Very insightful. The other thing I hate is when people say, "A spider is not a bug, because a bug is an insect! A spider is an arachnid!" But "bug" was never a scientific category anyway, and its definition never meant "insect." A "bug" is defined culturally, not scientifically, and culturally we tend to think of spiders as bugs.
The problem here is more than just the fact that there's lots of annoying and whiny people in the world. The problem is that we tend to have a strange assumption that science can control language. This would make sense if language were a mere utility, but language is really a deep part of who we are and the symbolic systems that govern the ways in which we think. Thus language is far more likely to govern the way that we approach science than the other way around.
Fortunately, there's absolutely nothing in Oklahoma, Alabama, or Mississippi that anyone here would want, so this only affects the poor folks who live there. But it does explain why they're at the bottom of almost every state ranking of quality of life.
Uh, no. Not only are you misinformed about the hell thing, but the Church has actively supported making the documents available to wider audiences. There's no reason to be scared of what is said because the validity of the Church is not based on some kind of myth of absolute human perfection. It's funny that people have to make up silly stories about popes when actual history is scandalous enough, and yet it does not undermine the Church one bit. One of my favorites is Pope Pius II, who wrote a raunchy play about priests picking prostitutes before he became pope. But that doesn't undermine the Church. We don't need the pretense that it is comprised of perfect human beings, because its authority is not grounded on human perfection but rather divine election. Even the claim that the pope can teach infallibly does not mean that everything he says is infallible, nor that he is a particularly excellent human being.
Perhaps the thing people are more afraid of seeing is how much documentary evidence actually speaks in favor of the Church. Many people will easily look past anything that doesn't complement their Dan Brown view of history.
This sounds like a great idea, but it's likely to be extraordinarily complicated. Not only does handwriting differ from age to age, culture to culture, and place to place (just try reading 20th century German Sütterlin), but many medieval manuscripts utilize complex systems of abbreviations called sigla. Interpreting these can be very complicated because they are heavily context-dependent. One symbol can mean several different things. For example, a cross through a p can mean per, prae, or pro. A line over some letters can signify anything being cut out in-between. Just try figuring out what this inscription says: here.
Reading such abbreviations was probably expected to be relatively simple for the human brain to decipher both because the human actually interprets the text while deciphering symbols and because the original audience would have a better sense of how a particular community tended to use abbreviations.
The task is not impossible for a computer, though. In most cases there are a limited number of words that could be signified by abbreviations, and it is possible to determine which word is most likely intended according to immediate context. However, that would require the machine to have a grasp of the Latin grammar, and even then not everything is going to follow perfect rules. There is so much potential interpretation involved. The AI component here does help with this inasmuch as it uses statistical data to optimize recognition, but it's still likely to run into many difficulties.
The main innovation in TFA, as I see it, is that it responds to one of the major problems of reading old Carolingian minuscule. The letters are bunched together and there are times when you cannot be sure whether you are looking at two i's or a u, for example. The two can look exactly the same, not even just similar. The software in question attempts to handle this by recognizing individual penstrokes. Although I am not sure that this is 100% better than the older approach mentioned--recognizing whole words at a time--it does show significant promise because of its combination with AI. Perhaps some day it will be able to note, for example, that a certain author always strokes the i in a certain way. However, I'm sure there's going to be plenty of hurdles before getting to that point.
Despite the name, the Secret Archives is not all that secret. It's not hard to request and gain access. The problem is simply that there's too much material to deal with, and perhaps also the complexities of scanning old books without damaging them.
Ecobee is an awesome thermostat. I almost never have problems with it. Also, I recommend Samsung SmartThings for fine control over your smart home devices.
Exactly. I agree with bogaboga. Some common-sense moral evaluation can tell us that this is immoral, and from there we can infer that if it isn't illegal, it probably should be.
It's immoral for at least the following reasons:
The seller has full knowledge of what the item will be used for.
The seller markets the object with the direct and clear intention that it should be used for the commission of crimes.
The seller should be aware that such crimes involve immoral actions, including harm of persons and even murder. ("should" because even if the seller does not directly know, this is what is called "vincible ignorance"--an ignorance that he easily could rectify and which is therefore his own fault.)
Cartel members buy toilet paper, tacos, beer and car window tint too.
If a person sells toilet paper to a criminal to wipe his behind, that is not immoral. In fact, providing a basic necessity like medical aid to a criminal could even be a morally good act if done for the sake of the person's human dignity and not for the sake of continuing their crimes. If you happen to see someone marketing toilet paper to a criminal so that he can murder someone with it, then you can go ahead and call the police on him.
What you say may be true; I can neither confirm nor deny it, and we all have good reason to expect greed and corruption from big companies. But this is independent of the question of whether antidepressants work and whether they should be prescribed. Mixing up the issue of social justice with the issue of pharmacological treatment blurs the truth and causes people to avoid treatment not out of intelligent skepticism but rather out of a kind of superstitious fear. I know a lot of people are afraid of antidepressants, and a lot of physicians are afraid to prescribe them, in part because of the extensive warnings about increased thoughts of suicide. But I think that the data shows well that a vast number of people were greatly benefit from taking these medications as part of their treatment. Yes we need to address the issues of social justice, but we need to do so in a way that does not mitigate the message of the importance of proper treatment for those who need it.
That's great; now for the next 10,000 years we can look at the thing and wonder just how many poor people could have been saved from starving to death if we had just done something useful with the money.
Good point. Who gives all this money to SETI anyway? How about this: SETI should just give up and goes back to watching old episodes of the original Star Trek. Then they can give their leftover money to the crypto-currency miners, so that way they can pay for the next WoW expansion without wasting all that electricity. And then maybe that will hinder global warming just enough so that when the aliens do come to kill us all, we will still be alive to enjoy it...
You don't think that's a lot? Judging by Slashdot, that is more than the total value of Netflix. Of course watching Netflix's line-up is sometimes like watching the movies on MST3k without the riffing... so I'm guessing that's why people are willing to pay more to hackers than to Netflix.
I'm fairly sick of Twitter and Facebook going on about this. The Internet is full of propaganda. The world is full of propaganda. We should not be surprised if Russia meddled a bit, because we meddle in everyone else's affairs, especially in the Middle East. I don't like Trump much either, but the fact is that people are using this merely as a way to comfort themselves about him having won the election. But does it really make a difference? Were we really naive enough to think that democracy was truly fair in the first place?
Let's think about this rationally. 700,000 were exposed; that's a tiny number. A Google search says that almost 139,000,000 voted. So that means that about 0.5%--a mere half percent of voters may have been exposed. But chances are that only some of those who were exposed actually voted. And then most of them probably already were Trump supporters in the first place, who merely grabbed hold of the propaganda as confirmation of their already-held point of view. So it's impossible to say how much it affected the vote--especially given the complexities of the electoral college and the fact that we do not know where these viewers lived--but chances are that it did not affect it enough to have swayed anything.
Or let's put it another way: the burden of proof would be on those who would claim that Russia actually changed the outcome of the election. Prove it. I sincerely doubt that it will ever be proved, but people will go on and on about it because it gives them a kind of comfort to think that it was really the fault of some sinister external force. People love blaming outsiders, or even internal minorities who are treated as outsiders--such as Mexicans like myself--but it is a sad, pathetic, illegitimate comfort.
You are correct that a digital signal is naturally protected against noise to some extent inasmuch as the noise should not be mistaken for signal.
However, noise can still interrupt a digital signal if it is significant enough. Noise is a problem in my setup because I have my PC in my basement and my monitor, speakers, and peripherals on the second floor. I push the length limits of USB 3 and HDMI using active repeaters, and they still have problems both because of the long parallel runs and because they come too close to the washing machine power line. When the washer is running, even with the repeaters, there's significant mouse lag. Without the HDMI repeater, the video signal is choppy. I haven't done audio over HDMI in this setup, but I imagine it would be a problem too.
So I use Toslink optical. Yes it's far from perfect because it compresses the signal, but most of my PC's audio is compressed in a lossy way at some point. Also I had to install a hacked driver to enable 5.1 in the first place.
I agree that Toslink optical seems to be on its way out because it was pretty hard to find the right equipment at an affordable price. It's sad because I would really like the technology to be updated and improved to carry 5.1 lossless. But the fact is that most people do not care about audio quality but only about convenience (hence the popularity of even low-quality Bluetooth devices).
As for me, I really wish that I could afford the optical USB cables I've seen on Amazon to try to reduce the mouse interference. Otherwise, I may have to open up the wall in the washroom and better shield the cables from the power line.
Feminism is the 'radical' idea that men and women should be treated equally.
No, feminism is a complex and varied thing; it does not mean the same thing in all cases, and it's really not possible to give an absolute definition of it. What matters in this case is simply that Hillary self-identifies as a feminist. To that extent she can be said to be a "feminist figurehead," i.e. inasmuch as she sees herself as precisely that.
Good point, except that I think the overall loss of business among the drivers would be felt more on the part of the collective rather than the individual. It is theoretically possible for certain individuals to profit using this, even if there's less to go around for everyone.
I wouldn't be surprised, then, if someone went on a forum to encourage logging out, but stayed logged in himself. He would probably be able to pick up a fare on surge pricing before the other people logged back in. It would be a cut-throat moved, of course, and so it would be capitalism at its finest.
It mentions lithium for batteries and tellurium for solar cells. I recall also that child slave labor is one of the main problems with sourcing lithium for batteries: http://www.reuters.com/article...
Nothing is absolute, however, and I think for example it's still somewhat open exactly what kind of batteries should be used alongside solar power. I remember seeing something about a test plant in China testing all sorts of batteries to rate their efficiency and monetary costs with solar power. So it's not certain that lithium inherently poses a problem for solar power, but for now it at least makes one particular setup--lithium batteries--more complicated.
Nuclear power probably is not without its esoteric requirements when you consider everything needed to build a plant and connect it to the grid. The main benefit in regard to mining, however, is that is uses so little fuel (fissible material).
Slashdot Mirror
Very insightful. The other thing I hate is when people say, "A spider is not a bug, because a bug is an insect! A spider is an arachnid!" But "bug" was never a scientific category anyway, and its definition never meant "insect." A "bug" is defined culturally, not scientifically, and culturally we tend to think of spiders as bugs.
The problem here is more than just the fact that there's lots of annoying and whiny people in the world. The problem is that we tend to have a strange assumption that science can control language. This would make sense if language were a mere utility, but language is really a deep part of who we are and the symbolic systems that govern the ways in which we think. Thus language is far more likely to govern the way that we approach science than the other way around.
Google Home is lame. I just asked and it said, "Better minds than mine are working on that."
Fortunately, there's absolutely nothing in Oklahoma, Alabama, or Mississippi that anyone here would want, so this only affects the poor folks who live there. But it does explain why they're at the bottom of almost every state ranking of quality of life.
Speaking of self-righteousness...
Even better... EditPad!
Uh, no. Not only are you misinformed about the hell thing, but the Church has actively supported making the documents available to wider audiences. There's no reason to be scared of what is said because the validity of the Church is not based on some kind of myth of absolute human perfection. It's funny that people have to make up silly stories about popes when actual history is scandalous enough, and yet it does not undermine the Church one bit. One of my favorites is Pope Pius II, who wrote a raunchy play about priests picking prostitutes before he became pope. But that doesn't undermine the Church. We don't need the pretense that it is comprised of perfect human beings, because its authority is not grounded on human perfection but rather divine election. Even the claim that the pope can teach infallibly does not mean that everything he says is infallible, nor that he is a particularly excellent human being.
Perhaps the thing people are more afraid of seeing is how much documentary evidence actually speaks in favor of the Church. Many people will easily look past anything that doesn't complement their Dan Brown view of history.
This sounds like a great idea, but it's likely to be extraordinarily complicated. Not only does handwriting differ from age to age, culture to culture, and place to place (just try reading 20th century German Sütterlin), but many medieval manuscripts utilize complex systems of abbreviations called sigla. Interpreting these can be very complicated because they are heavily context-dependent. One symbol can mean several different things. For example, a cross through a p can mean per, prae, or pro. A line over some letters can signify anything being cut out in-between. Just try figuring out what this inscription says: here.
Reading such abbreviations was probably expected to be relatively simple for the human brain to decipher both because the human actually interprets the text while deciphering symbols and because the original audience would have a better sense of how a particular community tended to use abbreviations.
The task is not impossible for a computer, though. In most cases there are a limited number of words that could be signified by abbreviations, and it is possible to determine which word is most likely intended according to immediate context. However, that would require the machine to have a grasp of the Latin grammar, and even then not everything is going to follow perfect rules. There is so much potential interpretation involved. The AI component here does help with this inasmuch as it uses statistical data to optimize recognition, but it's still likely to run into many difficulties.
The main innovation in TFA, as I see it, is that it responds to one of the major problems of reading old Carolingian minuscule. The letters are bunched together and there are times when you cannot be sure whether you are looking at two i's or a u, for example. The two can look exactly the same, not even just similar. The software in question attempts to handle this by recognizing individual penstrokes. Although I am not sure that this is 100% better than the older approach mentioned--recognizing whole words at a time--it does show significant promise because of its combination with AI. Perhaps some day it will be able to note, for example, that a certain author always strokes the i in a certain way. However, I'm sure there's going to be plenty of hurdles before getting to that point.
Despite the name, the Secret Archives is not all that secret. It's not hard to request and gain access. The problem is simply that there's too much material to deal with, and perhaps also the complexities of scanning old books without damaging them.
Ecobee is an awesome thermostat. I almost never have problems with it. Also, I recommend Samsung SmartThings for fine control over your smart home devices.
... In fact it's even in the opening examples of the man page.
That's exactly why we need more women in tech!
Or: Take his AU$1000, and use it to get him a good shrink.
He was fined because "The prosecution argued that, by cutting the chip out of the card, the ticket was invalidated.".
The solution: next time he needs to implant the whole card in his hand.
https://imgprod60.hobbylobby.com/sys-master/migrated/hde/h71/h00/9120365412382/1129832_1[5].jpg
This says everything.
Exactly. I agree with bogaboga. Some common-sense moral evaluation can tell us that this is immoral, and from there we can infer that if it isn't illegal, it probably should be.
It's immoral for at least the following reasons:
Cartel members buy toilet paper, tacos, beer and car window tint too.
If a person sells toilet paper to a criminal to wipe his behind, that is not immoral. In fact, providing a basic necessity like medical aid to a criminal could even be a morally good act if done for the sake of the person's human dignity and not for the sake of continuing their crimes. If you happen to see someone marketing toilet paper to a criminal so that he can murder someone with it, then you can go ahead and call the police on him.
What you say may be true; I can neither confirm nor deny it, and we all have good reason to expect greed and corruption from big companies. But this is independent of the question of whether antidepressants work and whether they should be prescribed. Mixing up the issue of social justice with the issue of pharmacological treatment blurs the truth and causes people to avoid treatment not out of intelligent skepticism but rather out of a kind of superstitious fear. I know a lot of people are afraid of antidepressants, and a lot of physicians are afraid to prescribe them, in part because of the extensive warnings about increased thoughts of suicide. But I think that the data shows well that a vast number of people were greatly benefit from taking these medications as part of their treatment. Yes we need to address the issues of social justice, but we need to do so in a way that does not mitigate the message of the importance of proper treatment for those who need it.
That's great; now for the next 10,000 years we can look at the thing and wonder just how many poor people could have been saved from starving to death if we had just done something useful with the money.
Good point. Who gives all this money to SETI anyway? How about this: SETI should just give up and goes back to watching old episodes of the original Star Trek. Then they can give their leftover money to the crypto-currency miners, so that way they can pay for the next WoW expansion without wasting all that electricity. And then maybe that will hinder global warming just enough so that when the aliens do come to kill us all, we will still be alive to enjoy it...
172 billion? That's all??
You don't think that's a lot? Judging by Slashdot, that is more than the total value of Netflix. Of course watching Netflix's line-up is sometimes like watching the movies on MST3k without the riffing... so I'm guessing that's why people are willing to pay more to hackers than to Netflix.
I'm fairly sick of Twitter and Facebook going on about this. The Internet is full of propaganda. The world is full of propaganda. We should not be surprised if Russia meddled a bit, because we meddle in everyone else's affairs, especially in the Middle East. I don't like Trump much either, but the fact is that people are using this merely as a way to comfort themselves about him having won the election. But does it really make a difference? Were we really naive enough to think that democracy was truly fair in the first place?
Let's think about this rationally. 700,000 were exposed; that's a tiny number. A Google search says that almost 139,000,000 voted. So that means that about 0.5%--a mere half percent of voters may have been exposed. But chances are that only some of those who were exposed actually voted. And then most of them probably already were Trump supporters in the first place, who merely grabbed hold of the propaganda as confirmation of their already-held point of view. So it's impossible to say how much it affected the vote--especially given the complexities of the electoral college and the fact that we do not know where these viewers lived--but chances are that it did not affect it enough to have swayed anything.
Or let's put it another way: the burden of proof would be on those who would claim that Russia actually changed the outcome of the election. Prove it. I sincerely doubt that it will ever be proved, but people will go on and on about it because it gives them a kind of comfort to think that it was really the fault of some sinister external force. People love blaming outsiders, or even internal minorities who are treated as outsiders--such as Mexicans like myself--but it is a sad, pathetic, illegitimate comfort.
I know! He should have taken up pole dancing to work himself through college, like a respectable person.
You are correct that a digital signal is naturally protected against noise to some extent inasmuch as the noise should not be mistaken for signal.
However, noise can still interrupt a digital signal if it is significant enough. Noise is a problem in my setup because I have my PC in my basement and my monitor, speakers, and peripherals on the second floor. I push the length limits of USB 3 and HDMI using active repeaters, and they still have problems both because of the long parallel runs and because they come too close to the washing machine power line. When the washer is running, even with the repeaters, there's significant mouse lag. Without the HDMI repeater, the video signal is choppy. I haven't done audio over HDMI in this setup, but I imagine it would be a problem too.
So I use Toslink optical. Yes it's far from perfect because it compresses the signal, but most of my PC's audio is compressed in a lossy way at some point. Also I had to install a hacked driver to enable 5.1 in the first place.
I agree that Toslink optical seems to be on its way out because it was pretty hard to find the right equipment at an affordable price. It's sad because I would really like the technology to be updated and improved to carry 5.1 lossless. But the fact is that most people do not care about audio quality but only about convenience (hence the popularity of even low-quality Bluetooth devices).
As for me, I really wish that I could afford the optical USB cables I've seen on Amazon to try to reduce the mouse interference. Otherwise, I may have to open up the wall in the washroom and better shield the cables from the power line.
Feminism is the 'radical' idea that men and women should be treated equally.
No, feminism is a complex and varied thing; it does not mean the same thing in all cases, and it's really not possible to give an absolute definition of it. What matters in this case is simply that Hillary self-identifies as a feminist. To that extent she can be said to be a "feminist figurehead," i.e. inasmuch as she sees herself as precisely that.
Good point. (Where's my mod points when I need them?)
Good point, except that I think the overall loss of business among the drivers would be felt more on the part of the collective rather than the individual. It is theoretically possible for certain individuals to profit using this, even if there's less to go around for everyone.
I wouldn't be surprised, then, if someone went on a forum to encourage logging out, but stayed logged in himself. He would probably be able to pick up a fare on surge pricing before the other people logged back in. It would be a cut-throat moved, of course, and so it would be capitalism at its finest.
A Google search turned up this: https://e360.yale.edu/features...
It mentions lithium for batteries and tellurium for solar cells. I recall also that child slave labor is one of the main problems with sourcing lithium for batteries: http://www.reuters.com/article...
Nothing is absolute, however, and I think for example it's still somewhat open exactly what kind of batteries should be used alongside solar power. I remember seeing something about a test plant in China testing all sorts of batteries to rate their efficiency and monetary costs with solar power. So it's not certain that lithium inherently poses a problem for solar power, but for now it at least makes one particular setup--lithium batteries--more complicated.
Nuclear power probably is not without its esoteric requirements when you consider everything needed to build a plant and connect it to the grid. The main benefit in regard to mining, however, is that is uses so little fuel (fissible material).