and ultimately the answer is "it just is" : Magic!
Stop being an asshole dude. It's not magic, it's justifiable ignorance.
You can call ANYTHING magic, including your assertion that perpetual motion must be in the universe -- you are positing "magic". Except, no, you aren't. You are positing an unknown mechanism, not a fucking wizard.
"I don't know": A declaration that heat death is absolutely going to happen contradicts this.
A declaration that the evidence points to heat death does not contradict this.
"God just is": Magic!
I agree, but that's irrelevant: my point is that it immediately leads to "who made God?" which is answered by "dunno?" or "mysterious ways".
"there just is a universe that recycles itself such that even entropy is reversed in the long run": Perpetual Motion!
This was me attempting to paraphrase your opinion, which was stated as perpetual motion, and show how it's magic, the same as the others.
"there is just this one universe": Not an answer to the question.
I apologize, what I meant by this is that there is just this one, non-recycling Universe.
I believe that's true for the question of whether you are innocent, which isn't the same as being true absolutely (consider sentencing, once you've been found guilty).
You don't get that for free. It arrives diffuse and with low reliability, blocked by clouds and, half the time, but the Earth itself. Collection requires other expensive technologies. Solar power is so far from "free" and "uncomplicated" it's hilarious. The closest thing to free and uncomplicated is burning wood, given that it's about a million-year-old technology, and that's not actually free.
Why do people keep acting like there can only be one power source? There's lots of good things about solar and wind power. That doesn't mean there aren't also imperfect things that we can shore up.
Our existence is not evidence of that. It could become evidence *if* you assume that there is an infinitely vast amount of time prior to now. I think that's a fairly common assumption but by no means proven and AFAICT has less evidence than the second law of thermodynamics.
It's not declaring magic, it's declaring ignorance, and that is an entirely appropriate declaration.
One possible explanation is that the universe is in an infinite state of heat death bookended at a point we can arbitrarily call "the beginning" by a non-heat-death state. Any internal observer, by definition, can only exist at that infinitesimal slice of Universal history, so here we are. Why is the universe like that? Just is, under that theory. You go back far enough into any explanation, and ultimately the answer is "it just is" / "I don't know", whether you say "God just is" or "there just is a universe that recycles itself such that even entropy is reversed in the long run" or "there is just this one universe" or whatever.
I couldn't be bothered to read the whole application but I did read part. As far as I can tell, it's not online at all. In fact, it appears that the problem it's solving is the one in your third paragraph.
Ironically, the fact that you identified group payment as a real problem and dismissed out of hand the idea that it could have been solved here actually implies that this could be legally patentable (assuming you are a person of at-least ordinary skill in the art).
It talks about moving money between the financial institutions of the users to settle the accounts. It talks about on-demand settlement of accounts, as well as periodic (with monthly as an example), or when the balance reaches a threshold.
Really, this doesn't seem to be about splitting bills. It seems to be a system for ensuring that "I'll got this one, you pay for the next meal" comes out fairly in the long run.
Well then please enlighten us, because I don't know Abelson either and I suspect that's true of almost everybody.
LargeMythicalReptile has given the most complete and well-sourced info thus far. The wikipedia article doesn't really say anything that imputes his character.
I didn't read all of his report but from the snippets that I did read (mostly in the "Questions for the MIT community") he did seem to dislike how exceeding use in the TOS becomes a felony. The conclusion section also contains the line “MIT didn’t do anything wrong; but we didn’t do ourselves proud”, specifically noting that they shouldn't have taken a position of neutrality. These both accord with the general slashdot consensus (well, actually there seems to be a common slashdot meme that MIT was against Aaron rather than neutral, which doesn't seem to be borne out by the facts I've dug up, but admittedly I got bored after reading chunks of the document from Abelson so I didn't keep going for long).
Using an OS tells you nothing about whether one OS is a miniaturized version of another OS.
The UI is not the same thing as the OS. With sufficient motivation you could make a shell on OSX, a shell on Windows, and a shell on Linux/BSD/whatever, which present an essentially identical UI. A somewhat better measure is if you've developed for both OSes, but even they can have a different API set or a converged one (eg. the WINE project or the Unix API implemented in *all* the major OSes including Windows, but put to varying degrees of practical use in each).
So the question becomes: did Jobs give up on pushing making a miniaturized OSX on the phone, or did you just misunderstand what he meant by miniaturized OSX (after all, he could have meant OS in the same way as you interpreted it, despite our quibbling about the technical definition of OS)?
And...I don't know the answer to that at all. Both are intuitively defensible positions, and with enough research one is likely correct.
I would say that an act like this is not terrorism if it does not attempt to push a significant agenda. Random violence, even if against politicians, isn't terrorist (which doesn't make it any better). And even if non-random, if the assailant was furloughed and pissed off about not getting paid, that's more a personal revenge-motive than a political motive -- yes, the furlough was political, but if this was a private corporation that put employees on unpaid leave you could imagine something similar. I don't think it's useful to so dilute the term terrorist that it just means "violent criminal".
I don't think we know yet what agenda this person had.
You aren't actually disagreeing with him. You can tell because you are literally comparing the Bible to a work of fiction.
Yes, Animal Farm is incompatible with biology. And yes, so is the biblical narrative. If you want to take the Bible as a metaphor with truths, that's entirely your right, and that means you're going to drop a bunch of nonsense where a thing is true because the Bible says it is true.
"Hitler was a man born in Austria who ran the Soviet Union during World War II (the Soviet Union was a major participant in that war)"
You can find evidence that Hitler was a man, born in Austria, he ran a major participant in World War II, and the Soviet Union was a major participant in World War II, and yet the sentence would *still* be unproven and, in fact, wrong, because Hitler did not run the Soviet Union.
(pre-emptive: This is not a Godwin. I'm not comparing anybody to Hitler. I'm just using one of the most well-known pieces of undisputed history to illustrate a point about historical evidence.)
Nobody who is contesting Christianity believes that there were no such thing as Jews 2000 years ago.
That's a rumour that's unsubstantiated by the facts. The famous "Phantoms in the Snow" study indicates that the large majority of Canadians getting US healthcare are getting it because they were in the US for business or vacation. Many of the rest are doing it for reasons of privacy. And there is a flow in the opposite direction for the same reasons (vacations, business, privacy, and your quicker/closer access claim which actually goes both ways). Also it's fairly well-known that people from the US cross the border to Canada for cheaper medical drugs.
It's probably happened in history that individual Canadians have made that bargain, but it's really, really not common.
I'm definitely not right-wing, but I don't see how a limit to currency means there's a limit to wealth. Currency is only a medium of exchange, it is not the same thing as wealth.
Furthermore, the amount of currency in the economy actually does fluctuate because of things like fractional-reserve banking and lines of credit.
No, because he's not demanding that you pick "rightly" or "wrongly", he's accepting both (and, by implication, anything in between). No dichotomy is posed.
If I say "a sabre-toothed tiger is scary whether it's frozen in glacier ice or it's been set on fire", that doesn't mean that a living sabre-toothed tiger in a stable temperature zone is non-scary. No dichotomy is posed.
If there's no difference between two models, both leading inevitably to results that are both correct and equivalent to one another, then by what criteria do you choose which one is "more" real? They're both real! Even if they contradict each other, they are both equally real except in their complexity.
I choose the simpler one to be reality. This is why we say the Earth orbits the sun in "reality" instead of everything orbiting the Earth with all sorts of corrective epicycles, even though both are actually valid views that can be worked out. If we later find a difference, where the simpler one is wrong and the more complex one is right, then my allegiance changes.
It may be that there is no simple, elegant model at the root, but a hairy mess. In that case, the least hairy mess that's equivalent should be the one called reality.
and that they weren't suggesting that they reflected reality (although they did).
What's interesting there is we say it reflects reality because it makes the calculations easier. Other than the math and mental models being easier to grasp, there really is no good reason to say the earth goes around the sun* rather than the sun going around the Earth. We just all decided that the calculations being easier trumps the very intuitive model that the sun circles the Earth. You can construct a perfectly rational model of the Universe from the non-inertial frame of reference that holds the Earth as stationary. It's just full of epicycles etc..
It's a fairly rare achievement for mass society to replace the naively simpler model of the stationary Earth.
*for the sake of argument, lets not get into them both orbiting a common barycentre; the argument extends to that as well anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
and ultimately the answer is "it just is" : Magic!
Stop being an asshole dude. It's not magic, it's justifiable ignorance.
You can call ANYTHING magic, including your assertion that perpetual motion must be in the universe -- you are positing "magic". Except, no, you aren't. You are positing an unknown mechanism, not a fucking wizard.
"I don't know": A declaration that heat death is absolutely going to happen contradicts this.
A declaration that the evidence points to heat death does not contradict this.
"God just is": Magic!
I agree, but that's irrelevant: my point is that it immediately leads to "who made God?" which is answered by "dunno?" or "mysterious ways".
"there just is a universe that recycles itself such that even entropy is reversed in the long run": Perpetual Motion!
This was me attempting to paraphrase your opinion, which was stated as perpetual motion, and show how it's magic, the same as the others.
"there is just this one universe": Not an answer to the question.
I apologize, what I meant by this is that there is just this one, non-recycling Universe.
I believe that's true for the question of whether you are innocent, which isn't the same as being true absolutely (consider sentencing, once you've been found guilty).
You don't get that for free. It arrives diffuse and with low reliability, blocked by clouds and, half the time, but the Earth itself. Collection requires other expensive technologies. Solar power is so far from "free" and "uncomplicated" it's hilarious. The closest thing to free and uncomplicated is burning wood, given that it's about a million-year-old technology, and that's not actually free.
Why do people keep acting like there can only be one power source? There's lots of good things about solar and wind power. That doesn't mean there aren't also imperfect things that we can shore up.
Our existence is not evidence of that. It could become evidence *if* you assume that there is an infinitely vast amount of time prior to now. I think that's a fairly common assumption but by no means proven and AFAICT has less evidence than the second law of thermodynamics.
It's not declaring magic, it's declaring ignorance, and that is an entirely appropriate declaration.
One possible explanation is that the universe is in an infinite state of heat death bookended at a point we can arbitrarily call "the beginning" by a non-heat-death state. Any internal observer, by definition, can only exist at that infinitesimal slice of Universal history, so here we are. Why is the universe like that? Just is, under that theory. You go back far enough into any explanation, and ultimately the answer is "it just is" / "I don't know", whether you say "God just is" or "there just is a universe that recycles itself such that even entropy is reversed in the long run" or "there is just this one universe" or whatever.
Care to explain the practical difference? How many people are Chinese, but are not Chinese nationals?
There's a solid chance at some point we've pissed all over your country.
The fact that you seem to be proud of this is concerning.
I couldn't be bothered to read the whole application but I did read part. As far as I can tell, it's not online at all. In fact, it appears that the problem it's solving is the one in your third paragraph.
Ironically, the fact that you identified group payment as a real problem and dismissed out of hand the idea that it could have been solved here actually implies that this could be legally patentable (assuming you are a person of at-least ordinary skill in the art).
It talks about moving money between the financial institutions of the users to settle the accounts. It talks about on-demand settlement of accounts, as well as periodic (with monthly as an example), or when the balance reaches a threshold.
Really, this doesn't seem to be about splitting bills. It seems to be a system for ensuring that "I'll got this one, you pay for the next meal" comes out fairly in the long run.
Well then please enlighten us, because I don't know Abelson either and I suspect that's true of almost everybody.
LargeMythicalReptile has given the most complete and well-sourced info thus far. The wikipedia article doesn't really say anything that imputes his character.
I didn't read all of his report but from the snippets that I did read (mostly in the "Questions for the MIT community") he did seem to dislike how exceeding use in the TOS becomes a felony. The conclusion section also contains the line “MIT didn’t do anything wrong; but we didn’t do ourselves proud”, specifically noting that they shouldn't have taken a position of neutrality. These both accord with the general slashdot consensus (well, actually there seems to be a common slashdot meme that MIT was against Aaron rather than neutral, which doesn't seem to be borne out by the facts I've dug up, but admittedly I got bored after reading chunks of the document from Abelson so I didn't keep going for long).
Using an OS tells you nothing about whether one OS is a miniaturized version of another OS.
The UI is not the same thing as the OS. With sufficient motivation you could make a shell on OSX, a shell on Windows, and a shell on Linux/BSD/whatever, which present an essentially identical UI. A somewhat better measure is if you've developed for both OSes, but even they can have a different API set or a converged one (eg. the WINE project or the Unix API implemented in *all* the major OSes including Windows, but put to varying degrees of practical use in each).
So the question becomes: did Jobs give up on pushing making a miniaturized OSX on the phone, or did you just misunderstand what he meant by miniaturized OSX (after all, he could have meant OS in the same way as you interpreted it, despite our quibbling about the technical definition of OS)?
And...I don't know the answer to that at all. Both are intuitively defensible positions, and with enough research one is likely correct.
I would say that an act like this is not terrorism if it does not attempt to push a significant agenda. Random violence, even if against politicians, isn't terrorist (which doesn't make it any better). And even if non-random, if the assailant was furloughed and pissed off about not getting paid, that's more a personal revenge-motive than a political motive -- yes, the furlough was political, but if this was a private corporation that put employees on unpaid leave you could imagine something similar. I don't think it's useful to so dilute the term terrorist that it just means "violent criminal".
I don't think we know yet what agenda this person had.
Problem is it still works if you hyphenate to the right.
They might, given that the boy scouts and hacker scouts have in common the fact that they are not scouts at all, but youth groups.
Just like Apple is trademarked, despite the fruit.
You aren't actually disagreeing with him. You can tell because you are literally comparing the Bible to a work of fiction.
Yes, Animal Farm is incompatible with biology. And yes, so is the biblical narrative. If you want to take the Bible as a metaphor with truths, that's entirely your right, and that means you're going to drop a bunch of nonsense where a thing is true because the Bible says it is true.
That's not even remotely the same thing.
If I say:
"Hitler was a man born in Austria who ran the Soviet Union during World War II (the Soviet Union was a major participant in that war)"
You can find evidence that Hitler was a man, born in Austria, he ran a major participant in World War II, and the Soviet Union was a major participant in World War II, and yet the sentence would *still* be unproven and, in fact, wrong, because Hitler did not run the Soviet Union.
(pre-emptive: This is not a Godwin. I'm not comparing anybody to Hitler. I'm just using one of the most well-known pieces of undisputed history to illustrate a point about historical evidence.)
Nobody who is contesting Christianity believes that there were no such thing as Jews 2000 years ago.
A woman, probably.
That's a rumour that's unsubstantiated by the facts. The famous "Phantoms in the Snow" study indicates that the large majority of Canadians getting US healthcare are getting it because they were in the US for business or vacation. Many of the rest are doing it for reasons of privacy. And there is a flow in the opposite direction for the same reasons (vacations, business, privacy, and your quicker/closer access claim which actually goes both ways). Also it's fairly well-known that people from the US cross the border to Canada for cheaper medical drugs.
It's probably happened in history that individual Canadians have made that bargain, but it's really, really not common.
Yes, it's Microsoft's fault that they are branded together. Do we HAVE TO follow Microsoft's mistakes?
I'm definitely not right-wing, but I don't see how a limit to currency means there's a limit to wealth. Currency is only a medium of exchange, it is not the same thing as wealth.
Furthermore, the amount of currency in the economy actually does fluctuate because of things like fractional-reserve banking and lines of credit.
No, because he's not demanding that you pick "rightly" or "wrongly", he's accepting both (and, by implication, anything in between). No dichotomy is posed.
If I say "a sabre-toothed tiger is scary whether it's frozen in glacier ice or it's been set on fire", that doesn't mean that a living sabre-toothed tiger in a stable temperature zone is non-scary. No dichotomy is posed.
You're confusing "bad" with "criminal".
A thing can be criminal while not being evil, or even being outright good.
A thing can be non-criminal while still being evil.
Owning black people, historically, was not a crime. Just because it's evil doesn't make it criminal.
The discussion here is whether the NSA are *criminals* by *definition*.
The only part of your sentence I don't understand is "No".
That doesn't seem to contradict what he said at all. It's just a proposed mechanism for why facts do not matter.
There's not a lot of used GTA V copies on day one, nor friends lending the game around.
They are specifically talking about the sales in 24 hours.
Context! It matters usually!
If there's no difference between two models, both leading inevitably to results that are both correct and equivalent to one another, then by what criteria do you choose which one is "more" real? They're both real! Even if they contradict each other, they are both equally real except in their complexity.
I choose the simpler one to be reality. This is why we say the Earth orbits the sun in "reality" instead of everything orbiting the Earth with all sorts of corrective epicycles, even though both are actually valid views that can be worked out. If we later find a difference, where the simpler one is wrong and the more complex one is right, then my allegiance changes.
It may be that there is no simple, elegant model at the root, but a hairy mess. In that case, the least hairy mess that's equivalent should be the one called reality.
and that they weren't suggesting that they reflected reality (although they did).
What's interesting there is we say it reflects reality because it makes the calculations easier. Other than the math and mental models being easier to grasp, there really is no good reason to say the earth goes around the sun* rather than the sun going around the Earth. We just all decided that the calculations being easier trumps the very intuitive model that the sun circles the Earth. You can construct a perfectly rational model of the Universe from the non-inertial frame of reference that holds the Earth as stationary. It's just full of epicycles etc..
It's a fairly rare achievement for mass society to replace the naively simpler model of the stationary Earth.
*for the sake of argument, lets not get into them both orbiting a common barycentre; the argument extends to that as well anyway.