What's interesting is that the machine should win easily in any number of players of poker, because the statistical analysis at any given point is trivial for a modern processor and the processor has no "tells" and can't be fooled by the meatbag's misdirections. They'd lose individual matches because of bad cards, but in the long run they'd win by playing the odds to a T.
EXCEPT, if one human is much better than the other humans they might be able to take the other humans' money faster than the computer can, by reading their body language etc.. Speed of chip acquisition is not part of the game in and of itself, so it generally would not be included in the optimal computer program, but by quickly consolidating all human chipcounts they can generate an advantage going into a head-to-head competition. Then the computer's slight advantage in accurate statistical evaluation might be overwhelmed by the human advantage in chips going into the final confrontation.
I would bet in a game of 6 person poker where 5 are computers programmed to "perfect play" (discounting that you might play more perfectly by taking advantage of others' weaknesses), and the sixth is an expert human, the expert would win less than 1/6 of the time. And in 6 person poker where 5 are humans, exactly one of whom is an expert, the human probably wins more than 1/6 of the time. Undecided on the case of 6 person poker, 5 humans, all of whom are equally skilled experts.
Yes, by stupid people, and also by smart people and people in between.
US and America both have ambiguous derivations. USA or "US American" is technically unambiguous, but people called that Miss America contestant a moron, in part, for saying "US Americans" in her famous response.
South Africa is a country in the south of Africa, but lots of countries in the southern part of Africa are not South Africa. Lesotho is actually entirely contained inside South Africa, in the South of Africa and south of much of South Africa, without being South Africa.
The problem comes because Spanish (and Portuguese?) has a similar-sounding word with a similar origin that doesn't fit with English usage, and people think the word itself must have some universal prime meaning.
I was going to say that this would be the "people blindly follow satnav without engaging their brains" aspect of technology. However, upon reading the article, I see this:
the driver deviated from the suggested route and, as a result, entered the prohibited area.
So fuck that, this article is about when the people DON'T use satnav technology. Yet they are blaming it on an error in Waze paragraphs earlier. Maybe they think it's an error that Waze came close enough that a small deviation lead to disaster? Well, they also say that the soldier who went astray had turned off the "avoid dangerous or prohibited areas" setting, which is also a user error.
Something doesn't quite add up about the Waze aspect of the story.
That's just such a backwards way of thinking about things. They don't filter out the word mortgage just because kids aren't taking out mortgages and aren't really financially aware. It's especially odd since songs children typically know, like many christmas songs, include the word "gay" in its non-sexuality context, so you're way more likely to false positive on gay.
The onus is on the one doing the filtering to describe why their filter makes sense in achieving their goals. If they were generating a whitelist, then you could reasonably ask why they should put gay and lesbian on the allow-list, but this appears to be a blacklist approach, or at best a weighted approach with a large negative value on those words.
There are a couple obvious directions they can take:
1. We don't want to expose our children to the idea of same-sex attraction. 2. Lesbian and gay, as used in practice on the Internet, are strongly correlated with things they do think are child-inappropriate, like perhaps hostile trolling or actual pornography or what-have-you.
If you take the second route, then you have to describe why they think those things are child-inappropriate. Eventually you'll come down to a series of principles that you agree with or don't, in whole or in part.
I'm a big believer in autonomous cars, but when I see
Google said its car's safety driver thought the bus would yield.
it makes me wonder how many crashes we would have had in autonomous mode, if there weren't an attentive driver who was fully aware he was sitting in an experimental vehicle.
Even if the first rounds of autonomous cars still require a driver for override (for legal reasons if nothing else), it seems like the number of autonomous crashes that likely would have happened is the number has to be driven way down to be comparable to, or less than, the ones with human drivers*; it's not really the amount of autonomous crashes overall that is important.
Also makes me wonder whether any of the manual mode crashes were initiated in autonomous mode and the manual override driver just couldn't recover the situation.
*whether average human drivers or above-average human drivers or even below-average human drivers are the standard is up for debate.
Freedom of Speech is a concept that is thousands of years old, and is not specific to governments.
You're probably thinking of the US First Amendment, which is a limitation on government that is broadly aligned with the concept of Freedom of Speech, and mentions the concept by name, but does not invent it or control all uses of the term.
For used items, it was within 3%. For new items, it was 20% on apples-to-apples item comparisons -- same as the purported wage gap. Even on gift cards, which have a real exact value.
Their first guess was that it came down to men describing things in a better light, and they do, but not by enough to really move the numbers, so that's not it. Nobody knows more specifically why this would happen, when raw capitalism suggests you would bid up the cheaper thing that women were selling.
There, I summarized the article because you clicked through and still didn't read it.
Fine. You tell me why the birds are hatching early and then starving to death from a lack of insects, in historically unprecedented ways. Your theory should provide evidence of comparable quality to that in this paper: http://rsos.royalsocietypublis.... It will not be sufficient for you to say "a kid stomped on all the bugs" or something like that.
It's not like they pulled this answer out of their asses. They presented actual evidence, whereas you are countering that by saying "well OF COURSE you'd say that, regardless of the evidence".
This climate change is caused almost entirely by the sun and the oceans.
But this isn't borne out by evidence. The sun has cooled very slightly, but the temperature has spiked up: https://www.skepticalscience.c...
The oceans absorb and release carbon dioxide in direct proportion to atmospheric carbon dioxide. They essentially function to reduce the impact of atmospheric CO2 changes that would otherwise happen, in either direction. The ocean doesn't just burp out CO2 on a whim.
Every reputable expert on geologic evidence I can find suggest that geologic evidence actually indicates that current climate change is overwhelmingly from human activity, and unusually rapid. There will of course be error bars and overall trendlines from natural sources as well, although it's not even clear that trendline runs in the same direction as current climate change.
I get why it's chilling to spy on your spouse or your child.
However, you have every right to spy on the whereabouts of your *car*. Those things are expensive, they get stolen, and sometimes people who didn't even do anything wrong get in trouble and it can be useful to know where it is, and maybe you just like to see where you yourself went. And if your child happens to use your car, then a consequence is you can figure out where they were.
Don't stick cameras in your child's room, even though it's your house that you pay for. But sure, track your car, your wallet, your cellphone. I'd even go so far as to say that it's not crazy to tell younger children they have to carry something with them that can be tracked (this might also assuage people's weird fears about kids walking to school alone).
The "very young" is an interesting point. From a quick look, I can't find the age range that the 75% applies to. I can't imagine they were counting newborn babies, but I could perhaps imagine they included young students.
I'll preface this by saying I think that the lazy person who is also starving / homeless because they are so lazy, *is* a myth. The hardest working people in society are at the bottom rungs. That doesn't mean that the CEO of the multimillion dollar corporation doesn't work his ass off. But the janitor working 2 full time jobs and one part time job to make rent is also working his ass off.
And it doesn't have to be paid work either. [examples]
That's where it falls over. You (maybe not you personally, but you generically) can find the same fulfillment in reading, playing video games, solving logic puzzles, considering philosophy, socialising with peers, playing sports, commenting on Internet forums, etc.. You could call that "work" in a sense, but it's the sort of work that nobody would give a shit about if you stopped doing (except the writers you pay to write books, developers you pay to develop games, people who read your brilliantly insightful comments on Slashdot, etc.). I can tell you the sense of accomplishment from completing all the toughest SpaceChem challenges is as much or more than any accomplishment I've ever had in my career, and I'd rather get the SpaceChem style accomplishments because I had fun doing it. This is at least as mentally active as a monk's chores.
The lazy person who doesn't want to do any work *that anybody else needs* absolutely exists. I have no data on how common they are relative to the people who have a deep-seated need to be valued by others, but it's common enough. That's what's at issue here.
Fortunately, there is an answer. A universal basic income doesn't have to be so luxurious that lazy people don't want more, and will trade their labour to get more. And if you can afford it to be so luxurious that they don't work? Then so what, they don't work. Clearly you didn't need them to generate this luxury lifestyle for everyone.
I really, honestly don't know how a UBI will work out in practice. It's barely been experimented on. I hope it works. The principles behind it are not unsound. But practical economics is often way more complicated than our simple pure theories predict.
Obviously a brand new house that is immediately torn down isn't a net gain for society. This said, this statement doesn't follow:
If it had, there wouldn't have been a need for a bail-out
.
No matter how you slice it, if you hold all else equal, but give everybody a house twice as big as it was 50 years ago, then *clearly* more productive capacity has been brought to bear. It's irrelevant whether it's encoded as a debt transaction or a cash transaction, somebody had to build and maintain houses, and it happened. We have more stuff. Debt is not negative-stuff.
This said, your link is very interesting. The 1440 hours annually figure it provides at the end was during a period of unusually low-labour, so let's compare it to http://www.businessinsider.com.... Looks like they still worked more than the Germans. Americans are working about 120% as much. Let's make every Friday a day off in the US, and you'll roughly match a period of unusually low-labour in preindustrial civilization:). Interesting note, even in the US, where labour has remained high, labourers work more than 10% less than they did 60 years ago.
Note the businessinsider.com links is for "full-time workers", and your link was for "laborers". It's probably as close to apples-to-apples as we're going to get without embarking on a huge research project. Obviously that does skim over part-time workers and phenomena like periods of time where women were more or less likely to be counted in the full-time labour pool (my understanding is that the 50s would be the outlier time period, and now and preindustrial are closer to one another).
Extremely skeptical on this genetic basis of left-right, though I do accept that genetics could swing your opinion on an important issue or two that the current left/right paradigm happens to be divided on. The thing with left-right is it puts multiple variables on a single axis of consideration.
There is no obvious reason for your belief in the literal truth of a religious textbook that mostly doesn't address economic theory, to be correlated with your belief in supply-sided economic systems. And in some countries, the correlation doesn't really appear. Even at some times in living memory in the US, it wasn't there. But right now in the US, there is a strong correlation between those things.
Yes, I think the Democrats will win this election, but you're fooling yourself if you pretend that the Republicans don't have a decent chance. Especially as compared to their chances of having a Republican president before the next election.
I would imagine that's part of the rules being written over the next six months. Rationally, we know the correct solution is "it depends". A software error could get the license revoked across-the-board until it received an update to resolve the situation, and a mechanical error would get an individual fixed.
You're confused. Humans *are* great apes (aka hominids, a taxonomic family). Our common ancestor with other apes was itself a great ape. Chimpanzees are more closely related to humans than either are to Gorillas, even though all three are great apes, because the common ancestor between Chimpanzee and Human is a descendant of the common ancestor between the three and Gorilla.
Every time somebody claims the Earth isn't round because it's an oblate spheroid, a devil gets his pitchfork.
Every time somebody claims that it's inaccurate to say that the Earth orbits the sun, a flesh-eating zombie rises from his grave.
If the difference between "Climate Change" is settled science and the reality of climate change is the same as the difference between the Earth orbiting the sun and the Earth orbiting the Sun-Earth barycenter (which is to say, a difference of precision, not accuracy), then we wouldn't be having any arguments today.
Actually, the earth is not round. It is more round than flat, but it is an oblate spheroid. You are showing off your high school education there...
Actually, the Earth is round. If you're going to claim that an oblate spheroid isn't round, then I'm going to claim that the sandcastle I built has taken the Earth from being an oblate spheroid to a sandcastle-surfaced oblate spheroid.
Somebody with a post-high school education can surely look up the definition of round: "shaped like or approximately like a sphere.". The Earth is approximately an oblate spheroid, and approximately a sphere.
The earth orbiting the sun is a tautology,
No it isn't. Seriously? People got burned at the stake over this.
Okay, it's disputed whether they were burned over this, whether the most prominent proponents just *happened* to get burned at the stake for unrelated reasons, but still.
that is the planets orbit the sun, and that defines the word orbit
For it to be a tautology, Earth would have to be, by definition, a planet. But we Earthlings concluded that Earth is a planet because the Earth orbits the sun.
Note though that we say the Earth orbits the Sun because that's a much simpler model than epicycles, but you *can* come up with an entirely consistent set of orbital mechanics where the Earth is defined to contain the center of the solar system. It's just not worth doing, so we say prefer to say the Earth orbits the sun. Planets are defined in the sense that is most convenient, without all the epicycles.
If you mean that the earth revolves around the sun as opposed to the sun revolving around the earth, you are describing a physical fact, not a scientific one.
Meaningless. Physics is science. Physical facts are scientific facts.
Science defines the law of gravity, the application of science only deduces that the earth revolves around the sun.
I don't understand the use of the word "only" in that sentence, but regardless, you seem to be contradicting yourself.
Space time can be curved AS FAR AS WE KNOW.
That's what SCIENCE IS.
Your statement is very similar to the statements made by Newtonian physicists.
So...correct?
You have to realize, if there's something deeper than General Relativity (and there is, because it's not fully unified with Quantum Mechanics, at least not in a settled way), it has to converge to the same results as General Relativity, within the very small margins of error we have, for every test we've ever had of General Relativity. The same as General Relativity converges on Newtonian Physics. Newtonian Physics is correct, so long as you aren't dealing with quantum-scale things or situations where space-time's curvature comes into play.
We might learn tomorrow that this only appears to be the case and there is some other, deeper fundamental behavior.
Yep. But the ground doesn't cease to be flat as far as the eye can see when we discover that the round-Earth model is the best explanation for why you can walk due east from a given point and never head West, and ultimately end up back where you started.
Curved space-time is the difference between General Relativity and Newtonian Physics, and the difference is there.
This is why we have theories about everything, instead of laws, because even Newtons laws have caveats thanks to our understanding of general relativity.
No, it's not. Theory doesn't mean a law we aren't sure of. It's not a hierarchy. The difference is somewhat fuzzy but as a rule of thumb, if you see a mathematical statement with an equals sign, it's a law. If
No, nothing like that. Climate does always change; people are talking about the current Climate Change because the evidence suggests that it is unusually quick and projected to change an amount that will have significant impact to civilization, depending on whether we take steps to curb it.
That's *nothing* like claiming the Earth isn't round.
What's unscientific about it? It's not a mathematically perfect sphere, but it is absolutely round.
No, the two-body formula for the earth and sun revolves around a common gravitational centerpoint (barycenter) that is within the volume of the sun. In an absolute scale, everything orbits everything.
It orbits a point inside the sun, or in other words, it orbits the sun. I think you said "no" as if you were thinking he said the earth orbited the exact center of the sun (either geometrically or center-of-mass), but nobody said that.
aside from gravity wells, space/time is flatter than we have the theoretical capability to test.
In other words, space time can be curved.
Ten years is not enough to settle anything scientific, especially not with models as bad at predicting the present as AGW use (not to mention the issues of
Global warming was not thought up ten years ago. Seriously?
I pay cash to websites which actually provide useful content to me. If you aren't willing to pay cash money to the website then it probably isn't worth much to you.
If those websites are so valueless, then why bother installing AdBlock in the first place? There's three obvious possibilities:
1. You're going there on purpose, so they *do* add value to you. 2. You're going there accidentally and AdBlock protects against that. In that case, would you use a service that instead replaces sites that contain ads with a single error page, stating that the site is ad-supported, and gives you the option of paying the site, accepting the ads anyway? 3. You're evaluating whether this site is of value to you so you can choose whether to pay them money. In which case, a non-obnoxious ad seems kind of like a reasonable compromise.
I am not so inflexible in how I'm willing to pay, and that includes receiving ads that aren't obnoxious, but it doesn't include every ad that I experience in practice (even with AdBlock). I do pay money to sites like Hulu that give me the option & I use frequently.
Generally, I don't mind ads so long as:
1. They don't engage me in ways that I wouldn't otherwise use on a page/app/whatever. For instance, an audio ad when I'm reading a written article is trying to engage me through sound; that's completely unacceptable. 2. Doesn't consume an inordinate amount of space/time compared to the media I'm consuming. Youtube frequently fails this. 3. Doesn't try to deceive me into thinking it's not an ad. "One weird trick" is like that.
To me it is adblock selling out. They're basically offering advertisers a protection racket. I want no part of that. I don't need an ad blocker whose interests are not clearly aligned with my own.
That's certainly a valid fear. My counter is that AdBlock doing this doesn't imply that it's impossible to block ads with a different service. If AdBlock starts letting shit through I don't like, I switch to another ad blocking method.
Who says they deserve compensation? Their bad business model is not my problem. Provide value or go away.
I do, as the person consuming that content. I want services like Google to exist. I want Slashdot to exist without requiring paid subscriptions -- you *can* subscribe to them but I think most don't.
Slashdot Mirror
What's interesting is that the machine should win easily in any number of players of poker, because the statistical analysis at any given point is trivial for a modern processor and the processor has no "tells" and can't be fooled by the meatbag's misdirections. They'd lose individual matches because of bad cards, but in the long run they'd win by playing the odds to a T.
EXCEPT, if one human is much better than the other humans they might be able to take the other humans' money faster than the computer can, by reading their body language etc.. Speed of chip acquisition is not part of the game in and of itself, so it generally would not be included in the optimal computer program, but by quickly consolidating all human chipcounts they can generate an advantage going into a head-to-head competition. Then the computer's slight advantage in accurate statistical evaluation might be overwhelmed by the human advantage in chips going into the final confrontation.
I would bet in a game of 6 person poker where 5 are computers programmed to "perfect play" (discounting that you might play more perfectly by taking advantage of others' weaknesses), and the sixth is an expert human, the expert would win less than 1/6 of the time. And in 6 person poker where 5 are humans, exactly one of whom is an expert, the human probably wins more than 1/6 of the time. Undecided on the case of 6 person poker, 5 humans, all of whom are equally skilled experts.
Yes, by stupid people, and also by smart people and people in between.
US and America both have ambiguous derivations. USA or "US American" is technically unambiguous, but people called that Miss America contestant a moron, in part, for saying "US Americans" in her famous response.
South Africa is a country in the south of Africa, but lots of countries in the southern part of Africa are not South Africa. Lesotho is actually entirely contained inside South Africa, in the South of Africa and south of much of South Africa, without being South Africa.
The problem comes because Spanish (and Portuguese?) has a similar-sounding word with a similar origin that doesn't fit with English usage, and people think the word itself must have some universal prime meaning.
I was going to say that this would be the "people blindly follow satnav without engaging their brains" aspect of technology. However, upon reading the article, I see this:
the driver deviated from the suggested route and, as a result, entered the prohibited area.
So fuck that, this article is about when the people DON'T use satnav technology. Yet they are blaming it on an error in Waze paragraphs earlier. Maybe they think it's an error that Waze came close enough that a small deviation lead to disaster? Well, they also say that the soldier who went astray had turned off the "avoid dangerous or prohibited areas" setting, which is also a user error.
Something doesn't quite add up about the Waze aspect of the story.
That's just such a backwards way of thinking about things. They don't filter out the word mortgage just because kids aren't taking out mortgages and aren't really financially aware. It's especially odd since songs children typically know, like many christmas songs, include the word "gay" in its non-sexuality context, so you're way more likely to false positive on gay.
The onus is on the one doing the filtering to describe why their filter makes sense in achieving their goals. If they were generating a whitelist, then you could reasonably ask why they should put gay and lesbian on the allow-list, but this appears to be a blacklist approach, or at best a weighted approach with a large negative value on those words.
There are a couple obvious directions they can take:
1. We don't want to expose our children to the idea of same-sex attraction.
2. Lesbian and gay, as used in practice on the Internet, are strongly correlated with things they do think are child-inappropriate, like perhaps hostile trolling or actual pornography or what-have-you.
If you take the second route, then you have to describe why they think those things are child-inappropriate. Eventually you'll come down to a series of principles that you agree with or don't, in whole or in part.
I'm a big believer in autonomous cars, but when I see
Google said its car's safety driver thought the bus would yield.
it makes me wonder how many crashes we would have had in autonomous mode, if there weren't an attentive driver who was fully aware he was sitting in an experimental vehicle.
Even if the first rounds of autonomous cars still require a driver for override (for legal reasons if nothing else), it seems like the number of autonomous crashes that likely would have happened is the number has to be driven way down to be comparable to, or less than, the ones with human drivers*; it's not really the amount of autonomous crashes overall that is important.
Also makes me wonder whether any of the manual mode crashes were initiated in autonomous mode and the manual override driver just couldn't recover the situation.
*whether average human drivers or above-average human drivers or even below-average human drivers are the standard is up for debate.
Freedom of Speech is a concept that is thousands of years old, and is not specific to governments.
You're probably thinking of the US First Amendment, which is a limitation on government that is broadly aligned with the concept of Freedom of Speech, and mentions the concept by name, but does not invent it or control all uses of the term.
I don't see the margin of error cited.
For used items, it was within 3%. For new items, it was 20% on apples-to-apples item comparisons -- same as the purported wage gap. Even on gift cards, which have a real exact value.
Their first guess was that it came down to men describing things in a better light, and they do, but not by enough to really move the numbers, so that's not it. Nobody knows more specifically why this would happen, when raw capitalism suggests you would bid up the cheaper thing that women were selling.
There, I summarized the article because you clicked through and still didn't read it.
Fine. You tell me why the birds are hatching early and then starving to death from a lack of insects, in historically unprecedented ways. Your theory should provide evidence of comparable quality to that in this paper: http://rsos.royalsocietypublis.... It will not be sufficient for you to say "a kid stomped on all the bugs" or something like that.
It's not like they pulled this answer out of their asses. They presented actual evidence, whereas you are countering that by saying "well OF COURSE you'd say that, regardless of the evidence".
This climate change is caused almost entirely by the sun and the oceans.
But this isn't borne out by evidence. The sun has cooled very slightly, but the temperature has spiked up: https://www.skepticalscience.c...
The oceans absorb and release carbon dioxide in direct proportion to atmospheric carbon dioxide. They essentially function to reduce the impact of atmospheric CO2 changes that would otherwise happen, in either direction. The ocean doesn't just burp out CO2 on a whim.
Every reputable expert on geologic evidence I can find suggest that geologic evidence actually indicates that current climate change is overwhelmingly from human activity, and unusually rapid. There will of course be error bars and overall trendlines from natural sources as well, although it's not even clear that trendline runs in the same direction as current climate change.
I get why it's chilling to spy on your spouse or your child.
However, you have every right to spy on the whereabouts of your *car*. Those things are expensive, they get stolen, and sometimes people who didn't even do anything wrong get in trouble and it can be useful to know where it is, and maybe you just like to see where you yourself went. And if your child happens to use your car, then a consequence is you can figure out where they were.
Don't stick cameras in your child's room, even though it's your house that you pay for. But sure, track your car, your wallet, your cellphone. I'd even go so far as to say that it's not crazy to tell younger children they have to carry something with them that can be tracked (this might also assuage people's weird fears about kids walking to school alone).
I'm glad the moderators figured out you were joking, because most of the accounts responding seem to have failed the Turing Test.
The "very young" is an interesting point. From a quick look, I can't find the age range that the 75% applies to. I can't imagine they were counting newborn babies, but I could perhaps imagine they included young students.
I'll preface this by saying I think that the lazy person who is also starving / homeless because they are so lazy, *is* a myth. The hardest working people in society are at the bottom rungs. That doesn't mean that the CEO of the multimillion dollar corporation doesn't work his ass off. But the janitor working 2 full time jobs and one part time job to make rent is also working his ass off.
And it doesn't have to be paid work either. [examples]
That's where it falls over. You (maybe not you personally, but you generically) can find the same fulfillment in reading, playing video games, solving logic puzzles, considering philosophy, socialising with peers, playing sports, commenting on Internet forums, etc.. You could call that "work" in a sense, but it's the sort of work that nobody would give a shit about if you stopped doing (except the writers you pay to write books, developers you pay to develop games, people who read your brilliantly insightful comments on Slashdot, etc.). I can tell you the sense of accomplishment from completing all the toughest SpaceChem challenges is as much or more than any accomplishment I've ever had in my career, and I'd rather get the SpaceChem style accomplishments because I had fun doing it. This is at least as mentally active as a monk's chores.
The lazy person who doesn't want to do any work *that anybody else needs* absolutely exists. I have no data on how common they are relative to the people who have a deep-seated need to be valued by others, but it's common enough. That's what's at issue here.
Fortunately, there is an answer. A universal basic income doesn't have to be so luxurious that lazy people don't want more, and will trade their labour to get more. And if you can afford it to be so luxurious that they don't work? Then so what, they don't work. Clearly you didn't need them to generate this luxury lifestyle for everyone.
I really, honestly don't know how a UBI will work out in practice. It's barely been experimented on. I hope it works. The principles behind it are not unsound. But practical economics is often way more complicated than our simple pure theories predict.
Obviously a brand new house that is immediately torn down isn't a net gain for society. This said, this statement doesn't follow:
If it had, there wouldn't have been a need for a bail-out
.
No matter how you slice it, if you hold all else equal, but give everybody a house twice as big as it was 50 years ago, then *clearly* more productive capacity has been brought to bear. It's irrelevant whether it's encoded as a debt transaction or a cash transaction, somebody had to build and maintain houses, and it happened. We have more stuff. Debt is not negative-stuff.
This said, your link is very interesting. The 1440 hours annually figure it provides at the end was during a period of unusually low-labour, so let's compare it to http://www.businessinsider.com.... Looks like they still worked more than the Germans. Americans are working about 120% as much. Let's make every Friday a day off in the US, and you'll roughly match a period of unusually low-labour in preindustrial civilization :). Interesting note, even in the US, where labour has remained high, labourers work more than 10% less than they did 60 years ago.
Note the businessinsider.com links is for "full-time workers", and your link was for "laborers". It's probably as close to apples-to-apples as we're going to get without embarking on a huge research project. Obviously that does skim over part-time workers and phenomena like periods of time where women were more or less likely to be counted in the full-time labour pool (my understanding is that the 50s would be the outlier time period, and now and preindustrial are closer to one another).
Extremely skeptical on this genetic basis of left-right, though I do accept that genetics could swing your opinion on an important issue or two that the current left/right paradigm happens to be divided on. The thing with left-right is it puts multiple variables on a single axis of consideration.
There is no obvious reason for your belief in the literal truth of a religious textbook that mostly doesn't address economic theory, to be correlated with your belief in supply-sided economic systems. And in some countries, the correlation doesn't really appear. Even at some times in living memory in the US, it wasn't there. But right now in the US, there is a strong correlation between those things.
Yes, I think the Democrats will win this election, but you're fooling yourself if you pretend that the Republicans don't have a decent chance. Especially as compared to their chances of having a Republican president before the next election.
I would imagine that's part of the rules being written over the next six months. Rationally, we know the correct solution is "it depends". A software error could get the license revoked across-the-board until it received an update to resolve the situation, and a mechanical error would get an individual fixed.
You're confused. Humans *are* great apes (aka hominids, a taxonomic family). Our common ancestor with other apes was itself a great ape. Chimpanzees are more closely related to humans than either are to Gorillas, even though all three are great apes, because the common ancestor between Chimpanzee and Human is a descendant of the common ancestor between the three and Gorilla.
Look here: http://www.evolutionarymodel.c...
Here's the study on what the last common ancestor between humans and extant non-humans probably looked like: http://www.sci-news.com/others...
Ape refers to individuals of an ape species. Humans are an ape species, and they are several apes.
Every time somebody claims the Earth isn't round because it's an oblate spheroid, a devil gets his pitchfork.
Every time somebody claims that it's inaccurate to say that the Earth orbits the sun, a flesh-eating zombie rises from his grave.
If the difference between "Climate Change" is settled science and the reality of climate change is the same as the difference between the Earth orbiting the sun and the Earth orbiting the Sun-Earth barycenter (which is to say, a difference of precision, not accuracy), then we wouldn't be having any arguments today.
I think you need to read this, first of all: http://chem.tufts.edu/answersi...
Actually, the earth is not round. It is more round than flat, but it is an oblate spheroid. You are showing off your high school education there...
Actually, the Earth is round. If you're going to claim that an oblate spheroid isn't round, then I'm going to claim that the sandcastle I built has taken the Earth from being an oblate spheroid to a sandcastle-surfaced oblate spheroid.
Somebody with a post-high school education can surely look up the definition of round: "shaped like or approximately like a sphere.". The Earth is approximately an oblate spheroid, and approximately a sphere.
The earth orbiting the sun is a tautology,
No it isn't. Seriously? People got burned at the stake over this.
Okay, it's disputed whether they were burned over this, whether the most prominent proponents just *happened* to get burned at the stake for unrelated reasons, but still.
that is the planets orbit the sun, and that defines the word orbit
For it to be a tautology, Earth would have to be, by definition, a planet. But we Earthlings concluded that Earth is a planet because the Earth orbits the sun.
Note though that we say the Earth orbits the Sun because that's a much simpler model than epicycles, but you *can* come up with an entirely consistent set of orbital mechanics where the Earth is defined to contain the center of the solar system. It's just not worth doing, so we say prefer to say the Earth orbits the sun. Planets are defined in the sense that is most convenient, without all the epicycles.
If you mean that the earth revolves around the sun as opposed to the sun revolving around the earth, you are describing a physical fact, not a scientific one.
Meaningless. Physics is science. Physical facts are scientific facts.
Science defines the law of gravity, the application of science only deduces that the earth revolves around the sun.
I don't understand the use of the word "only" in that sentence, but regardless, you seem to be contradicting yourself.
Space time can be curved AS FAR AS WE KNOW.
That's what SCIENCE IS.
Your statement is very similar to the statements made by Newtonian physicists.
So...correct?
You have to realize, if there's something deeper than General Relativity (and there is, because it's not fully unified with Quantum Mechanics, at least not in a settled way), it has to converge to the same results as General Relativity, within the very small margins of error we have, for every test we've ever had of General Relativity. The same as General Relativity converges on Newtonian Physics. Newtonian Physics is correct, so long as you aren't dealing with quantum-scale things or situations where space-time's curvature comes into play.
We might learn tomorrow that this only appears to be the case and there is some other, deeper fundamental behavior.
Yep. But the ground doesn't cease to be flat as far as the eye can see when we discover that the round-Earth model is the best explanation for why you can walk due east from a given point and never head West, and ultimately end up back where you started.
Curved space-time is the difference between General Relativity and Newtonian Physics, and the difference is there.
This is why we have theories about everything, instead of laws, because even Newtons laws have caveats thanks to our understanding of general relativity.
No, it's not. Theory doesn't mean a law we aren't sure of. It's not a hierarchy. The difference is somewhat fuzzy but as a rule of thumb, if you see a mathematical statement with an equals sign, it's a law. If
No, nothing like that. Climate does always change; people are talking about the current Climate Change because the evidence suggests that it is unusually quick and projected to change an amount that will have significant impact to civilization, depending on whether we take steps to curb it.
That's *nothing* like claiming the Earth isn't round.
For a very unscientific definition of "round."
What's unscientific about it? It's not a mathematically perfect sphere, but it is absolutely round.
No, the two-body formula for the earth and sun revolves around a common gravitational centerpoint (barycenter) that is within the volume of the sun. In an absolute scale, everything orbits everything.
It orbits a point inside the sun, or in other words, it orbits the sun. I think you said "no" as if you were thinking he said the earth orbited the exact center of the sun (either geometrically or center-of-mass), but nobody said that.
aside from gravity wells, space/time is flatter than we have the theoretical capability to test.
In other words, space time can be curved.
Ten years is not enough to settle anything scientific, especially not with models as bad at predicting the present as AGW use (not to mention the issues of
Global warming was not thought up ten years ago. Seriously?
So first, malware is not 100% due to those, but a good percent.
Second...your point c is what everybody is afraid of. Enumerating it doesn't make it go away.
I pay cash to websites which actually provide useful content to me. If you aren't willing to pay cash money to the website then it probably isn't worth much to you.
If those websites are so valueless, then why bother installing AdBlock in the first place? There's three obvious possibilities:
1. You're going there on purpose, so they *do* add value to you.
2. You're going there accidentally and AdBlock protects against that. In that case, would you use a service that instead replaces sites that contain ads with a single error page, stating that the site is ad-supported, and gives you the option of paying the site, accepting the ads anyway?
3. You're evaluating whether this site is of value to you so you can choose whether to pay them money. In which case, a non-obnoxious ad seems kind of like a reasonable compromise.
I am not so inflexible in how I'm willing to pay, and that includes receiving ads that aren't obnoxious, but it doesn't include every ad that I experience in practice (even with AdBlock). I do pay money to sites like Hulu that give me the option & I use frequently.
Generally, I don't mind ads so long as:
1. They don't engage me in ways that I wouldn't otherwise use on a page/app/whatever. For instance, an audio ad when I'm reading a written article is trying to engage me through sound; that's completely unacceptable.
2. Doesn't consume an inordinate amount of space/time compared to the media I'm consuming. Youtube frequently fails this.
3. Doesn't try to deceive me into thinking it's not an ad. "One weird trick" is like that.
To me it is adblock selling out. They're basically offering advertisers a protection racket. I want no part of that. I don't need an ad blocker whose interests are not clearly aligned with my own.
That's certainly a valid fear. My counter is that AdBlock doing this doesn't imply that it's impossible to block ads with a different service. If AdBlock starts letting shit through I don't like, I switch to another ad blocking method.
Who says they deserve compensation? Their bad business model is not my problem. Provide value or go away.
I do, as the person consuming that content. I want services like Google to exist. I want Slashdot to exist without requiring paid subscriptions -- you *can* subscribe to them but I think most don't.