instantly obvious from reading the terms, and I'm not a lawyer: that combination of facts makes me nervous about making assertions here.
The kid has two parents, so you could get the mother's partner to pay up rather than the father. The other woman explicitly chose to be a parent, thus the burden should be her responsibility. Why aren't they? Perhaps because this guy has more income so he's the guy they can extract money from, or perhaps they just think the law is written heteronormatively enough that this will work better.
I don't know the breakdown of $6000 of assistance but I wouldn't just assume that's over and above what another parent might get without more information, since there are numerous tax effects of having a kid. I'm not assuming the other way either. It's just really hard to infer from no information whatsoever.
Note that the state doesn't stop the extremely poor from having a kid together, and then target the midwife for child support payments. Why should this be any different? There were two parents signed up. If the state doesn't like the poor having kids, maybe the state can consider a solution that affects all poor people having kids (it's easy to imagine that going wrong, but it's an option).
I can imagine a market for self driving car taxis that cater specifically to smokers. Part of why you can't do it in taxis now is that there's a driver to consider, and another part is the lingering effects of smell etc.. The majority of autotaxis would be nonsmoker but there would be smoker vehicles as well, and your wife could refuse to ride the nonsmoker autotaxis and call the smoker taxi company.
Another thing is that even in the "world of taxis" theory, I don't think private cars are outlawed. A smoker could still get their our private self-driving car because they want to smoke on the way to work, but most would not because these days most people do not smoke, and even most smokers can deal with the stretch of time in a car as you can (and then, if you can't afford the private self-driving car and still want to smoke in the car, *that's* where the "well then you should quit because you can't afford it" arguments come in).
The theory would be that the number of taxis would be basically the same as present cars during peak traffic (give or take), since they are replacing private vehicles, and they will be distributed appropriately.
I'm not convinced of the "world of taxis" theory. I'm not even sure it will lead to reduced private car ownership. You can in principle have a private car for young children at an age where today we wouldn't trust them with a driver's license but we would trust them to bike to the store. It can drive itself to a parking lot you don't need parking on your property for all your vehicles, just your main "I decided to go out right now" vehicle (similarly, you don't need a parking lot at every last box store).
But you have to make reasonable assumptions. Asserting a 45 minute wait for a peak period taxi is like saying that cars can't replace horses because you can't switch to a new car at the stables when your old one gets tired of carrying you on a long journey. That's only an argument against the world of taxis if you simply cannot imagine a reasonable scenario that doesn't have a 45 minute wait, and we surely can imagine such a scenario -- 1:1 replacement of all private cars with taxis would be more than enough; you realistically only need a fraction of that. Especially if the world can get behind the idea of staggered work hours.
Or you can look at the line of reasoning that lead to this guy making terrible predictions: http://www.newsweek.com/cliffo... (he has commented with embarrassment about the article).
Does it mean, if you don't understand something, and physicists don't understand it, that means it doesn't exist?
No, it doesn't. You're being really bizarre here. What Neil deGrasse Tyson was arguing is that if you don't understand something, and physicists don't understand something, then it says nothing about whether or not God did it. That's really, really obvious.
Note that Neil deGrasse Tyson explicitly does NOT identify as an atheist.
Nobody is seriously suggesting everything outside our understanding = God anymore.
Umm...you just did. Your initial post started with a strawman about atheists, a proclamation that this isn't science's "final triumph over God". Then it goes on about how we don't know anything and need to be humble about our knowledge.
From that, we infer that you do believe in God and are specifically arguing God exists on the basis of our puny knowledgelessness.
How is that not a god of the gaps argument? Or else, how is that not the argument you made?
And then just now, you've made up this story where physicists pretend things don't exist when they don't understand it, the implication being that if they recognized they exist, then they would believe in God. Which is exactly a god of the gaps argument because that's the argument you were mimicking and trying to reverse in the first place.
breathlessly waiting for the announcement confirming life on another planet because they believe that will be the final triumph of science over God.
...huh?
I think you overestimate how important god is to atheists.
God is extra-terrestrial life by definition
I'm not familiar with any definition of life that includes an omnipotent omnipresent timeless entity.
There is life on other planets/in other dimensions, and that life is possibly many many orders of magnitude more intelligent than us.
Umm, maybe. You seem to be talking about extraterrestrial life beyond just your notion of god here. How do you know?
Meanwhile, our narcissistic belief that our discovery of the metaphorical light switch [...]
I have no idea what the metaphorical light switch is.
entitles us to stand before the universe and claim "knowledge"
This is poetic, and I understand you're warning against hubris, but this it doesn't actually have meaning. What is overweaning pride here? How much pride in advancement is too prideful?
Every great discovery in man's history has only made the universe bigger, not smaller, nor easier to understand.
Well, no. At least depending on what you mean by "easier to understand" and "great discovery". For instance, heliocentric theory makes the universe easier to understand. It's not actually more "correct" than geocentric theory with its epicycles (certainly not less correct, though!) -- we can choose a geocentric frame of reference today and still calculate everything we calculate today with great precision. But heliocentrism was a great advance that made the universe easier to understand.
We have made a lot of progress, but we also must have the humility to recognize that scarcely 500 years ago, the overwhelming majority of the population was completely illiterate, and that science was the purview of a vanishingly small number of people.
Shouldn't that be a source of pride rather than humility? It means we're getting better, and when you say "scarcely" 500 years ago, it sounds like we're getting better quickly.
A toddler who learns to wipe his own ass has every right to be proud of his accomplishment, and it is, indeed, an accomplishment. The 10 year old who gets an A+ on his math test isn't scorned because his engineer dad can solve the same problems correctly while drunk and having not slept for 3 days.
We must have the humility to understand the limits of our intellect
I think it's arrogant to assume we have a strong understanding of the limits of our intellect, given all the things you said in this very post. I also don't understand why we must have this humility. What are the limits of human intellect? How can we know until we test them?
without wisdom and the human soul, the world is nothing but a very complex spreadsheet.
Again this is poetic but not meaningful. What are you trying to say here?
Also I thought you were talking about god but he pretty much disappeared from your post after the first sentence of the third paragraph. Did you just change topics part way through, or is this a god of the gaps argument?
You need a non-crappy course. That's literally the point of taking courses.
That can be done now. There's no reason except the laws of the land and the near certain outrage of the public [...]
Umm, so in other words it can't be done now?
That's literally every reason apart from physical impossibility. I don't understand the point you're trying to make.
There's a huge mass of geeks that were right onboard with facebook. I strongly suspect that far even after pulling out the "neutral" majority, more geeks were for Facebook than against. Geeks are social creatures too, 80s movies notwithstanding.
I think a huge part of the problem is that the inertia inertia is to putting up an adblock at all, but once you do, now you have to convince those people to unblock your site.
So every time one person who gets fed up with their search results autoplaying audio ads and searching in vain for that one tab that's being annoying, even if it's not your ad that's the problem, you get punished.
Given that others are already doing it, why wouldn't you? People who don't install adblock obviously won't (unless you're the straw that breaks the camel's back), and people that will already have. The likelihood of somebody manually enabling ads on your site is quite low (not zero, but low).*
It's kind of like the prisoner's dilemma, and being an annoying git with your ads is like defecting.
* An individual site that a person returns to has a decent chance, eg. a webcomic site or a fairly famous site like slashdot, but a site that gets most of its traffic from news aggregators probably does not.
It's to make monsters feel the pain they inflicted on others
...which you do to make yourself feel better.
and to deter future monsters
Not convinced that has ever worked. I am doubtful anybody has ever sat down and thought "man, I'd blow up this school if I thought I'd go to federal pound me in the ass prison for life, or if I was humanely executed, but if there's a chance I might get tortured for ten minutes and then executed it's just not worth it".
No, but a car isn't alive because no car can self-replicate.
Aside from that, I think you've strayed off topic. A mule is not a cell, and a human is not a cell. A vasectomy has no bearing whatsoever on whether a thing needs to be self-replicating in order to be a cell. The biological definition of cell given by wikipedia is "Cells are the smallest unit of life that can replicate independently, and are often called the "building blocks of life"." I'm sure you can find a definition that doesn't include self-replicating, if for no other reason than that it is rarely important.
Really this comes down to a semantic argument, which is ultimately not very interesting (and has no bearing whatsoever on the infertile). What is significant is whether this thing is not self-replicating. Assuming the sandertje's interpretation is accurate, anyway -- the article is thin on details and only mentions that chemists have made self-replicating cells before (without the multiple reactions) and doesn't seem to mention whether this guy can self-replicate.
The employee they hire to review the code might be compromised by the NSA or CIA. You have to stop somewhere, and if your core competency isn't software development, then you can't stop with yourself.
Why can't somebody have multiple motivations?
If I solved the Navier-Stokes problem, I'd be stoked about lots of things, and among them would be a million dollars.
If you can't enjoy two things, your priorities aren't fucked up because they *don't exist at all*. Since priorities are comparisons between multiple things you want.
My desire for 1 million dollars would be greater than my desire to delay publication so that no Russian speakers learn of this before Frans Faase does.
I'm really wondering about your priorities if you think delaying publishing this until it is in English has value. Depending on this guy's flluency, this might lead to it getting published in English *faster* than if he kept it secret until he could publish in English. Plus he can understand the initial responses this way.
That's the quote for communism, not socialism. Socialism is "to each according to his contribution/work". The communist form decouples your needs and your abilities in a way that socialism does not.
If that's the result of capitalism, then capitalism is a failed system that needs to be abandoned before your predictions come to pass.
Conversely, if capitalism is not a failed system that needs to be abandoned, then there must be solution to this (either the situation is impossible in the first place, or we spice up the capitalism with a bit of socialism, or something along those lines).
In a world where nobody works, nobody gets paid. In a world that nobody gets paid, people go hungry.
Neither of those conclusions are obvious, given the premise of the perfect robot labour force.
Because I have to have this funny thing called MONEY to buy FOOD, because I get HUNGRY without it.
The whole premise is that producing and distributing food is a solved problem (otherwise humans would still do it because that's something humans can do). Money is an allocation mechanism.
a) socialism (which is evil according to many),
Well that's just stupid. If socialism is evil, there's a reason for its evil.
b) means I will sit on my ass all day long doing nothing, because why would I do anything else? The machines do all the work that matters! I could just sit here, ask my robo-butler to bring me the gourmet food my robo-chef cooked up for me, and I will turn into a fat slob who can't get off my bed/couch/floor. After all, it's not like I *need* to go anywhere - everything I *need* is provided for me by robots and free money/food/water!
And the problem is...? About the only thing there that sounds bad at all is the "fat slob", but that's your own choice in this hypothetical world where you have all the time in the world to exercise at your own pace.
c) communism, where the government assigns you a job (much like joining the military - you want to be a computer geek but they assign you to clean big guns and swab the deck) and in exchange the gov't gives you money/food/water and whatnot. Also not really something most Americans consider "good".
What? That's not what communism is, and that's also not a result of robot labour. It's actually contrary to it. Why wouldn't the government just assign you no labour (since the premise is that robots do it better and cheaper in the first place), and then give you money/food/water? Which *is* communism ("from each according to his capacity" where capacity = 0 leads to just "to each according to his needs").
If capitalism requires us to have human labour do things rather than machines, then capitalism is a failure. Also nobody tried communism in a world where all menial labour was doable by machines, which is the premise of this...
Replacing human labour is the goal of technology. Tying human labour to consumption is a necessary evil, not a good thing.
Speed of Light in a vacuum is a fundamental constant expressed in units of m/s. In this case, space (m), and time (s) are the fundamental units.
I think you might be interested in looking up the concept of linear independence. It's kind of like being Turing complete. Your system doesn't have to have a fundamental unit for space or time at all, any more than you need one for speed. It's enough to be able to combine other fundamental units to generate a derived unit of space or time.
There is absolutely no reason that the fundamental units can't be c (the fundamental unit of speed) and seconds (the fundamental unit of time), with distance being the derived unit. C makes a wonderful unit precisely because it's a universal constant, and because it makes it really easy to remember how fast the speed of light is (it's 1!). You could even make your fundamental units a velocity unit and an acceleration unit, with both time and space being defined in terms of those.
That's very smug and glib, but your attitude is like saying that trains and cars are a waste of time because we'll eventually invent airplanes, and we can stick with horses until then.
I actually *really like* that analogy. You can imagine your left side struggling more than your right side, and this ultimately turning you.
Since I must be pedantic, I think in practice, to a degree, denser water would be easier to swim through, since it gives you more substance to push against. This is similar to how even if you lay on a low-friction surface (eg. a big skateboard) in air (considerably less dense than water), making the motions of swimming* doesn't get you nearly as far as it does underwater. That's where we fall back to "it's just an analogy, guys".
*Hereby acknowledging all possible breast stroke jokes that can be made here.
Sure he does. The analogy is unsatisfying because an analogy is being drawn between gravity and gravity. It just removed one space dimension. A bunch of posters here have commented that they don't see how it explains gravity in a relativistic sense any more than it does in a Newtonian sense, since we're mapping time to time and not making it clear that it's part of the time-space continuum.
That analogy never really worked for me either (to be fair, nobody ever tried to formally present this to me; it's an analogy I saw on science shows and the Internet after I learned the fundamentals in school).
To attempt a meta-analogy, it's like explaining a tornado by pointing to the drain of a sink or bathtub or toilet (or to planet / solar system formation, etc.). It's an analogy, and it's not completely off-base, but it is unsatisfying because chances are whoever didn't know how tornadoes work also doesn't really know how the whirlpool is formed in a sink or bathtub or toilet, and they really just look like the same phenomena at different scales instead of a "simpler to understand" phenomenon. You don't have to explain all of angular momentum completely. If the person can skate, getting them to spin and then tuck their arms in might make a better analogy -- it's actually still the same angular momentum phenomenon minus the fluid portion (and coriolis effect at tornado scales, and a thousand other little details), but this time you're relating it to a thing that actually seems quite different than a vortex and has an intuitive component.
Of course, the rubber sheet analogy, and the bathtub vortex analogy, both have some uses because you can actually make a model of them more practically than an actual gravity well or tornado :) (yes, I know you meant a different sense of model).
Sure they can, but unless Russia, China, and the US all coordinate to do this bullshit at the same time in the same places, then it doesn't matter.
That's literally what redundancy means.