The exchange doesn't buy your BTC, they just help you find someone else who wants to. Whilst other exchanges have a smaller market, which makes it potentially more difficult or a worse deal, they will still *have* buyers and sellers to trade with.
Every so often, an idea that I thought maybe I at least semi-understood just goes and throws a fresh curveball.
That is bug-fuck insane and I love it (well, more properly, our intuitions are bug-fuck insane when applied to things moving at relativstic speeds, but I guess insanity is also relative)
Strong opinion, not a rampaging dick about it. I like you.
Any suggestions to go on the reading list for a guy who sees Ender's Game as not terribly original, but reasonably fun, and who hasn't read enough of the elder sci-fi to be bored of the 'same old tropes'? Because, y'know, I have this friend...
They're sure going to feel silly when they realise how easy it really was all along. Especially if they ever find out that some guy from the internet beat them to the punch on such an obvious idea.
You're describing elements of the Hero's Journey. That shows up damn near everywhere because it's a compelling template - the reluctant or unlikely hero who turns out to have more strength than they thought... it's an easy model to imagine yourself into, to draw inspiration from, as well as providing counterpoints to what would otherwise be "Awesome person saves the day again, the end"
That said, Ender's game does particularly gel with certain geek-guy stereotypes; the bullied outcast who gets to be entirely justified in striking back, and whose unique genius makes them valuable. There's a potential comparison with Twilight also; both books make for good escapist fiction (for the gender they're aimed at) whilst having some somewhat disturbing moral assumptions buried just below the surface.
The difference (I think) is that Ender's Game does that at least somewhat knowingly, to force you to consider some ugly ideas that it's holding up as virtues.
Science in a sentence: "The validity of an idea is tested by experiment" (as opposed to say, by sitting and having a really good think about how things ought to be, as favoured by certain greek philosophers, or by reference to scripture/revelation).
So we have an idea about how life might have come about, and we do experiments to see if that really is a viable way for life to happen, or whether our hypothesis gels with what we can find out about the conditions of an earlier state of the planet. We are doing science, and in doing so we shift the probabilities as best we can know them in favour of whatever hypothesis fits best. We won't achieve perfect certainty, but we don't expect to.
I am agnostic. Atheism is a belief if not a religion in it's own way.
It's all very well recycling the old comparisons to baldness, or not collecting stamps, but if I may take a moment to apply a little less snark to this...
Atheism and Agnosticism are two different dimensions to a position on religion, you can be one or both or neither without ever causing a contradiction. People often seem to imagine a single line, running from "Atheist" at one end (implying that you're certain there's no god), through to "Theist" at the other, with Agnostic in the middle as some kind of "I don't know" option, but imagine instead two lines perpendicular to each other.
One one line, Theism-Atheism, as before, this line concerns what you believe, and how sure you feel about it privately. The other line runs from Gnosticism to Agnosticism, which is about what you claim to know, or to paraphase, what you think we can be certain of. "Gnostic" is used to describe certain groups of Christians in a different sense of the word, I'm just aiming for it's root word which means 'knowledge'.
So we have a 2-dimensional system for talking about what people believe, to point out the 4 corners, we have...
Gnostic Theists believe in god and believe we can know that to be the case - the types who see the Bible as divinely inspired and inerrant, or think you can prove the matter logically or through evidence (the 'design' crowd come to mind here too).
Agnostic Theists believe there to be a god, but don't think they can claim to know it. Perhaps thinking that the truth of the matter is beyond human proof, appealing to pure faith instead, or possibly saying that we can't know until after death.
Agnostic Atheists don't believe in god but don't claim certainty or proof - like the previous group they don't think we can know for sure, they just come down on the other side. This is where ideas about invisible pink unicorns and the like come in, to point out just how many things we can't technically know either way about, and how few we decide we have to take on faith anyway.
Gnostic Atheists don't believe and think we can know there to be no god. Proving a negative is difficult, but you might come to the conclusion that the gods described by the religious are logically inconsistent ideas that can't possibly exist, or might reason from the problem of evil (if there were a god he would prevent it, but we still see horrendous unnecessary suffering, therefore...).
Hope this helps someone. It'll probably be lost amid more bad analogies, but I can hope.
Personally I think the religious idea of god is either an impossible fantasy or too loosely defined to be disproved (and hence scarcely worth believing in). It seems like the refuge of faith for the "sophisticated theologian" types is in the space where we can't possibly know anything, because you can't see any evidence for or against a god that has no measurable effect on anything anywhere. Those who are less slippery about the whole thing and describe a god who actually does things we would expect to see... well they fail the test of the evidence.
The problem isn't necessarily the government of today, in it's current state. The problem is that granting any government greater power than it already has is an action that's very difficult to undo; that power is unlikely to be relinquished without a protracted fight. That means you're not just trusting the government of today not to abuse whatever you allow them to do, but also every conceivable future government.
If you want to truly evaluate whether the government should be permitted to do a thing, first imagine the worst possible abuse of that power. In this case... I'm not actually all that overwhelmed by the worst case, it's true, but in any other sphere, saying "the government is less of a threat than the criminals, best give 'em whatever power they say will help fight crime" is a fucking terrible idea.
If my (admittedly very limited) understanding is correct, beating Uncertainty would entail also being able to violate the laws of thermodynamics. It'd be an amazing thing if we could, but I don't think we're going to be able to cheat to that degree just by saying "Well I only looked at it a little bit, so it doesn't count".
You're making the assumptions of what we need to defend ourselves based on the enemies we're currently fighting. You better believe I expected the military defending this country to not be this shortsighted.
Considering how difficult it has been to fight a war in Afghanistan and Iraq, I am extremely worried about our abilities to protect ourselves. Because these are developing nations without a strong military. How do you think we would do in a war against a first-world country?
So far as I can tell, it'd be a hell of a lot easier for the US to fight against a clearly identifiable enemy nation with a defined/professional military. If it ever came to actual all-out warfare then all the expensive armaments could be used to full force, and the fact that you out-spend the next 10 highest military spenders combined (incidentally, mostly your allies on that list) would show quite clearly.
The problem seems to be that the whole engine is geared up to fight a war like the wars of the past, where you knew who the enemy was and could justifiably bomb the living crap out of them until they surrendered. Now that "the enemy" is indistinguishable from the civilian population, and they're not openly associated with the state they're in... well, it becomes a lot harder to justify anything except laser-accurate precision strikes. Which takes a lot more work to pull off, and even more work to do it without earning the animosity of the people surrounding whoever you just smote.
That, and dividing the world into territories when it should probably be divided into something else like government, military, private computers, mobile, multinationals, kids, etc.
I'm intrigued, how exactly does one go about dividing the world into mobile?
Libraries are treated like pirates by many publishers.
They're treating libraries like pirates? Makes sense, pirates are like a library.
The whole copyright-infringing piratical collective constitutes the biggest and most efficient public library ever known. The point of a library being to make cultural works available to the public for little/no cost... no inherent requirement that the number of copies circulated be limited, or that they only be loaned out temporarily, that's just what you have to do to make a library feasible when copies are expensive. Now they're not.
Numbers found by a brief search indicate ~60% (anywhere from 45% to 75% depending on age and obesity) for a human body, and ~80% for a potato. So you could probably get away with a potato sack smaller than a human, but it's a decent approximation either way.
If that doesn't make sense, it's because QM is not supposed to make sense, it just is (or maybe I'm not explaining it very well).
When we think reality is confusing, that's a fact about us rather than about reality - QM (or whatever the actually true laws of physics turn out to be) got here first, has always been in force, and has created that "normal" looking world we're all so used to. A severely curtailed approximate model was good enough to locate ripe fruit and throw rocks at each other, so that's what we find intuitive, but we're the weird ones - imagining the universe operating on the basis of tiny little billiard balls bopping about when that's not even close.
Put briefly: Quantum mechanics isn't weird, you're weird.
Unless the going theory is that Intel wants to piss off a big chunk of the market for their shiniest "Extreme edition" type CPUs (and expects to make more money by making their offering less consumer-friendly), I have to assume that they're doing this for reasons of techical limitation.
Don't know enough to speculate what the limit would be, but it doesn't seem to make sense otherwise.
I'm idly wondering whether there's the slightest possibility (with sufficient applied phlebotinum) of being able to burn natural gas while leaving the carbon behind - derive energy only from H + O2 => H2O. Probably violates the laws of physics somewhere though; I can't see how you'd be able to allow oxygen to steal away the hydrogen without also reacting with the carbon.
If we're thinking of the same organisation, it's "Hamas". The S is part of the acronym and it doesn't get capitalised anywhere I've seen. Upshot, the rockets belonging to Hamas would be Hamas', or possibly Hamas's rockets, depending on your preference for possessive nouns where the singular already ends with an S.
I just don't see why your congress should be that different from our parliament in this regard.
Actually I'm from the UK, but we have the same problems with FPTP - 2 major parties, ostensibly on opposite sides of the left/right divide, but with not all that much daylight between them. Well, three parties that get sensible percentages of the seats, but only two with a shot at an outright majority.
I think it's fairly established that FPTP normally favours a 2 party set-up. Canada may just be an oddity on this one, or it could be in the process of settling out to 2 major parties yet. I know nothing of Canadian politics though; has the makeup of your parliament generally been getting more diverse or more concentrated recently?
From what I understand the normal track is for small parties (or those that have their support spread thinly and evenly across voting regions) to gradually lose favour because they "don't have a chance", until only two remain. You then really can't blame people for voting 2-party, it's the rational choice to maximise your effect on the result.
May not be the best way to maximise your effect on policy though (every third-party vote being a message to their rivals of "Be more like this guy", so there is that. If Canada has a tradition of coalitions, could be that despite FPTP, people know which "half" they're voting for, and can influence policy better by picking a party specifically. Again, speculating for lack of knowledge; would that make sense?
Of course not, but if you predict a whole bunch of things and say you're assigning 50% probability to them, you should expect (approximately) 50% of them to occur. If events don't match your expectations, you should modify your expectations.
i.e. If more than 50% of those events occurs, then either you were less confident in your predictions than you should have been, or it's a fluke and your success rate will tend back towards 50% in the long run. That's what's meant by calibration.
Are you really having trouble understanding that replying to someone and opening with "This", is a simple shorthand for some position located between "I agree", "this is correct" and "that's good advice"? It's just an expression of agreement, in a single word so as not to be excessively verbose to the length of saying "Oh yes, I quite agree with you. That's an excellent idea you have there, now if I might also suggest an extension to that thought"
Pretty sure if you replaced all occurrences of "This." with "I agree." it'd mean more or less the same thing, it's purely a new idiom, language evolving towards brevity, as well as favouring reference over re-stating.
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The exchange doesn't buy your BTC, they just help you find someone else who wants to. Whilst other exchanges have a smaller market, which makes it potentially more difficult or a worse deal, they will still *have* buyers and sellers to trade with.
Every so often, an idea that I thought maybe I at least semi-understood just goes and throws a fresh curveball.
That is bug-fuck insane and I love it (well, more properly, our intuitions are bug-fuck insane when applied to things moving at relativstic speeds, but I guess insanity is also relative)
Strong opinion, not a rampaging dick about it. I like you.
Any suggestions to go on the reading list for a guy who sees Ender's Game as not terribly original, but reasonably fun, and who hasn't read enough of the elder sci-fi to be bored of the 'same old tropes'? Because, y'know, I have this friend...
They're sure going to feel silly when they realise how easy it really was all along. Especially if they ever find out that some guy from the internet beat them to the punch on such an obvious idea.
In that case I guess we'd best all go back to punching binary machine code into cards.
You're describing elements of the Hero's Journey. That shows up damn near everywhere because it's a compelling template - the reluctant or unlikely hero who turns out to have more strength than they thought... it's an easy model to imagine yourself into, to draw inspiration from, as well as providing counterpoints to what would otherwise be "Awesome person saves the day again, the end"
That said, Ender's game does particularly gel with certain geek-guy stereotypes; the bullied outcast who gets to be entirely justified in striking back, and whose unique genius makes them valuable. There's a potential comparison with Twilight also; both books make for good escapist fiction (for the gender they're aimed at) whilst having some somewhat disturbing moral assumptions buried just below the surface.
The difference (I think) is that Ender's Game does that at least somewhat knowingly, to force you to consider some ugly ideas that it's holding up as virtues.
Tell that to the thousands of commuters sat staring at each others' bumpers.
Science in a sentence: "The validity of an idea is tested by experiment" (as opposed to say, by sitting and having a really good think about how things ought to be, as favoured by certain greek philosophers, or by reference to scripture/revelation).
So we have an idea about how life might have come about, and we do experiments to see if that really is a viable way for life to happen, or whether our hypothesis gels with what we can find out about the conditions of an earlier state of the planet. We are doing science, and in doing so we shift the probabilities as best we can know them in favour of whatever hypothesis fits best. We won't achieve perfect certainty, but we don't expect to.
I am agnostic. Atheism is a belief if not a religion in it's own way.
It's all very well recycling the old comparisons to baldness, or not collecting stamps, but if I may take a moment to apply a little less snark to this...
Atheism and Agnosticism are two different dimensions to a position on religion, you can be one or both or neither without ever causing a contradiction. People often seem to imagine a single line, running from "Atheist" at one end (implying that you're certain there's no god), through to "Theist" at the other, with Agnostic in the middle as some kind of "I don't know" option, but imagine instead two lines perpendicular to each other.
One one line, Theism-Atheism, as before, this line concerns what you believe, and how sure you feel about it privately. The other line runs from Gnosticism to Agnosticism, which is about what you claim to know, or to paraphase, what you think we can be certain of. "Gnostic" is used to describe certain groups of Christians in a different sense of the word, I'm just aiming for it's root word which means 'knowledge'.
So we have a 2-dimensional system for talking about what people believe, to point out the 4 corners, we have...
Hope this helps someone. It'll probably be lost amid more bad analogies, but I can hope.
Personally I think the religious idea of god is either an impossible fantasy or too loosely defined to be disproved (and hence scarcely worth believing in). It seems like the refuge of faith for the "sophisticated theologian" types is in the space where we can't possibly know anything, because you can't see any evidence for or against a god that has no measurable effect on anything anywhere. Those who are less slippery about the whole thing and describe a god who actually does things we would expect to see... well they fail the test of the evidence.
The problem isn't necessarily the government of today, in it's current state. The problem is that granting any government greater power than it already has is an action that's very difficult to undo; that power is unlikely to be relinquished without a protracted fight. That means you're not just trusting the government of today not to abuse whatever you allow them to do, but also every conceivable future government.
If you want to truly evaluate whether the government should be permitted to do a thing, first imagine the worst possible abuse of that power. In this case... I'm not actually all that overwhelmed by the worst case, it's true, but in any other sphere, saying "the government is less of a threat than the criminals, best give 'em whatever power they say will help fight crime" is a fucking terrible idea.
From what I understand, they actually observer statistically distinct spikes in heart attacks and suicides with the time changes each year.
I've heard similar about traffic accidents, at least in the vicinity of the one that leaves everyone sleep deprived on a Monday morning.
If my (admittedly very limited) understanding is correct, beating Uncertainty would entail also being able to violate the laws of thermodynamics. It'd be an amazing thing if we could, but I don't think we're going to be able to cheat to that degree just by saying "Well I only looked at it a little bit, so it doesn't count".
You're making the assumptions of what we need to defend ourselves based on the enemies we're currently fighting. You better believe I expected the military defending this country to not be this shortsighted.
Considering how difficult it has been to fight a war in Afghanistan and Iraq, I am extremely worried about our abilities to protect ourselves. Because these are developing nations without a strong military. How do you think we would do in a war against a first-world country?
So far as I can tell, it'd be a hell of a lot easier for the US to fight against a clearly identifiable enemy nation with a defined/professional military. If it ever came to actual all-out warfare then all the expensive armaments could be used to full force, and the fact that you out-spend the next 10 highest military spenders combined (incidentally, mostly your allies on that list) would show quite clearly.
The problem seems to be that the whole engine is geared up to fight a war like the wars of the past, where you knew who the enemy was and could justifiably bomb the living crap out of them until they surrendered. Now that "the enemy" is indistinguishable from the civilian population, and they're not openly associated with the state they're in... well, it becomes a lot harder to justify anything except laser-accurate precision strikes. Which takes a lot more work to pull off, and even more work to do it without earning the animosity of the people surrounding whoever you just smote.
That, and dividing the world into territories when it should probably be divided into something else like government, military, private computers, mobile, multinationals, kids, etc.
I'm intrigued, how exactly does one go about dividing the world into mobile?
Libraries are treated like pirates by many publishers.
They're treating libraries like pirates? Makes sense, pirates are like a library.
The whole copyright-infringing piratical collective constitutes the biggest and most efficient public library ever known. The point of a library being to make cultural works available to the public for little/no cost... no inherent requirement that the number of copies circulated be limited, or that they only be loaned out temporarily, that's just what you have to do to make a library feasible when copies are expensive. Now they're not.
Numbers found by a brief search indicate ~60% (anywhere from 45% to 75% depending on age and obesity) for a human body, and ~80% for a potato. So you could probably get away with a potato sack smaller than a human, but it's a decent approximation either way.
If that doesn't make sense, it's because QM is not supposed to make sense, it just is (or maybe I'm not explaining it very well).
When we think reality is confusing, that's a fact about us rather than about reality - QM (or whatever the actually true laws of physics turn out to be) got here first, has always been in force, and has created that "normal" looking world we're all so used to. A severely curtailed approximate model was good enough to locate ripe fruit and throw rocks at each other, so that's what we find intuitive, but we're the weird ones - imagining the universe operating on the basis of tiny little billiard balls bopping about when that's not even close.
Put briefly: Quantum mechanics isn't weird, you're weird.
Cubits. Probably.
Unless the going theory is that Intel wants to piss off a big chunk of the market for their shiniest "Extreme edition" type CPUs (and expects to make more money by making their offering less consumer-friendly), I have to assume that they're doing this for reasons of techical limitation.
Don't know enough to speculate what the limit would be, but it doesn't seem to make sense otherwise.
I'm idly wondering whether there's the slightest possibility (with sufficient applied phlebotinum) of being able to burn natural gas while leaving the carbon behind - derive energy only from H + O2 => H2O. Probably violates the laws of physics somewhere though; I can't see how you'd be able to allow oxygen to steal away the hydrogen without also reacting with the carbon.
If we're thinking of the same organisation, it's "Hamas". The S is part of the acronym and it doesn't get capitalised anywhere I've seen. Upshot, the rockets belonging to Hamas would be Hamas', or possibly Hamas's rockets, depending on your preference for possessive nouns where the singular already ends with an S.
No criticism intended, just information.
I just don't see why your congress should be that different from our parliament in this regard.
Actually I'm from the UK, but we have the same problems with FPTP - 2 major parties, ostensibly on opposite sides of the left/right divide, but with not all that much daylight between them. Well, three parties that get sensible percentages of the seats, but only two with a shot at an outright majority.
I think it's fairly established that FPTP normally favours a 2 party set-up. Canada may just be an oddity on this one, or it could be in the process of settling out to 2 major parties yet. I know nothing of Canadian politics though; has the makeup of your parliament generally been getting more diverse or more concentrated recently?
From what I understand the normal track is for small parties (or those that have their support spread thinly and evenly across voting regions) to gradually lose favour because they "don't have a chance", until only two remain. You then really can't blame people for voting 2-party, it's the rational choice to maximise your effect on the result.
May not be the best way to maximise your effect on policy though (every third-party vote being a message to their rivals of "Be more like this guy", so there is that. If Canada has a tradition of coalitions, could be that despite FPTP, people know which "half" they're voting for, and can influence policy better by picking a party specifically. Again, speculating for lack of knowledge; would that make sense?
Of course not, but if you predict a whole bunch of things and say you're assigning 50% probability to them, you should expect (approximately) 50% of them to occur. If events don't match your expectations, you should modify your expectations.
i.e. If more than 50% of those events occurs, then either you were less confident in your predictions than you should have been, or it's a fluke and your success rate will tend back towards 50% in the long run. That's what's meant by calibration.
Are you really having trouble understanding that replying to someone and opening with "This", is a simple shorthand for some position located between "I agree", "this is correct" and "that's good advice"? It's just an expression of agreement, in a single word so as not to be excessively verbose to the length of saying "Oh yes, I quite agree with you. That's an excellent idea you have there, now if I might also suggest an extension to that thought"
Pretty sure if you replaced all occurrences of "This." with "I agree." it'd mean more or less the same thing, it's purely a new idiom, language evolving towards brevity, as well as favouring reference over re-stating.