So, what you are referring to is a variant of gap-creationism, where there's a gap between each day. It doesn't fit the evidence either. The order of which things are created is not the order which they evolved. Moreover, the fossil record is not consistent with large gaps between successive creations in this fashion.
And I believe that evolution occurs, but evolution doesn't explain what happened before the beginning of time, or where all the mass in the universe came from in the first place.
Since no one claims that evolution has anything to do with these (evolution talks about the diversification of life after life arose, nothing more), this indicates that you don't know what you are talking about. Please take an actual ev bio course or do something similar.
I considered the metadata and timestamp to be very interesting a few days ago, and to be a possible indication of forgery. I no longer consider that to be the case. Gleick explained that he got the document separately and then obtained the other documents to try to verify that document. Gleick's story adequately explains the apparent differences in metadata.
Alex was clearly pretty smart. However, it is as yet still unclear if Alex was actually a representative parrot or was smarter than other parrots. A lot of the current work being done will help answer that. There's also some concern that some of the early experiments with Alex didn't adequately handle the Clever Hahns problem- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans where an animal rather than give actual answers uses subtle cues from the examiner on how to answer correctly. The more recent experiments help address that. It seems clear at this point that Alex's intelligence, and that of the other African Greys, is genuine, but what the average is like is still unclear. One thing is certain though: the use of the word "parrot" to mean mindlessly repeat is deeply unfair.
That isn't the only piece of evidence. Please reread her piece. There's the matter of the discrepancy with what the Koch funding is for. There's the general lack of standard puffery in the piece that you expect in a strategy document- this reads much more like a monologue by an evil villain. Contrast it for example with the Wedge document - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_document, a similar leak from the Discovery Institute, and note the differences in presentation. There's the convenient matter, that every factual detail is contained in the other documents. There's the strange focus on Forbes, which seems out of place in the document. There's the fact that the document looks photoscanned (in contrast to all the other documents in the leak). None of these are absolute markers, but each is a small sign of weakness. Taken together they raise a serious issue.
McArdle is fairly right-wing, but she strongly disagrees with the right-wing attitudes about climate change. She both agrees with the scientific consensus that it is happening due to people, and she supports direct government intervention to help deal with it. She isn't a person who is going to make apologetics for Heartland on this simply for that. In any event, putting the author aside, she does seem to raise some pretty troubling issues about the nature of the document. Her pieces make me much less certain that the document is real. I still think it is more likely than not to be real, but not by much.
The most fascinating thing about this is the general hypocrisy involved. Whenever the whole "ClimateGate" matter occurred, Heartland was at the front of trumpeting the documents from that (which incidentally turned out to be utterly benign), with zero concern about the ethics of taking confidential documents from other people using hacking. Yet now, when the same thing happens to them, they use every bit of the legal system to go after not just the people who actually did do it but anyone who is then commenting or reproducing the documents. Really charming behavior.
This is great. Now we can get Sanderson back on his own stuff. More Mistborn! And maybe the sequel to Way of Kings. Sanderson is one of the best fantasy writers alive today. It will be good for him to go back to his own, very original stuff. His own works are much more groundbreaking than Jordan's. So for example, in the Mistborn books he's been far more willing to play around with the tech level of "fantasy" universes. His most recent book in that universe, "Allow of Law" is excellent and essentially amounts to a demonstration that contrary to common belief, fantasy worlds can have guns and not suck.
So you did essentially answer the question. One of these you doesn't register in your moral system. And in fact, as discussed already, the existence of child porn or distribution of child porn doesn't by itself hurt children. And in the vast majority of the cases in discussion, it isn't even clear that it would normally be labeled child porn. We're talking mainly about pictures taken off the web from Facebook and the like of teenagers. Now, you may find that morally problematic. I find it repugnant. But finding something morally repugnant isn't a reason to let people not engage in essentially harmless acts. If free speech and tolerance mean anything they can't be just for the speech that one doesn't mind. That's not free speech.
There's a decent argument for most (not all) of Stallman's position. The essential problem with pedophilia is that children can't consent in an informed fashion. But that's not much of an issue for most of the rest of that list. If someone states in their will that people can use their body for necrophilia, then why should society have a problem with it?
The issue of possession of child porn is a really interesting case. What actual benefit comes from having laws against possession of child pornography? One can argue that exposure to child porn will make people more likely to go out and molest children. That's an interesting argument, but there's nor real evidence that exposure does make it more likely. Moreover, one could easily make an argument in the other direction- that people with pedophilic tendencies will be less likely to act on them if they have outlets in the form of porn. There's some corroborating evidence- in general rape levels go down when internet access goes up- http://www.toddkendall.net/internetcrime.pdf. Now, you could argue that the continued distribution of child pornography will further traumatize the children who were abused to make it. But if one believes this argument, then one shouldn't have any problem with porn that has been digitally altered to look like it is child porn, something which is currently illegal. And one shouldn't have a problem with child porn when either the children are dead or as adults they've stated that the material's continued distribution doesn't bother them. Yet, again, the law doesn't allow this.
In the case of the subreddits this is particularly interesting in that according to the people who actually spend time in these subreddits, these pictures aren't taken in any coercive fashion but are often simply found on the internet, taken from Facebook profiles, or taken at public beaches and the like. There's no real difference then than creepy individuals watching teenagers in public locations. Creepy and disturbing but not illegal. Moreover, this sort of thing runs into serious issues of legality between countries. While pretty much everyone agrees that a 12 year old can't consent, the actual age of consent varies a lot from country to country, and many are much lower than those in the US. So using a standard of 18 years essentially forces the US standard on an international internet community. In any event, it is very difficult to argue that anyone is being actually harmed by this content.
The behavior in question is sick, disturbing and morally repugnant. But the actual measure of how much one really allows freedom of speech and tolerance is not what one allows that one doesn't mind, it is how much one allows that one does mind. In a similar fashion, one isn't demonstrating incredible tolerance when one supports gay marriage if one doesn't have a moral problem with gay marriage. The individual who has a moral problem with homosexual activity but still supports it being legal is exercising tolerance. The situation is similar in this case. The fact that we find these people to be sick and morally repugnant is all the more reason that we need to think very carefully before we say that this behavior isn't protected as free speech and basic autonomy.
Sure. No disagreement. My response was completely about the generalization which I quoted. In the case in question, it seems pretty clear that what happened with Challenger was the wrong result.
You deserve to be modded down. Every life lost, that could have been avoided, is a disaster
This is nice rhetoric. At another level, we do actually make real trade offs involving how many deaths are acceptable. For example, banning personal cars would likely save lives. But we're not going to do it because their convenience is too high. Similarly, in the US many children die drowning in backyard pools. Banning such pools would make sense if all you care about is total deaths. But we're not going to do so, because the overall chance of death is pretty small in any given case. Lots of people also die from alcohol related issues even without counting those from drunk driving. Etc. Etc. It creates a lot of cognitive dissonance to acknowledge that we're actually ok with letting some people die, because we don't like to tell ourselves that we allow that sort of thing. But we're still going to make the tradeoffs.
Absolutely not. This is criminal behavior. The vast majority of traders are law abiding citizens who are trying to make a living. They are necessary to allow for general market liquidity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_liquidity and for the world economy to function. In a general economic crisis, everyone is going to get hurt, and some countries more so than others. It is also pretty damn clear that he was't using this money to help little orphans or unemployed widows or what not. This was money that the criminal directed to himself. And much of the money in the stock market is in pension funds and the like for all sorts of companies, so draining money from the market ends up hurting all sorts of people who are about to retire and live on fixed incomes or people who have already retired and are stuck on tiny fixed incomes. This isn't Robin Hood, this is a thief taking advantage of regular people.
The radiation in open space from one solar flare would fry a bunch of astronauts.
Unless the solar flare actually directly hits the spacecraft this isn't a big worry. In fact, to some extent under the right circumstances things are safe during a solar flare since there will be less exposure to cosmic rays due to the Forbush effect- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbush_decrease. And magnetic shielding can easily handle any indirect solar flare, while direct hits are extremely rare (the ISS for example has been in space for about a decade and has never gotten a serious direct hit). In general, the risk of solar flares is wildly overestimated.
Endeavor Crater where it is very close to now is about 17 km (11 miles) from the point Opportunity landed. But the actual travel path was not a straight line, so the actual total travel is probably on the order of 20 or 25 km.
Actually you can use a padding argument to construct languages that are equivalent to the Halting problem but aren't NP-hard. For example, let t_n be the nth Turing machine by some reasonable ordering. Consider then the language that accepts a number k written in binary if and only if k=2^2^2^n for some n such that t_n halts on the blank tape. This is equivalent to the halting problem but the language size blows up too fast to gives answers to NP-hard problems (as long as P!=NP. Of course if P=NP then all languages are NP hard).
How you define the problems matter
on
Pac-Man Is NP-Hard
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· Score: 4, Interesting
This is a good example of how you define the problems mattering. For example he declares Starcraft to be at least NP-hard. But if one is allowed to use trigger events and some other aspects of the scenario editor one can actually fully model a Turing machine in Starcraft. You do this in a straightforward way by giving trigger based instructions to a unit (say a probe) and have it move along a line where having some other specified unit in an adjacent spot represents a 1, or one has a 0 if the unit isn't there. This is a much stronger result than the result he has. But it seems that his version of Starcraft as defined doesn't let you use event triggers (or at least he doesn't mention them). So he only gets the weaker result of Starcraft being NP hard.
In the 1970s and 1980s, showing something was NP-hard used to be a big deal and there are a lot of papers from that time period. As the techniques improved one occasionally got some fun with someone showing that some new game was NP hard or NP complete (Tetris was done a few years ago as was Minesweeper). But these are really not considered to have any real insight. This paper is a bit more impressive because of the sheer number of games, and the systematic way he approaches the games especially his Metatheorem 1 and Metatheorem 2. Those two results are not obvious. Overall this is quite clever and makes for a fun read.
Sure. In fact, that sort of legitimate sharing is exactly what is being hurt by people like the person I replied to. The individual isn't picking up nice independent music that is being freely offered. The fact that much of his emphasis is on how some methods are harder to trace the IP addresses makes it pretty clear what sort of thing he's interested in. The use of sharing services so that small time people can legitimately get an audience without having to go through big recording companies is one of the great innovations in art in the last few years. I have little doubt that when groups like the RIAA go after filesharing websites and the like, they are motivated in part due to the threat such websites would pose to them even if they only had freely available material. Downloading copyrighted stuff like what the OP wants just makes those targets more legitimate.
This sort of comment is part of the problem, not the solution. Breaking the law simply because one isn't going go through the effort to pay for something optional like music is not helpful. It isn't noble. And it is exactly the sort of thing that makes nasty things like SOPA and the like get momentum. And as a result now, websites like Filesonic, which has perfectly legal and legitimate uses are now running into trouble. By all means, help those of us who care about civil liberties fight against draconian laws that would damage the Internet, and by all means join us in our attempts to make copyright laws marginally sane. But don't think that you are doing anything helpful when you make posts like the above.
Currently, the B612 Foundation http://www.b612foundation.org/b612/ is interested in similar stuff but is an NGO. Although they have a much smaller budget (and to some extent do more in the way of lobbying rather than direct research) They have the virtue of having a much better name than "NEOShield." B612 is the name of the asteroid in "The Little Prince".
The group NEOshield from their reports seems to have correctly acknowledged that using a big nuke to just blow up an asteroid is not a good solution. However, it does seem like they aren't very sure what would be the actual best thing to concentrate on.
This sort of reasoning is a common cognitive error. People assume that if someone else is stupid then doing the exact opposite must be smart. Or that if someone else frequently behaves immorally then doing the opposite must be moral. But this isn't accurate. Homeopathy is stupid, but avoiding consumption of water as the reversed form is really dumb. Similarly, if some serial killer tortured to death a dozen people, and they also volunteered an animal shelter for abandoned puppies, that doesn't make kicking puppies to death a good idea.
Slashdot Mirror
And I believe that evolution occurs, but evolution doesn't explain what happened before the beginning of time, or where all the mass in the universe came from in the first place.
Since no one claims that evolution has anything to do with these (evolution talks about the diversification of life after life arose, nothing more), this indicates that you don't know what you are talking about. Please take an actual ev bio course or do something similar.
I considered the metadata and timestamp to be very interesting a few days ago, and to be a possible indication of forgery. I no longer consider that to be the case. Gleick explained that he got the document separately and then obtained the other documents to try to verify that document. Gleick's story adequately explains the apparent differences in metadata.
Alex was clearly pretty smart. However, it is as yet still unclear if Alex was actually a representative parrot or was smarter than other parrots. A lot of the current work being done will help answer that. There's also some concern that some of the early experiments with Alex didn't adequately handle the Clever Hahns problem- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans where an animal rather than give actual answers uses subtle cues from the examiner on how to answer correctly. The more recent experiments help address that. It seems clear at this point that Alex's intelligence, and that of the other African Greys, is genuine, but what the average is like is still unclear. One thing is certain though: the use of the word "parrot" to mean mindlessly repeat is deeply unfair.
That isn't the only piece of evidence. Please reread her piece. There's the matter of the discrepancy with what the Koch funding is for. There's the general lack of standard puffery in the piece that you expect in a strategy document- this reads much more like a monologue by an evil villain. Contrast it for example with the Wedge document - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_document, a similar leak from the Discovery Institute, and note the differences in presentation. There's the convenient matter, that every factual detail is contained in the other documents. There's the strange focus on Forbes, which seems out of place in the document. There's the fact that the document looks photoscanned (in contrast to all the other documents in the leak). None of these are absolute markers, but each is a small sign of weakness. Taken together they raise a serious issue.
McArdle is fairly right-wing, but she strongly disagrees with the right-wing attitudes about climate change. She both agrees with the scientific consensus that it is happening due to people, and she supports direct government intervention to help deal with it. She isn't a person who is going to make apologetics for Heartland on this simply for that. In any event, putting the author aside, she does seem to raise some pretty troubling issues about the nature of the document. Her pieces make me much less certain that the document is real. I still think it is more likely than not to be real, but not by much.
The most fascinating thing about this is the general hypocrisy involved. Whenever the whole "ClimateGate" matter occurred, Heartland was at the front of trumpeting the documents from that (which incidentally turned out to be utterly benign), with zero concern about the ethics of taking confidential documents from other people using hacking. Yet now, when the same thing happens to them, they use every bit of the legal system to go after not just the people who actually did do it but anyone who is then commenting or reproducing the documents. Really charming behavior.
This is great. Now we can get Sanderson back on his own stuff. More Mistborn! And maybe the sequel to Way of Kings. Sanderson is one of the best fantasy writers alive today. It will be good for him to go back to his own, very original stuff. His own works are much more groundbreaking than Jordan's. So for example, in the Mistborn books he's been far more willing to play around with the tech level of "fantasy" universes. His most recent book in that universe, "Allow of Law" is excellent and essentially amounts to a demonstration that contrary to common belief, fantasy worlds can have guns and not suck.
So you did essentially answer the question. One of these you doesn't register in your moral system. And in fact, as discussed already, the existence of child porn or distribution of child porn doesn't by itself hurt children. And in the vast majority of the cases in discussion, it isn't even clear that it would normally be labeled child porn. We're talking mainly about pictures taken off the web from Facebook and the like of teenagers. Now, you may find that morally problematic. I find it repugnant. But finding something morally repugnant isn't a reason to let people not engage in essentially harmless acts. If free speech and tolerance mean anything they can't be just for the speech that one doesn't mind. That's not free speech.
If your statement starts with, "I'm not defending pictures of Muhammad, but" ,you should just stop typing, and quit while you're ahead.
Does that sound different to you? If so, why? Is it simply that one is bad in your own moral framework and the other one isn't?
There's a decent argument for most (not all) of Stallman's position. The essential problem with pedophilia is that children can't consent in an informed fashion. But that's not much of an issue for most of the rest of that list. If someone states in their will that people can use their body for necrophilia, then why should society have a problem with it?
The issue of possession of child porn is a really interesting case. What actual benefit comes from having laws against possession of child pornography? One can argue that exposure to child porn will make people more likely to go out and molest children. That's an interesting argument, but there's nor real evidence that exposure does make it more likely. Moreover, one could easily make an argument in the other direction- that people with pedophilic tendencies will be less likely to act on them if they have outlets in the form of porn. There's some corroborating evidence- in general rape levels go down when internet access goes up- http://www.toddkendall.net/internetcrime.pdf. Now, you could argue that the continued distribution of child pornography will further traumatize the children who were abused to make it. But if one believes this argument, then one shouldn't have any problem with porn that has been digitally altered to look like it is child porn, something which is currently illegal. And one shouldn't have a problem with child porn when either the children are dead or as adults they've stated that the material's continued distribution doesn't bother them. Yet, again, the law doesn't allow this.
In the case of the subreddits this is particularly interesting in that according to the people who actually spend time in these subreddits, these pictures aren't taken in any coercive fashion but are often simply found on the internet, taken from Facebook profiles, or taken at public beaches and the like. There's no real difference then than creepy individuals watching teenagers in public locations. Creepy and disturbing but not illegal. Moreover, this sort of thing runs into serious issues of legality between countries. While pretty much everyone agrees that a 12 year old can't consent, the actual age of consent varies a lot from country to country, and many are much lower than those in the US. So using a standard of 18 years essentially forces the US standard on an international internet community. In any event, it is very difficult to argue that anyone is being actually harmed by this content.
The behavior in question is sick, disturbing and morally repugnant. But the actual measure of how much one really allows freedom of speech and tolerance is not what one allows that one doesn't mind, it is how much one allows that one does mind. In a similar fashion, one isn't demonstrating incredible tolerance when one supports gay marriage if one doesn't have a moral problem with gay marriage. The individual who has a moral problem with homosexual activity but still supports it being legal is exercising tolerance. The situation is similar in this case. The fact that we find these people to be sick and morally repugnant is all the more reason that we need to think very carefully before we say that this behavior isn't protected as free speech and basic autonomy.
Right, they really wanted to go and defend Byzantium. That's why during the First Crusade, the crusaders first action was to massacre the Jews in Germany. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Crusade#Attacks_on_Jews_in_the_Rhineland.
Sure. No disagreement. My response was completely about the generalization which I quoted. In the case in question, it seems pretty clear that what happened with Challenger was the wrong result.
You deserve to be modded down. Every life lost, that could have been avoided, is a disaster
This is nice rhetoric. At another level, we do actually make real trade offs involving how many deaths are acceptable. For example, banning personal cars would likely save lives. But we're not going to do it because their convenience is too high. Similarly, in the US many children die drowning in backyard pools. Banning such pools would make sense if all you care about is total deaths. But we're not going to do so, because the overall chance of death is pretty small in any given case. Lots of people also die from alcohol related issues even without counting those from drunk driving. Etc. Etc. It creates a lot of cognitive dissonance to acknowledge that we're actually ok with letting some people die, because we don't like to tell ourselves that we allow that sort of thing. But we're still going to make the tradeoffs.
Is Linux unfair competition for Windows because it's given away for free?
There's no danger that everyone using Linux will have to pay Linus Torvalds to keep using it after it gains market ascendancy.
Yeah, see most of us aren't so nationalistic that we think that minor indirect help to our home country excuses stealing money from poor retirees.
Absolutely not. This is criminal behavior. The vast majority of traders are law abiding citizens who are trying to make a living. They are necessary to allow for general market liquidity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_liquidity and for the world economy to function. In a general economic crisis, everyone is going to get hurt, and some countries more so than others. It is also pretty damn clear that he was't using this money to help little orphans or unemployed widows or what not. This was money that the criminal directed to himself. And much of the money in the stock market is in pension funds and the like for all sorts of companies, so draining money from the market ends up hurting all sorts of people who are about to retire and live on fixed incomes or people who have already retired and are stuck on tiny fixed incomes. This isn't Robin Hood, this is a thief taking advantage of regular people.
The radiation in open space from one solar flare would fry a bunch of astronauts.
Unless the solar flare actually directly hits the spacecraft this isn't a big worry. In fact, to some extent under the right circumstances things are safe during a solar flare since there will be less exposure to cosmic rays due to the Forbush effect- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbush_decrease. And magnetic shielding can easily handle any indirect solar flare, while direct hits are extremely rare (the ISS for example has been in space for about a decade and has never gotten a serious direct hit). In general, the risk of solar flares is wildly overestimated.
Endeavor Crater where it is very close to now is about 17 km (11 miles) from the point Opportunity landed. But the actual travel path was not a straight line, so the actual total travel is probably on the order of 20 or 25 km.
Actually you can use a padding argument to construct languages that are equivalent to the Halting problem but aren't NP-hard. For example, let t_n be the nth Turing machine by some reasonable ordering. Consider then the language that accepts a number k written in binary if and only if k=2^2^2^n for some n such that t_n halts on the blank tape. This is equivalent to the halting problem but the language size blows up too fast to gives answers to NP-hard problems (as long as P!=NP. Of course if P=NP then all languages are NP hard).
This is a good example of how you define the problems mattering. For example he declares Starcraft to be at least NP-hard. But if one is allowed to use trigger events and some other aspects of the scenario editor one can actually fully model a Turing machine in Starcraft. You do this in a straightforward way by giving trigger based instructions to a unit (say a probe) and have it move along a line where having some other specified unit in an adjacent spot represents a 1, or one has a 0 if the unit isn't there. This is a much stronger result than the result he has. But it seems that his version of Starcraft as defined doesn't let you use event triggers (or at least he doesn't mention them). So he only gets the weaker result of Starcraft being NP hard.
In the 1970s and 1980s, showing something was NP-hard used to be a big deal and there are a lot of papers from that time period. As the techniques improved one occasionally got some fun with someone showing that some new game was NP hard or NP complete (Tetris was done a few years ago as was Minesweeper). But these are really not considered to have any real insight. This paper is a bit more impressive because of the sheer number of games, and the systematic way he approaches the games especially his Metatheorem 1 and Metatheorem 2. Those two results are not obvious. Overall this is quite clever and makes for a fun read.
Yes, that's an important distinction especially since in many locations outside the US one can't actually release works into the public domain.
Sure. In fact, that sort of legitimate sharing is exactly what is being hurt by people like the person I replied to. The individual isn't picking up nice independent music that is being freely offered. The fact that much of his emphasis is on how some methods are harder to trace the IP addresses makes it pretty clear what sort of thing he's interested in. The use of sharing services so that small time people can legitimately get an audience without having to go through big recording companies is one of the great innovations in art in the last few years. I have little doubt that when groups like the RIAA go after filesharing websites and the like, they are motivated in part due to the threat such websites would pose to them even if they only had freely available material. Downloading copyrighted stuff like what the OP wants just makes those targets more legitimate.
This sort of comment is part of the problem, not the solution. Breaking the law simply because one isn't going go through the effort to pay for something optional like music is not helpful. It isn't noble. And it is exactly the sort of thing that makes nasty things like SOPA and the like get momentum. And as a result now, websites like Filesonic, which has perfectly legal and legitimate uses are now running into trouble. By all means, help those of us who care about civil liberties fight against draconian laws that would damage the Internet, and by all means join us in our attempts to make copyright laws marginally sane. But don't think that you are doing anything helpful when you make posts like the above.
Currently, the B612 Foundation http://www.b612foundation.org/b612/ is interested in similar stuff but is an NGO. Although they have a much smaller budget (and to some extent do more in the way of lobbying rather than direct research) They have the virtue of having a much better name than "NEOShield." B612 is the name of the asteroid in "The Little Prince".
The group NEOshield from their reports seems to have correctly acknowledged that using a big nuke to just blow up an asteroid is not a good solution. However, it does seem like they aren't very sure what would be the actual best thing to concentrate on.
This sort of reasoning is a common cognitive error. People assume that if someone else is stupid then doing the exact opposite must be smart. Or that if someone else frequently behaves immorally then doing the opposite must be moral. But this isn't accurate. Homeopathy is stupid, but avoiding consumption of water as the reversed form is really dumb. Similarly, if some serial killer tortured to death a dozen people, and they also volunteered an animal shelter for abandoned puppies, that doesn't make kicking puppies to death a good idea.