As semi-automatic weapons where the gun is controlled by a human, yes, robots are probably the future of US warfare. The US military and public have always been obsessed with rating the lifes of American soldiers and citizens ten to hundred times higher than that of any other fellow human being on earth, including innocent civilian bystanders.
As a fully autonomous weapon, I very much doubt these robots will be usable any time in the foreseeable future, though. Reliable friend/foe recognition is a problem that will not be solved anytime soon. I'm not claiming that friendly fire is not a problem among humans, but we allow humans to make more errors than machines. When soldiers are getting shot at by their own automatized war machines, they will accept that less than if one of their fellow humans makes a mistake.
It is vital to the bizarre legal strategy of the US authorities that the public and a potential future jury are led to believe that Assange is a sort of criminal mastermind who 'ordered' people like Manning to hack into military computer systems and steal state secrets, and that he did not just receive documents like any journalist. The movie script portrays him in exactly that way.
So I agree. The 'conspiracy' does not seem very far-fetched in this case. At least the motive is there.
How does Ubuntu run on it? Or any other decent linux distro? How is battery life under GNU/Linux? Does it also run Wine? (Need to run some windows apps on it)
I'm interested in getting one as a replacement for my EEE, especially since it has a non-glare screen, but this "Chrome OS" would be useless for me.
Interpretations of quantum mechanics are usually mathematically equivalent
Now I'm not a physicist but I'm doubtful about that one, for I've heard that the many worlds interpretation is in principle testable against the Copenhagen interpretation.
Could some physicist explain this little popular science riddle? Preferably with a car analogy.
Another difference to the real world is that they were not afraid to die. If you remain calm it's easy, but outside the simulator in reality you might panik.
You don't understand how advertising works. It's purpose is not to inform but to trick people into buying things. The only rule is that they are not allowed to lie directly into their faces (as opposed to politics, apparently). Read Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, it is more general and doesn't talk much about advertising in particular but will give you a good impression of the mechanisms modern advertisements are based on.
Why, I like his first point and have an improvement for it: We should implant microchips into the brains of all citizens, so when someone is about to commit a capital crime the chip will detect it and blow up his brain - for the benefit of society! Also: It is clearly beneficial for society if the wealthiest 1% of the population distribute their wealth among the poor (think Rawls), so let's behead them and seize all their property!
I trust some people's knowledge and expertise in one domain, but not in another. Likewise, if I were a US citizen running an entirely legal US company I'd have not the slightest problem with trusting the NSA cloud with all my company data (if they had such a service). I trust AES with keeping my personal data unencryptable by crooks and criminals, but I probably wouldn't use AES to encrypt all my data if I were a member of the Chinese military. It really depends in the threat scenario and your goals. An unconditional discussion of trust is fruitless.
What are you talking about? The article you link to doesn't say anywhere that his visum was denied. It says he had a printed confirmation that his ESTA status said "authorization approved".
Good suggestions - which will never be implemented. A small addendum: As Condorcet already observed in 1785 (and before him Ramon Lull, Nicolaus Cusanus and possibly the Romans), Condorcet voting sometimes has no winner, so it needs to be modified/accompanied by additional voting rules to avoid Condorcet cycles. One of the solutions to this problem was suggested by Lewis Carroll.
It's kind of amusing, because who can afford to attack Switzerland? Politicians of other countries have stashed away their tax evasion money there!
Anyway, I once saw a documentary in which a formerly top secret and now decomissioned installation against Germany was shown. It was an innocent looking family house whose complete facade could be lowered, revealing some mean looking mortar battery. Makes me wonder what they have built as a replacement...
I doubt that. People might have complained about the quality of PC keyboards but that's another issue. Typewriter vs. PC with good keyboard doesn't matter, what matters is whether you learn touch typing or not. Being able to type fast and reliably without looking at the keyboard is a huge advantage - I wish I had learned that at school.
Now here is the big question: What skill you can learn on an iPad that you cannot learn on a laptop? Learning how to perform multi-touch gestures?
More advertisements, more crap, more trolls... apart from that, not much has changed on the WWW. I'd say the biggest useful change was Wikipedia. Oh, and perhaps you could say Facebook of today==AOL of the past.
Let me add to this that the problem is not that the US is super-evil. Everybody knows that the US is not significantly more or less evil than most other civilized countries, just a bit more powerful. The problem is that when the mechanisms for abuse are in place, they will invariably be used for something evil one day or another. Perhaps not now, but who knows what happens in 20 years?
Ubuntu is still one of the most convenient ways to install and use GNU/Linux. I'm using it daily for everything. The point is that Ubuntu is great despite Shuttleworth's and Canonical's stupid ideas and decisions. It's great because of the community and forums. For example, my girlfriend uses Ubuntu, and when there is a problem I (who else?) have to fix it. Right now, I just take a quick look at the Ubuntu forums and helpdesk, and it's done. I don't want to imagine what would happen if she used Gentoo.:O
Regarding the Desktop/GUI: The desktop is not a reason to switch away from Ubuntu. People who give a fuck can install another window/desktop manager, for example I give a fuck and use XFCE.
To give examples that are not computer-related, I have been trying to find an affordable copy of Fishburn's classic Utility Theory for Decision Making from 1970 and it costs more than 100 Euro now. (Well, on Amazon.com it lists as $2,396.90 new and $1,899.33 used but I think we can safely ignore this offer. Amazon just sucks.) Or, try to find a copy of the classic (and IMHO best) text about communicating with aliens, Freudenthal's Lincos - Design of a Language for Cosmic Intercourse from 1960. Unless you're very lucky, it's going to be expensive. Finally, somewhat more computer-related, many out-of-print books on older calculators like the HP48g sell fairly well, because they are hard to get.
The problem is that God is apparently evil, because he requires other people to love and praise him and condemns them to eternal damnation with never-ending torture if they don't. Compulsory love is an evil and self-defeating concept.
On the one hand, such online learning systems are certainly welcome and this sounds like a good program. On the other hand, I cannot help recognizing that some of the courses are advertised like TED talks - with sensational titles and a lot of pseudo-smart attitude like in the recent, sometimes fairly mediocre regional TED talks (some of them remind me of cheap personality training videos). Titles like "The mind is flat: the shocking shallowness of human psychology" or "Sustainability, society and you", "Muslims in Britain: Changes and challenges" do sound a lot like they had been invented by politicians who wanted to implement "governmental education programs" rather than like introductions to real science. There is a reason why courses at university are called "Introduction to Cognitive Psychology", "Syntax II" or "Calculus 1", namely that there is a (hopefully) well-designed curriculum that is intended to improve real knowledge and skills as opposed to sensationalist teaching of (alleged) facts.
Khan Academy and the Open Courseware programme by MIT and other US universities do it the right way, but I'm a bit skeptical about this one. Don't get me wrong, this one is also a good idea, but universities must also resist temptations of advertising, dumbing down, or sensationalizing their offers.
I want a phone without any high-resolution color display and without a touch screen. It should have a small led display, many sensors (including alitmeter, barometer, thermometer, movement & tilt sensor), should have a little keyboard with a control key, sophisticated power-management with built-in wakeup/alarm routines, would have a battery life of one week or more and needs to be entirely hackable/scriptable in LISP. On the backside, there should be a picture of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Slashdot Mirror
As semi-automatic weapons where the gun is controlled by a human, yes, robots are probably the future of US warfare. The US military and public have always been obsessed with rating the lifes of American soldiers and citizens ten to hundred times higher than that of any other fellow human being on earth, including innocent civilian bystanders.
As a fully autonomous weapon, I very much doubt these robots will be usable any time in the foreseeable future, though. Reliable friend/foe recognition is a problem that will not be solved anytime soon. I'm not claiming that friendly fire is not a problem among humans, but we allow humans to make more errors than machines. When soldiers are getting shot at by their own automatized war machines, they will accept that less than if one of their fellow humans makes a mistake.
It is vital to the bizarre legal strategy of the US authorities that the public and a potential future jury are led to believe that Assange is a sort of criminal mastermind who 'ordered' people like Manning to hack into military computer systems and steal state secrets, and that he did not just receive documents like any journalist. The movie script portrays him in exactly that way.
So I agree. The 'conspiracy' does not seem very far-fetched in this case. At least the motive is there.
How does Ubuntu run on it? Or any other decent linux distro? How is battery life under GNU/Linux? Does it also run Wine? (Need to run some windows apps on it)
I'm interested in getting one as a replacement for my EEE, especially since it has a non-glare screen, but this "Chrome OS" would be useless for me.
Interpretations of quantum mechanics are usually mathematically equivalent
Now I'm not a physicist but I'm doubtful about that one, for I've heard that the many worlds interpretation is in principle testable against the Copenhagen interpretation.
Could some physicist explain this little popular science riddle? Preferably with a car analogy.
Another difference to the real world is that they were not afraid to die. If you remain calm it's easy, but outside the simulator in reality you might panik.
You don't understand how advertising works. It's purpose is not to inform but to trick people into buying things. The only rule is that they are not allowed to lie directly into their faces (as opposed to politics, apparently). Read Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, it is more general and doesn't talk much about advertising in particular but will give you a good impression of the mechanisms modern advertisements are based on.
Why, I like his first point and have an improvement for it: We should implant microchips into the brains of all citizens, so when someone is about to commit a capital crime the chip will detect it and blow up his brain - for the benefit of society! Also: It is clearly beneficial for society if the wealthiest 1% of the population distribute their wealth among the poor (think Rawls), so let's behead them and seize all their property!
I trust some people's knowledge and expertise in one domain, but not in another. Likewise, if I were a US citizen running an entirely legal US company I'd have not the slightest problem with trusting the NSA cloud with all my company data (if they had such a service). I trust AES with keeping my personal data unencryptable by crooks and criminals, but I probably wouldn't use AES to encrypt all my data if I were a member of the Chinese military. It really depends in the threat scenario and your goals. An unconditional discussion of trust is fruitless.
What are you talking about? The article you link to doesn't say anywhere that his visum was denied. It says he had a printed confirmation that his ESTA status said "authorization approved".
Good suggestions - which will never be implemented. A small addendum: As Condorcet already observed in 1785 (and before him Ramon Lull, Nicolaus Cusanus and possibly the Romans), Condorcet voting sometimes has no winner, so it needs to be modified/accompanied by additional voting rules to avoid Condorcet cycles. One of the solutions to this problem was suggested by Lewis Carroll.
But it could also be double bluff, designed to cause smart people like you not to switch away from broken Rijndael!
Woaahh.. but wait a minute... what if it's a TRIPLE bluff?
Why is the parent post modded offtopic?
Serpent is not a bad choice, it has a conventional design with a large safety margin (32 rounds).
It's kind of amusing, because who can afford to attack Switzerland? Politicians of other countries have stashed away their tax evasion money there!
Anyway, I once saw a documentary in which a formerly top secret and now decomissioned installation against Germany was shown. It was an innocent looking family house whose complete facade could be lowered, revealing some mean looking mortar battery. Makes me wonder what they have built as a replacement...
I doubt that. People might have complained about the quality of PC keyboards but that's another issue. Typewriter vs. PC with good keyboard doesn't matter, what matters is whether you learn touch typing or not. Being able to type fast and reliably without looking at the keyboard is a huge advantage - I wish I had learned that at school.
Now here is the big question: What skill you can learn on an iPad that you cannot learn on a laptop? Learning how to perform multi-touch gestures?
Naaah, not really. Yours is a pirate scream, whereas mine is the sound you make when you're falling off a cliff.
More advertisements, more crap, more trolls... apart from that, not much has changed on the WWW. I'd say the biggest useful change was Wikipedia. Oh, and perhaps you could say Facebook of today==AOL of the past.
Let me add to this that the problem is not that the US is super-evil. Everybody knows that the US is not significantly more or less evil than most other civilized countries, just a bit more powerful. The problem is that when the mechanisms for abuse are in place, they will invariably be used for something evil one day or another. Perhaps not now, but who knows what happens in 20 years?
Ubuntu is still one of the most convenient ways to install and use GNU/Linux. I'm using it daily for everything. The point is that Ubuntu is great despite Shuttleworth's and Canonical's stupid ideas and decisions. It's great because of the community and forums. For example, my girlfriend uses Ubuntu, and when there is a problem I (who else?) have to fix it. Right now, I just take a quick look at the Ubuntu forums and helpdesk, and it's done. I don't want to imagine what would happen if she used Gentoo. :O
Regarding the Desktop/GUI: The desktop is not a reason to switch away from Ubuntu. People who give a fuck can install another window/desktop manager, for example I give a fuck and use XFCE.
That's "families" plural, not "family's" possessive, and "their", as in 'belonging to them', not "there", 'a place other than here'.
Please do not copy advice from the Chicago Manual of Style without proper permission!
Some of them even increase in value.
To give examples that are not computer-related, I have been trying to find an affordable copy of Fishburn's classic Utility Theory for Decision Making from 1970 and it costs more than 100 Euro now. (Well, on Amazon.com it lists as $2,396.90 new and $1,899.33 used but I think we can safely ignore this offer. Amazon just sucks.) Or, try to find a copy of the classic (and IMHO best) text about communicating with aliens, Freudenthal's Lincos - Design of a Language for Cosmic Intercourse from 1960. Unless you're very lucky, it's going to be expensive. Finally, somewhat more computer-related, many out-of-print books on older calculators like the HP48g sell fairly well, because they are hard to get.
What the fuck are you talking about? The iPhone literally is a little Unix computer you can ssh to.
The problem is that God is apparently evil, because he requires other people to love and praise him and condemns them to eternal damnation with never-ending torture if they don't. Compulsory love is an evil and self-defeating concept.
On the one hand, such online learning systems are certainly welcome and this sounds like a good program. On the other hand, I cannot help recognizing that some of the courses are advertised like TED talks - with sensational titles and a lot of pseudo-smart attitude like in the recent, sometimes fairly mediocre regional TED talks (some of them remind me of cheap personality training videos). Titles like "The mind is flat: the shocking shallowness of human psychology" or "Sustainability, society and you", "Muslims in Britain: Changes and challenges" do sound a lot like they had been invented by politicians who wanted to implement "governmental education programs" rather than like introductions to real science. There is a reason why courses at university are called "Introduction to Cognitive Psychology", "Syntax II" or "Calculus 1", namely that there is a (hopefully) well-designed curriculum that is intended to improve real knowledge and skills as opposed to sensationalist teaching of (alleged) facts.
Khan Academy and the Open Courseware programme by MIT and other US universities do it the right way, but I'm a bit skeptical about this one. Don't get me wrong, this one is also a good idea, but universities must also resist temptations of advertising, dumbing down, or sensationalizing their offers.
How can pseudonymity — one of the key foundations of early internet communities — be saved?
By not using services on the web that don't allow it.
I want a phone without any high-resolution color display and without a touch screen. It should have a small led display, many sensors (including alitmeter, barometer, thermometer, movement & tilt sensor), should have a little keyboard with a control key, sophisticated power-management with built-in wakeup/alarm routines, would have a battery life of one week or more and needs to be entirely hackable/scriptable in LISP. On the backside, there should be a picture of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Alas, it's not going to happen... :-(